Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [159]
Last Tango in Paris required a lot of emotional arm wrestling with myself, and when it was finished, I decided that I wasn’t ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie. I felt I had violated my innermost self and didn’t want to suffer like that anymore. As noted earlier, when I’ve played parts that required me to suffer, I had to experience the suffering. You can’t fake it. You have to find something within yourself that makes you feel pain, and you have to keep yourself in that mood throughout the day, saving the best for the close-up and not blowing it on the long shot, the medium shot or the over-the-shoulder shot. You have to whip yourself into this state, remain in it, repeat it in take after take, then be told an hour later that you have to crank it up once more because the director forget something. It takes an enormous toll. Last Tango in Paris left me feeling depleted and exhausted, perhaps in part because I’d done what Bernardo asked and some of the pain I was experiencing was my very own. Thereafter I decided to make my living in a way that was less devastating emotionally. In subsequent pictures I stopped trying to experience the emotions of my characters as I had always done before, and simply to act the part in a technical way. It is less painful and the audience doesn’t know the difference. If a story is well written and your technique is right, the effect is still the same: in a darkened room, the magic of the theater takes over and the audience does most of the acting for you.
When I arrived in the Philippines in the summer of 1976 for my scenes in Apocalypse Now, the film about the Vietnam War based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, Francis Coppola was alternately depressed, nervous and frantic. Shooting was behind schedule, he was having trouble with the cameraman, he wasn’t sure how he was going to end the movie and the script was awful. It bore little resemblance to Heart of Darkness, and most of it simply didn’t make dramatic sense.
“Listen,” I said, “you have me for a certain number of weeks and I’ll do the best I can, but I think you’re making an enormous error.” I wanted him to return to the original plot of Conrad’s novel, in which a man named Marlow describes his journey up the Congo in search of Walter Kurtz, a once idealistic young man who had been transformed by his experiences into a mysterious, remote figure involved in what Conrad called “unspeakable rites.” In the original script Kurtz—my part—was a caricature of a reprobate; he was sloppy, fat, immoral, a drunk, a stereotypical character from a hundred movies. The part must have had thirty pages of dialogue; it went on and on while going no place theatrically. I thought it was an idiotic script, but I didn’t say this to Francis. In such situations I’ve found it best to say, “This may be all right the way you’re going to do it, but I think we’re missing a bet by not changing it.”
“In Heart of Darkness, “ I told Francis, “Conrad uses this guy Kurtz almost as a mythological figure, a man who is much larger than life. Don’t misuse him in the film. Make him mysterious, distant and invisible for most of the picture except in our minds. What makes Conrad’s story so powerful is that people talk about Kurtz for pages and pages, and readers wonder about him. They never see him, but he is part of the atmosphere. It’s an odyssey, and he’s the heart of the Heart of Darkness. The longer it goes on, the more he occupies the minds of readers as they imagine him.” The same thing could be done in the movie,