[on
Being There (1979)] So much of what I had been thinking about in the recent past led me straight to that make-believe movie death scene. When it was completed, the sound stage full of people, perhaps forty or more, burst into emotional applause. I was startled. Hal [director
Hal Ashby] told me later that I had made a little clicking sound in my throat, a "death rattle", which everyone "knew", whether they had heard such a sound or not. Was I playing my own death, the death that is in me, in spite of myself? Could be.