Al Weisel
The Actor's Actor: Marlon Brando
By Al Weisel
Premiere, September 2004, pp. 98-104
"MARLON, YOU DID IT FOR US!"
ROBERT FORSTER, costar, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) The third or fourth day of shooting, [there was] a whisper. "Marlon's on the set." Everybody's eyes went to him.
HUBERT CORNFIELD, director, The Night of the Following Day (1969) The first glance I had of Marlon was at the Actor's Studio. He appeared silhouetted in the doorway, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He reached up and grabbed the cigarette, blew a cloud of smoke into the room, and disappeared.
SHIRLEY JONES, costar, Bedtime Story (1964) Wally Cox invited me and my husband Jack Cassidy to dinner at his home. Sitting under the table in kind of a Buddha position was Marlon Brando. I said, "What's he doing under the table?" Wally said, "I don't know. He doesn't want to talk to anybody right now." He didn't come out till close to the end of the party, and he said hello and good-bye.
STEWART STERN, screenwriter, The Ugly American (1963) As we went through the countryside in a UN jeep [traveling in Southeast Asia in 1956 to research a film], he was at his absolute crest. A kid on a water buffalo would see Marlon in the front seat and stand on his water buffalo's back and start screaming to everybody else in the paddy field, "Hey, Viva Zapata!"
JOHN SAXON, costar, The Appaloosa (1966) The first time I laid eyes on him, he had won the Academy Award for On the Waterfront. This was on Sunset Boulevard in [front of] Schwab's Pharmacy [and] Googie's, both hangouts for actors. Brando got out of his car, and I remember an actor saying, "Marlon, you did it for us!" These were not the Tyrone Power kind of good-looking people. "You did it for us" meant you gave us an opportunity to be somebody. It was a break in the system.
DIANE KEATON, costar, The Godfather (1972) I remember all the guys being obsessed with him. When he turned away, they would do impressions of him. Jimmy Caan's was really good. They were in awe.
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, director, Last Tango in Paris (1973) We finished the first shot of the film, and I said, "Good," and Enrico [Umetelli], the camera operator, says to me, "No, I'm sorry, but I looked in the viewfinder and saw Marlon Brando, I got paralyzed and I couldn't follow him."
MARLON BRANDO'S METHOD
WILLIAM PHIPPS, actor, Julius Caesar (1953) The anti-Brando people would have been astonished at how professional he was. They were quick to think of him as being a rogue and sloppy. But he came on the set extremely well-prepared. Everybody thought he was a Method actor. I don't think he was. Method acting wouldn't do a fucking bit of good in [Julius Caesar]. Yeah, he was a Method actor—Marlon Brando's method.
JOHN AVILDSEN, director, The Formula (1984) He gave his character a waddle and a hesitancy. He infused [him with] specifics. When he's in his office and talking about his neighborhood guy at the gas station pumping gas on the way to grandmother's house, I told him, "Think Norman Rockwell," and boy, did he. It almost started to smell in the office. He was worth the $250,000 he insisted on getting each day. In cash.
SIDNEY LUMET, director, The Fugitive Kind (1959) When he wanted to work, his concentration was almost psychotic. It was incredible how focused he was. Everything that happened around him was grist for the mill. A bird would tweet, and he'd look up to it, he'd not let it interrupt him. The clearest illustration of that is that extraordinary scene in On the Waterfront when Eva Marie dropped her glove. And bang, not only was it not an interruption, it became the essence of the scene.
EVA MARIE SAINT, costar, On the Waterfront (1954) During rehearsal I dropped the glove, and it shows you his genius that he picked it up and fondled it. It's a very sexy thing that he does there. When we showed it to Gadg [Elia Kazan], he said, "That's wonderful," so we repeated it for the film.
ARTHUR PENN, director, The Chase (1966) and The Missouri Breaks (1976) How we did the big fight scene [in The Chase] was Marlon's idea essentially. He said, "We shouldn't use stuntmen here, and why don't we do actual punches except that they will be slowed down ever so slightly, and why don't you undercrank [the camera]"—which worked wonderfully.
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI One day I asked him to tell the girl a memory of your childhood. [He talks] about his mother being drunk and his image of a dog that was jumping in the mustard field. Then I really felt he was giving me pieces of his life. He was pretending that he wasn't telling me the truth. I didn't really know if he was, but the emotion I had was very real. And then I discovered in his autobiography that many things were real.
JEREMY LEVEN, director, Don Juan DeMarco (1995) Somehow Irish accents came up. He said, "You know, there's not just one Irish accent, there are scores of them." He started doing different accents—a barrister, a barkeep. Somebody who was royal, a derelict. Not only was every Irish accent totally different. every character was different. The muscles in his face changed. The way he sat on the sofa. Clearly, he did not go off and look for sense memories, and he did not do research. It was wired into him.
ROBERT FORSTER There's a moment [in Reflections in a Golden Eye] at which he's waiting for me to come in the house and he looks in the mirror [and primps himself]. You look at that and you say, "Jesus, where does a guy think of that?" How natural and how simple and how right.
ARTHUR PENN Right in the beginning [of The Missouri Breaks] he comes into the house and he is patting his cheek [and says he has a] toothache. And lo and behold, he walks over to the casket, takes a piece of ice out [and presses it to his cheek]. That's completely invented. He looked at the set and he saw the ice and thought, I'm going to use that. One day I needed a scene, and Marlon said, "Give me a horse and a mule." And suddenly you have a family quarrel with these two animals, and he ends up kissing the horse on the lips. That was entirely Marlon's work.
RICHARD DONNER, director, Superman: The Movie (1978) [His agent] said, "In his mind he's going to play Jor-El as a green suitcase." I said, "What does that mean?" He said, "Just think about it—if he can talk you into filming a green suitcase he can just give you his voice-over." So we're sitting around [Brando's] living room and finally he said, "I think Jor-El should look like a bagel." I was prepared for a green suitcase, but not for a bagel. He said, "Nobody really knows what [the inhabitants of Krypton] look like. Maybe they do look like a bagel, but Jor-El creates his son [like an Earthling] so he'll look right." And you know, it made sense. [But I said], "Kids know what Jor-El looks like." And he looked at me and said, "Okay, show me what I'm going to wear." We showed him the costume, he agreed, and he was wonderful.
ANDREW BERGMAN, director, The Freshman (1990) I remember this thing he did in the scene in the dorm room, just twirling his hat around in his hand. You couldn't take your eyes off it. It was just one of these small, magical kinds of things. He loved props.
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, director, The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979) I wanted to shoot the scene in the book where [the Godfather] dies in the tomato patch, but Paramount thought we could just cut to the funeral. They sent the big studio brass to pull the plug on me. The little kid was frightened, and they were telling me, "We're going to lunch." Brando saw that I was under fire. He said, "Look, I have an idea, get me an orange." And he cut the orange peel and he put [it] in his mouth to make orange peel teeth and he scared the little kid and then hugged him and laughed. That scene wouldn't have existed if Marion had not come up with that bit of business and related to the child.
GORDON Willis, cinematographer, The Godfather (1972) He understood what a close-up meant and what a long shot meant and where he should use his time on the screen regarding those two sizes. He would always ask me, "What size are we at?" He'd show up without his pants 'cause he knew that the shot was from the waist up. We used overhead lighting in the scene [where Tom Hagen tells the Godfather that Sonny is dead]. You'll notice that he looks up, into the light. He was very savvy about all of that.
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA I kept saying I wanted to play [Kurtz in Apocalypse Now] like he was in Heart of Darkness, and he said it wouldn't work. We went through a million ideas, and he had interesting observations about all kinds of things. But I only had him for 15 days and I used up five of them just listening to him talk about termites. Finally, he arrived with his head shaved. I said, "Marlon, you said it wouldn't work," and he said, "Well, I think it will work." And I said, "You said you had read [the book]," and he said, "I lied." He had read it that night and shaved his head the next morning.
KEEPING IT FRESH
JAMES GARNER, costar, Sayonara (1957) Marlon once told me that every scene has a cliché. He said, "I try to find the cliché and get as far away from it as I can."
ARTHUR PENN [In The Missouri Breaks] Randy Quaid was feigning sleep, and Marlon picked up a grasshopper and to my astonishment dropped it in Randy's mouth. Randy didn't mind, but it sure took him by surprise.
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI [When he bites Maria Michi's hand] he didn't tell her before—or me. Every time he was taking me by surprise I was feeling like the luckiest director in the world. The moment when he does a kind of acrobatic jump—he did it to give the camera operator palpitations.
ROBERT DUVALL, costar, The Chase (1966) and The Godfather (1972) He mostly read his lines [instead of memorizing], even on The Chase. Even that far back. He claimed it was to make it fresh. Once [on The Godfather] we took a cue card away and put a wedding invitation, and they had to yell cut. One time Lenny Montana said, "Oh, Godfather" and stuck out his tongue, and we had written "Fuck you" across his tongue. Brando loved it.
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA He felt in life you don't know your line. So why learn your lines and then try to make people feel as if they're coming to you spontaneously? He liked to struggle for the lines because that's a real thinking process. I did once say, "Gee, Marlon, you're gonna have the cue cards, they're going to see you reading them," and he said, "You remember that scene in On the Waterfront in the cab? Did you see me reading cue cards?" The implication was that he had cue cards in the cab. I doubt it.
EVA MARIE SAINT I can't imagine. Cue cards were never allowed on a Kazan set. Rod [Steiger] never told me that; he would have said something.
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI When he's talking to the coffin with his dead wife, he added a flavor of rage, which is very much from him. He wanted some of the monologue to be written on the blackboard just behind the coffin. He wasn't lazy. He was trying to find the state of grace where this dialogue was being said for the first time. That moment it was like the film had become a documentary.
RICHARD DONNER Many times [in Superman] I would have the script on the chest of the actor he was looking at. The baby that was in the rocket, the synthetic child we had in there, we cut a hole in his stomach and put a little TV monitor in it.
JOHN AVILDSEN Marlon's character [in The Formula] has a hearing aid that went to a little tape recorder where his lines were being read for him. In his waistband he had a switch. He could flex his stomach muscles and that would turn this thing on and off. So he and George C. Scott are walking down this road chatting away, and at a certain point he stopped. I said, "What's wrong?" He said, "I ran out of tape."
DIRECTORS, A LOVE/HATE STORY
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA He was not the kind of actor who liked you to talk to him a lot and give him justifications. He didn't go for actor verbiage. I think he had a kind of anti-bullshit detector.
SIDNEY LUMET He was going through a custody fight for his son. There's a section in [The Fugitive Kind, in the monologue about a legless bird that can never land] where he kept going up on the same spot. The same line and bang, he'd lose it. About take 22, it occurred to me why it was happening. Marlon said, "Sidney, do you think we ought to let it lay till tomorrow?" And I said, "No, I think if you go back to the house and stew about this tonight, you'll come in tomorrow morning and it'll be twice as big a problem." We went 34 takes. I never said to him why it was happening until it was over. He hugged me because he respected the fact that I hadn't violated him, that I let him fight it through himself and did not try to be a psychoanalytic smart-ass.
ANDREW BERGMAN My nervous habit was chewing Bazooka bubble gum on the set [of The Freshman]. He said, "Do you have any more of that gum?" I said, "Here's the deal: You give me a good take, I'll give you a piece of gum," like I was dealing with a chimp. So we did the thing, he nailed it, and he just walked over with his hand out, like a four-year-old.
JAMES GARNER I think he liked [Sayonara director] Josh [Logan], and Josh loved him, but they couldn't get along. Marlon one day threw a fit, and I got him out in a rowboat and I said, "Marlon, you're going to give Josh a heart attack." And he said, "The son of a bitch won't direct me." And I said, "Why'd you do this movie?" And he said, "For the damn money." I said, "Well, Marlon, why don't you take the money and let's get it over with, but don't kill Josh."
HUBERT CORNFIELD [In The Night of the Following Day] he thought we were going to shoot with him sitting on the edge of the tub, which would make [Rita Moreno's] head cut off completely. I said, "I'm sorry, we're shooting it as if we're in the tub with her." Well, he leaves and comes back crocked. He had finished a whole bottle of scotch. But he was enough of a professional that you couldn't tell.
JOHN SAXON His relationship with [The Appaloosa director Sidney] Furie got to the point where he would come on to do a close-up and would be reading a book. He would only lower the book when it was action. When it was cut, he'd raise the book again. But at the same time, he would suddenly leap into—with great energy—some idea he got and look for props and scurry around. All of a sudden he was zealous about doing a good job.
JAMES CAAN, costar, The Godfather (1972) Everybody was trying to conquer him, and all he wanted really was to be talked to.
ANDREW BERGMAN The one director he totally respected was Kazan. The rest he thought were hacks. He hated Kazan for [naming names to HUAC]. He thought it was despicable. But it didn't affect his view of his talent.
"THE POWER TO SEE"
EVA MARIE SAINT [For an improvisational audition before being cast] Gadg [Kazan] said to me, "You're a Catholic girl. You have a little sister. Her boyfriend is coming. She's not home. Do not let this man in." I don't know what he told Marlon. So Marlon got in the house, and we laughed and giggled and danced, and I ended up laughing and crying at the same time. Gadg could see that sparks were flying, that Marlon had his way and that I was very vulnerable to him. It was more than improvisation. It was that this young man had the power to see—you felt like glass.
STEWART STERN He knew who you were right down to the center of your spine, and he could use that to manipulate you. One night he said, "You're like an organ. I know every pipe, everything to pull, everything to push. I can make you do anything." And he could. And so he could with everyone.
DIANE KEATON Psychologically, he was so huge. He could dip into every aspect possible in a human being—sadistic and tender and sexy, my God! I mean, for a woman he was to die for. One of the best all-time kisses I've ever seen is [in On the Waterfront] where they slide down the wall. You want it so bad, and finally when it comes it couldn't have been better.
SUSAN SARANDON, costar, A Dry White Season (1989) I was looking at a picture from Streetcar where he's kneeling and has his head on Stella's stomach. Something about it was so compelling and sexual, the surrender and at the same time strength. He was the bad boy I longed for in high school.
MARIA SCHNEIDER, costar, Last Tango in Paris (1973) He used to take me aside and say, "Don't worry, this is only a movie." He put on records of Ella Fitzgerald to quiet me down. We both had our birthdays during the shooting. I turned 20 and I couldn't get in my trailer because there were so many flowers. He was the one who sent them, with a little note written in Tahitian that said, "From an Unknown Admirer." But I knew it was him.
SUSAN SARANDON God knows he loved women. He called here, and he was talking to our housekeeper, who has a bit of an accent—she's from St. Kitts. She's giggling, and finally I said, "Who's on the phone;" and she said, "Marlon Brando." I got on and said, "You cannot have her." Sure enough, he had proposed that. He said, "I was just trying to figure out that accent."
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA My daughter Sofia was on the Godfather set when she was about three weeks old. Once during lunch I went up and put this naked infant in his hands and you could tell by the way he took her and smiled how much he loved children. Children have a wonderful instinct about adults, and when you're a big celebrity like Marlon Brando, you seek the refuge of children.
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI [Regarding the word Brando's character says in Last Tango as he's dying] I asked him, "What the hell are you saving?" He told me years later: "Tetiaroa," which is his island.
COMEDY IS HARD
ANDREW BERGMAN He said, "I'm flying blind, give me a line reading." I said. "I'm not going to give you a line reading." He said, "I'm serious. I don't trust myself with comedy so much."
SHIRLEY JONES He wanted to play comedy all his life, and nobody gave him the opportunity. He wanted to do much more slapstick in [Bedtime Story]. He really wanted it to be drop your pants and do pratfalls.
STEWART STERN The phone rang one night and it was Marlon. He said, "I don't know why I feel the grief I feel." I said, "What is it?" And he said, "Jimmy Durante." I said, "Yeah, I know he died." He said, "So much sweetness. The funeral is tonight, do you want to go?" We walked in and somebody took the word down to Mrs. Durante, and [we were led] down to sit behind the family. Marlon said, "This is very unusual, because I don't even know him." He just wanted to go quietly and pay tribute.
RED BUTTONS, costar, Sayonara (1957) I was getting on a plane one day, and as I'm putting my bag overhead a pillow hits me in the head. I turn around quickly and I catch him ducking under a seat. I pick up a pillow and I hit him in the head. So he calls the stewardess over and complains: "That man just threw a pillow at me, and I want him off this plane." The stewardess comes over and says, "Sir, we can't stand for that behavior," and I said, "Look, my name is Red Buttons and that's Marlon Brando, I just did a picture with him." He says, "I never saw this guy before in my life, get him off the plane." Finally, everybody squared it up. We sat together, hitting each other with pillows.
ROBERT DUVALL He liked the camaraderie, the jokes. There was a lot of cutting up to keep things loose. [In the scene in The Godfather where] he comes home from the hospital, these two grips in hospital jackets have to carry him up these steep steps. He put these heavy metal things between the mattress in the springs, and they practically had a heart attack going up the steps. He just laughed like a kid.
DIANE KEATON Mooning was a big item. Brando was the king of the mooners.
ROBERT DUVALL On the way home from work one night, Jimmy [Caan] mooned Brando from my car. Sometimes Francis would say, "Come on guys, we gotta get serious and keep working."
JAMES CAAN He and I went to some new disco. You remember the dance he did in Guys and Dolls? That's what he did. Everyone was doing whatever the freakin' rage was, and he did the mambo. He had such courage.
SUSAN SARANDON At Sean [Penn]'s wedding he said, "I bet you never saw this," and put a cigarette out on his tongue. He was a real clown.
A TORTURED SOUL
STEWART STERN He was always on the lookout for betrayal and who would tell what they shouldn't. That was one of the reasons why so many friends found it difficult to stay his friend, because he was so diligent about checking up on them in every possible way, including pretending to be someone else on the phone.
JOHN SAXON His father had died very recently before [The Appaloosa]. He spoke about being at his grave in wrath and anger. He had allowed his father to invest his money in a cattle ranch in Nebraska and it was a disaster financially, which was why he was doing The Appaloosa. His behavior [was] a kind of a demonstration of contempt for the whole procedure. I think it stemmed from something deep inside. From what I've read, his father was an alcoholic, a womanizer. His father had done him in somehow from early on in life.
ANDREW BERGMAN [Brando gave an interview trashing The Freshman prior to its release.] It was incredibly destructive. I called him and said, "How the fuck could you do that?" He said, "Oh, it will be wonderful publicity." He had no sense of reality. He was furious at TriStar. He didn't realize he was hurting everybody in the movie. I think he'd had a really good time making the movie, and it went against everything he'd taught himself to believe. Somehow he had to foul his nest. I know he was an unhappy person and a tortured soul. He paid for that gift many times over.
EUZHAN PALCY, director, A Dry White Season (1959) There was a moment where Marlon is supposed to insult the magistrate, [who] asks two guards to drag him out of the courtroom. It is a very dramatic scene and then when Marlon comes with the guy, his robe opening and his belly coming out, it was funny. I said, "I cannot leave that in the movie." [But Marlon] said, "I love it." He was putting so much pressure on me [to restore the scene]. He called [MGM's] Richard Berger and told him terrible things. And he threatened me. He said, "I'll go out and tell a lot of bad stuff about you, that you are a shitty director." I told him it was unfair, but I forgave him because I could understand that his bitterness was on the same level with the commitment he made. When the movie came out, they were saying he gave one of his best performances. I said, "Marlon, if I had left that piece of crap in the movie, you would never have that Oscar nomination." When the storm was gone, he reflected on what he did and wrote me a three-page letter. He said, "I want to thank you for the opportunity to have touched your life and to have been moved by your unwavering belief that in spite of his ignorance, fears, and hatreds, man cannot ignore his love of beauty, his kindness, and his essential dignity." This is so sweet. This is the kind of exchange that we had.
ROBERT DUVALL I ran into him once when we were looping Apocalypse. He said, "I'll be fat forever." He wasn't even really that fat then. He said, "I'll be fat forever."
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA On Apocalypse he arrived quite overweight, so the first issue was, what should he wear? There was no Green Beret uniform made in that size. Would he have gone to pot in the jungle, just eating and putting his arm around native girls? Marlon was embarrassed about being heavy; he had feelings. He didn't want to play it that way.
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI He told me, "I never suffered so much [as when making Last Tango]. I don't want to do another film like this." He didn't speak to me for ten or twelve years. Then I was very sad because his silence made me full of doubt about my method of work. He was telling me he felt raped because of what happened after the film. Then one day I called him and we started talking on the phone, hours and hours.
JEREMY LEVEN I think there was a certain guilt about [his talent]. Because it was nothing he earned. It's like a woman being complimented on her beauty—it wears thin after a while, because it's not an accomplishment. He claimed not to like [acting]. I didn't believe it. Part of Marlon was a real boyish enthusiasm for stuff, in the way a kid will follow a frog for a day because he's just fascinated by that. He came to the set each day like a kid—everything was new and fresh and worth being explored. I'm not even sure he was aware of how much acting really meant to him.
JAMES CAAN I just wish to God in retrospect that I'd grabbed him and shook him and said, "Do some more good stuff!"
EVA MARIE SAINT I wonder why he lost the joy in acting, because working with him was a very joyous experience. He seemed to love it more than any actor I ever worked with.
THE ACTOR WHO INSPIRED ACTORS
ARTHUR PENN Ordinarily actors who are off-camera tend to just feed the lines [to actors being filmed]. Marlon was off-camera with Jane [Fonda, on The Chase] and just took a wonderful acting adjustment that caused her to stop in the middle of a take and look at him and say, "You are the best fucking actor in the world." She just had to stop and admire it.
DIANE KEATON His performances had that natural quality of just watching someone be—not act, be. The way Marlon Brando played with words was unique; [after that] I think actors got more control over how they approached a sentence, pausing and not just saying the words for their obvious meaning. He changed the whole concept of how you use language in film. We all benefited from what he gave. I couldn't have done an Annie Hall because Woody Allen wouldn't have thought to do that himself. It would never have been.
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA He clearly is the hero of generation after generation of young actors. As new actors know him from his antics as an older person, maybe less so, but he was the actor who inspired actors.
JAMES CAAN He was everybody's major idol as far as being an actor was concerned. Anybody that tells you different is a liar.
JAMES GARNER Marlon took things that were really outrageous and made them real. Not a lot of actors could do that.
MARIA SCHNEIDER He had the strength to seduce men and women.
JOHN AVILDSEN He said that the thing you've got to do is get their attention. He began mimicking the moviegoers sitting in their seats with a bag of popcorn. He's popping the popcorn in his mouth, looking up at the screen. And he said, what you've got to do is stop the popcorn in mid-pop and hold them there. And that's what he was able to do.
STEWART STERN It was that astonishing ability to assimilate people and behavior and to identify so completely with people—and not just people, with animals as well. To be absolutely without his skin, to go into the world flayed so that everything hit him without any defense, and to incorporate that and give it back in a way that people thought they were seeing something absolutely real. That was the shock.■
For more on Marlon Brando go to Remembering Brando
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause.