Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (22 page)

“Oh Jesus! Wait a moment. I’m putting Jean-Jacques on the phone right now so we can prove to you that we’re not kidding around. But before I give him the phone I need to have your agent’s phone number, because we need to strike a deal right now so you can get on the plane at eleven o’clock to be here the first thing tomorrow morning, to start shooting almost immediately.”

As it turned out, she wasn’t bullshitting. Jean-Jacques got on the phone, and I said, “J. J.? Is that you? What’s going on?”

“So it took me a little bit of maneuvering,” he said, “but what we both wanted to has come true; you are gonna be Salvatore. So get your ass over here. I gotta go. And whatever you do, just make sure you make that eleven o’clock flight.”

The first thing that came to mind, I guess in my still-asleep shock, was, “Holy shit, I got dry cleaning! I got most of my good fucking clothes at the fucking dry cleaners. What time do they fucking open? Do they open in time for me to put them in my fucking suitcase?” I thought that by using the word
fucking
enough it would help me to regain consciousness. And then, sure enough, the sleepy, groggy state started getting overwhelmed by the
Holy shit, I gotta get moving state
, so I started making calls to my agent, wakin’ his ass up and figuring out what in the fuck to do next. I had to pick up a copy of the script from Lynn Stalmaster, the Los Angeles casting director, before I left. They wanted me to be ready to hit the ground running the minute I landed in Germany, as shooting was to start immediately.

With all the hubbub coming from the living room, finally Opal woke up. I told her the news, and she knew by the look of sheer and utter panic in my eyes that I wasn’t fucking around. Oh, and she forgave me, by the way, for what neither of us could remember what we were fighting about in the first place. I threw some shit in a bag, brushed my teeth, grabbed my passport, kissed the baby, and,
boom
, out the fuckin’ door. The driver swung around to get my dry cleaning, and,
boom
again, I was on my way. The half-smile that never left my face during the whole ride to the airport belied the strangely delicious irony that played out in my mind’s eye: For two and a half, three years I was thinking
Quest
was a one-off and nothing like it was ever gonna happen again. And sure enough, and with the same magician, no less, Annaud rode in like some dashing deus ex machina on a white charger to save me from oblivion and obscurity. And not only that but also hands me this jewel of a character on a silver tray and says, “This is yours.” This unbelievable role was an incredible opportunity to do something requiring all of the skills I’d learned. I mean, looking back on the creation of Salvatore, it took every single fiber of my being to solve the riddle of who this character was and how to play him.

I poured over the material, going back and forth between the novel and the screenplay for the entire ten-hour flight. I was obsessively attempting to figure out how I was going to distill this character I previously described, with all his behavioral quirks, seamlessly to life. The first revelation that hit me on the plane was that the reason the audition had been so mediocre is that I didn’t have the guy in me yet, that I needed a model outside of myself to draw from. I didn’t know who this guy was. I didn’t know what he looked like. I didn’t know what he talked like. And because he was such an exotic compendium of behavioral traits, I needed to physically see a guy like that. I concluded that my search might start in an institution for the mentally challenged, just as Salvatore himself was. So I wrote down a list of things that I’m gonna need the minute I hit the ground in Germany. I wanted to see if they’d arrange for me to be taken to as many institutions as possible, in hopes of finding the seeds. I also figured out on the plane how to
solve his jumble of languages and make sense of all the seven different languages that Salvatore used, but used without reason. So the other things I needed once in Germany were copies of the book translated into all the languages the character used. I would find everything Salvatore ever says in the book, and I was going to write down every sentence in all those languages. Then I was going to do an eeny, meeny, miny, moe, thus creating his random modality of speech.

I landed in Germany about mid-afternoon, and once there, I was taken immediately to the set, where they were already deep into shooting the movie. I said hello to my old friend Christian Slater, who is the son of another old friend, Mary Jo Slater, a casting director I had known in New York since the beginning. Finally Jean-Jacques appeared. I got a big hug and a kiss. And I said, “Jean-Jacques, I’m gonna ask these guys to provide me with a few things to make this thing happen and happen quick. Can you help me out with that?”

“Absolutely.” He took me to the producers and said, “Give this man everything he wants. Except more money! That’s how we lost the last guy!”

I told them I wanted to visit mental institutions, and within twenty minutes I was on my way to the first one. The place was a locked-down facility for people with Down syndrome, who, of course, back then were insensitively referred to as mongoloids. This place had patients who were distorted physically and were mentally challenged beyond the point at which they were capable of living on their own, but they were marginally functional. This, indeed, was where I found Salvatore! I watched this one guy interacting with a group, having been given a bunch of ice cream Popsicle sticks so as to create a little house or something; it was the institution’s version of occupational therapy. But while he was doing it, he was touching every girl’s tit that he could get his little hands on, including the nurses and all the patients. And he was just getting the biggest charge out of this, squeezing a titty and then giggling profusely over how clever he was to cop a feel. This obsessive proclivity for sexual thrills was a
huge
window into one of the completely illogical attributes Salvatore displays in the movie. And
so now I was locked into this guy! As he went back to his little task of building a stick house with Popsicle sticks, all the while his eyes were darting around, seeing which titty he could snag next. That was a part of Salvatore that I needed. Suddenly I am infused with power and well-being. I am on a roll. I decided to check out one more place, a prison for the criminally insane. To say I didn’t find my guy in there was an understatement. In fact, all I knew was that I needed to get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible. Aside from the open call for
Quest for Fire
, that was the sickest place I’ve ever been in my life.

When I went back to the set I thanked everybody for making my little tour happen. Then I got my marching orders. They told me Jean-Jacques wanted to have dinner with me that night. I checked into the hotel and waited until a driver fetched me at around nine o’clock to take me to a restaurant where J. J. was waiting.

“Good to see you, my friend.”

“Same here, mon ami, same here! So, tell me, J. J., how the fuck did I get here?”

“Well, frankly you were very close to getting the role from the beginning, but because this movie is a coproduction between Germany, France, and Italy, and because each country is responsible for putting in a small modicum of money to come up with the budget, after the Italian government put in their four million, they said, ‘Who are the Italian actors in there?’ I said, ‘We don’t have one.’ And they said, ‘Well, what role’s open?’ And I tell them there are none. So they flex some muscle and said, ‘Well, you either open up a role, or we take our four million dollars and go home.’”

“Ergo, Franco Franchi,” I said.

“Exactement! The only role I was still figuring out was Salvatore. So I said, ‘Salvatore is half-open,’ and then they directed me to Franchi. So, reluctantly, I sign him on and tell him to come in for a haircut. I wanted to make him look like he had mange or something, with patches of hair missing and exposing his scalp, giving him an even more unsettling demeanor. It was a special haircut I had designed. So we made an appointment for Franchi to come in, and he doesn’t show
up. A week later we made another appointment. Again he is a no-show. He did this about four times, and then finally, on the day I called you, it was the day prior to when he was scheduled to do his first scene. This is after weeks and weeks of him not coming in for the haircut. So he arrives to get the haircut, when, apparently, trouble brews. They pull me from what I am doing and call me into the makeup room. They say, ‘Jean-Jacques, we have a problem.’ And I say, ‘What’s the problem?’ Franco Franchi stands with the haircutting cape around his shoulders and raises his voice. ‘I tella you what is de problem. If I cutta my hair . . . now, you haffa pay me double.’ And I said, ‘Excuse me? What did you say?’ And Franchi repeats, ‘You hearda me. I want twice as mucha money, and then I cutta ma hair.’ I turned my back on him and said to the producer standing behind me, ‘I want him off my set. He’s trying to rob me, and if he’s not off my set in five minutes, I’m going to go get my gun and I’m gonna start shooting at him. You got it?!’ And the producer says, ‘Yes J. J., I got it, but the character works tomorrow. Do you have a second choice?’ And I say, ‘HE IS MY SECOND CHOICE! MY FIRST CHOICE IS ASLEEP IN LOS ANGELES!’ That’s when you got the call at five in the morning.”

“Over a fuckin’ haircut. What kinda beautiful fuckin’ luck is that?” I said.

The next day on the set I met Sean Connery. I couldn’t believe I was in the presence of a movie star. And not only was I in the presence of a movie star, but I was in the presence of
the
movie star. Because in my mind there was everybody else, and then there was Sean. To this day I feel as though Sean Connery is the very last of the great movie stars of old, like in the mold of the guys who were around when I was a kid growing up—larger-than-life, guy-guys . . . nothing ephemeral about them. Complete masculine forces of nature. Like Gable, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Jimmy Stewart, and Robert Mitchum. Sean was cut from that cloth. And there have not been any to replace him since. The closest you come these days is Clooney, but pretty much everybody else is ephemeral, everybody else is kind of like . . .
I’m not talking about a lack of talent, because there’s a lot of actors out there who are incredibly talented, but what we are looking for in our leading men has changed, starting with McQueen, Newman, Redford, all of whom possessed a bedroom sort of manliness. Then that morphed into the leading men of today. But back then there was the final hold out for the fuckin’ OG, fucking alpha-male thing. That was Sean fucking Connery. And so to be in his presence, the very first true, bona fide movie star I ever worked with, was indeed a gift of a very singular nature.

He seemed delighted to meet me and was so welcoming and warm: “You’re that fellow who Jean-Jacques keeps talking about. He adores you. It’s good to meet you. I can’t wait to work on this film with you.”

And so he immediately welcomed me into his world, even to the point of giving me the feeling that he was gonna have my back. Regardless of what happened, he was completely behind me playing this role. There was nothing I had to worry about. Sean was tickled that Jean-Jacques got his way in this particular thing. He was completely up on the whole story about what happened to the original guy, how he got fired, and how happy it made Jean-Jacques. He was such a fan of Jean-Jacques; he was truly one of “us.”

As soon as we began shooting the same scenes together, he made me realize that he was as dependent on me giving a performance that was gonna fuel him as I was on him. I felt part of this exclusive club, even if I had that same ol’ fucked up tape running in my head: “I’m not worthy.” At first I was thinking I had no business being on the same set as Sean Connery, much less in the same scene as Sean Connery. Then, not long after we met, one scene was scripted in which I spit in his eye. I was hesitating . . . how do you spit in the eye of the great Sean Connery?

Sean leaned in to me and said, “You have to spit in my eye because if you don’t, I won’t have anything to play.” And that’s how I came up with the fucking balls to fucking spit in 007’s eye. And you really, really gotta do it, ’cuz the only thing more terrifying than spitting in the muthafucka’s eye is “take two” of spitting in the muthafucka’s eye!

There were not a lot of moments in my life when I got the acting lessons I did from Sean. I remember one day I was not on the call sheet. It was going to be this very, very big, dramatic scene in which William of Baskerville, the character that Sean played, is in serious trouble. He was to be investigated by all of the Brotherhood because at one point he had been labeled a heretic, thrown out of the church, and spent a huge chunk of his life paying for this empty accusation. Now he’s back, and there’s this whole host of guys from this other order just laying for him. He’s a Franciscan, but his rivals are desperate to finally and decisively take him down. So there is to be this kangaroo trial, and it’s this big scene with probably thirty actors. Sean has some gorgeous dialogue to speak in this scene.

Because we were on location and I didn’t really have anything much better to do, I went to the set that day just to observe. I watched Sean do this one moment about twelve times. It was the first time I realized the glory of language when it is loved and respected as if it were a beautiful woman you wanted voraciously, for that is how Sean caresses his every word and every syllable. I was never able to catch it by watching his movies, but being on that set with him, seeing him grappling with giving this performance each time as if it were the first time—my God! Glorious! No word should be uttered unless it is important enough to be uttered beautifully. So the pace at which Sean Connery speaks stems from a decision he’s made. And every single vowel delivered is with respect for the language. But he delivers it so naturally and with so much humanity that you don’t realize that, technically, he is giving a master class in how to deliver a line. And because I watched him do this thing over and over and over again, I would never have seen it otherwise. This is something I’ve taken with me for the rest of my time as an actor: Don’t say a word unless that word is worth saying, and if that word is worth saying, say it beautifully. I learned that from Sean Connery. And I’ve never delivered a line the same way since.