by Martin Sheen
I was living back at home during the filming, and after work each day my father and I would walk around the backyard together, away from the phones, and run our lines. “Again please,” he’d suggest, “Let’s go one more time. One more time,” and “Why don’t you try this?” and then he’d demonstrate. We became two actors helping each other out, not just father and son. On set he had a big trailer and I’d go in there and run lines with him during breaks, too.
We’d practice until we felt we’d nailed a scene. It’s preferable to do this in the actual filming location, where you can attach a movement or a gesture to a specific spot or object in the room, but running lines into thin air, as we did in our backyard and in the trailer, helped us own them. The whole point of rehearsing is to learn the lines so well that you forget you’re reciting them, so that each time you say them they come to you as a fresh thought. James Cagney is rumored to have said acting is a great profession, as long as you don’t get caught at it. We actors interpret that to mean, Be natural. Make it look effortless. The actor’s job is to make it look as if he’s not doing any work at all.
As helpful as my dad and I were to each other in our off hours, in front of the cameras I felt fiercely competitive with him, as if I needed to out-act and out-box him in every scene. But why? And for whom? I wonder. It wasn’t as if I were being tested. I’d already gotten the role. I suppose part of the reason was just my own adolescent bluster and swagger, and part was that I didn’t want to disappoint my father. I wanted to prove that I was as good an actor as we both hoped I could be.
I’d made sure I was prepared for the role both physically and emotionally. By the time filming began I knew not only my own lines but the lines of everyone who shared scenes with me, and I had a great deal of confidence in myself. The movie was shot mostly in San Pedro, California, a rough-around-the-edges port city about fifty miles southeast of Malibu. My father’s longtime friend Matt Clark was playing an attorney in the movie and the three of us would drive to and from the set together on the days we were all scheduled to shoot. We’d talk and run lines together in the car. One evening we were heading home after a long day on set. The two of them were trying to make sure I understood the difference between being a serious, working actor and being a celebrity.
“Don’t concentrate on people knowing your name,” my dad said. A curious statement, I thought, from a father who’d urged me to keep the family name just a year and a half before.
Matt agreed. “Do good work, you’ll get hired, and you’ll have a career as an actor,” he added. “But don’t do this to be famous. No one’s going to know your name.”
Their message, loud and clear, was, “Get over yourself. No one’s ever going to know you.” I remember being furious with both of them for trying to short-circuit my ambition before it even had a chance to take off. Or were they instead trying to convey their own disappointments as actors? Or giving me solid advice born from years of experience? Over time I’ve come to see it as the latter, having learned from my own experience that work begets work, and that doing good work that lasts is more important than celebrity. But on that evening in 1981, as I pushed myself deeper into the backseat of my father’s car in defiance, I thought, Okay, you know what? It’s a different time now. People are going to know my name.
I loved going to work every day on that film, loved the challenges I faced on the set. This was the film in which I learned to trust my instincts as an actor, and I would ad-lib from time to time and make adjustments to the character on the spot. In a scene where Danny meets with his probation officer in a prison rec room, I wandered around the room nervously touching objects and hitting a Ping-Pong ball around. On pure impulse I opened the door of a wooden coat closet, stepped inside, and closed the door behind me. The cameraman wasn’t prepared for that, but to his credit, Jon Van Ness, who played the probation officer, didn’t miss a beat. He leaned back in his chair, impatiently flung the door open, and kept on going with his questions. His response was so in character that the scene ended up in the film.
I’m not sure I could be that bold on a set now. At nineteen I had the sort of unself-conscious abandon you can afford to have when you’re young and don’t know any better. It’s a time to make mistakes, when nobody holds you accountable because of your age and inexperience. I’m much more cautious now that the expectations and the stakes are both higher.
Toward the end of the filming my father left to do a play and I filmed the scenes that took place in jail. In one sequence, Danny is serving eggs in the chow line when one of the inmates picks a fight. Danny throws eggs in the guy’s face and leaps over the counter to attack him. The inmate was played by Anthony Davis, a famous former football player for USC. The stuntman, Gary McLarty, walked me through how to throw a punch on screen. I’d never done staged fighting before and Gary taught me not only how to throw a punch without hurting its recipient, but also how to receive one so it looked like I’d been hit. Twenty-eight years later I would think of Gary, and what he taught me on that set, when my father and I tried to teach two police officers how to duck staged punches in the courtyard of the bodega in northern Spain.
Soon after In the Custody of Strangers finished filming I went to audition for Francis Coppola and Fred Roos. They were casting for The Outsiders, a film based on Susie Hinton’s first book, written when she was still in high school, about a group of boys called Greasers from the wrong side of Tulsa and their run-ins with the affluent kids from the south side, the Socs (pronounced “soashes”). The story centers on a family of three brothers, Darrel, Sodapop, and Ponyboy, trying to stay together after their parents were killed in a car wreck.
Published in 1966, the book explores the social divisions Susie saw in her own school and became required reading in middle schools across the country. Almost fifteen years later, Francis received a letter from a school librarian in Fresno, California, asking him to consider making the book into a film. She included a petition signed by all her middle school students. Francis had never heard of the book but he was so moved he decided to read it and immediately realized the story would make for a compelling film.
Virtually every male actor under the age of thirty-five in Los Angeles turned out for The Outsiders auditions, which were held in an enormous soundstage at Zoetrope Studios in Hollywood, Francis’s Los Angeles headquarters. Val Kilmer, Dennis Quaid, Scott Baio, Anthony Michael Hall, Vincent Spano, Nicolas Cage, and a new kid named Tommy Howell—everyone wanted a shot. For the role of Cherry, the Soc girl who befriends the Greasers, a crop of young actresses that included Brooke Shields, Nicollette Sheridan, Kate Capshaw, and Helen Slater were considered. I went to audition for the role of Sodapop, Ponyboy’s sweet, protective older brother who drops out of high school to help support the family with a job at a gas station.
For the auditions for The Outsiders Francis used a method that was different from any reading I’d done before. For starters, he kept everyone in the room together so we all saw one another read. That alone was unusual. Then, after three or four actors had read a scene together, he’d juggle the roles around to see what kind of new synergy he could create among the actors.
“Okay,” he’d say to whoever was at the table. “Now we’re going to switch it up. This time you’re going to play Sodapop, and you’re going to take Johnny, and you’re going to play Darrel. Great. Let’s go.”
It was like watching tryouts for a football team. The actors Francis called on would jump in and do the scene, and then that group would be shuffled around before being replaced by the next one.
Francis looked much as I remembered him from the Philippines, with a thick dark beard and oversized glasses and an air of absolute authority. He knew what he was looking for, even if we didn’t know how to deliver it.
“Now you . . . I want you to stick around,” Francis would say when he was done with a group. “And you, thank you very much. You can leave.” The process was fascinating and exciting and nerve-wracking all at once.
The auditions went on for weeks. The guys in the room were desperate to stand out, and we all came up with different quirks and styles for the characters we wanted to play. I fashioned a reverse duck’s ass in my hair with gobs of grease every morning. As competitive and selective as the process was, I always thought I would be cast. Maybe it was because I’d already done a film based on an S. E. Hinton book, or maybe it was because my intuition told me I’d get a role, or maybe it was just pure, uninhibited nineteen-year-old confidence. As I sat in the soundstage and watched actor after actor go up to the table and then either get sent back to his seat or directed to the door, I thought, I’m a natural for this. I’m going to get a role here. I don’t know which one, but I’m going to be in this film. Still, I had to go through the audition process like everyone else. If Nicolas Cage, who was Coppola’s nephew, didn’t have an edge, then my father’s prior film relationship with Francis wasn’t going to matter. If anything, having already done Tex with Matt Dillon and knowing my way around Tulsa seemed to help distinguish me more.
Every morning of the auditions I drove to the soundstage with an actor my age from New Jersey who was staying at our house. His name was Tom Cruise and he’d worked with Sean Penn a year or two earlier on Taps. Tom was driven, focused, and hilariously self-effacing. I was living back at my parents’ house at the time, and Tom was looking for a place to stay during the auditions. He seemed like a nice-enough guy, and Sean vouched for his character.
“There are two beds in my room,” I told him. “Just stay with us.”
So Tom Cruise and I became roommates in my parents’ house for a while. One night we were fast asleep when a loud boom boom boom woke us up. It took me a few seconds to realize someone was pounding on the window. It took me a few seconds more to realize it was Sean. I rolled over and looked at my clock: just past 3:00 a.m.
“What the hell, man?” I said, unlocking the window. Sean angled himself over the hedge and into the room in his usual fashion. He was hammered, and he was raging because he couldn’t get the audition he wanted for The Outsiders. He’d set his sights on the role of Dallas, the delinquent Greaser to whom the younger ones go for help. Sean was an up-and-coming actor at the time, but for some reason Francis wouldn’t let him read for the part.
“I’m telling you, it’s an injustice, man!” he shouted as he paced around my bedroom. “It’s a missed opportunity!”
Tom and I agreed that to omit Sean from the auditions was insane. If anyone from our generation of actors should have been included, it should have been Sean Penn. He was one of, if not the most, compelling and important young actors in our group.
The more Sean shouted, the more worked up he became. I flipped on a lamp and noticed his face and his fists were covered with blood.
“What happened to you, man?” I asked.
“Ah, just some fight,” Sean said, and went back to raging against Francis. He was like a living embodiment of one of the Greasers that night. I’ve always wondered why he wasn’t asked to read.
One morning on the soundstage, a slightly older actor came sauntering into the room to read for the role of Darrel, Ponyboy’s oldest brother. Mickey Rourke was already known for his work in Body Heat with William Hurt and Kathleen Turner and when he read for Francis that day I thought he nailed the role. He destroyed all the props on the set, smashing them with his fists and his feet, while the rest of us sat there quietly staring at him in awe. It was staggering and inspiring to see how good he was.
When the call came, I was surprised to learn that Mickey hadn’t made the cut. I was even more surprised to learn that the call was for us to go to New York, where we’d audition with the actors who’d made the East Coast cuts. We hadn’t even known that a nearly identical set of actors had been auditioning for The Outsiders in New York.
From the whole crop of Los Angeles actors who’d auditioned, Francis chose only four to fly to New York: Tommy Howell, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, and me. In New York City we were mixed and matched with the actors there and met up with Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, and a relatively unknown actor, dancer, and gymnast named Patrick Swayze. At twenty-nine, Patrick was the mature counterpart to the rest of us, who were constantly poking one another and pulling pranks in the hotel. It was an incredibly competitive week or two as we all vied for the roles we wanted, but it was also a time of true camaraderie. We were on the brink of something big, together, and this sense of fellowship would extend throughout the entire shoot.
In the end, Matt Dillon, who’d starred in Tex, landed the role of Dallas. Patrick was cast as Ponyboy’s older brother Darrel, and the middle brother, Sodapop, went to Rob Lowe. Tom got the part of Steve Randle, Sodapop’s best friend, and Ponyboy went to Tommy Howell, a quiet, intense fifteen-year-old kid whose film experience, up to that point, was limited to a small role in a movie none of us had seen yet, called E.T. Ralph Macchio, a twenty-year-old actor from New York who’d had a recurring role on the TV show Eight Is Enough, was hired to play Johnny. I was cast in the role of Two-Bit Matthews, who rounded out the core Greasers gang.
Fred Roos, who’d done the casting for American Graffiti and had also cast my father in Apocalypse Now, proved once again to have a true gift for matching actors to roles. The casting in The Outsiders was spot-on. My father and Matt had been right: Good work begets good work. In that winter of 1982 in New York we had no way of knowing how well known all of the actors cast as the Greasers would become, but by the end of 1984 Tom had broken out in Risky Business, Ralph in The Karate Kid, Rob in The Hotel New Hampshire, and Patrick and Tommy in Red Dawn, which would also be my brother Charlie’s first major feature film.
The seven of us Greasers, plus Diane Lane and the kids playing the Socs, arrived in Tulsa about three weeks ahead of shooting to have ample time to rehearse. Francis also had us practicing gymnastics and learning how to fight. He wanted us all to be physically fit for our roles, and able to do nearly anything he asked of us. Patrick, who’d gone to college on a gymnastics scholarship, served as our unofficial coach and taught us how to do flips and basic gymnastics. You can see Tom turning flips off of cars twice in the film.
At first, I’d been terribly disappointed to be cast as Two-Bit Matthews. I’d wanted to play Sodapop, a more substantial role. But Francis encouraged us to develop our own characters during those rehearsal weeks and all of us—Tom, Ralph, Tommy, Patrick, Rob, Matt, and me—were eager to do anything we could to stand out from the pack. Tom decided Steve should lose a tooth in the big rumble between the Greasers and the Socs toward the end of the movie, and even went so far as to have one of his teeth removed and a fake one fashioned. I came up with the idea for Two-Bit to like Mickey Mouse and started wearing Mickey Mouse T-shirts with the sleeves cut off. The reverse duck’s ass stayed. Most of the boys carried blades, and I decided that Two-Bit should carry one of the butterfly knives I’d brought back from the Philippines. I’m not sure if that was an anachronism or not—could a balisong knife have found its way to a kid in 1966 Tulsa? Maybe if Two-Bit’s father had fought in the Korean War?—but Francis was so charmed by the Philippines connection he let me use the knife in the film. You can see Two-Bit swinging it open at the end of the drive-in sequence as if he’s very familiar with that knife, a gesture that took a lot of practice.
I played Two-Bit with a high-octane laugh, a tough-guy swagger, and a perpetual beer in his hand. The way Francis cut the final version of the film Two-Bit wound up getting the screen time Sodapop was supposed to have and then some, so getting cast as Two-Bit turned out to be a blessing in the end.
Francis’s son Gio, with whom I became reacquainted on that set, had an unbelievably bright mind for emerging technology. He had dialed Francis in to what’s now called “video village” for his prior film, One from the Heart. On most sets, video village is a tent set up with monitors, but for The Outsiders Francis had converted a silver Airstream trailer into his mission control. During rehearsals we would stand in front of a green screen while Francis watched us
on video monitors inside the Airstream and directed us from there, with chroma-key backgrounds on his screen that the rest of us couldn’t see.
“Okay,” he’d tell us as we stood in front of absolutely nothing. “You’re in the house now,” or “All right, now this is the scene in the park.” Filming that way made me feel like a weatherman standing in front of an empty background that would show up as the entire country’s weather map on TV.
When filming began, we shot the movie in sequence, starting with a first reel that introduced the characters but wound up being cut, and then moving into the drive-in scenes. It must have been very expensive to film that way, since we would return to the same locations multiple times, but it helped us live our roles as much as act them. Before filming started, Francis even made Patrick, Rob, and Tommy live together for a few days in the house he was using as the Curtis brothers’ home to help them feel like a real family.
On The Outsiders, I received a first-rate education in how accidents can sometimes be transformed into art. Francis allowed us to ad-lib and often used our impromptu lines or gestures in the final cut, and he was a genius at letting action naturally unfold. In the drive-in scene when Matt Dillon is harassing Diane Lane’s character, he accidentally falls off his chair. All the other actors started laughing. Any other director might have yelled “Cut!” when Matt hit the floor—you can even see Tommy Howell looking right at the camera, expecting Francis to do just that—but Francis kept the camera rolling and used the fall to let Matt’s character Dallas be a little more vulnerable and a little more likable than he might otherwise have come across in that scene.
One night we were filming outside with a couple of big Ritter fans blowing—incredibly noisy, two-thousand-pound, eight-foot-tall fans Francis used in many of the outdoor scenes to simulate wind. In this particular scene I was walking across the street with Ponyboy and Johnny when a hat came tumbling right into the frame. A Ritter fan had blown it off cameraman Elliot Davis’s head, and when I saw it cartwheel past I ran over, picked it up, shouted, “Whoa! Looky here! Got myself a new hat!” and stuck it on my head. It was exactly something the rambunctious Two-Bit might have done, and Frances left that moment in the final cut, too.