My long marriage to Shakira has survived for two reasons. First, I married the most beautiful, intelligent, kind and all-round-wonderful person in the world. And, second, Shakira always came with me on location. Not so much to keep an eye on me, or for me to keep an eye on her, but so that our lives would stay intertwined.
There is a myth that film stars are all demanding divas. If that was ever true it isn’t now. There are too many talented people around for anyone to be prepared to put up with that kind of nonsense for long. All things being equal, film people prefer the actor who turns up on time, knows his lines, is fun to work with and stays focused on the task in hand. In life, as in the movies, competence is a basic and yet all-too-rare quality. Never underestimate its value. Most people will pick competent professionalism over erratic brilliance any day of the week.
9.
Taking Direction
Ebenezer Scrooge: “Let us deal with the eviction notices for tomorrow, Mr. Cratchit.”
Kermit the Frog: “Uh, tomorrow’s Christmas, sir.”
Ebenezer Scrooge: “Very well. You may gift wrap them.”
The Muppet Christmas Carol, 1992
MOVIE ACTORS ARE EXPECTED to fully prepare their roles before they arrive on set, and then to simply get on with it without needing constant streams of praise and feedback. The director is thinking about the many technical and aesthetic aspects of the movie, not just about the actor’s performance, so if he says nothing, we can assume he’s happy. But we also need to be able to take direction: to listen, to be flexible, to respond in the moment, to take criticism on board. As in movies, so in life. We all have to work things out for ourselves and take responsibility for whatever is down to us. But at the same time you have to be open to what the guv’nor has to say—whether that means the boss, the client or your partner in life.
I have worked with at least a hundred directors in my seven decades in the movies, including some of the very best in the business. I have learnt to start out from the position of trusting that the director knows what he’s doing. It might not always be obvious to me why he seems to be letting another actor get away with terribly bad acting, or why he has called, “Go again,” for yet another take when I said my lines perfectly, or why he wants me to try it a different way, but that’s because I can’t see the big picture: I can see it only from my limited point of view. The director might be looking for something I haven’t thought about; he might have seen something I haven’t; or he might be intending to edit things in a way that wouldn’t occur to me. All directors want what is best for the whole picture, and most of them know how to achieve that. So I try to take whatever’s thrown at me and go with it.
Whether your director (or your boss) is good, bad or ugly, for the time you are stuck with them, you have to do your best to make it work. And, whether good, bad or ugly, I have learnt something from every director I have worked with. In fact, although it’s much more difficult to do a good job under a bad director, it can be a valuable experience. I think of it as the actor’s equivalent of an athlete training at altitude and running on sand. It’s bloody hard work and you’re not going to achieve a personal best, but it means that when you get to work with a good director, or run on a hard track, you’re able to perform even better than before.
My favourite directors to work with are sparing in their direction and reassuring about their grip.
Joe Mankiewicz, who directed Sleuth, was a master at reassurance. I really needed it on that movie because I was intimidated to be working with Laurence Olivier, who was an iconic actor and an incorrigible upstager and scene-stealer. (An upstager is someone who keeps moving backwards, “upstage,” so forces the other actors to turn their heads away from the camera in order to say their lines to him. A scene-stealer is someone who puts in a little raised eyebrow or twitchy nose, drawing focus to them at your key moment. You see it in life everywhere.) Olivier was also an Oscar-winning director, so I wondered how Joe was feeling.
On my first day, before the great Lord Olivier had arrived, Joe watched me walking myself quietly around the set. I must have been exuding unease because he let me finish, then came over and put his arm around my shoulders. “Don’t worry, Michael,” he said, “I’ll take care of you.” It was just what I needed to hear.
A few days later I was concerned again, though. Larry was a force of nature who conducted himself at all times at the very highest level of intensity, and he wanted to be front and centre in every scene. Larry would position himself where he wanted to be, and I was expected to act around him. Whenever a line of mine interfered with a move of his, he would order Joe to cut it. Eventually I went to Joe to complain. “Don’t worry, Michael,” he said again. “I said I’d take care of you and I will. Every time I promised to cut a line, I promised to cut it in the editing. Did you notice? And the next time Larry turns you around, turn right around and I’ll put a second camera over his shoulder for a close-up on you. We have skilled camera operators and an editing suite. It will all be taken care of. Trust me.” I did, and it was.
I twice had the tremendous experience of being directed by the man I regarded as the greatest all-round movie talent of our time, the late great John Huston: fifteen-time Academy Award nominee, director of my childhood heroes, director of three of my all-time favourite childhood movies—The African Queen, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon. John first cast me in The Man Who Would Be King, in the part of Peachy Carnehan that he had originally written twenty years earlier for my idol Humphrey Bogart. We worked together a second time in Escape to Victory in 1981.
John was something of a father-figure to me. He was very gentle with actors because he loved being one himself, and he had an aura about him—charisma maybe, or star quality—that seemed effortlessly to command attention and respect.
It was John who taught me not to expect constant input from a director—and that the quality of a director’s input could not always be measured by the number of times he interacted with me or the number of words he threw in my direction.
When we were working together on The Man Who Would Be King in 1975, something started to bother me and, after a few days, I brought it up. “John,” I said, “you never give me any direction.”
“Michael,” said John, in that laconic Wild West–style voice, like gravel, or like God, “you get paid a great deal of money to do this. You don’t need me to tell you what to do.” He was right. After that, a director moving on to his next shot was all the indication I needed that he was happy with my performance.
In the end, though, he did give me a direction, with the minimum of words and fuss. A day or two later he anchored my character for me in just a few words. I was in the middle of a long speech and I thought it was going very well when suddenly John shouted, “Cut.” He looked at me and smiled a slow smile. “You can speak faster. He’s an honest man.” His point, which was dead right, was that honest men don’t need to take the time to think about their words or study the impact they’re making. They just talk.
Lewis Gilbert directed me in Alfie in 1966, for which I got my first Academy Award nomination, and in Educating Rita in 1983, for which I earned another, so he holds a special place in my heart. He came from a similar background to me, and was an understated, sincere man with a feeling for actors. Like John Huston, he believed in letting actors get on with it unless he spotted some fatal flaw in their performance, at which point he could put you back on track with just a few words. I found him a joy to work with.
It was Lewis who made the to-camera pieces in Alfie work so well. Our first instinct had been to treat them like “asides” in theatre, where an actor steps away from the main action to address the audience. I spoke my lines into the camera as though I was making a long declaratory speech to a packed auditorium, basing my performance on Laurence Olivier in Richard III and Tom Finney in Tom Jones. “Cut,” said Lewis. “It’s not working. We need something more intimate, more current.” He moved the camera in, and asked me to
try it again, but this time as though I was speaking to just one close confidant. It was an unusual idea but I knew exactly who I was going to be speaking to: my friend Jim. Jim would have entirely appreciated Alfie’s tastier remarks, and imagining him on the other side of the camera gave me the air of cheeky charm and supreme confidence that I needed to deliver them. That delivery somehow got the cinema audience rooting for Alfie, even if they didn’t entirely approve of all of his amoral antics.
Brian De Palma was quite shy and reserved, perhaps even a little cold. By way of illustration, I did one scene for him where I wound up having hysterics in a heap on the floor. We were shooting and I was there on my own, breaking down and crying, giving it my all. Eventually Brian said, ”Cut!,” walked over to me lying on the floor, put his hand down to help me up and said, “Great.”
“Huh,” said the cameraman. “He must really like you. I’ve never seen him that emotional before.” Brian was chilly and the movie, Dressed to Kill, was a bit dark for my tastes, but I enjoyed the challenge of working with such an exacting director and incredibly skilled technician. Brian would just keep shooting until he got exactly what he wanted. One shot involved a 360-degree swing of the camera and took twenty-six takes—twenty-five more than I usually like.
Mike Myers, by contrast, was warm, crazy and determined that he and everyone else should have fun. In Austin Powers in Goldmember, I played Nigel Powers, Austin’s father. It was essentially a send-up of the sixties man-about-town—a send-up of me, or at least my image from that time—and I loved every moment. Mike, who was starring and directing, is as wacky in real life as he seems in his movies and liked to play rock ’n’ roll between takes. At first I didn’t take to having this music blasting out when I was trying to remember my lines. But I got used to it, and then I started looking forward to it. A couple of times we even had a little dance. Mike loves what he does and he makes sure everyone else has a blast too.
The director for whom I have made the most movies, and perhaps the director with whom I have felt most comfortable in my entire career, is Christopher Nolan, a brilliant London-born writer-director whom I consider to be the David Lean of his generation. I have had the enormous privilege of appearing in seven of Chris’s movies: his three blockbuster Batman movies, his three super-clever mind-bender movies, The Prestige, Interstellar and Inception and, most recently, the terrific Dunkirk. Chris calls me his lucky charm: when there was no part for me in Dunkirk, he cast me as the voice of the squadron leader who talks to the pilots over their radios, to make sure I was there in the credits. I feel that it’s more the other way: he is my lucky charm. Chris Nolan is a fabulously clever writer and director and some of his movies that I have acted in I still don’t fully understand. (Chris did reveal to me that the only bits of Inception that are real, as opposed to dreams or imagination, are the bits I’m in. Still, when people ask me what it’s about, I just say, “It’s about two hours.”)
In his directorial style he reminds me very much of that other great writer-director John Huston. Like John, he is sparing and softly spoken but always on-the-nose with his direction. If he needs you to alter something, he won’t shout, “Cut.” He will let you go through the whole take, then wander over and tell you, in a very gentle and understated way, after a sip from the flask of tea he keeps going at all times “Can we do another one, Michael? And this time could you do it this way?” It’s all very calm. There is never a raised voice. He is the exemplar of quiet authority. To be honest, if you walked onto the set you wouldn’t even know who the director was because he’s just wandering around, no ego, very quiet.
And, like John, he can be this way because he has put the effort in up front. He has a crystal-clear vision, terrific scripts with real characters, a great producer, Emma Thomas, who also happens to be his wife, and he casts like a dream. I remember I once asked John what the art of direction was. “Casting,” he replied. “If you cast it right, you don’t have to tell the actors what to do.” Chris Nolan is the same. I don’t want to sound conceited but his casting is wonderful.
I remember, for example, the first scene I made on my first Chris Nolan movie, Batman Begins, in 2005. It was with Christian Bale, the best Batman ever in my view. Great casting. And after just the second take, Chris said, “Cut, print,” and we were off.
Chris brought Christian Bale and me together again the following year for The Prestige, a story about magicians, violence and love, this time joined by Hugh Jackman, who is one of my favourite actors and people. Hugh can do everything: sing, dance and act in the cinema and the theatre, and he is terrific to work with too. To top it all I was working with two brilliant and beautiful actresses, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall, and with David Bowie like you’ve never seen him before, very strait-laced and severe, looking like a middle-aged banker in a suit and tie and moustache.
In 2010 Chris pulled together another stunning cast for Inception: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard and Ken Watanabe. And in 2014 he did it again with Interstellar, whose cast included Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Ellen Burstyn, Matthew McConaughey and Casey Affleck. Between the six of us we have six Academy Awards and twenty nominations—and I’m sure more to come.
And Chris not only casts wonderful actors, he also re-casts them. I am not the only one he has used again and again in his movies. In fact, he has almost created his own little repertory company.
My point is that, in my experience, the best directors, like the best leaders in other industries, achieve great things by gathering the right people around them, then trusting them to get on with what they do best, giving them a quiet nudge whenever they need it to keep them on track. That approach tends to make everyone—actors and crew—do their best work: happy, productive and tremendously loyal.
The bad and the ugly
Bad directors are bad for all the same reasons other bosses are bad. They are not good enough at their jobs, they don’t work hard enough, or they are bullies.
Of course it’s more fun to learn from good directors. But even the bad ones have things to teach you. Like self-protection and self-reliance, which are part of being a true professional. And in the very worst cases they might force you to learn how to direct yourself. There was one movie I worked on where it quickly became clear to the entire cast that the director was off with the fairies, probably tapping them up for the fairy dust he seemed to have developed a taste for. We realised we’d have to deliver the picture ourselves. (We did, and the director in question was deemed to have done a fabulous job. The boss takes credit for other people’s work in all walks of life.)
On another occasion, a movie with a stellar cast working at the top of their game was ruined by an illustrious veteran director, who one day openly admitted to me that he was only still directing to fund his very expensive hobby of deep-sea fishing off the coast of California. As soon as the filming was done and he had been paid, off he went. He was at sea and, sadly, so were editing and post-production without him.
The hardest directors to work with—and unfortunately you find them in every workplace, every family, every community of people—are the bullies. My approach with bullies has always been to make it clear from the start that I won’t be their victim. When I worked with Otto Preminger on Hurry Sundown in 1966, I knew his reputation as a monstrous tyrant who was happiest when everyone else was miserable. I had heard that he liked to scream at actors and crew alike. So the first day I met him, I told him, “You need to know, Otto, that I’m very sensitive. You mustn’t shout at me. If anyone shouts at me when I’m working I burst into tears and I can’t work for the rest of the day.” Otto stared back at me. He seemed genuinely puzzled. Or perhaps, I thought, he was getting ready for a particularly big scream.
“But why do you think I would do that?” he finally asked.
“Well,” I said—I stayed calm, “I have friends who worked with you on Saint Joan and they said you shouted.”
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�You shouldn’t make such friends,” said Otto. “I only shout at bad actors. And I would never shout at Alfie.”
Whether because he considered me a good actor, because he loved Alfie, or, more likely, because I had made things clear at the start, Otto never shouted at me. He did, though, give everyone else a terrible time, especially my young co-star Faye Dunaway. My little talk hadn’t managed to change his personality, only to protect me personally from it. Otto tormented the inexperienced and sweet Faye, who ended up in tears most days. Of course everyone worked in a state of abject terror, which was not only deeply unpleasant, but also did nothing for the quality of the movie, since no one can give their best when they are frigid with fear of doing something wrong and being screamed at. And Faye ended up paying a lot of money to get out of her six-movie contract with Otto, going on to become an enormous star.
Disagreeing with a good director is very different from having to work with a bad one. I adopt a couple of approaches in this situation. If I am convinced the direction I want to take with a particular scene is the right one, I may suggest a compromise. I may propose we try it his way, and try it my way, and then he can decide when he sees the rushes. The director usually agrees—and usually turns out to be right. I’ve got my point of view, but he has the vision and is seeing the bigger picture. But at least this way I get the chance to see I’m wrong. Then again, sometimes I just tell the director he’s right, then go my own way anyway. What I never do is have a stand-up row about it.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 11