IN MY OWN TIME x Exclusive Excerpt
I was in Mexico City working on an independent film and feeling like my movie career was sinking. I had been living in Los Angeles for a while, and it didn’t seem like things were happening there for me anymore. But I knew that I could always work steadily in New York, where I had been able to perform onstage as many as fifty weeks out of the year. I had an offer from the Long Wharf Theatre in Connecticut to play Hans Christian Andersen, and Colleen Dewhurst would be cast as my mother. I figured that before I lost any more momentum, I should head home to the East Coast and pick up my stage career where I’d left off.
My agents at Gersh had sent me the screenplay for a film project that I knew nothing about. I kind of skimmed through it and tossed it into a wastepaper basket. What an extraordinary career move on my part—extraordinarily arrogant. A friend I was with at the time said, “You never did things like that back in New York.” She knew—anything that looked like it had the most distant possibility of yielding a role, I would show up for. So I thought about what she said and felt there was some truth to it. I took the script out of the trash and looked at the title: Back to the Future. I read it, flew back to L.A. for the weekend, and met with its director, Bob Zemeckis.
***
Bob Zemeckis was a friend and protégé of Steven Spielberg, and he had set our meeting at the offices of Spielberg’s company, Amblin, on the Universal lot, which was useful to me. It gave me the opportunity for some research and reconnaissance. This was a few weeks before filming was to start on Back to the Future, which he had written with his friend and creative partner, Bob Gale. We would be getting to know each other, and if Zemeckis approved me, I would have the part of a frantic scientist named Dr. Emmett Brown, the inventor of a DeLorean sports car that can travel through time. When I had read the script, there was one scene in particular that concerned me. In the big climax of the film, Doc Brown is racing to help his young friend Marty McFly prepare for a lightning bolt that will strike a clock tower and send his car home to the year 1985. Marty is hurtling toward his destiny while Doc is in the clock tower building, and it was described in the script that Doc was standing on a window ledge at the top of the building, shouting out to Marty. I thought, I’d better check this out.
I got to Universal ahead of my meeting with Zemeckis and walked around the lot. One of its features is a big town square with all the storefronts and buildings that they were going to use in Back to the Future. I took a walk to the clock tower building, which is known as Courthouse Square—you might recognize it from movies like To Kill a Mockingbird. The building was about three stories tall with a set of classical columns in the front and a triangular pediment at the top with the clock inside it. I went inside and walked up the stairs to the top floor and looked out one of the windows there. I thought, There’s no way that I could stand on that ledge and do the scene. I am not someone with a general fear of heights, but I was a neophyte to this type of filmmaking. Maybe I was comfortable riding on a horse, but who goes and stands on a ledge like that? It was just too precarious. I could sit on it, but I ain’t standing on it.
When I had my meeting with Bob a little later that day, I brought this up with him. I said, “Maybe I could sit on the ledge instead of standing on it?” He explained to me that when the time came to shoot this scene, I would be wearing a harness, and the harness would be secured by a cable. That was reassuring. Our meeting ended and we thanked each other and said goodbye. I was in the process of leaving the office, not quite out of earshot, when I heard Bob say, “There’s no fucking way he’s sitting on that ledge.” Not angrily, but he was saying that wasn’t happening. His back was to me and I’m not sure he knew I was still there.
I didn’t know this at the time, but my work on Buckaroo Banzai had played an important part in getting me cast in Back to the Future. Neil Canton, a producer on Back to the Future, had also been our producer on Buckaroo Banzai and had suggested three actors from that film to play the role of Doc Brown: John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, and me. Their casting sheets, which I never saw, show that other great actors like Gene Hackman and Donald Sutherland were also in the mix. I’m not sure why they picked me, and I try not to ask too many questions about these things. I suspect they had looked at the other things I’d done on film, going all the way back to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and they just saw something in me that said Doc to them. But there was no moment where they sat me down and said, “This is how we see Doc Brown and this is how we want you to play him.” Zemeckis was pretty canny about sensing intuitively what kind of performance he would get from an actor.
But once they had selected me, I had to start thinking about who this person was and how I would bring him across. I like to try to figure out what a character is feeling and how he feels about what he’s doing— in what way is it important to him and what does he get out of it? I’m not necessarily modeling my performance off anyone specifically—if there’s someone I know who shares certain qualities with the character, I can look to them, but in a way a character’s traits are no different than his costume: I am already thinking about what I’m going to wear before I go in for that costume fitting. I start to get feelings about who the person is and then I try to express them in every way that I can, through every outlet available to me.
You catch little glimpses of Doc Brown’s personal history throughout the film, from the things that Marty says about him or the press clippings he has posted on his bulletin boards. We know he is a unique member of a larger family and that the family had some wealth, which is how he’s been able to finance his crazy projects over the years. But none of that was written for me. Any of his genius or eccentricity I simply assumed from the script. If he was the creator of the flux capacitor—a major step forward in the evolution of time travel— then that just came with the territory. It was also a great innovation of Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s screenplay that Doc Brown had this friendship with Marty to bounce his ideas off of. There are several scenes in the movie where Doc has to telegraph to the audience what is about to come next—what he’s going to do and why, and what the consequences will be if he doesn’t succeed. You see this done a lot in film and theater, and when this kind of dialogue isn’t written well, it just brings the whole story to a halt. But it just seemed so natural for Doc to be giving that information to Marty, who isn’t a scientist and is more urgently focused on reuniting his parents and making sure they fall in love. As far as Doc is concerned, the space-time continuum is always on the verge of collapsing, and this gives him a certain kind of energy.
Whenever I’m offered a part, I’m being given a chance to do what I feel I can do. My approach, if you want to call it that, is always the same: I’ve got to learn those lines and think about what this person is all about. I’m still so grateful that I’m being asked to do something, because going all the way back to my days in acting class, I thought there was no way I was ever going to get these kinds of opportunities. I was hopeful. I was striving for them. But they were way, way out there in space somewhere. I didn’t know what was coming then. I still don’t know what is coming now. It could be a big role or a small role, or a role that exceeds its size because it’s so bizarre. But I’m always thinking about it the same way: I’ve been put in a situation where people are going to be looking at me, so I’ve got to hit every button, to complete the context and pay off the promise of whatever that is. If somebody has hired me, they want me to do this part. I’ve got to get there and I’ve got to give back whatever they were expecting when they asked me to do it. I must fulfill the dimensions of the character.
As I was thinking about all of this in relation to Doc, I was also thinking about how much I love classical music. I grew up around it, hearing it played at Waveny, on records, and at concerts I have attended. While I can’t name every work or tell you its history, I’m into it. And when I was a young man, there was a great British composer and conductor named Leopold Stokowski. He had all the characteristics of an inventor— a tremendous intellect, a deep curiosity in his field, and a wild energy that came through when he was conducting. He was also known for making his own orchestrations of renowned classical pieces, sometimes to the irritation of his critics. In the 1950s, he conducted a recording of The Planets, a wonderful orchestral suite by a composer named Gustav Holst—a different piece of music for each planet, the warlike Mars, the gentle and beautiful Venus, and so on. On the cover of the album, there’s a photograph of Stokowski standing in profile as he’s conducting. He was made for the role: his arms are raised in dramatic action, there’s an image of the cosmos behind him, and he’s got this white hair that is long and crazy, going off in every direction. I knew that was my visual image for Doc.
We spent about six weeks of shooting Back to the Future where the role of Marty was played by Eric Stoltz. They had wanted Michael J. Fox before the film got started, but my understanding was that his producer on Family Ties felt he was too essential to the show and didn’t want to give him up. Eric Stoltz was a good actor, and I accepted what he was doing in his performance. But when the producers went back and watched the dailies, they had an awareness that there was something missing. What I heard later was that he lacked a kind of comic flair and timing. He also took a kind of Method acting approach to the role where he tried to remain in character at all times, even when we weren’t filming, to the point that he asked people to call him Marty, rather than Eric, around the set.
After a long night of shooting outdoors at the Twin Pines Mall—later to become the Lone Pine Mall—in the San Gabriel Valley, we broke for dinner at about midnight or one o’clock in the morning. They told us to all gather around a production van where an important announcement was going to be made. Bob Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg were both there. And that’s when Spielberg broke the news to us: Eric Stoltz had been let go from the production and was going to be replaced by Michael J. Fox. There’s a story that Bob Gale tells that when he explained to me that Eric would be leaving the film, my initial response was, “Who’s Eric?” I guess I was so used to calling him Marty that it didn’t occur to me who Eric was. I won’t necessarily dispute Bob Gale on that, but then again, I’ve never been great with names. In fact, his departure was kind of sad. Eric had put a lot of work into the role and he had hit his marks. He just lacked this certain quality, the specific energy that they wanted the character to have.
That was my first thought. My next thought was, Oh my God—I’m going to have to do those six weeks of filming over again. In moviemaking, six weeks can be an eternity, and in that amount of time we had already shot so much: Doc Brown showing Marty the DeLorean for the first time. Marty coming to Doc in 1955 and convincing him that he has traveled from the future. Marty making his final preparations with Doc to escape in the DeLorean as the lightning storm gathers. I had stretched myself to get my performance where it needed to be in those scenes. And now I would have to do it all a second time? I was really worried about that.
Michael started working on the movie immediately. There was no time for rehearsals or a table read of the screenplay with our new Marty, no way to test for what his onscreen chemistry was like with me or Lea Thompson or any of the other actors who had already been working on the film. Michael just showed up and started going in front of the cameras, and I had tremendous respect and admiration for what he was doing. He was working double duty between Family Ties and Back to the Future, getting shuttled between the two productions and sometimes sleeping in the car or plane that was transporting him back and forth because that was his only time to rest. But he did it, and it never detracted from the work he was doing.
While it is possible that Michael and I may have crossed paths at the Paramount lot during the time I was finishing up Taxi and he was starting Family Ties, I don’t ever recall meeting him there. So as far as I can tell, our introduction happened in a parking lot on Back to the Future, as Doc Brown and Marty, at a time when we were re-shooting scenes that I had already done once before. I was having a very self-involved reaction at first, and moment to moment I was feeling the challenge of it, knowing that I had to make Doc’s scenes happen again and worrying about whether I could bring them back to the level I had brought them to the first time. It was a very internal thing, one that I’m not sure that any of my costars even picked up on, and certainly not anything I discussed with them. I kept reminding myself, Well, they haven’t replaced me yet.
So here we were, two actors feeling each other out, both of us working pretty hard. And it seemed to be clicking. Michael could do quick verbal jokes or physical gags seemingly without even thinking. I’m sure he has his own process and puts in the work, but he has a natural comic vitality that is very humorous and fun to watch. I didn’t know that about him at the time, and I was totally taken by surprise. I was doing what I was told to do. I was trying to create this character and work with the actor who was there. And I was extremely grateful that the other actor in this case was Michael, because he brought his own energy and that sparked me to get over my own anxieties.
It reminded me of a lesson I had learned when I was studying with Sandy Meisner: your performance doesn’t depend on you. It depends on what the other person is doing. Now, that’s a generalization, but it’s true. Somebody does something and you react to what that person just did. You can come in with your preconceived notions, but you have to be ready to adapt. Because it felt natural with Michael, we didn’t have to fumble around and establish a rapport. It was just there and it was easy. It fit without alteration.
In our downtime Michael and I kept to ourselves. We were separated by a generation in age, and he was busy doing essentially two jobs at once, one of which was a movie where everyone else had already done many more weeks’ worth of work, and now he was expected to come in quickly and help save the day. It must have been a very heavy burden for him. (There’s that word again, heavy.) Maybe every now and then he caught me grazing over the leftovers at a craft services table in the wee hours of a long shooting day, or we would silently shoot each other a knowing glance if we saw an unruly actor getting into it with Bob Zemeckis. It would take two more Back to the Future movies before Michael and I truly got to know each other and become friends. But it would come.
My mind would go to all different places while I worked on the film. When I was a student at Darrow, the study hall was held in the library and I spent a lot of time daydreaming there. I was once sitting there, looking around at the titles of the books, and I saw one called Hell on Ice. It intrigued me so I read it, and it was an incredible story about an attempt to reach the North Pole in the 1870s. The ship they were using, the Jeannette, was a square-rigged sailing ship—there were no diesel engines in those days—and after the boat left San Francisco Harbor with much hoopla, it got frozen in the Arctic ice. The crew took the lifeboats and went south to the shores of Siberia, and many of them perished along the way. It was an incredible story of danger, survival, and human endurance. The book is still around today, but I hadn’t seen it since I found it in the school library. So I obtained a copy at a secondhand store on Melrose and I kind of naively gave it to Bob Zemeckis at one point, in the midst of everything else that he was dealing with in Back to the Future, because I thought he might be interested in making it his next picture. It didn’t quite occur to me that Bob might have had a few other things on his mind at the time, like having to practically start his whole picture again from scratch. I intended it as a compliment to Bob, because I knew that only a great director could pull this off, and I didn’t want him to have to worry, as all artists do, about where his next project was going to come from. Somehow, we’ve never talked about it since. I still see Bob from time to time and he doesn’t bring it up.
What I should have seen then and have since come to learn is that all a director can really focus on when he’s making a movie is the movie at hand. Back to the Future was a big production with a lot going on, and Bob was somehow on top of all the elements. What made him remarkable is that, in the midst of that, he would listen to his actors and make time for them. He was always very sensitive to what I was doing as an actor and wanted to know what he could do to alleviate or fix problems if I had them. He was never brutish or forceful about things—he just got it done.
I still had my own challenges to face. I had to shoot that clock tower sequence. They did have a full-size replica of the clock built on a soundstage so we could do a lot of close-up work at ground level and they could make it look like I was in danger. But for a few of those shots where you’re looking at Doc from a distance, and you can see the height he’s dangling from and the peril he’s in? Well, that’s really me up there. We filmed that sequence over a couple of nights, and of course, as Bob Zemeckis had promised, I was tethered: I was fitted with a harness that went under my costume, and I was hooked to supports that would prevent me from falling. Then they had a crane lift me up to the top of the building. And then the crane went away, and it was just me up there by myself, hanging on to the hands of the clock for dear life.
I wish I could say I had the foresight to know that Back to the Future would become such an incredible hit that we’d make two more films, or that I’d still be here, all these years later, talking about it with fans. In a strange way, the movie hasn’t aged, even though there are elements of it that place it very firmly in a specific time—or times. It’s still very funny to think about Doc’s disbelief in 1955 that Ronald Reagan has become the president in 1985. And somehow that DeLorean from the 1980s still feels like something out of the future.
There’s a level on which a time- travel story appeals to us that’s easy to understand. It’s a kind of escapism—we all wonder what it would be like to go forward in time and see events that haven’t happened or the consequences of our current actions; or to turn back the clock and change things around that we wished had worked out a different way. But I think there’s more to Back to the Future than that. I speak to people all the time who first saw Back to the Future when they were seven, eight, or nine years old, and they loved it and it never left them. Marty was a character who was young and had all the components of a family like they had—a mother and father, a brother and sister—and he represented the possibility of an adventure they could have, a thrill they might someday experience (with the help of this old fuddy-duddy who had mastered time travel). Those people were children when they first saw Back to the Future, and they’ve since grown up and had children of their own, and they’ve shown it to their children, and their children react just as passionately as their parents did.
I have adults come up to me regularly and say, “You made my childhood.” Now, what can I say to that? It tells me that something was missing from their youth, as is so often the case, and whatever they felt they were lacking, Back to the Future provided it for them—the movie was a refuge for them, and deeply so. Of course, I can’t know that about everyone, and I’m sure many people who are fans of the film had perfectly happy childhoods, too. I’m probably just making that assumption because I know it to be true about me: I had a childhood that, in its own ways, was pretty grim and lonely, and that’s something that kids who were brought up in much humbler situations can experience, too. Hypothetically, if Back to the Future would have come out in 1947, I would have been totally into it. I would have lived vicariously through it.
After shooting on Back to the Future had wrapped but before the film was released, I was asked to play Doc Brown again in the music video for “The Power of Love,” one of the songs that Huey Lewis and the News contributed to the movie. I didn’t have to do much more than pull up to the entrance of a nightclub in the DeLorean, tell some kids not to touch the control panels, and then stand at the back of the club while the band did its thing. But it had been another arduous, all-night shoot, and during a break, I was sitting on a bench with a few other people at about two o’clock in the morning. Huey Lewis sauntered over and asked, “Is this going to be anything?”
He wasn’t being arrogant at all. He was just curious. He was staying up all night to make a music video for a film that no one had seen yet. He was wondering, Is this going to be anything? Am I wasting my time? What am I working here for? Is this a piece of shit or what? No one knew quite what to say at the time. But when I think about it now, talk about the understatement of the century.
Excerpted from IN MY OWN TIME. Copyright © 2026 Christopher Lloyd published by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette Book Group company. All rights reserved.
Emmy Award-winning actor Christopher Lloyd—one of the most iconic performers of his generation—shares an intimate portrait drawn from the defining moments of his life, from his early years in theater to his time on the sets of iconic television and film, his struggles with addiction, and an isolated childhood of privilege.
Whether appearing as a disembodied head in Wednesday or taking on the title role in a stage production of King Lear, Christopher Lloyd has become known for portraying larger-than-life characters with a singular intensity and imagination. Now, for the first time, Christopher shares stories from his life that he has rarely spoken about before.
In My Own Time begins with Christopher’s childhood at Waveny, the sprawling Connecticut estate. Raised primarily by governesses and wandering the grounds, he became a quiet observer of the people and relationships around him, including the complicated dynamic between his creative mother and his stern father.
With New York already a familiar part of his world, Christopher immersed himself in the demanding life of the theater. On stage he developed the intensity, imagination, and fearlessness that would come to define his work. From there, Christopher’s career expanded across television and film, where audiences came to know him as the intense and unpredictable Taber in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the eccentric and beloved Reverend Jim Ignatowski on Taxi, and the wild-eyed genius Doc Brown in the Back to the Future trilogy—performances that helped define some of the most enduring films and television of their time.
Christopher Lloyd offers a rare and deeply personal reflection on a life spent both onstage and on screen, told with charm, dry wit, and honesty. In sharing the stories behind his work, his struggles, and the people and places that shaped him, In My Own Time reveals the thoughtful and deeply observant man behind the iconic characters.