"Aw....it's you again."

Ebert on a 1969 set visit with Paul Newman.

I walked into his trailer. He did not regard me as an intruder, a possible source of irritation, someone who was invading his private time. He casually welcomed me to the flow. He looked at me openly and accepted that we were talking with each other, and that such a thing was natural. There was no "getting to know you" process with Newman. He acted as if he already knew you. I am not naive. I don't believe I have ever truly known an actor--or a director either, with a few exceptions. When you approach them as a journalist, they are there and you are here. But sometimes they can act as if the line isn't there. Lee Marvin was that way, too. Martin Scorsese. Meryl Streep. Robert Altman. Werner Herzog. Tilda Swinton. Paul Schrader. Joan Allen. Gregory Nava. Mile Leigh. And others, but my list is limited.

Never mind what happened in 1969. I'll dig up the old magazine and put it on the web site. Let's move forward to 1995, and listen very carefully. When I walked into his room, he said, "Aw...it's you again." The point is not that he remembered me. The point is how he said "aw..." Imagine it in Paul Newman's voice. It evoked feelings hard to express in words. The "aw" wasn't "oh, no," as it sometimes can be. To it me it translated as, "Aw, it's that scared kid, grown up." Whatever it meant, it put me right at home.