Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [30]
Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Everybody acts, whether it’s a toddler who quickly learns how to behave to get its mother’s attention, or a husband and wife in the daily rituals of a marriage, with all the artifices and role-playing that occur in a conjugal relationship. Politicians are among our most flashy and worst actors. It’s hard to imagine anyone surviving in our world without acting. It is a necessary social device: we use it to protect our interests and to gain advantage in every aspect of our lives, and it is instinctive, a skill built into all of us. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we’re acting. Most people do it all day long. When we don’t feel the emotions someone expects of us and want to please them, we act out the emotion we think they expect of us; we’re enthusiastic about their project even though it bores us. Someone says something that hurts our feelings but we hide our hurt. The difference is that most people act unconsciously and automatically, while stage and movie actors do it to tell a story. In fact, most actors give their best performances after the camera stops rolling.
A lot of the old movie stars couldn’t act their way out of a box of wet tissue paper, but they were successful because they had distinctive personalities. They were predictable brands of breakfast cereal: on Wednesdays we had Quaker Oats and Gary Cooper; on Fridays we had Wheaties and Clark Gable. They were off-the-shelf products you expected always to be the same, actors and actresses with likable personalities who played themselves in more or less the same role the same way every time out. Clark Gable was Clark Gable in every role; Humphrey Bogart always played himself; Claudette Colbert was always Claudette Colbert. Loretta Young was virtually the same character in every part, and as she got older, cinematographers kept putting more layers of silky gauze between her and their lenses to keep her that way and convince audiences she was still Loretta Young. Nowadays movie grips call the devices they use to conceal the physical evidence of aging “Loretta Young silks.”
I was lucky because I became an actor at the beginning of an era when the craft was becoming more interesting, thanks to Stella. Once she told a reporter that she thought one of the assets I brought to acting was a high degree of curiosity about people. It’s true that I have always had an unwavering curiosity about people—what they feel, what they think, how they’re motivated—and I have always made it my business to find out. If I can’t figure somebody out, I’ll follow him like a weasel with persistence until I find out what his nature is and how he functions, not for any reasons of advantage—although I admit that when I was young I sometimes did it to gain an advantage—but because I’m curious not only about others, but about myself. I am endlessly absorbed by human motivations. How is it that we behave the way we do? What are those compulsions within us that drive us one way or another?
It is my lifelong preoccupation. I used to hang around the coffeehouses on Washington Square just watching people. If I was out with a woman, I tried to figure out why she decided to cross her legs or light a cigarette at a certain moment, or what it meant if she chose at a certain point in our conversation to clear her throat or brush back a lock of hair from her forehead. I used to sit in the phone booth of the Optima Cigar Store at Broadway and Forty-second Street looking out the window at people walking by. I saw them for perhaps two or three seconds before they disappeared; if they were close to the phone booth, they might even disappear in a second. In that flick of time I studied their faces, the way they carried their heads and swung their arms; I tried to absorb who they were—their history, their job, whether they were married, troubled or in love. The face is an extraordinarily subtle instrument; I believe it has 155 muscles in it.