Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [94]
“This picture is about my having to pay two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a week to Karl Maiden,” I said. I’d signed him for the picture, and each week of delay meant another $250,000 lost.
“Well,” Stanley said, “if that’s what it’s about, I think I’m doing the wrong picture.”
I sent the script to Sidney Lumet, then Gadg, then two or three other directors, but no one wanted to do it, so I had to direct it myself. We shot most of it at Big Sur and on the Monterey peninsula, where I slept with many pretty women and had a lot of laughs.
On the first day of shooting, I didn’t know what to do, so the cameraman handed me one of those optical viewfinders that directors use to compose a scene. I looked into it, then shook my head and said, “I don’t know.… It’s hard to tell what this scene’s going to look like because it’s so far away.…”
The cameraman came over and gently turned it around. I’d been looking through the wrong end.
“If you think this is bad, wait until we get to the fifth week,” I said and laughed. I wasn’t embarrassed, although there were a lot of muffled titters behind me. By the fifth week, and even the fifth month, I was still trying to learn. I thought it would take three months to do the picture, but it stretched to six, and the cost doubled to more than $6 million; naturally this didn’t please Paramount, which was paying for it.
I tried to figure out what to do as I went along. Several writers worked on the screenplay—Sam Peckinpah, Calder Willingham and finally Guy Trosper—and he and I constantly improvised and rewrote between shots and setups, often hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute. Some scenes I shot over and over again from different angles with different dialogue and action because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was making things up by the moment, not sure where the story was going. I also did a lot of stalling for time, trying to work the story out in my mind while hoping to make the cast think I knew what I was doing.
Maybe I liked the picture so much because it left me with a lot of pleasant memories about the people in it—Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens and especially Karl Maiden, who played Dad. I don’t want to do it again—a director has to get up too early in the morning—but it was entertaining to try to create reality, make a story interesting and to work with actors. Sometimes I played tricks on them. In one scene Ben Johnson had an argument with one of his compatriots, then shot him. I didn’t like the expression on the other man’s face before he was shot because it didn’t show a fear of death. I wanted him to show shock and terror, so I said, “Let’s rehearse this one more time.” I put him on a saddle mounted on a piece of wood and, without telling him, kept the camera rolling. I walked over to him and said, “Larry, in this scene I want you to—” Then, boom! I slapped him hard and jumped out of the scene.
He had a wonderful expression on his face, just what I wanted, but I had slapped him so hard that I knocked off his mustache, and so I couldn’t use the shot. In another scene I was supposed to get drunk, come in out of the rain and rape a Chinese girl. You can’t fake drunkenness in a movie. You can in a play, but not in a close-up, so I figured the scene would work better if I really got drunk. I started drinking about 4:15 in the afternoon of the day I was going to shoot the scene after telling the other actors what I wanted them to do. It has never taken much alcohol to put me over the edge, so in no time at all I was staggering around, grabbing hold of the girl.