Along the Way

by Martin Sheen

  “We’ll be finished before long. Not to worry,” he said when I asked again.

  He held our tickets and passports. I couldn’t go anywhere without them. It was an enormously frustrating position to be in. And a strange one, too. On set, I was surrounded by actors who couldn’t get enough of the action in the Philippines and there I was, just wanting to get the hell out.

  Then, on the last day of August, Marlon Brando arrived.

  Here, too, the story of the film’s production slides nearly into myth. Marlon showed up so overweight that the character of Colonel Kurtz, the rogue army captain who had set up his own violent, lawless compound in the Cambodian jungle, had to be reconceived. Francis spent days reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness out loud to him because it served as a template for the film and Marlon was supposed to have read it in advance but hadn’t. He brilliantly ad-libbed most of his lines, but his tight three-week shooting schedule for a $3 million paycheck almost forced Francis into a state of scheduling and financial crisis. Having seen Marlon’s work in The Godfather, which was practically required viewing for teenage boys back home, I knew that he was a legend. I also knew he was the guy who’d sent Sacheen Little-feather up to refuse his Oscar for The Godfather in 1973.

  Everyone on set treated him carefully, as a fragile Hollywood star, but to our family, he was just a kind, gentle actor staying in one of the cabanas up the hill. At dinnertime he would come down to our porch when he smelled my mother’s chicken or beef on the grill. He probably came down as much for the company as for the food. “Where are you from?” “What are you doing here?” my brothers and sister would ask him, and we’d all sit around joking and sharing stories late into the night. He would light a single cigarette after eating, hold it aloft, and confess, “This is the only time I smoke. One a day.”

  When he fell ill, my parents sent him a case of Evian and a case of Perrier from our stash. They knew the local water could make you sick. “No one else thought of that,” he said, which endeared my mother to him forever. He made sure a lei of fresh flowers was sent down to her every day.

  With Marlon’s arrival, the filming location shifted to Kurtz’s compound on the river. Production designer Dean Tavoularis and his team, along with six hundred Filipino laborers, had constructed the immense temple ruins from the ground up out of 300-pound dried adobe blocks. They used photos of Angkor Wat for inspiration and created a gorgeous, mysterious imaginary world. I loved everything about that set.

  Kurtz’s army of native Montagnards were played by more than 250 Ifugao tribespeople who’d been brought down from the rice terraces of a northern province. They were related to the real-life Montagnard forces that American forces had encountered in Vietnam. Within days they set up stilt houses with bamboo floors and created a temporary village adjacent to the set, complete with their own pigs. They helped build props for the film, like the cage in which Willard is imprisoned by Kurtz’s loyal followers, and made handicrafts to sell. Their ingenuity using the jungle resources was completely natural to them but remarkable to me.

  I was there the night they sacrificed a water buffalo by hacking off its head with four brutal blows, images that were used in the movie’s final cut. Most viewers think the slaughter was orchestrated for filming purposes but it wasn’t. The Ifugao themselves chose to do this tribal ritual, led by their native priest, and the cameramen spontaneously decided to capture it on film. I saw the whole thing. The animal went down in minutes and several tribespeople stripped and gutted it right away. They scooped the blood from the carcass into a yellow plastic bucket and gave the tail to the children to play with. It was horrifying and fascinating at the same time, primitive yet reverent, painful to watch but impossible to turn my eyes away from.

  When you spend weeks on a single set, whether it’s the Do Lung Bridge, Kurtz’s compound, or any other location, you dig in for a while. It becomes your home base and the cast and crew form a temporary family. The longer the filming takes, the more apparent this becomes. We were at the temple ruins for almost a month. After a while, everyone on set talked freely around me, as if I were one of the team. The crew was having difficulties with Marlon’s weight and the delays on set that resulted while he and Francis sat together fine-tuning his lines. “We’re trying to figure out how to shoot him,” I’d hear, or “We’re waiting for the same light as yesterday to reshoot the scene.” I was privy to some of the crew’s decision making and watched how they solved problems on the spot, and I absorbed it all. It was an extraordinary film education for a junior-high-school kid to receive.

  Still, I would rather have been back home, at school.

  “Yeah, yeah,” my father said when I asked again in mid-September. Gio and Roman had already flown back to San Francisco to start their school year on time. Mine was starting that week in Malibu without me. “We’re getting around to that. Not to worry,” he said.

  Many of the compound scenes were rehearsed and shot during the day, leaving the actors with free time at night. By then, everyone was settled in and knew they’d be there for a while. The crew was staying at a hotel in downtown Pagsanjan, where they held Ping-Pong tournaments at night. Charlie and I entered, and I held my own for a while but a sound mixer named Nate Boxer was an amazing Ping-Pong player and always beat the hell out of everyone.

  The demands of my father’s role and the logistics of family life in a jungle were stressful, and my parents were trying hard to hold everything together. Between the emotional pressures of playing Willard and the plentiful alcohol, my father was trying to stay alive, and my mother was trying to keep him alive; that’s no exaggeration. As a result, I went unsupervised much of the time. Looking back, I can see how this might make them look like neglectful parents, but I never felt that was the situation. Because I was the oldest and most independent of their four kids, they trusted me to be responsible.

  On his nights off, Fishburne and I would sometimes take off for Manila by ourselves. We’d catch a ride in a jeepney, a form of local public transportation that’s like a cross between an army jeep and a psychedelic Guatemalan chicken bus. In the capital we’d check into the Manila Hilton for the night, eat dinner at Pizza Hut, and drink beer without being asked for ID. Then we’d wander around and wind up racing back to the hotel at 11:59 p.m. to beat the midnight curfew imposed by martial law. You didn’t want to get caught out on the street after curfew by a grim-faced soldier with a machine gun strapped across his back. And yet none of this felt dangerous or even risky. It had actually started to feel normal, which reveals just how crazy the situation was at the time.

  The Manila Hilton was the only place where I could get an outside line to make telephone calls to the States. I’d have to ring the operator to request an international call.

  “Hold on, sir, I’ll call you back when I have the connection.”

  I’d go to sleep and the phone would ring two or three hours later in the middle of the night.

  “Please hold. I have your call to the United States, sir.”

  “What’s going on?” I’d say groggily, when I heard a friend’s voice. “Remember me? I’m still alive.” They were sixteen hours behind me, still living in my yesterday, but I was the one missing out on everything. The calls were expensive and I had to keep them short. A minute, two minutes, that was all we could talk.

  On the nights we didn’t go to Manila, Fishburne and I often could be found together in Pagsanjan. He and his mother lived in an apartment there with two bedrooms where I was always invited to sleep over. It was easier to go there from the set than back to our cabana at the lake.

  One night Fishburne and I went out for dinner at the crew’s hotel in Pagsanjan. We were joined by Dennis Hopper and an Asian journalist he was trying to seduce. Hopper had arrived just a week or two earlier. He was a force unto himself, like a frenzied molecule bouncing off everyone who stood near him, and he injected a big dose of hilarity and playfulness onto the set. Hopper was there to play the manic American photojournalist who
runs down the steps to greet Willard and his remaining PBR crew when they glide up to Kurtz’s compound. He became notorious for not knowing his lines and making some of them up. His ad-libbed scenes with Willard, in which he describes Kurtz as a brilliant madman, show traces of his own mad genius.

  “You can’t travel in space, you can’t go out into space, you know, without like, you know, with fractions,” he tells Willard when the captain is being held inside Kurtz’s compound. “What are you going to land on? One-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That’s dialectic physics. Dialectic logic is there’s only love and hate. You either love somebody or you hate ’em.”

  That night at dinner, the four of us—Hopper, Fishburne, the journalist, and I—are sitting in an outside dining area eating our food. Suddenly, and out of nowhere, two well-dressed men climb over the fence between the garden and the restaurant and walk up to our table. One of them is balancing a wooden board with cheese, crackers, fruit, and an enormous knife on top. The other is holding a bottle of wine.

  What? I think. Who are these guys? They’re totally incongruous with the surroundings, more like a pair you’d see at a wine tasting in Napa.

  One man is very blond, the other dark haired. Of course they recognize Dennis right away.

  “I’m John from America,” the blond man introduces himself. “Mind if we join you?” They sit down without waiting for an answer.

  Now it’s the six of us. I look at the two men. I feel the distinct energy of something weird about to go down, but I can’t get a grasp on what it will be. The scene is too confusing. Dennis is trying to get it on with the journalist and Fishburne starts talking to the dark-haired man when, apropos of nothing, the blond man announces that he’s an assassin.

  What?

  He calmly turns to Dennis. “I’m an assassin,” he repeates, “and I’ve been sent here to kill you.”

  A long pause settles over the table. I glance at the enormous knife lying on the cheeseboard. I’m fourteen, Fishburne is fifteen, and Hopper is . . . Hopper. He’s sitting there in his photojournalist costume, with the knotted red-cloth headband and the olive-green shirt and pants and all those beaded necklaces. He hasn’t taken it off the whole time he’s been here, and by now it stinks. Still, why the hell would anyone want to kill Dennis Hopper?

  Dennis breaks the silence with a laugh. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Whatever, man.” He turns his attention back to the journalist.

  It’s clear this wasn’t the response the American was expecting. It only makes him more insistent. Dennis acts even less interested, if that’s possible. Then the woman excuses herself to use the restroom, and Dennis gets up and follows her.

  The dark-haired guy tosses his napkin on the table and stands up. He’s not going to let Dennis out of his sight.

  Great. Now it’s me, Fishburne, and this blond man, John from America, who may or may not be an assassin. Either way, he’s crazy. He has to be. You don’t just announce out loud in a restaurant that you’re an assassin, and you definitely don’t announce it to the guy you want to kill.

  Fishburne turns to the blond man. “Listen, man,” he says, in a calm, measured tone. “I’m not letting you kill Dennis Hopper.”

  I feel my eyes go a little wider. Fishburne’s from a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn. He’s probably no stranger to confrontation or men with weapons. Still. He’s fifteen.

  “I have this knife,” the blond man says. I glance at the long blade. He does, in fact, have that knife. “And I can do it if I want.”

  What the hell am I doing here? I think. This is all going so sideways. The skin on the back of my neck starts to crawl. Night maneuvers for the Do Lung Bridge scenes were nothing compared to this.

  Fishburne and the blond man go back and forth for a while: “You’re not killing Dennis Hopper.” “I can do whatever I want.” “You’re not killing Dennis Hopper.” “Oh, yes. I am.”

  Where did Hopper go? Not that he was a help, but there might be some safety in numbers.

  Finally, Fishburne looks the blond guy right in the eye. He breathes in, and out. “You can take that knife and you can stick it in my heart,” he says. “Or we can be friends.”

  Wow. The two of them sit there face to face, eight inches apart, their eyes locked. It’s a showdown. I don’t know who’s going to win.

  The guy sizes up Fishburne and realizes he’s serious.

  “Let’s be friends,” he says.

  And that was it. I couldn’t believe Fishburne had defused the situation that fast. Whatever admiration I already felt for him increased sixfold that night.

  The story should end there, with Fishburne’s heroic gesture, but it doesn’t. The next day, while the rest of the family is on an outing, Charlie and I are hanging around together outside the cabana. We notice a man at the end of the dock where the boats come in. He’s throwing a knife into the wood at his feet. It looks like he’s doing a practice maneuver. Throw the knife, boom, pull it out, throw it again, boom, pull it out. The blade pierces the wood perfectly, sticking upright each time. The man knows how to handle a knife. I’m watching him, not quite understanding, and then he looks up.

  It’s John from America.

  I know that guy, I think. I know that knife. We’ve got to get him out of here.

  I quickly tell Charlie what happened the night before. He’s only eleven, but he gets it. He completely freaks out. Now we both know this guy could be dangerous.

  If I turn him in, I wonder, will that make me a target as well? Does it mean he’ll come back and try to get all of us in the middle of the night? My mind clicks through the options. Isn’t it better for the police to deal with him now rather than me having to deal with him in the middle of the night? There’s no security at the compound. Anyone can walk right up to our cabana, at any time.

  “The hell with it,” I tell Charlie. “We’re calling the cops.”

  I call the front desk from our room. “There’s a strange man who says he’s an assassin here to kill Dennis Hopper and he’s on the dock throwing a knife,” I say. I can tell how ridiculous it sounds, but I can’t take any chances. Marlon is staying in the compound, too, and this blond guy is a threat.

  Ten minutes later, the police show up and take him away. I heard they detained him for questioning and then let him go. It turned out he was a banker with a strange story about being on our dock. Maybe he was having a psychotic episode in the jungle. Or maybe he really was an assassin, an operative, or mercenary. Really, he could have been anyone. He was mysterious, ambiguous, unhinged. He could have stepped right out of Francis’s script.

  Seven hundred kids were enrolled at Malibu Park Junior High that fall. Six hundred and ninety-eight of them had shown up when the school year started. The other two, Ramon and me, were stuck here in this jungle. September was almost over, and by now I’d missed two weeks of the ninth grade. My worry started turning to panic.

  “You promised,” I reminded my father.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “We’re getting to that.”

  Fishburne’s mother, Hattie, tried to homeschool us so we wouldn’t fall behind, but our little school failed, through no fault of hers. I didn’t want to do lessons in the Philippines, I wanted to do them back in Malibu with my friends. And there were too many distractions pulling my focus away from school. A couple nights a week I was going out with crew members to a house called Dampa in Pagsanjan. “Dampa” means “hovel” in Tagalog, and this place fit the bill. It was a toilet, literally: The bathroom had a drain that ran right through the center of the restaurant. Downstairs was warm San Miguel beer, Boz Scaggs singing “Lowdown” on the jukebox, and local girls who worked as prostitutes sidling up to the Americans at the bar. That’s where I’d spend some of my week-nights, drinking warm beer, smelling urine, and doing what everyone else was doing upstairs. It was madness, and I knew it.

  I didn’t even care anymore if the family came back to Malibu with me. I’d go al
one if I had to.

  “Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. We’re getting to that. Soon.”

  What was it going to take to be heard?

  As September turned into October, I felt my worry turning to anger. Enough already, I thought. I’d spent most of my childhood following my father to locations, leaving my friends behind, having to adjust and readjust to school after months away on the road. I understood my father’s desire to keep the family together at all costs. I truly did. But I had obligations back home. Didn’t he realize that?

  Equally important, I had started getting scared of what might happen if I stayed. My behavior had gotten reckless and crazy and I didn’t feel grounded anymore. The jungle had started getting to people and not in a good way. Days earlier the prop guy had taken my mother aside and said, “Get your children out of here,” because it had started to feel as if anything might happen. People were drinking heavily and doing drugs. An exhilarating form of darkness seemed to have penetrated everyone on set. The heat, the drugs, the pressure, the chaos—it felt like our own little Vietnam. Jimmy Keane took some photos of me at that time, and at fourteen I already looked like a tired old man. Miserable and unhappy. A part of me had started thinking I might die there in the jungle if left to my own devices for much longer. I needed to get out, to save myself.

  By the middle of October, a month into the school year, I’m ready to make my move. My father comes back from the Kurtz compound set one night. I’m waiting in the cabana to confront him.

  “Not to worry . . .” he begins, but I’m not taking that for an answer. Not anymore.

  “You’re a liar!” I explode at him. “You promised I’d be back for school and the clock’s ticking. This isn’t just about you! I’ve got to get home!”

  “But I can’t do anything about it,” he protests, his voice rising to match mine. “I’m not in control of—”

  “You gave me your word!” I shout.

  “I’m not in control of the schedule! Can’t you see this from my point of view? I’m carrying the weight of this enormous—”