Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [164]
Several years later, the Salkinds asked me to be in Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, and I accepted because I wanted a chance to shape it into something close to historical truth. A picture about Columbus was sure to be made on the five hundredth anniversary of his voyage to the New World, but I didn’t want him celebrated as a hero. Instead of a day for celebration, Columbus Day ought to be one of mourning. I wanted to tell the truth about how he and his minions exploited and killed the Indians who greeted them, but the script had wrapped him in all his myths as a great sailor and explorer.
I called Ilya Salkind and said, “Ilya, you can film this script the way it is if you like, but I think you’re going to have a tragedy on your hands if you do; it’s the most boring, poorly written, idiotically constructed story I’ve ever seen.” I convinced him that he and his father were going to have a failure on their hands if they didn’t stick to the facts, and persuaded him to turn the story around completely and portray Columbus as the cruel, ambitious man he was, a man who would stop at nothing, including exterminating the guileless Indians who offered him food and gold. I convinced the other actors, who were also unhappy, to agree with me, and Ilya asked me to put together the story the way I thought it should be told. I rewrote my part as Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor in the court of Queen Isabella and, using false teeth, darkened eyes, and a huge hood I draped over my face to make me look like death, I designed an effective costume and makeup.
Everything was fine until Ilya’s father, Alexander Salkind, arrived in Spain on the first day of filming. He didn’t like to fly and had arrived late by train from someplace in Eastern Europe. When he read my script, he refused to use it and insisted on sticking with the original story, which was idiotic, untruthful and uninteresting. It was a big mistake because the picture was a huge failure.
I was depressed and wanted to go home, but I knew Alexander would sue me if I backed out of my contract. There was nothing left for me to do except walk through my part. The other actors and I had nothing to work with. They tried hard, but I’m afraid I didn’t. I mumbled my way through the part and gave an embarrassingly bad performance. The pay wasn’t bad, though: $5 million for five days’ work.
58
DURING THE TEN YEARS between The Formula in 1979 and The Freshman in 1989, I didn’t make a movie except for my role in A Dry White Season because I didn’t need the money. I was content doing other things: traveling, searching, exploring, seeking. I spent a lot of time on Teti’aroa, read a lot and became interested in many things, including meditation, one of many interests the luxury of time and money allowed me to examine during the eighties and early nineties.
Meditation was something I slipped into easily. I suppose it came out of acting. Because of the introspection that is a part of acting, I had developed a fairly strong sense of where my feelings were and how to gain access to them. I was fascinated by my ability to send an impulse from my brain to my body that enabled me to experience different emotions, and thought it would be interesting to know more about how the process worked. I consulted an expert on biofeedback, the discipline of controlling your physiological responses by monitoring your body’s inner dynamics and learning to modulate them accordingly. I told him about the trick I had learned as an actor and asked him if he could measure any physical manifestation of it using instruments that measured galvanic skin response, the electrical resistance on your fingertips that varies according to activity in your central nervous system. He confirmed that the mental exercises I thought of as sending an electrical current from my brain to my body in order to experience a certain emotion did in fact have a physical