Brando (49 page)

IN
LAST TANGO IN PARIS
, my first picture after the
The Godfather
, I played a recently widowed American named Paul who has a quirky, anonymous affair with a French girl named Jeanne, played by Maria Schneider. The director was Bernardo Bertolucci, an extremely sensitive and talented man although, unlike Kazan, he wasn’t trained as an actor and didn’t address himself to the development of characters. This simply happens or it doesn’t, though Bernardo did do something unusual on this picture. Usually actors have to conform to the writer’s story and take on the characteristics he creates, but in
Last Tango
Bernardo tailored the story to his actors. He wanted me to play myself, to improvise completely and portray Paul as if he were an autobiographical mirror of me. Because he didn’t speak much English and knew nothing about American slang, he had me write virtually all my scenes and dialogue, and we communicated in French and sign language.

Some of the lines I wrote for the picture may have a certain resonance to the readers of this book: “I can’t remember very many good things about my childhood … my father was a drunk, a screwed-up bar fighter. My mother was also a drunk. My memories as a kid are of her being arrested. We lived in a small town, a farming community.… I used to have to milk a
cow every morning and every night, and I liked that, but I remember the time I was all dressed up to take a girl to a basketball game, and my father said you have to milk the cow … and I didn’t have time to change my shoes and I had cow shit all over my shoes when I went to the basketball game.…” I made up the dialogue from my memories of events, though not everything was accurate and they didn’t necessarily happen in the sequence I told them. For example, my father didn’t order me to milk a cow before a date, but as mentioned earlier I did take girls to games mortified that they might smell cow dung on my galoshes.

I had one of the more embarrassing experiences of my professional career when we were making this film in 1972. I was supposed to play a scene in the Paris apartment where Paul meets Jeanne and be photographed in the nude frontally, but it was such a cold day that my penis shrank to the size of a peanut. It simply withered. Because of the cold, my body went into full retreat, and the tension, embarrassment and stress made it recede even more. I realized I couldn’t play the scene this way, so I paced back and forth around the apartment stark naked, hoping for magic. I’ve always had a strong belief in the power of mind over matter, so I concentrated on my private parts, trying to
will
my penis and testicles to grow; I even spoke to them. But my mind failed me. I was humiliated, but not ready to surrender yet. I asked Bernardo to be patient and told the crew that I wasn’t giving up. But after an hour I could tell from their faces that they had given up on me. I simply couldn’t play the scene that way, so it was cut.

This scene was one of several in which Bernardo wanted me to make love to Maria Schneider to give the picture more authenticity. But it would have completely changed the picture and made our sex organs the focus of the story, and I refused. Maria and I simulated a lot of things, including one scene of buggering in which I used butter, but it was all ersatz sex.

Last Tango in Paris
received a lot of praise, though I always
thought it was excessive. Pauline Kael in particular praised it highly, but I think her review revealed more about her than about the movie. She is the best reviewer I know, but I think she became too subjectively involved in the story and critiqued the film from her own unique set of values and biases. Her review was flattering, but I don’t think the picture was as good as she said it was. To this day I can’t say what
Last Tango in Paris
was about. While we were making it, I don’t think Bernardo knew either, though after it was released, he was quoted as saying that it was meant to explore whether two people could have an anonymous relationship, and then sustain it after its anonymity was breached and affected by the outside world. But he didn’t say this when we were making the picture. It was about many things, I suppose, and maybe someday I’ll know what they are.

Last Tango in Paris
required a lot of emotional arm wrestling with myself, and when it was finished, I decided that I wasn’t ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie. I felt I had violated my innermost self and didn’t want to suffer like that anymore. As noted earlier, when I’ve played parts that required me to suffer, I had to
experience
the suffering. You can’t fake it. You have to find something within yourself that makes you feel pain, and you have to keep yourself in that mood throughout the day, saving the best for the close-up and not blowing it on the long shot, the medium shot or the over-the-shoulder shot. You have to whip yourself into this state, remain in it, repeat it in take after take, then be told an hour later that you have to crank it up once more because the director forget something. It takes an enormous toll.
Last Tango in Paris
left me feeling depleted and exhausted, perhaps in part because I’d done what Bernardo asked and some of the pain I was experiencing was my very own. Thereafter I decided to make my living in a way that was less devastating emotionally. In subsequent pictures I stopped trying to experience the emotions of my characters as I had always done before, and simply to act the part in a technical way. It is less painful and the audience doesn’t know the difference. If a story is well written and your technique is right, the effect is still the same: in a darkened room, the magic of the theater takes over and the audience does most of the acting for you.

   
When I arrived in the Philippines in the summer of 1976 for my scenes in
Apocalypse Now
, the film about the Vietnam War based on Joseph Conrad’s novel
Heart of Darkness
, Francis Coppola was alternately depressed, nervous and frantic. Shooting was behind schedule, he was having trouble with the cameraman, he wasn’t sure how he was going to end the movie and the script was awful. It bore little resemblance to
Heart of Darkness
, and most of it simply didn’t make dramatic sense.

“Listen,” I said, “you have me for a certain number of weeks and I’ll do the best I can, but I think you’re making an enormous error.” I wanted him to return to the original plot of Conrad’s novel, in which a man named Marlow describes his journey up the Congo in search of Walter Kurtz, a once idealistic young man who had been transformed by his experiences into a mysterious, remote figure involved in what Conrad called “unspeakable rites.” In the original script Kurtz—my part—was a caricature of a reprobate; he was sloppy, fat, immoral, a drunk, a stereotypical character from a hundred movies. The part must have had thirty pages of dialogue; it went on and on while going no place theatrically. I thought it was an idiotic script, but I didn’t say this to Francis. In such situations I’ve found it best to say, “This may be all right the way you’re going to do it, but I think we’re missing a bet by not changing it.”

“In
Heart of Darkness, “
I told Francis, “Conrad uses this guy Kurtz almost as a mythological figure, a man who is much larger than life. Don’t misuse him in the film. Make him mysterious, distant and invisible for most of the picture except in our minds. What makes Conrad’s story so powerful is that people talk about Kurtz for pages and pages, and readers wonder about him. They never see him, but he is part of the atmosphere. It’s an odyssey, and he’s the heart of the
Heart of Darkness
. The longer it goes on, the more he occupies the minds of readers as they imagine him.” The same thing could be done in the movie, I said, “but you have to hint at it, make him such a mysterious person that the audience will wonder more and more about him until the end.” When Willard, the army officer played by Martin Sheen, and the character based on Conrad’s Marlow, heads up the river and people shoot at him, I said that neither he nor the audience will know whether Kurtz is going to appear, and as Willard keeps getting closer and closer, he becomes more frightened by the mystery of what may be ahead of him, and the audience will share these feelings. Willard doesn’t know if he will survive the journey up the river, and as it continues he gradually loses confidence until he finally finds Kurtz, who
then
can represent the quintessence of evil.

A break in shooting
Apocalypse Now
. (Stephanie Kong/SYGMA)

If we locked ourselves into the portrayal of Kurtz in the original script, I said, it would be impossible to focus on the man’s mystery, that which is truly ominous, because what is truly ominous must be unseen. I offered to rewrite the script based on the original structure of the book, and Francis agreed. I spent about ten days on a houseboat completely rewriting the movie and thinking about how my character should look. Conrad described Kurtz as “impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball.…” Without informing Francis, I shaved my head, found some black clothing and asked the cameraman and lighting crew to photograph me under eccentric lighting while I spoke half in darkness with a disembodied voice. After I showed him these tests, I told Francis I thought that the first time the audience hears Kurtz, his voice should come out of the darkness. After several long moments, he should make an entrance in which only his bald head is visible; then a small part of his face
is lit before he returns to the shadows. In a sense the same process is going on in Kurtz’s mind: he is in darkness and shadows, drifting back and forth in the netherworld he has created for himself in the jungle; he no longer has any moral frame of reference in this surreal world, which is a perfect parable of the insane Vietnam War.

I was good at bullshitting Francis and persuading him to think my way, and he bought it, but what I’d really wanted from the beginning was to find a way to make my part smaller so that I wouldn’t have to work as hard.

I loved shaving my head. I’d never done it before, and putting witch hazel on my head and sticking it out the car window while we were driving to another location during those hot days in the Philippines was heaven.

Besides restructuring the plot, I wrote Kurtz’s speeches, including a monologue at his death that must have been forty-five minutes long. It was probably the closest I’ve ever come to getting lost in a part, and one of the best scenes I’ve ever played because I really had to hold myself under control. I made it up extemporaneously, bringing up images like a snail crawling along the edge of a razor. I was hysterical; I cried and laughed, and it was a wonderful scene. Francis shot it twice—two 45-minute improvisations—but used hardly any of the footage in the picture. I thought it was effective, though it might have been out of place. I never saw the footage of the entire speech, so I wouldn’t know.

IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS
there is a crude but amusing saying: “The way to say ‘fuck you’ in Hollywood is
‘trust me.’ ”
It’s not always true. I’ve known wonderful, honest people there, but I’ve also run into a sizable number of whores, cheats and thieves. When this happens, you have to take charge of the situation; if you don’t, they’ll devour you. When I made
The Men
, I was one of the first movie actors to negotiate a one-picture deal instead of a long-term studio contract. Later, when the studio system, whose seven-year contracts had made indentured servants out of actors, collapsed, other actors began making similar deals. Like everything else, the price producers paid us was determined by the law of supply and demand and, like any other workers, our objective was to drive up the price as high as we could.

After the highest level that actors were able to negotiate reached 10 percent of the producers’ gross receipts—against a minimum, generally $1 million or more—I said to myself, Marlon, you should ask for 11.3 percent of the gross. I had pulled the number out of a hat.

The producers asked, “Why eleven point three?”

“Never mind,” I said, “I have my reasons.”

Usually they paid it, though sometimes they promised to pay and then reneged. When this happened it was necessary to be forceful.

My first picture after
Last Tango in Paris
was a western,
The Missouri Breaks
. At the time I was still giving money to the American Indians and spending heavily on Teti’aroa, so I needed the money. It wasn’t a good movie, but I had fun making it. There was a lot of pot smoking and partying, my friend and neighbor Jack Nicholson was in it, and much of the picture was filmed on the Crow Reservation in Montana, where I discovered a beautiful river and a lovely way to relax by floating down the river on an inner tube. At night, when most of the other people went to town, I liked to stay by myself and read in my trailer under a grove of cottonwood trees. One evening I heard a storm approaching in the distance. The clouds overhead were butting heads and putting on a spectacular sound-and-light show. As the horizon darkened, the thunder got louder and the lightning flashes closer. I began counting the seconds between each flash of lightning and clap of thunder, and as the interval shortened, I knew the storm was marching rapidly in my direction. I was tempted to stand outside and watch, but went inside the trailer to avoid being hit by lightning. The intervals got so short that the sound of the thunder and the flash of lightning were almost simultaneous, and then I heard a tremendous explosion right above me. When I got up in the morning, a huge, charred cottonwood branch was lying on the ground near the trailer, looking as if it had been severed by a blowtorch. Another few feet and it would have crushed the trailer with me in it.