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An Interview with Robert Loggia and Marc Meyers

Robert Loggia: As an actor, you bring your own life experience to the role and I think for all of us, it’s kind of a shared experience. I think all of us have relatives, whether they’re brothers and sisters or uncles and aunts or grandparents or whatever, that experience this Alzheimer’s dilemma.

Gary Barg: What is the most important piece of advice you might give to your grandson or to a family caregiver?

Robert Loggia: That’s a tough question. Even now that I’m 81, it’s more like passing the baton or the leadership. I don’t know how else to put it. I can’t say I like hitting 81. I tell you that life is finite, but you’re part of the family of man and that’s the way it is.You don’t become a know-it-all because you’re 81 years old. You become, at least for me, someone who’s given his best effort to wife and children and grandchildren, all of that. You’ve given it your best shot and I’ll see you in heaven, you know?

Marc Meyers Interview
Writer, Producer, Director Harvest

Gary Barg: What is the story your movie Harvest is trying to tell us?

Marc Meyers: What the movie is really about is how this family learns, in their own individual and collective ways, to come to terms with the fact that the family is now changing. They know a chapter in their collective history is closing and a new one is beginning that they will not understand until this non-mystery, this inevitable loss of the patriarch, is going to happen. From my point of view as a storyteller, I wanted to look into how people really behave in this moment that they know is happening to them.

Gary Barg: Can you tell me how it was to work with Robert Loggia in your film?

Marc Meyers: He is such a gentleman. He is such an artist at his core. His persona is just all him being tough, but he is really a tender guy. He is an actor with such confidence that even the older actors like Ari Gross learned from his calmness as an actor. He has been doing it for 50 years. For me it was a thrill beyond anything to work with such a pro like him. It was a real honor to collaborate with him so openly.

Gary Barg: For anybody who has not seen the movie, explain what you meant by having him ride around town on a bicycle like that.

Marc Meyers: I do not think when he gets on his bike he knows where he is going. So he hops on the bike to go into town and maybe just go to the coffee shop, which is his regular daily or weekly joint to hang out in and run into some friends in the center of town. But what it eventually turns into is someone who goes on one last lap around the town in which he had lived his entire life. He is soaking up the town that he had grown up in and raised his children in and somewhere along that ride, he realizes he could stop by and see his sister. It is really one last lap around town.