by Martin Sheen
Today he’s not just my father, he’s also one of my closest friends. He and my mother Janet still live in the same house in Malibu where they raised me, my brothers Ramon and Charlie, and my sister Renée. I live 200 yards up the street with my partner Sonja on an acre of land with a vineyard and gardens we planted in our front and back lawns. I know: My father is a famous recovering alcoholic and Sonja and I make wine. Go figure. He helps us harvest our grapes every fall. It’s one of his favorite things to do. Despite our differences, the two of us now share a place of deep mutual acceptance and respect. But it wasn’t always an easy road.
The pickup truck bounces and rattles as we climb the Pyre-neees. Just beyond us are enormous, jagged limestone formations and beyond them, the low white farmhouses of Basque country, but we can barely see anything through the fog. Our producer David Alexanian is behind us somewhere, driving the other truck. David is one of my closest friends, but right now he’s probably cursing me for having the brilliant idea to film today and is trying to come up with a plan B.
Me, I know I have to surrender to the moment. Sometimes as a filmmaker that’s all you can do. That, and know when to get out of your own way. When I was in my twenties and first started directing, I wanted to control every aspect of my films. Now I know that’s exactly how you overlook possibilities. You have to learn when to relinquish control. Otherwise, you miss all the gifts.
Fog, I think. Okay. This is an opportunity. How can we make it work?
No doubt, I am the only person in the vehicle with that thought in mind.
The most popular and well-trodden route on the Camino de Santiago is called the Camino Frances. It stretches from St.-Jean in the French Pyrenees to Santiago in the region of Galicia in northwest Spain. In ancient times, many pilgrims began the walk from their front doors. Others chose to assemble at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, where pilgrims would worship together before starting their treks. The plan was typically to walk to Santiago de Compostela and then to walk all the way back. Monasteries and hospices for pilgrims offered food and shelter along the way but the journey could be treacherous. If the wild animals didn’t get you, the weather or the bandits often did.
Our plan for the film is to shoot the script in sequence, starting in St.-Jean and moving steadily west along the Camino Frances. We’ll act like real pilgrims ourselves, picking up cast members along the way as Tom encounters them on his walk. As a result, this won’t be the kind of production that cycles back to earlier sites to redo a scene. Once we leave a town we’ll have left it for good, and whatever we didn’t get on film the first time we’ll have to do without. This means that whatever gets in our way, whatever surprises we encounter in terms of weather or townspeople or cast, has to become part of the film. A shoot like this is one part preparation, one part skill, and two parts faith that everything will work out in the end.
We have a forty-day journey ahead of us, but it was an even longer journey to get us here. In 2003, my father, his close friend and fellow actor Matt Clark, and my son, Taylor, saw the Camino for the first time when the three of them took a trip to Spain. My father was on hiatus from The West Wing and didn’t have enough time to walk the Camino’s length, so they drove along it for a few weeks instead. At an inn for pilgrims outside the city of Burgos, Taylor met and fell in love with the Spanish woman who would become his wife. Later that year he moved to Spain to be with her, and they live there to this day.
After that 2003 trip to Spain my father began to give me gentle nudges about making a film about the Camino—ideally, one that would feature him. He was always on the lookout for substantial film roles, and Spain exacted a strong pull on him as his paternal family’s ancestral home.
Living 200 yards away from my father has both its advantages and its disadvantages. The advantage is that he can come knocking on my door at any time. The disadvantage is that he can come knocking on my door at any time. Especially when he has ideas about a film he wants me to write.
Knock knock.
“Yes, Dad?”
“I have a great idea. Write something for me set in Spain. A documentary.”
“I don’t do documentaries, Dad.” When had I ever expressed an interest in directing a documentary? Besides, I was out pitching the script for Bobby. I didn’t have time to start something new right then.
But my father didn’t give up. He only regrouped.
Knock knock.
“Yes, Dad?”
“I have another idea. How about a story where two old guys go to Spain with a young guy who speaks the language and shepherds them along the way?”
Two old guys and a young guy traveling together in Spain? Hmm. That sounded familiar. It also sounded like a small European movie with a very limited potential audience.
“What happens next?” I asked.
“That’s for you to figure out. I’m busy with West Wing. Just write a script where I’m the guy. It’ll be fun—you and me, in Spain!”
I sat with his idea for a while. Two old guys and a young guy walking the Camino . . . two old guys and a young guy walking the Camino . . . and then . . . zzzz. I couldn’t find anywhere to go with this story, other than to sleep.
But since the beginning of time, every son in existence has wanted to please his father. From the painted macaroni cigar boxes he brings home in the first grade to the SAT scores in high school, the son is always angling for the father’s attention. “Look at this,” he says. “Look at me. Aren’t you proud?” I was no exception. Even as an adult I still wanted to please my father. So after Bobby had been funded, filmed, and released, I returned to my father’s idea. If I was going to invest a couple years’ worth of time and energy in the project, I wanted it to be special for both of us. But I still didn’t have a hook for the story.
When I started writing scripts in my teens and twenties, my mother would say, “Write what you know.” What she meant was, “Don’t write something so far out there it doesn’t connect for you emotionally. Write movies that are thematically close to wherever you’re coming from at that point in your life.” I still have one of my early scripts for Men at Work, a film I wrote half my life ago, when I was twenty-five. Men at Work is about two garbagemen, played by me and my brother Charlie, who become involved in the murder cover-up of a local politician. What did I know about garbagemen? Not much. Murder cover-ups? Even less. My mother knew that, of course. She wrote a page of notes she attached to the script that said, “I’m reading this script and I don’t know what it’s about. It has nothing to do with who you are. I feel that your life experiences are limited and it’s reflected in this screenplay.”
She probably didn’t know how much life experience I did have, much of it gained when I was fourteen and we spent five months in the Philippines during the shoot for Apocalypse Now. But as usual, she was right. I’d do better work if I wrote about what I understood.
What did I know about being an old guy or a young guy walking in Spain? Nothing. But I knew what it felt like to lose a son to the Camino. That’s what it had felt like after Taylor moved to Spain, and something in that theme felt right. This film needed to be about a father who loses a son.
But how would I get an American to the Camino? What could bring him there that wouldn’t feel manufactured or contrived? Slowly, an idea came to me.
I pitched it to my father one day in the car, as we were driving north together on the 101 freeway. Right around the sand hills between Malibu and Ventura I explained, “I think it should be a father-son story. And I think the son is no longer with us. I think he died on the Camino and the father goes to pick up the body and decides he’s not coming home and does the route himself.”
My dad didn’t even stop to think about it. “That’s it,” he said.
And so here we are two years later up in the French Pyrenees, in the freezing cold. In the last half hour the fog has become so thick we could walk right off the mountain and not even know until it was too late. Jean-Jacques tells us that’s exactly what h
appened to a hiker in this same spot last year. As if on cue, half the crew walks right by us without even noticing we’re there.
What if Tom’s son Daniel got caught in a storm with a fog like this? It could happen.
“Wait a second!” I say. “This is where Daniel gets lost.”
We break out the cameras and film me standing in the mountain fog, then walking away from the camera. Twenty feet ahead of me at the edge of an abrupt drop-off, a small wooden cross sticks out of the ground. It seems too coincidental but it’s true: Someone has died here recently. The crew members share a moment of solemn respect when they realize what we’re seeing. It’s also a powerful reminder that we’re onto something real. We don’t know it yet, but this will be the first of many coincidences we’ll encounter while making this film.
Five days later, we return to the same spot to film Tom Avery on his first day of his trek. The morning is sunny and clear this time. Half the crew, along with my mother, have already headed into Spain to prep for tomorrow’s shoot in the small border village of Roncesvalles. The rest of us go up into the mountains and make a cross to mark the site where Daniel died. Tanya twists it down into a mound of dirt and drops fresh flowers at its base. My father drapes his rosary over the simple cross. He always carries a rosary. It comes in helpful today.
We shoot him heading uphill in his royal blue parka with a loaded pack on his back. He does yoga every morning and for a man of almost seventy he’s extremely fit. But he’s trudging uphill the first week of shooting with a nearly forty-pound pack on his back. It’s twelve pounds more than the guidebooks recommend and he’s adamant about carrying it full, just as he was adamant about not training with it in advance or training for the walk at all. The guidebooks about the Camino advise hikers to prepare for weeks before starting the trek, but he wasn’t having any of it.
“Tom’s not a young guy!” he insisted. “He’s never carried anything before! He’s a man of privilege. He wouldn’t be prepared. Don’t worry, I’ve got all this in hand.”
I knew better than to get in the middle of that. Still, as I stand next to the camera and watch my dad charge uphill at 4,700 feet elevation with the pack strapped to his back, and then come back down and do it all over again, I’m not so sure about his choice. The director in me is grateful I have a leading man who wants to embody his character so fully. The son in me is worried that my father is going to seriously mess up his back.
“You’ve got to stop him!” our producer David says as we trail my father from the moving camera truck. “What are we gonna tell your mother?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Tell her nothing. She’ll see the movie and kill us both afterward.”
This stretch from St.-Jean in France to Roncesvalles in Spain is the first, longest, and most difficult leg of the Camino Frances route, covering 25 kilometers (15.5 miles). Roncesvalles is where Tom spends his first night in a pilgrim shelter, arriving in the dark. We’ve been filming in the Pyrenees all day and now sunset is imminent. We still have to shoot Tom descending into Roncesvalles with a headlamp strapped to his forehead.
We pile the equipment back into the trucks and head down into the valley on another prehistoric road. Rocks and more rocks. Huge ones this time. The truck lists from side to side and comes down at nearly 45-degree angles. For the second time today, we’re hanging on for our lives.
“Can you slow down, please?” my father shouts to Jean-Jacques, who cheerfully keeps up the pace.
My dad has had enough experience on sets to know that, just when you least expect it, just when you think someone else is in control and you become careless about your own safety, that’s when accidents happen. He was on location in Mexico during the filming of Catch-22 when John Jordan, a second unit director, fell out of a B-54 bomber to his death. He was also the only actor who stepped onto the navy patrol boat during the filming of Apocalypse Now and asked for a life jacket. There were so many people on that set in the Philippines, he’s said, so much noise, so much action: helicopters, boats, weapons, fire. Somebody easily could have gotten killed, and he had a wife and four children. He didn’t want it to be him.
I know what he’s thinking up there right now. He’s thinking that, pretty soon, one of these trucks is going to tip over and someone’s going to be in the way. And that he’s not going to stick around to watch that happen.
“Pull over!” he shouts.
Jean-Jacques brings the car to a neck-bending stop. My father slides out of the cab and takes off. We follow him but it’s not easy. He’s actually outpacing the truck on this road.
David watches all this unfold with awe. “That’s an almost seventy-year-old man with a forty-pound pack on his back running at three thousand feet altitude in shoes that aren’t made for running,” he says. “Is he insane?”
Insane? Definitely not. Determined? Absolutely. He’s trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the truck, and he’s succeeding. But as I watch him running ahead of us, his jacket now a blue smudge in the twilight, I see something else, too.
I’m his son. I know.
My father isn’t just running away from us. He knows exactly where he’s going. He’s heading toward the border.
He’s running toward Spain.
CHAPTER ONE
MARTIN
1940–1959
My father, Francisco, once told me, “To be a man you have to do three things: have a son, kill a bull, and write a book.”
“Well,” I said. “You’ve got a lot to write about if you have a son and kill a bull.”
My father never killed a bull or wrote a book but he raised nine sons and a daughter, and he did much of that work alone. My mother died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at forty-eight in 1951, a few days before my eleventh birthday, and my father kept the family together on a modest working-class salary in Dayton, Ohio. Responsibility, honesty, and faith were the three pillars of his character. He was the kind of man who did the right thing simply because it was the right thing to do.
My father was a frugal man out of both upbringing and necessity. He had ten young mouths to feed and ten young minds to educate at Holy Trinity Catholic grade school and Chaminade High School. Family was the center of his orbit. He never thought about himself. His only jewelry was a watch and his wedding ring, his only personal luxuries a pipe for smoking and a glass of wine at Christmas. He owned one suit and two hats and ironed his own shirts. After my mother died, he shared a bedroom with me and my brother Alfonso until we both left home. Even when my brothers prodded him to buy new furniture or move us to a bigger house he stuck to his principles of austerity. He never owned a car, never even learned to drive. Instead he walked twenty-five minutes to and from his job at the National Cash Register company every day in every season. Years later I asked him why he chose our brick house on Brown Street in Dayton’s working-class South Park neighborhood. He explained it was because from that house he could walk to work, he could walk to church, and he could walk to a hospital.
“I coulda carry you over there to the hospital, yes, no far away,” he said in his deep, heavily accented English, still weighted with the cadences of Galicia. “I coulda carry you there.”
I could carry you there. That was my father. Even in Dayton, Ohio, he lived with the rural sensibilities of northern Spain. Everything was about being responsible, about acting responsibly, about doing something responsible and productive with your life. In 1959, when I boarded a bus bound for New York City, nobody could have called pursuing a career as an actor “responsible.” Least of all my father. Yet we grew to understand and respect each other for the different choices we made and we loved each other always, complicated as that love sometimes became.
The Irish have a saying: “We never get over our fathers, and we’re not required to.” The message is, “Don’t even try. For good or ill, you won’t get over that hurdle.” We carry the image of that man we focus on most with us forever. And so to write about being a father, and even more so, to
understand myself as a man, I have to begin with the source.
Francisco Estevez Martinez. He was a Galego, from the region of Galicia in the far northwest corner of Spain that sits on top of Portugal like a square hat. His family lived in the small farming parish of Parderrubias in the province of Pontevedra, five miles north of the Portuguese border. He was a child of auspicious beginnings, born on July 2, 1898, in the midst of the sixteen-week Spanish-American War. Whether his family received news of fighting that week, or even that month, is questionable. Today one village in the province blends right into the next, but in the early 1900s each town was self-sufficient, distinct, and relatively isolated from the rest of Spain. News didn’t travel fast. Galegos have historically been seafarers, with their gazes and their hopes trained west—a smart choice given the state of Spanish infrastructure back then. I’ve been told the reason more Galegos headed for the New World than to Madrid, which was less than 300 miles away, was because both journeys took the same amount of time.
My father left Spain with two of his cousins in 1916 and landed in Cuba, where he found work in the sugarcane fields. Three years later, he entered the United States through Miami as a Cubano, and made his way to Ohio.
It’s hard to imagine what those first few months in America in 1919 must have been like for my father. Though he spoke Galician, Spanish, and Portuguese, he knew very little English. I imagine him trying to gain a foothold in a country freshly out of World War I and in the midst of an influenza epidemic—tagged with the unfortunate nickname “the Spanish flu”—that would eventually claim more than 500,000 American lives, many of them women and children. In Galicia his family had its own vineyard, but, in the United States, Prohibition had just gone into effect. And women in America were poised to earn the right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment would be ratified by Congress the following year. My father began the chapter of his American life during a momentous transition, a time of great victory and enormous grief.