by Martin Sheen
Wisdom became a classic example of letting my past dictate my present. Instead of leaning more on the incredible talent that had assembled to do the film, I didn’t let myself trust them. I was too afraid they would conspire to take the movie away from me.
Had I listened to them, had I let their wise counsel penetrate, would I have wound up with a better movie? I’ll never know. I know only that at the time I was neither a collaborator nor an experienced enough filmmaker to do an excellent job on my own.
Nothing could have prepared me for walking onto a set and facing a hundred people asking, “Where do you want the camera?” and “Where do we stand?” and waiting for me to make the decisions that would determine their next moves. Nothing prepares you for that experience except the experience itself. Some days I would go into my trailer and wring my hands while I worried about which choice to make next, and then I’d walk back out and make a decision, because I was the director and I had to. Having Robert Wise on the set helped me understand what worked and what didn’t. He would sit in front of the video monitors and watch scenes in real time as they were being filmed. I’d look over and he’d be laughing or giving me the thumbs-up. Whatever criticism he gave was always constructive, which to me is the mark of a true mentor.
I’d worked with my brother Ramon on In the Custody of Strangers when he played one of Danny Caldwell’s derelict friends but Wisdom marked the first time I cast a family member in one of my films. It was the start of a practice I’d go on to use in nearly every film I’ve made. I could count on my family members to do good work, and if the film was low-budget I knew they’d help me out for cheap or even for free. For Wisdom I asked my brother Charlie to take a small role as the manager of a burger joint who has to fire my character. Charlie was leaving for the Philippines the next day to shoot Platoon. “Before you go, can you just come in and play this? We won’t even hear what you’re saying,” I said. As Charlie’s character fires John Wisdom, Elfman’s score drowns out most of his lines, but his angry gestures and expression of fury convey the manager’s sentiments perfectly. You don’t need to hear Charlie’s voice to guess what he’s saying.
The film had an obvious part for my father in the role of John Wisdom’s father, but I chose to meet with other actors, including Dennis Hopper. I wound up casting Tom Skerritt in the role even though Hopper had wanted it. Years later he told me, “Hey man, you know, I’m really mad you didn’t cast me in that film. I thought I was more right for that role than Tom Skerritt.” There was nothing to say at that point except, “I’m sorry.” I’d made a choice that I felt was right for the film, but it could have been fun to work with Dennis Hopper as my on-screen father, given our history together.
Wisdom was released in January 1987, and of all the reviews in the media the one I looked forward to most was from the LA Weekly, which functioned as my entertainment bible. I liked reading it so much I would have friends send copies to me on location. In the 1980s, F. X. Feeney and Michael Wilmington were cool, progressive film critics writing for the Weekly and I valued their opinions above all.
The LA Weekly’s review of Wisdom was titled “Ain’t No Rosebud.” It was a reference to Citizen Kane, which Orson Welles had written, directed, and starred in at age twenty-six. From there, the review went from bad to worse.
Even though I still had to believe the film was good, in retrospect the reviewer was spot-on when he explained why the movie was weak. On the other hand, he took two whole pages of valuable LA Weekly real estate to do it. Ultimately I was left with respect for him for making a thoughtful effort to deconstruct the film instead of writing up the usual dismissive single paragraph films often receive.
My salvation during that week of harsh reviews was the Los Angeles Times, where Michael Wilmington called the film a weak attempt to revive the mix of violence, social context, and lyricism of Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde. But he also said that the film showed more promise than Ron Howard’s first film, Grand Theft Auto, which Howard also wrote, directed, and acted in at age twenty-three. And we all know how that career story turned out.
My father, who’d had his own share of film highs and lows—with one of the highs being Badlands, also a film about two lovers on the run—became both a voice of reason and a source of emotional support for me at that time. He waxed philosophical about the reviews.
“Imagine they were singing your praises,” he said. “Where would you go from there? Now you’ve got somewhere to go.”
It was hard for me to see his point back then, but he was right. I did have room to improve. I’d jumped into directing without being ready for it, driven by ambition and the desire to tick a new box earlier than I was ready to. I’d wanted to learn a new skill set but instead of going to film school I chose to learn on a public stage where everyone could watch me stumble. My experience with Wisdom was the epitome of taking a risk and not doing it safely. Or maybe it was that in my twenties I had such a measure of fearlessness I didn’t realize the extent of the risks I was taking. Or maybe I was just too stupid to know or to care. Probably a combination of both.
It may be a cliché to say that over time we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The Los Angeles Times critic had been right when he described Wisdom as a poor derivative of Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde. I was writing a script and making a film about something that wasn’t personal. I didn’t know anything about bank robberies or helicopter chases. It would take me another movie about two garbage men (Men at Work) before I fully understood that a personal connection to one’s material makes for a much better film. Then I would give myself license to direct and act in The War at Home, a Vietnam War–era drama about a son who returns from the military and a father who can’t see his pain; to direct and act in Rated X, about the contentious relationship between two brothers who helped launch the adult film industry; to write, direct, and act in Bobby, about the night of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination at the Ambassador Hotel; and, most recently, to create The Way, the most personal of my films by far.
Once I let go of the capers and the chase scenes, when I stopped trying to provide what I thought Hollywood wanted and started focusing instead on human relationships and all of their corresponding joys and disappointments, I felt myself shift from being a maker of films to being a filmmaker. I believe the work reveals the same.
Paloma Rae Estevez was born on February 15, 1986. Sadly, by the time she arrived it was clear to everyone that Carey and I couldn’t live together again. My father still thought I was stubborn, and he was right, but over time, he became resigned to my position and readjusted his expectations of me. “You don’t have to be a full-time father,” he told me, “but you still have to welcome these children into your life.”
He and my mother tried to fashion their own relationship with Carey so as not to be cut off from Taylor and Paloma. They rented a house in Malibu for her and the kids and welcomed the kids into their own home whenever she wanted to bring them over. Their motto was that all differences had to be checked at the door, and while at first I objected to them jumping over my relationship with Carey to forge their own, over time I came to recognize it as the best choice for everyone involved. They wanted to have access to their grandchildren, and as a result my kids’ connection to my parents has been one of the most rewarding in their lives.
The mid-1980s was a tumultuous time for my dad and me. I was becoming as well known as an actor, perhaps even more well known than he was at the time. I was also choosing to separate from the family, not out of anger or animosity but out of a desire to assert myself as an independent artist. Charlie was acting by then—Platoon was released just a week before Wisdom—and the media had already started talking about our family as a sort of acting dynasty. I didn’t want to arrive at every screening, premiere, or party and have it look like a family function. Also, by making the decision to keep my name I’d discovered that my individuality was important as well. I didn’t want to
be thought of as the parenthetical guy in the family who was described as Emilio Estevez (Martin Sheen’s son), or Emilio Estevez (Charlie Sheen’s brother), or Emilio Estevez (Brat Packer). I wanted my name and my work to stand on their own merit. The choice to step out on my own wasn’t a personal rejection of the family, but rather a separation from the professional connections between us.
And so I backed away from the family and became less available. I’d bought a little prefab house on some land near White-fish, Montana, where I started spending more time, and when I came home to California I acted like less of a family team player. This didn’t always go over well with my parents.
“Oh, come on,” they would say.
“Come on what? Give me my moment here,” I’d tell them.
It’s clear to me now that I had to pass through this stage to assert myself both as an artist and a man. The historical father-son struggle for power and dominance that’s practically encoded in our DNA took place, for my dad and me, in the professional arena. Most of the time it was driven by fear that I wouldn’t get the credit I deserved for my work. I was afraid to appear as if I were riding on his coattails, especially when, as a father now myself, I was committed to making my own career choices and not to be influenced by his.
Growing up, I’d watched him make decisions that weren’t good for his career but that he felt were necessary to feed his family. In the years before Apocalypse Now he’d been a journeyman actor, experienced and talented but never distinguished from the pack. Apocalypse Now had given him the potential to become a movie star, but he never saw himself that way. His self-image remained that of a struggling actor who answered the phone each time his agent called and thought, I have to take this role; it could be my last job. Rather than looking at the bigger picture and asking, “Is this a movie that I want to be part of?” he would dial back into actor mode and say, “This is a great role.” I heard him say that a lot. Not “This is a great movie” but “This is a great role.” The problem with that? If it’s a great role but a shitty movie, no one’s going to see it.
My father never saw himself as a movie star, and therein lay the heart of his professional dilemma: Because he didn’t see himself as a star, other people in the industry didn’t see him as a star either, and actors who aren’t seen or treated as stars don’t get starring roles.
I didn’t want that to happen to me, and when I first started out as an actor, it didn’t. But then, at the age of twenty-four, I was supporting two children, an ex-girlfriend, two households, and trying to keep everything up in the air. Before long, I found myself doing exactly what my father had done all those years: taking jobs for the money. Another Stakeout; D2: The Mighty Ducks; Loaded Weapon 1; Judgment Night: these films were neither career moves nor creatively challenging roles for me but they paid the mounting bills. For the first time, I could empathize with the source of my father’s past dissatisfaction and rage.
By my late twenties I truly understood what my father had managed to pull off for all of my growing-up years. I learned about the struggle between balancing the anxiety that comes with being a provider with the pride in being a father and had to figure out how to reconcile the resentment over having to support a family at such a young age with a fierce and selfless love for the children who made those responsibilities necessary.
My dad and I were both so young when fatherhood took us by surprise. Like him, I felt like more of a contemporary and a friend to my children than like their parent, as if we were only half a generation apart instead of a full one. My children and I grew up together and had to figure out a lot of things simultaneously. It would take ten years of parenthood before I felt that I was a good father. By then my kids had matured enough to understand the choices I’d made, and I’d matured enough to be able to understand and explain them myself.
I give thanks every day now for Taylor’s birth, and for Palo-ma’s, too. As unexpected and as challenging as those first ten years were, early fatherhood changed my life and shaped my view of everything that followed. Everything.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MARTIN
1984–1989
In director Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, Charlie and I played a father-son scene that perfectly dramatized the characters’ father-son struggle. In the movie Charlie plays Bud Fox, an ambitious young stockbroker who comes under the tutelage of the ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. I played Bud’s father, Carl, a hardworking blue-collar foreman and union president at Bluestar Airlines. In this particular scene we’ve just come from a meeting where Gekko reveals his plan to take over Bluestar, provided I can get the workers to agree to work longer hours for less pay. As Bud and Carl ride the elevator down to the street together, I tell my son that Gekko is using him but that he’s too blind to see it.
“What I see is a jealous old machinist who can’t stand that his son has become more successful than himself,” Bud says.
“What you see, son,” Carl says, “is a man who never measured success by the size of a man’s wallet.”
“That’s because you never had the guts to go out in the world and stake your claim,” the son responds.
“Boy, if that’s what you think,” the father says, “I must’ve really screwed up my job as a father.”
Oliver Stone got that one right. The upstart young Turk, the aging patriarch, and all the misunderstandings between them: a variation of that scene could play out in nearly any adult father-son relationship on the planet. The Irish have a proverb that says, “A craftsman’s son may grow up in ignorance of his father’s skills.” How often do sons and fathers see each other for who they really are, and how often do they see what they need to, ascribing wrongful motivation to each other to justify their own beliefs?
In my forties, some part of me couldn’t let Emilio own his own success. In some ways, I still expected the family spotlight to shine brightest on me. Now, as a grandfather of seven, I shy away from attention. I want the grandchildren to bask in their own light. But in the 1980s, when Emilio was the oldest and the first of the kids to move out and forge his own career path, I found myself standing there and wondering, When did this happen? Why wasn’t I informed? Why wasn’t I asked for permission? Like Tevye, the patriarch from Fiddler on the Roof, I was still living with a sense of Old World tradition. I wasn’t resentful toward Emilio. I just felt left out. Plain and simple.
I was still just a kid when my own children were born, but when Taylor, Cassandra, and Paloma arrived I was in my early forties. I finally felt old enough to be a father yet I was still young enough to chase the grandchildren around in the backyard and jump in the pool with them. They brought me a sense of renewal and a tremendous feeling of liberation. I could still have an influence on my own children through my grandkids, and I could make up for a lot of things I had or hadn’t done as a young father, but I didn’t have the full weight of responsibility I had as a parent. I’ve never met a grandparent who doesn’t feel the same way. We become attached to our grandchildren in ways we never could have imagined with our own children, with whom the responsibilities and the risks always felt so huge. It’s as if we’ve already made our parenting mistakes and learned from them, and now that we know how to do it better, maybe we can even do it right.
Janet and I loved having the grandchildren come over to our house. We often had all three of them spend weekends with us and they became close. Our backyard had a huge pit trampoline where they would bounce for hours, then sit on it and eat picnic lunches. In 1982 we had a lagoon-style pool put into our backyard and the grandkids loved to come over to swim. They’d race straight through the house and jump right into the pool, and the backyard would be filled all day with the splashes and squeals of children having fun.
Our house was a neutral zone where the grandkids and their mothers were always welcome. We told both boys, “This is what we’ve chosen. The children are welcome and their mothers are welcome. You don’t have to come but if you choose
to, you all have to park your differences at the door.” I even put a sign out front that read “All Are Welcome Here” to drive the point home. And so everyone agreed to set aside their quarrels, at least when at our house, for the sake of the children, which was its own form of grace.
The pool in particular was instrumental in breaking down barriers. When the kids frolicked in the water with absolute glee, we would all react in the fun of the moment, without regard for what had been said last week or what might happen tomorrow. Everyone shared in his exhilaration the first time Taylor jumped off the big rock into the water, and together we witnessed Paloma’s astonishment when she discovered the underwater tunnel in the middle of the pool.
The summer Taylor learned to swim was the summer I saw Emilio start embracing fatherhood. He would go in the water with his children and let go of everything except the pure joy of being with them. I sat on the patio and watched with gratitude, thinking, All right, now. This is the way it should be.
When Emilio began directing in 1986 I had very little advice to offer. I had no experience directing feature films. I generally knew a scene was good when I saw it, but I didn’t always know how to make it happen. Emilio took to directing very early, at twenty-three becoming one of the youngest directors to do a studio feature. By the time I tried my hand at directing a feature film, I was nearly fifty, and of course by then he had far more experience in the director’s chair than I did.
The film I directed was called Cadence, based on the novel Count a Lonely Cadence by Gordon Weaver. It was a military drama about an army private who goes AWOL after his father’s death and winds up as the only white prisoner in a military stockade in Germany in 1965, where he finds himself torn between the angry, racist white sergeant Otis McKinney in charge of the prison and the community of African-American prisoners. The film was a difficult sell to studios until Charlie agreed to play the leading role of Private Bean. He was an emerging star by then and with his name attached we were able to get funding and hire other actors, including Laurence Fishburne, to play fellow prisoners. My son Ramon also joined us to play the young guard Corporal Gessner, McKinney’s sycophant.