Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [156]
Correction: “think” is not the right word; you experience the emotion you want to convey. That’s when you reach into your spectrum of emotions and send a signal from your brain to execute one of them. The close-up says everything. It’s then that an actor’s learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away unconsciously at its experience of reality. The audience should share what you are feeling in a close-up. I have often reminded myself that I wasn’t working in “motion words,” but in “motion pictures.” The close-up reveals your thoughts and feelings by the expression on your face, whether it’s the raising of an eyebrow, chasing a piece of food around your mouth with your tongue, or making a tiny, fleeting statement by frowning. In a close-up the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage. In a large theater it is the entire proscenium arch, so that no matter what you do, it becomes a theatrical event. When your image is so large and the audience has such an immediate perspective, the actor can enable the audience to experience his emotions in an intimate and personal way if he does his job right.
But as I’ve said, there are some parts where less is more, and underplaying is important, and never more so than in the close-up, when your entire face fills the screen. An example is the scene in The Godfather in which Don Corleone dies while playing with his grandchild in a garden. A few moments before he collapses, he surprises his grandson by stuffing a piece of orange peel into his mouth to simulate a set of teeth. I invented that business with the orange; I simply made it up on the spot. I used to do the same thing with my own kids; it’s funny under almost any circumstances because it changes your personality hilariously, but in that scene it had a resonance that made the Godfather more human, and it was the kind of thing I thought the gentle character I had in mind would have done.
When I saw The Godfather the first time, it made me sick; all I could see were my mistakes and I hated it. But years later, when I saw it on television from a different perspective, I decided it was a pretty good film.
I had a lot of laughs making The Godfather. Mafiosi were always dropping in to watch us, and there were a lot of playful high jinks. In a scene in which the Godfather’s family bring him home from the hospital after a failed assassination attempt, they must carry him up a flight of stairs on a stretcher, and before we did the shot, I told the cameraman to give me three hundred pounds of lead weights. Then I hid them under my blankets, which made the stretcher weigh over five hundred pounds, but nobody knew this except the cameraman and me. My family started carrying me up the stairs, but they couldn’t make it; they were strong, but before long they were wringing with sweat, huffing and puffing and unable to get up the stairs. I said, “C’mon, you weaklings, I’m gonna fall off this thing if you don’t get me up there. This is ridiculous!”
The camera operator nearly fell off his stool laughing, while Francis barked at the four men to hurry up. One of them kept muttering, “What the hell’s going on? How can this guy weigh so much?”
After five or six takes, I raised the blanket and showed them the lead weights.
After we finished the picture, Sam Spiegel’s secretary called me and said that an FBI agent wanted to interview me and would I be willing to talk to him? I said I would, and she told me that the agent would call me from San Diego. He did so, and we had a five- or six-hour conversation that covered a lot of ground. He wanted to know everything I knew about the Mafia, about making and financing The Godfather, whether I’d made any secret contributions to anybody, and so forth. He gave me lots of opportunities to rat on the Mob, but I smelled a different kind of rat.
“Listen,” I said finally, “I have children and a good life, and I wouldn’t want to see anybody hurt or threatened, so if I knew anything, which I don’t”—this was not entirely true—”I wouldn’t tell you.” I’d