No Land's Man (16 page)

That evening Ismail came home and announced he would be cooking and having a few guests over for dinner. I could join them if I liked.

A handful of well-dressed people in suits and saris gathered in his dining room later that night and talked of film, food, politics . . . and, of course, Ismail. I walked in to the room inconspicuously, trying to stay out of sight. It didn’t work. Ismail caught my eye the moment I entered the room and in mid-conversation turned to his friends.

“Let me introduce you to the next great star of the Merchant/Ivory family,” he said pointing to me. “This young man is the star of my new film
The Mystic Masseur
, also starring the great Om Puri, a wonderful actress named Ayesha Dharkar, and the incomparable James Fox.”

The guests turned to me with huge smiles on their faces. Toasts and congratulations were tossed in our direction as Ismail came and stood with his arm on my shoulder. Just as I was reaching to shake the hand of the nearest guest, I saw one of the older ladies in the room sit down on the antique chair that I had glued together. With a shriek and a flying plate of chicken mango curry, basmati rice, and okra, she collapsed amid a pile of three-hundred-year-old handcrafted wood and plush purple satin.

“He broke my bloody chair!” Ismail screamed, without missing a beat, as he helped the poor woman back to her feet. “He was having sex on my chair, and he broke it!”

I did a double take, not sure if I heard him correctly. I began to deny the preposterous allegation but didn’t have a chance as he continued with even more flamboyance and showmanship.

“Unbelievable,” he said now with a distinct smile as he helped wipe the yellow and red stain off the poor woman’s blouse with some seltzer and a napkin. “See what happens? You extend someone the courtesy of having them stay in your home, you offer to make someone a movie star for God’s sake, and this is how he repays you: by having sex on your antique chair and breaking it.”

I could not believe what I was hearing. The great storyteller, who had become one of the most prolific and unlikely Hollywood success stories, was accusing me in front of a group of strangers of
having sex on his priceless antique chair. I stood dumbfounded until I realized as everyone turned to me, faces horrified, that this was part of his theater. He was clearly delighting in the deliciousness of serving this lie to his audience as much as he might in serving them his delicious lemon daal. Fiction was better than truth in his world. I smiled. Instead of an embarrassing moment, it became a hilarious moment, even if it was at my expense.

I turned to the guests and played along, taking the cue from my director to be.

“I’m very embarrassed,” I apologized.

Ismail looked at his guests and smiled.

“What are you going to do?” he replied. “That’s what happens when you let an actor stay in your house. Hugh Grant was worse.”

Everyone laughed.

I arrived in Trinidad on December 31st of that same year to begin shooting
The Mystic Masseur
.

Ismail housed me in a lovely home he had rented with a pool and a beautiful garden in Port of Spain, but I was not there to lie by the pool. I arrived armed with my wall charts, my accent tapes, and my books about Trinidad. I had a collection of photographs from the region in the 1950s that I pasted onto my bedroom wall for inspiration.

It was New Year’s Eve when we arrived, and after a party that Ismail had thrown for the cast and crew, Om Puri suggested he and I and a local actor with a car go into Port of Spain and check out the bars. Initially I declined, saying I had to go home to study my script and be well-rested for the start of filming.

“Boy,” said Om, leaning out of the passenger side window, “you will learn more about how to play this role by drinking with the locals than learning your lines. Trust me, I’ve made a hundred films.”

“Is that true?” I asked, impressed.

“Of course not,” said Om. “I’ve made a hundred and twenty-three. Now get in the car.”

The first day of shooting was supposed to start at five
A.M
., but luckily I got more shut-eye than I expected since the ex-con they had hired to be my driver forgot to show up. A production assistant picked me up at seven, which pushed production to nine. When we arrived, Ismail was running around in the ninety-degree heat screaming at extras and crew like a blur wearing a caftan. Since I had never actually spoken to Ismail about the script or the scenes or anything, I imagined that first he would sit down with me and discuss some things. The first scene I was going to shoot was on a farm road with a wonderful eighty-nine-year-old actress named Zohra Seghal who was playing my grandmother. I assumed we would all have long conversations about our characters’ relationship and Ismail’s vision of the scene and how it fit into the larger story. As it turned out, I would have had a better chance of going over my scene with one of the local farmers.

This was a passion project for the great producer and what would turn out to be the last of only four movies he would ever direct himself. I realized very quickly, and much to my dismay, that my expectations of starring in my first movie were very different than Ismail’s expectations of me starring in my first movie. The luxury of excavating a character or text analysis were left to the safety of Wynn Handman’s acting class—that was the process that one is allowed on stage or in grad school, with weeks of rehearsal. This was the world
of independent filmmaking; this was the world where Ismail was creating something out of nothing.

The first few days I followed Ismail around with questions that he never answered or he thought were pointless or he answered with a perfunctory, “Sure, fine, try it.” He didn’t have time to hold my hand, he didn’t have time to talk to me about character and the truth of a scene or the legitimacy of dialogue because, well . . . because I realized he didn’t know how to. He was in his own process. He was painting the story he wanted to paint, even if sometimes that story was pretending that he knew what he was doing. I started having sleepless nights as I became afraid that without any guidance, without a director who could talk to me, my performance in this film might be the beginning and the end of my career. I was infuriated and disappointed that he seemed to care more about getting an immoveable cow with a rider on it to gallop through the foreground of a scene than answering a single question about the relationship between my character and his grandmother, which happened to be the scene the cow was an extra in.

His filmmaking maddened me. He spent forty-five minutes figuring out how to get the chickens on the roof of the house we were shooting in front of not to walk out of frame during the scene. He finally instructed the Indian boys on the crew to tie the feet of the chickens together and hold the other end of the string just off camera so they literally could not move. As a result the chickens were furious and clucked so loudly they almost drowned out the actors.

Ismail treated the script like a suggestion and every day we would invariably end up shooting scenes that were never written. It confounded me to no end since I had not prepared for them. He would see a wonderful road or a view or a tree that he liked
and we would stop and shoot a scene. Once, when told to ride my bicycle down a particular road, I told him that the scene was not in the screenplay.

“Never mind,” he said. “I don’t care what’s in the screenplay. This is a beautiful road and I want to see you riding your bike down it.”

“But where is my character even going?” I asked.

“He’s going home!” Ismail replied, irritated and impatient to start filming.

“Well, then tell me where I am coming from,” I pressed.

“Umm . . .” he said, searching for an answer, “you are coming from Ram Logan’s shop.”

I paused and then reminded Ismail that didn’t make any sense because it was well established in the film that Ram Logan’s shop was across the street from my house.

“Maybe you are taking the scenic route!” he screamed. “Now please stop talking and get on the bike and ride.”

At another point in filming I was honestly not sure if he was mad or a genius when I saw him instruct crew members to dress up in camouflage with giant leaves, hide in the marshland, and then scare a flock of geese that would fly over a vintage car carrying myself and actor Sanjeev Bhaskar as it drove down a country road. But he got the shot and I could not deny, it was beautiful.

What I came to realize as production went on and I was working sometimes twelve to fourteen hours a day was that this adventure would never be what I wanted it to be. I complained to myself that Ismail was not interested in my creative input and the work I had done on my character. It seemed like I was just a tool to him, a prop, a color on his palette board, and I was not entirely wrong.

One day when I was not called to the set and had planned to have a relaxing day off going over my upcoming scenes, an intern showed up at my front door saying Ismail wanted me on the set ready to shoot.

“What scene?” I asked. “It’s my day off.”

“I know,” he said, “it’s not in the script. It’s something he added to the schedule this morning.”

I was furious as I was pulled from my day to go through hair and makeup and was planted back on set. I felt disrespected and used. I grumbled, complained, and hollered to anyone who would listen (except Ismail), asking how was I supposed to give a worthy performance under these conditions. Om Puri was growing frustrated with my grumbling and finally he lost his patience and said four words that boomed out of his pockmarked face, like it was a megaphone: “Boy, do your work.”

This was exactly what I needed to hear, because he was absolutely right. That’s all I could do. In the midst of the insanity or magic that was Ismail Merchant, all I could do was my work. Everything else was out of my control. It’s also exactly what I was not doing. The charts, the research, worrying about the accent—even though it was all important stuff, I had spent weeks hiding behind it, using it as a crutch, afraid that I was going to be bad, afraid that I was going to fail. I may not have agreed with the way Ismail did things, but what I had to admire was that he was an artist who was not handcuffed by the worry that what he was creating would be viewed as good or bad. He was just creating, often in the moment, without any reason or rationale. He had given me a huge opportunity to do the same and that’s what I was blowing. The rest of the
shoot was just as frustrating, but slowly I let go of worrying about the work and I managed to just do the work.

The Mystic Masseur
premiered the following year in New York City. I was incredibly nervous to see it with an audience. I had heard through other actors and some of the other producers that unfortunately not one single A-list or even B-list celebrity was going to be able to attend the premiere. Woody Allen had a movie opening the same night and Paul Newman was having an event that everyone in New York seemed to be invited to. I was simultaneously disappointed and somewhat relieved.

Ismail called me before the screening and said, “The film is a masterpiece.”

I smiled because I knew he was lying.

“There will be lots of press at the premiere, you should be very excited.”

I smiled again, because I knew he was lying.

“But no one famous is coming, right?” I asked, hoping that was indeed the case.

“They can have their movie stars,” Ismail scoffed. “I have managed to snag the biggest celebrity in the world.”

“You have?” I said, wondering if Oprah could actually ruin my career if she hated this movie.

As I stepped out of a limousine with my parents at the premiere, which Ismail had turned into a fundraiser for the American India Foundation, I saw what he meant when the handful of press who had showed up suddenly stopped taking pictures of me and turned their lenses on the biggest celebrity in the world who also happened to be a board member of the American India Foundation: Former President Bill Clinton.

As the film started, I realized that Ismail Merchant had done what he did best. He had told the story the way he saw it. The movie was not perfect; in fact it got tremendously mixed reviews from the people in the theater that night and beyond. It would not go on to do much business at the box office or change my life in the way I thought it would, but as I watched the film, I saw for the first time what my story really was. It was not the story that I was hoping it would be—that of a young actor who gives an Oscar-winning performance his first time out and is applauded as the next great talent of our generation. It was instead the story of a young actor who is given an unbelievable opportunity, not to become a movie star, but to learn how to star in a movie.

Bill Clinton may have stood up and left ten minutes after the film began and gone to Paul Newman’s party down the street, but it didn’t matter. After the screening was over and people came up to me and my parents and congratulated me on a job well done, I realized that Ismail Merchant had given me something that perhaps no one else could have. He showed me how to make a great story out of a broken chair.

B
ROOKE
S
HIELDS KICKED ME OUT
of her New Year’s Eve party and I blame Jenny Cockshot and a very powerful pot brownie. Now, I have never been that guy that people kick out of their parties. It had never happened to me before. I am a fairly decent conversationalist and with the right music I’m a pretty good dancer, so mostly people like having me at their parties.

First of all, let me preface this story by saying that it was perfectly appropriate for Brooke to throw me out of her party. I might have done the same thing in her position. However, the reason this incident was significant was because of my strange history with Brooke Shields. Brooke and I were not friends. In fact, I had never really spoken to her. And yet when I was fourteen years old I went to sleep every night staring into her eyes.

When I was a kid, everyone had posters up in their bedroom. And since it was the seventies, most boys had posters of the scantily-clad Farrah Fawcett or the libido-raising dominatrixy Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, or in the case of my friend Darren,
the tightly-uniformed Erik Estrada. I had only one poster on my bedroom wall. It wasn’t even really a poster, it was just a photograph torn out of a magazine. It showed Brooke as a young screen goddess, barely a teenager, with puckered, moist lips, hair blown back, and a sultry expression in her eyes. I had posted the picture on the wall right to next to my pillow, so every night just before I turned off my lamp, Brooke was the last face I would see. She was the girl with whom I imagined I could go see movies. A beautiful girlfriend to hold my hand. Someone I could talk to.