Nicholson adds, "Look, nobody should smoke. It is not so much that you fear that moment when somebody comes in and says, 'That's it. You're dead. You smoked too much.' Well, that's not the real fear. The real fear is going through now the process and thinking, 'I'm dying of stupidity.' This is the self-recrimination about it."
Mortality hovers over Nicholson, as it does over "The Bucket List" despite its jolly sequences of the spry pair diving from airplanes, racing cars, climbing the Himalayas -- all courtesy of computer graphics. Freeman, however, seems more relaxed about facing the gaping maw. If given the option of living to 120, he'd take it in a flash, "because I'm going to be viable. Otherwise, no, I won't live that long. You can't. Life is only about the strong."
Indeed, the pair differ on many of the big questions in life. Freeman believes in God, though not as embodied by himself in a film like "Evan Almighty" or "a white man up in the sky who looks down on us. . . . What I believe about God is there is that part of all of us, that is the only thing you can call it. You can call it anything you want to, actually. . . . So God suffices."
Nicholson questions everything. "I have always been like a grain of sand in the oyster."
"I'm not anti-religious in any way, but I like 'The End of Faith' [by Sam Harris] because they just took Galileo off the heretics list. There are certain areas where I'm not going to challenge anyone's sense of mystery, but I don't want reason to be held back by someone's idea of fundamentalism, and that happens. . . . You can't go on behaving as though the world is flat."
This said, he adds: "Everybody is superstitious. Just like Morgan said. I used to run [nearby], and one of the odd byproducts of it was I found myself what I would call praying and, just as he said, I didn't pray straight out. My focus was up in the air. So we all have these innate things which I don't think we should be too fast to classify. . . . I'm not going to waste my time pretending I know what isn't either."
Perhaps befitting their status as major American movie stars, both have a passel of children by different women. Nicholson's youngest two are teenagers, and he's still enmeshed in the hard job of child rearing. In the film, Nicholson's character is painfully estranged from his daughter, and the uncertain peregrinations of fatherhood struck a chord with the actor.
