John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [154]
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JOHN WAYNE
I told Aissa that acting was no great profession because Patrick had been trying for years to get out from under my shadow, and she saw the sense in that and gave up all ideas of becoming a movie star.
“Kim Darby wasn’t too unlike Mattie. She was strong willed, independent, and determined. Problem was, that’s great for the character, but not so great for an actor—or actress—to be too much like that. I tried to get some rapport going between the two of us but that didn’t work. Henry did his best to get her to work at making our on-screen relationship work, and I think if it wasn’t for him, I’d have given up on her. She was a superb actress, no doubt; but was she spoiled. Henry said to me, ‘I think she’s trying to show everyone she’s not impressed just because she’s working with John Wayne.’ Her attitude on me worked the way Mattie’s attitude worked on Rooster.
It made him go all out, and so I went all out. Gave it my best shot.
Better than my best. But it’s not the way I like to work. I like me and my screen partners to get along. Jesus, I got along better with Kirk Douglas!”
The choice of actor for the role of Texas ranger Le Boeuf was a curious one, but one made with commercial rather than artistic reasons in mind. Said Hathaway, “We cast Glen Campbell who wasn’t a great actor but he was a popular singer. I figured that he could record the title song from the film, have a hit with it, and it would help the picture. Mind you, if he’d been a really lousy actor, I wouldn’t have cast him. And if he had been lousy and Hal Wallis had insisted I use him, I’d have walked off the picture because I don’t put commerce before craftsmanship or talent. So that’s my way of saying that Glen Campbell gave us the performance we wanted, and no actor can do more.”
Despite Hathaway’s complimentary remarks about Campbell, the singer, making his film debut, found Hathaway difficult to please, but Wayne, used to Hathaway’s tough manner, had nothing but praise for the director. “Henry decided to shoot the picture in Colorado, which kind of upset Charles Portis who said the story took place in Arkansas and complained to Henry. But Henry, in his own sweet way, told Portis that filming was all about illusion, and the audience would believe Colorado was 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 289
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Arkansas. We shot in the autumn so it was extraordinarily beautiful as the leaves changed color and then dropped. The way Lucien Ballard [director of photography] captured the landscape was breathtaking.”
Hathaway admitted he could be “a mean bastard”: “I haven’t got time to make friends. Making pictures is damned hard, especially the older you get. If actors don’t like me then that’s tough. It’s goddamn hard to make a good movie if you’re being distracted by actors going, ‘Oh, come on Henry, it’s a hot day and I’m so tired and . . .’
Chickenshit! We got a schedule to meet and a budget to keep. I don’t pretend I’m one of those directors who know it all. Jesus, I made enough turkeys to prove that. But when you get a script the quality of True Grit and you got John Wayne giving a tour de force performance, you don’t get too sympathetic toward actors who can’t keep up the pace.
“If there was an actor on that picture giving me any trouble—
and I’m not saying there was and I’m not saying there wasn’t—I’d be inclined to tell him—or her—to go and watch Duke work at it.
He’s a man with one lung who had trouble breathing up there in Montrose, Colorado, yet before we shot the famous scene where he single-handedly charges the gang of outlaws, twirling guns in both hands and holding his reins in his teeth, he was up at the crack of dawn before anyone else, practicing how to do that stunt. Duke was sixty-one then, but he never stopped until he could do that ride perfectly, so when we came to shoot it, we didn’t have to do take after