Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [93]
One of the things I always did before working with a new director was to call another actor who knew him and ask, “What’s the lowdown on this guy?” Before working with John Huston on Reflections in a Golden Eye, I called John Saxon and asked the usual question.
“He’s good,” John said. “He doesn’t get on your back and he leaves you alone, and near the end of the picture he’ll disappear. But if you have a scene with horses in it, get a double because he’ll kill you if you don’t.”
He was right about Huston leaving actors alone. He didn’t give us any direction. He hired good actors, trusted them and let them improvise, but never helped shape a characterization the way Kazan did. He sat at the edge of the set and said, “Yeah, all right, kids, that’s good, that’s a good start, now why don’t we try it over.” He was always vague and we took our own cues. John did a lot of heavy pot smoking on that picture, and before he filmed one scene he gave me some marijuana, which I smoked. Before long, I had no idea who or where I was or what I was supposed to be doing. The only thing I knew was that everything seemed okay, that the world was very funny and that John thought so, too. I could barely stand up, and if somebody asked me a question I’d say “What?” about five seconds later, but somehow I managed to get through the scene.
At the end of the picture, Huston did what I’d been told he would: he disappeared. Some days he didn’t show up on the set at all, and one of the assistant directors would have to take over; on others he came to work, then walked away after an hour or so, or we might see him off in the distance by himself. For some reason he became moody and depressed when he approached the end of a picture.
Unfortunately I didn’t take seriously what John Saxon had told me about Huston and horses. I had a scene in which a horse was supposed to run away with me, and when he asked me if I could do it without a double I said, “Sure.” I’d spent a lot of time on Hollywood horses and wasn’t afraid of them. But when I came out of my dressing room for the scene, I saw a big stallion waiting for me, and it was shaking and shuddering so much it might have been wired to an electrical plug. John had instructed a groom to heat it up, and the man had done his job; he had trotted the horse back and forth until it was awash with perspiration and trembling with eagerness to move. I looked up at him and said to myself, “You know, Marlon, that’s a lot of horse.” I knew stallions had minds of their own and could be aggressive, sometimes dangerous, but I got on him anyway, and as soon as I did, he took off like a jet fighter catapulted from an aircraft carrier.
Before he’d taken four or five steps, I knew I was on the wrong horse. He was so charged up with adrenaline that I expected him to run me into a barn or a fence. I took my feet out of the stirrups, lifted my right leg and jumped, landing with both heels in the mud, then said, “John, if you need me, I’ll be in my dressing room. I think I need a different horse or else a double.”
For the long shot in that scene, Huston used a stunt rider, and for the close-up he put me in a saddle mounted on a pickup truck and photographed me with a lot of fright on my face.
I also got to ride a horse in One-Eyed Jacks, my first picture after The Young Lions. In its first four years, Pennebaker had spent almost as much money trying to develop a good script for a western as it had on the story about the United Nations,