Brando (50 page)

Arthur Penn was the director of
The Missouri Breaks
and he encouraged us to improvise. I rewrote my part and made up a lot of nonsense. I was supposed to play what the script called a “regulator,” a hired gun who went around the West assassinating people, and it was so boring that I decided to make changes.
First I played the part as an Englishman, then changed his name and made him an Irishman. I also played him as a gunman disguised as a woman, and invented a wonderful weapon by sharpening the ends of a four-spoked tire-lug wrench: when I threw it, it sailed like a Frisbee and stuck in anything; if I missed with one prong, another would hit the target. In one scene I had to chase a rabbit on a cutting horse, and I kept thinking that if the horse went down I would probably fall on this weapon I was so proud of inventing.

The producers had agreed to pay me my usual fee, but several weeks into the filming, they still hadn’t signed a formal contract. I complained, but they kept making excuses. I knew they were trying to wait me out; after they had enough footage, they’d say their financing had fallen through and that they couldn’t pay me what they’d promised. In situations like this, you can’t always simply walk off a movie. You might not be paid for the work you’ve already done, and a studio can tie you up in court for years while cranking out publicity blaming you for its larceny. But as noted earlier, once filming begins, actors gain an edge over producers, who don’t want to stop because if they do they’ll lose whatever money they’ve already spent and still have no picture. Producers also hate delays because it can cost over $100,000 a day to keep a crew on location. Actors can use these circumstances to their advantage when others try to cheat them, as my experience on
The Missouri Breaks
demonstrated. After the producers repeatedly broke promises to sign the contract, I started slurring my speech and blowing my lines. If your technique is effective, nobody can prove you’re doing it on purpose.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” I told Arthur Penn. “I’m having a lot of problems with this part. Be patient with me. I know I’ll get it right sooner or later.”

After a week or so, one of the producers flew to Montana and we had a big scene in my trailer about the unsigned contract.
I threw a can of Coke at him and it smashed against a wall a few inches from his head. I missed purposely, pretending to be outraged. He was a fastidious man who couldn’t stand a mess, and he immediately started wiping up the Coke, but when he finished he assured me that there had been a misunderstanding and that the contract would be signed shortly. It was, and suddenly I started remembering my lines again.

In
The Freshman
a few years later, I played the character who resembled Don Corleone, and Matthew Broderick played a college freshman whom I hired to make some unusual deliveries. I thought it was a funny picture, though it could have been even more comic. When I read the script, I laughed and laughed and couldn’t wait to do it. It was a wonderful satire by Andrew Bergman, who had written an extremely funny movie I liked called
The In-Laws
, but he decided to direct it, which I think was unfortunate because his inexperience was evident in the way
The Freshman
was edited; a lot of potential was lost in the cutting room.

About the time we were finishing the picture and I was getting tired after weeks of working long hours, I spoke to a reporter in Toronto, where most of the filming was done, and happened to mention that this might be my last picture and that I was disappointed with it. As it happened, TriStar Pictures at the time owed me about $100,000 for some extra work on the picture. As soon as the story appeared, the studio apologized and paid the money I was owed, and I then issued a press release saying I hadn’t meant what I’d said because I was exhausted after working so hard on the film.

I didn’t always win, however. When Paula Weinstein, a producer, asked me in 1988 to play a lawyer who defends a wrongly accused black man in South Africa in
A Dry White Season
, I hadn’t made a picture in nine years. Jay Kantor told her that my fee was $3.3 million, plus 11.3 percent of the gross, but she said she had to make the picture on a low budget
because studio executives were leery about movies with political themes. The script by Robert Bolt, usually a first-rate screenwriter, wasn’t special, but Paula promised to revise it to satisfy me, and so I volunteered to be in the picture for nothing. I thought the story was effective not only because it demonstrated how blacks were treated under apartheid, but because it gave a white audience an opportunity to experience through the eyes of a white South African how inhumane the policy was.

After I offered to work for nothing, MGM gave the go-ahead and the script was reworked, but never satisfactorily, in my opinion, and I had to rewrite my own scenes. When I went to London for filming, I discovered that the director, Euzhan Palcy, was a headstrong neophyte who was out of her depth, an amateur trying to play hardball. I felt that she offered nothing in the way of direction—no scene conception, no plan of execution—but I did everything I could to get it right.

A couple of months before the film was released, MGM showed me a rough cut of the picture and invited me to propose changes. Donald Sutherland was very good as the South African who discovers the corruption of his country’s judicial system when it is applied to blacks. He is a man caught in a conflict between the traditions and values of his culture and his own sense of morality; he refuses to turn his back on the injustice directed against one of his employees, and becomes ensnared in tragic circumstances that culminate in his losing everything, including his life. But Euzhan Palcy had cut the picture so poorly, I thought, that the inherent drama of this conflict was vague at best. She had also made parts of the picture too transparently polemical; subtlety and sensitivity were needed, not preaching. The result was dramatic gridlock. Her approach was aggravated by the fact that several important scenes had inept and sometimes self-indulgent performances by amateur black actors she had hired in Africa, and one of the most powerful scenes in the picture, when I defy the judge in the courtroom and say, “You are a pustule on the face of justice” and he has me dragged out of the courtroom, had disappeared. After I saw the rough cut, I implored Paula Weinstein and MGM to let me pay for recutting the picture to give it more tension and dramatic coherence.

These are a few excerpts from my letters:

I offered MGM executives many specific suggestions on how to improve the picture without reshooting it, but they either didn’t answer my letters, said that the director refused to make changes or claimed that it was too late to recut it. I resented having extended myself on behalf of the picture and a good cause, working hard at no charge, and not having been allowed to recut at least my part of the picture the way it should have been done.

Finally I called Connie Chung at CBS and told her I would give her an interview if I could speak about what had happened. I did, but MGM still refused to budge. Then Paula Weinstein called me from the Tokyo Film Festival, where the picture was being shown, and I pleaded with her again. “It’s not too late,” I said.

She said, “It
is
too late, we can’t do it, if we had more time …”

“It’s never too late. I’ll still pay for the cutting,” I said; “I’ll pay whatever it takes.”

Paula was making more excuses when she was interrupted by someone; then she said, “You’ve just won the best acting award.”

“Did the picture win?” I asked, and she said, “No, the picture didn’t, but you did.”

She still didn’t get the message and wouldn’t change the ending. I felt betrayed, and the picture was a terrible flop.

   I had only a small part in
Superman
, but since it was a popular movie and my contract gave me 11.3 percent of the gross, I made about $14 million for less than three weeks’ work. When
Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the producers, asked if they could use footage from the picture in a sequel,
Superman II
, I asked for my usual percentage, but they refused, and so did I.

Several years later, the Salkinds asked me to be in
Christopher Columbus: The Discovery
, and I accepted because I wanted a chance to shape it into something close to historical truth. A picture about Columbus was sure to be made on the five hundredth anniversary of his voyage to the New World, but I didn’t want him celebrated as a hero. Instead of a day for celebration, Columbus Day ought to be one of mourning. I wanted to tell the truth about how he and his minions exploited and killed the Indians who greeted them, but the script had wrapped him in all his myths as a great sailor and explorer.

I called Ilya Salkind and said, “Ilya, you can film this script the way it is if you like, but I think you’re going to have a tragedy on your hands if you do; it’s the most boring, poorly written, idiotically constructed story I’ve ever seen.” I convinced him that he and his father were going to have a failure on their hands if they didn’t stick to the facts, and persuaded him to turn the story around completely and portray Columbus as the cruel, ambitious man he was, a man who would stop at nothing, including exterminating the guileless Indians who offered him food and gold. I convinced the other actors, who were also unhappy, to agree with me, and Ilya asked me to put together the story the way I thought it should be told. I rewrote my part as Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor in the court of Queen Isabella and, using false teeth, darkened eyes, and a huge hood I draped over my face to make me look like death, I designed an effective costume and makeup.

Everything was fine until Ilya’s father, Alexander Salkind, arrived in Spain on the first day of filming. He didn’t like to fly and had arrived late by train from someplace in Eastern Europe. When he read my script, he refused to use it and insisted on sticking with the original story, which was idiotic, untruthful and uninteresting. It was a big mistake because the picture was a huge failure.

I was depressed and wanted to go home, but I knew Alexander would sue me if I backed out of my contract. There was nothing left for me to do except walk through my part. The other actors and I had nothing to work with. They tried hard, but I’m afraid I didn’t. I mumbled my way through the part and gave an embarrassingly bad performance. The pay wasn’t bad, though: $5 million for five days’ work.

DURING THE TEN YEARS
between
The Formula
in 1979 and
The Freshman
in 1989, I didn’t make a movie except for my role in
A Dry White Season
because I didn’t need the money. I was content doing other things: traveling, searching, exploring, seeking. I spent a lot of time on Teti’aroa, read a lot and became interested in many things, including meditation, one of many interests the luxury of time and money allowed me to examine during the eighties and early nineties.

Meditation was something I slipped into easily. I suppose it came out of acting. Because of the introspection that is a part of acting, I had developed a fairly strong sense of where my feelings were and how to gain access to them. I was fascinated by my ability to send an impulse from my brain to my body that enabled me to experience different emotions, and thought it would be interesting to know more about how the process worked. I consulted an expert on biofeedback, the discipline of controlling your physiological responses by monitoring your body’s inner dynamics and learning to modulate them accordingly. I told him about the trick I had learned as an actor and asked him if he could measure any physical manifestation of it using instruments that measured galvanic skin response, the
electrical resistance on your fingertips that varies according to activity in your central nervous system. He confirmed that the mental exercises I thought of as sending an electrical current from my brain to my body in order to experience a certain emotion did in fact have a physical signature; as I tried to control my emotions, the needle on the biofeedback instrument shifted back and forth, proof of a linkage between the directions from my brain and my body’s response. In a distant and primitive way, it was a process similar to that which yogis and swamis, after years of training and practice, use through the meditative process to produce virtually any pattern of brain waves they choose. They reach into their minds, and with refined, introspective techniques achieve tremendous control over their bodies in pursuit of religious enlightenment.