Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman Page #4

of learning a skill

just as the importance

of learning the skill of acting.

He was not good when he

started, and he admits that.

But as he worked and developed

and worked and developed,

he became a very good actor.

Now, you look here.

You've had 24 of my 34 years

working for you on this ranch,

and, daddy, you have had

top-grade cheap labor.

But it took a while

to realize that that was not

his "A-One" passion.

It was really cars... racing.

So when he realized that,

he went at it hammer and tongs.

I mean, he went at it fully.

Well, he approached it a bit

like, in a way, in his acting.

We got a racehorse here,

a thoroughbred.

You make him feel good.

I teach him how to run.

When he got a part, he really

investigated the character

and investigated where he

was gonna go with it and the arc

that he was gonna take.

You're talking about a guy

who'd kill a grifter

over a chunk of money

wouldn't support him for two days.

He obviously used some of that

in approaching the racing.

At one point,

he said to me, "you know,

I'm acting out the role

of a racing driver."

That's the lovely part

about being an actor

is that you get to assume a lot

of different personalities.

And a lot of those personality

traits stick.

I look at that, and I say,

"gee, there's a little bit

of Hud in there

or fast Eddie Felson."

Acting is an enormously

disciplined thing

to do in terms of work,

of preparation,

and Paul is extreme

about preparation for any film,

whether he's acting or directing.

And I think all of that kind

of preparation

lends itself to the work

that you have to do as a racer,

that you can't just leap

into the car and start driving.

Paul and Joanne could walk

from our motor home,

two blocks to the false grid

with movie people

with a motorized bottom

taking 200 hundred pictures,

and I think

he was oblivious to that.

He had an ability to not let

those kinds of things upset him,

and I think the movie concentration

helped his racing concentration.

Really be able to know

that you can discard

all the extraneous stimuli

and depend on the one focus

that you want to focus on.

And when you really accomplish it,

I think you just

feel really good about it.

For about 24 years,

I had a place in Connecticut,

Westport, just about a mile

from where he was.

And it was then

that he was racing up Lime Rock.

He'd been with Sharp.

So he said, "why don't you

come up?"

So I went up there

and got on the track.

I whipped around about five

or six times.

But he jumps in and zips around

in about half the time that I did.

When I saw that, that's

when I first saw Paul race,

and I said:
"Whoa, he's really good."

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