I Blame Dennis Hopper

by Illeana Douglas

  I was auditioning a lot but with mixed results. It took three auditions to get a role in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever. The night we shot, the cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, laughed at everything I said. Spike, if he really liked something, gave you a kind of half smile. He was a great, albeit tough audience. The part got cut. I worked with Woody Allen in Husbands and Wives. It snowed the day we shot, and I could not believe I was staring at another great cinematographer, Carlo Di Palma, as he lighted a set. I thought, My God, I have made it. I will probably be in every Woody Allen movie. Annie Hall Douglas.

  My part got cut. I went to an early screening and nobody had told me I was no longer in the movie. I think Marty was more upset than I was. The nerve to cut another director’s girlfriend out of your movie. I wrote in my journal, “I am an actor. I go from job to job. Although the job let me down, I will continue to prosper.” I was right. After all that work trying to be in a movie, the producers of Cape Fear—Amblin Entertainment and Steven Spielberg’s producers, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, who I had met at the premiere—put me in Alive and I could not have been more grateful. I wrote, “It was a good thing, because I had no more furniture to sell.”

  I was looking out at the Canadian Rockies and thinking, Here I was, a working actress. Going from job to job. About to shoot Alive. But I was worried. It was March 13, 1992. Friday the 13th. I was flying on a plane over mountains about to shoot a movie about a plane crash, based on the real life crash in the Andes of a plane that had also flown on Friday the 13th—on October 13, 1972. I was reading the book that our movie was adapting, Alive, by Piers Paul Read, trying to keep it in my lap, understanding that it might not be what your fellow passenger wants to see you reading. The guy next to me noticed it and reminded me, good-naturedly, that it was Friday the 13th and asked, “Are you at all superstitious?”

  As we were passing over the mountains there was some turbulence, and I laughed it off, but it got me thinking that I was superstitious. But I figured that flying on Friday the 13th to make a plane-crash movie was either a good omen, or a really, really bad one. There were other things I was scared about. I was leaving Marty for what would be our first separation in four years. Would things be the same when I got back? He was also about to shoot The Age of Innocence. I was supposed to have played the small part of Daniel Day-Lewis’s sister, but I had to give that up, since the shooting of Alive forced us to be on set every day whether we were on camera or not. The juxtaposing of our films did not go unnoticed by Marty and me. He would be depicting the life of upper crust New York society, shooting in mansions that featured sumptuous banquets. I would be living in the Canadian Rockies, possibly sleeping in a tent, starving, with a bunch of guys on top of a mountain. He packed me off with three books, Silence, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and The Brothers Karamazov. They were all about suffering!

  Alive would be a long, arduous, physically and mentally demanding movie. I knew that because back in sunny California, the director Frank Marshall and his wife, the producer Kathleen Kennedy, had personally interviewed actors to make sure they knew what they were in for. There would be risks. We would be living in the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies in a place called Panorama. There would be bears there! I would be the only woman in a cast of men to fly by helicopter to the Delphine Glacier—12,000 feet up—where we would shoot most of the film. The temperature would reach 30 below in minutes. Blizzards and whiteouts could develop instantly. We would very possibly be snowed in. We would shoot six-day weeks. There was also no end date; you were simply agreeing to be there for the run of the picture. However long it took. To re-create the accuracy of the story of Alive, we would be contracted to lose up to fifteen pounds on a special “survivors” diet.

  You’d think I’d be running for the door, right? That’s what was so awesome about Frank and Kathy. All the while they were detailing the dangers that could surround me, they had huge smiles on their faces. After all, they explained, they’d worked in the Venezuelan jungle for Arachnophobia. Shot in the Serengeti for The Color Purple. They made Alive and its disturbing story line seem like a picnic. No pun intended. Frank said, “We wanted to shoot it in the Andes, but we couldn’t figure out a way to get the equipment there, so we found the last sister plane of The Fairchild, the exact plane that crashed in the Andes, and replicated the crash site.” They wanted total authenticity. He took out storyboards and showed me side-by-side photos of a recently destroyed airplane in the snow on the Delphine Glacier next to pictures of the actual plane-crash site in the Andes. I was staring at the pictures, and for the first time, I got it. We would be shooting on a mountain. In the snow. On a mountain!

  “Do you get altitude sickness?” Frank said at the audition. “You might be throwing up a lot at first, but you’ll get used to it!”

  Here I was, this dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, used to my creature comforts and my twenty-four-hour food delivery, but the more Frank and Kathy described how hard it was going to be, the more they made it seem like an amazing adventure—something I might be able to talk about for the rest of my life—if I lived through it, of course.

  I came out of filming Alive not only alive, but reborn. Like all births, it didn’t come without some pain and suffering. Yes, I threw up. Yes, it was freezing. Yes, there were times, I thought, I cannot do this. Yes, I had a nervous breakdown over a baked potato. But that’s not what I remember. It’s the first line of the movie: “We were part of a grand experience.” I couldn’t have said it any better.

  Let’s start with what everyone remembers about the movie. The plane crash. There was never a time I saw Alive with an audience when the sequence didn’t get applause. We shot that crash scene for four weeks. Imagine four weeks of getting dressed, made up, and reenacting the same horrific plane crash. Just the crash. We hadn’t even got to the scenes yet. That’s the attention to detail I had seen the day Frank and Kathy had shown me pictures and storyboards. By starting with the crash, they set the tone of the film, because it gave us discipline, and we all got to know each other very well during those long days buckled in our seats.

  To create the images, they used different planes, each to create a different effect. For close-ups, your section of the plane was separated while a wind machine blew potato flakes in your face, or it was rotated at a 45-degree angle to better record your anguish. The moment I have been asked about the most is when two passengers are sucked out of the back of the plane. This was created by having a plane twenty feet in the air on a hydraulic lift, which was then dropped fifteen feet while two stuntmen attached to rigging were yanked out the back. The day that we shot it, we knew this was a big stunt, but none of us actually knew what was going to happen, because Frank wanted to record our genuine fear. Well, we were all in our seats on the set plane, and suddenly it dropped fifteen feet in the air. The guys went flying out the back. Instead of screaming and acting scared, everyone just gave this simultaneous “Whoaaaa!!!” as if we were on the best ride of our lives.

  From over the loudspeaker we heard Frank say, “Cut. Cut…”

  The plane slowly went back up the hydraulic lift to what was called “first position” to try it again. We knew we had ruined the take. Frank, bless his heart, came inside the plane shaking his head at us. We were bad kids. We felt terrible, but he was grinning at us. He said, “Don’t do that again.”

  We were miles away from any city, so Frank and Kathy went to a small town nearby called Invermere and rented out an entire theater for us. We used it to watch movies that might inspire us. Nothing current. Just classics that we had never seen, all with adventure themes, such as the original Flight of the Phoenix and The Great Escape. None of us had seen The Warriors, a movie Frank had worked on, so we put in a request for that. I can’t remember enjoying a film more. I have a lasting memory of the cast of Alive hooting and hollering at the screen. Afterward, Frank told us stories about the filming of this Walter Hill classic. We bonded over nights like that, because the days on the mountain were long and
challenging.

  From the beginning, there was something familial about Alive. John Patrick Shanley—the Academy Award–winning screenwriter of Moonstruck—had written the script. In a hotel suite in Vancouver, the entire cast gathered to read the script aloud for the first time. We were all getting to know one another, and everyone was nervous and excited, wanting to do a good job, because John would be sitting there listening to us speak his words, which were so beautiful, they were like poetry. John wouldn’t have any part of the seriousness. He volunteered to read the stage directions, which he did, acting out everything in a loud and boisterous manner, making everyone laugh. I was so happy to see John, who had always had faith in me. He gave me a hug after the reading and said, “What did I tell you? Did I tell you you’d be here?”

  I had an association with John when I was working for Peggy Siegal. Peggy had done the publicity for Moonstruck. Some of my favorite conversations were talking to John while I was supposed to be working on Moonstruck. He was such a funny, humble, and talented artist. The fact that I had known him in my previous life made working on Alive seem like destiny, and he was thrilled that I would be playing Lilliana Methol, until the day I called him for some clarification about a line I was having an issue with. Frank had said to me, “John’s the writer; you’ll have to talk to him.”

  In real life, Lilliana Methol had been eating the bodies of the dead before she died in the avalanche. For the film, John thought it worked better dramatically if Lilliana was revolted by the idea and died without ever eating the bodies. We were discussing the script and John said, “I don’t want a comma out of place.” Needless to say, I did my scenes exactly as they were written. There was a time in movies that when an actress had an issue with the script, she spoke to the writer and respected his wishes.

  But to this day I’m not sure he ever correctly explained why my character is singing Burt Bacharach’s “The Look of Love” the night before she decides she will finally eat human flesh!

  We all felt the responsibility of playing real people and were fortunate to have the actual survivors of the Andes crash there to guide us. I wrote in my journal, “I feel like Nando Parrado is God, because he was closer to God than anyone I have ever known.”

  I was raised a Catholic, but I hadn’t been to church for years. I was an actress. I was raised as a hippie. I didn’t know what I believed in. I believed in movies. I believed Audrey Hepburn was a saint. I believed Billy Wilder was God. When we recited prayers in the film, like the real survivors had, with Nando there watching, it had a profound effect on all of us, and I think you can feel that in those scenes.

  He told me, “There were so many times I could have died. My will to die was as strong as my will to live, but I know that God saved me. I must repay that debt every day by telling people how lucky they are to be alive.” One of the ways Nando expressed this enormous love he had inside him was by hugging you. Nando was a great hugger, and this became a real hugging movie. We were going through a lot of difficult emotions; sometimes you didn’t know if it was about the film or a real incident. One time an actor was crying, “My dog died; my dog died,” and I said, “I’m so sorry; when did it happen?” And he looked at me very strangely and said, “When I was a kid.” It was an eerie moment. Nando just took a hold of the actor and started to hug him, while he experienced this long-repressed memory. Knowing that it was more important just to hold him, not judge him, Nando let the actor cry in his arms. He had this ability to hold you long and hard until you felt safe. You could truly feel the love he was radiating. One time we were shooting, and I scratched my cornea. This cloud appeared on my left eye, and I couldn’t see out of it. Nando took me in his arms, and calmed me down. He personally wanted to take me to the hospital. It was a long drive, and I was pretty scared, but he just made me believe I was going to be OK. On the way back from the hospital we drove to this abandoned Western town where they had shot The Grey Fox. We walked the empty streets, looked out at the fields, and watched the sun go down together. He said to me that the most important thing for us to project in the film was that life was beautiful and worth living.

  Our other tech advisor, also a survivor, was Roberto Canessa. If Nando was the kind and loving supportive father figure, Roberto Canessa was the tough love father I also needed. Nando was serenity. Roberto was strength. I was complaining to him about something that was happening in my life, and he said, “You’d better grow up, because you’re not a little girl anymore.” It was like being slapped in the face. Yeah. Try not to whine to someone who managed to walk out of the Andes alive. Roberto told me I had to be stronger than any of the men on the film. “Lilliana never cried,” he said. “Remember that.” We were filming the avalanche scene. I was buried under the snow, in a specially designed set we called the mausoleum. I had a breathing tube that was about to be pulled from my mouth. From above, I could hear the muffled noises of the crew and the actors. From under the snow I heard the cameraman Dave say, “Illeana is packed in snow! Let’s move!” My head had a gigantic ice cream headache going through it, but I had to pretend I was dead. I couldn’t scream in pain. I couldn’t move. They pulled the breathing tube. All I had now was the trust that the actors would pull me out to safety. We shot it again and again, until my face was scratched with snow and ice. My hands and feet were numb. Each time something would go wrong. Frank would say to me, “Can you do it one more time?” I’d think, I cannot do this. I can’t feel my face. But somehow I found the strength to continue. I didn’t want to let Frank down. The hardest thing about climbing under again was that you knew how scary it was going to be. In the years since Alive, I’ve been on a lot of sets, and folks have said to me, “You don’t complain much, do you?” I’ve just laughed.

  We were shooting a very difficult scene, the one in which we decide that we will eat the bodies of the dead. We had gone on a three-day fast before it to get into character. For two days Frank pumped the soundtrack of The Mission over loudspeakers to get us in the mood before we shot. It felt so real, and I had never been more proud of the work we all did over those two days. Saturday night came, and to reward us, Frank said we were all going out to dinner in Invermere. The cast, the survivors, everybody. We could have anything we wanted except for bread, pasta, or dessert. We got to the restaurant—The Windy—before Frank and Kathy and associate producer Bruce Cohen arrived, and we saw pasta with four cheeses on the menu. It sounded incredible. We were so proud of ourselves that we were going to get away with this, and we all ordered it. The waitress looked at us and said, “I’m really sorry, but Frank and Kathy already called ahead. You can’t have the pasta.” They knew our every move!

  Later that night, Frank pulled me aside and told me there had been something wrong with the focus, and none of my close-ups was usable. They would all have to be shot again. At first I thought it was a joke, but he was not kidding. I slowly walked backed to the table and told my castmates what had happened. I was reeling. How on earth would I be able to re-create that scene alone, without the rest of the cast? Some of the actors gathered around me. Ethan Hawke was kneeling next to me; Josh Hamilton was holding my hand. Jack Noseworthy, Christian Meoli, Kevin Breznahan. They said, “Illeana, we’ll be there for you, OK? Don’t worry.” If I had climbed the mountain looking for something, I was beginning to find it.

  On the day we reshot the scene, every actor in the movie was there for me off camera. It’s hard to describe the feeling you have when your fellow actors do something like that. When they let you know, as Jack Noseworthy had said in his thick Boston accent, “Honey, we got your back.” Ethan was doing his same lines again off camera, and he was just tearing it up, drawing everything I had in me out of me again, and shouting at me, “If we want to live, we’re going to have to eat!” He’d lost fifteen pounds by then.

  Someone recently asked me who the most surprising person I’ve ever worked with was. Ethan Hawke. Ethan so dramatically affected my life that when we finished shooting Alive I wrote him a thank-yo
u note. I told him that knowing him had changed me. And it did. He was an artist. He may have looked like a shaggy puppy, but he was one of the most inspiring people I have ever met. Ethan made me excited and hopeful about music, movies, art, books, you name it. His authenticity and daring to be an artist affected me.

  I was doing a film after Alive, and I just didn’t feel like I fit in in the same way I had on that set. Ethan, who was on his way to Texas, drove sideways to Wilmington, North Carolina, just to cheer me up. “Fuck ’em,” he said. “Stop trying to please everybody. Just do your work.” And he was right. The night he got there I watched Ethan walk into a roomful of strangers, introduce himself, and just start playing the guitar. I’ll never forget it. I thought, I want to be like that. Just fearless.

  On Alive, Ethan’s condo was the hub of late-night discussions with the cast about movies, music, sex, lack of sex, food, lack of food. All I wanted when I got home was cherry pie. We painted pictures. We played music. Wrote songs. Read scenes from plays by Sam Shepard. We were pretty “artsy.” We all talked about wanting to make movies like the ones John Cassavetes had. It was Ethan who said to me, “You need to direct. I’ll help you.” And he did. When I got home from Alive, I used to joke, the rest of the cast bought cars; I made a movie. I wrote and directed and starred in my first short film, The Perfect Woman. Ethan helped me cast it, and he was also my clapper.

  We borrowed a camera from Marty—one he had got from none other than John Cassavetes—to shoot it. The Perfect Woman was later bought by Miramax. I remember standing backstage at the New York Film Festival. It was playing the closing night before The Piano, and I was standing next to Harvey Weinstein, and he said, “I’m going to buy this movie,” and he did. Here’s how I thanked Ethan. He had never seen the film East of Eden, so I asked Marty if he could screen it for him and some of the cast of Alive. Maybe we could even invite Elia Kazan himself to talk about it. Marty had never met Mr. Kazan, but he invited him, and sure enough he came. It led to a lasting friendship between the two masters. Picture the scene: this group of hot young actors, jammed into Martin Scorsese’s screening room, watching East of Eden with Elia Kazan. There was the emotion of the film. The emotion of watching it with Kazan. Marty watching it with Kazan. The lights came on, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was pretty special. That was all because of Alive. Alive awakened the artist in us. I’ve fallen off the mountain a few times since then, but it was on the set of Alive that I accepted that I was “artsy.” I was an artist. I would die for my art. Well, almost.