by Ron Perlman
“Yeah,” I said. “I was wondering if you got it, ’cuz I never heard from ya!”
“Oh man, Caroline just told me it was you. That shit is great! You shoulda come to my trailer. I been dancing my ass off the whole time!”
“Wow,” I said. “That would have been fun. Maybe when we do The Island of Dr Moreau II!” And he gave me a hug and a kiss on the face.
Then he said, “You’re playing blind. You’re playing the guy who’s responsible for justice, blind. That’s fucking genius.” He was whispering this shit to me. That was the first time he realized I was not this fucking lump who had just been sitting there in his way every time he had to get in and out of his chair, that I had actually given this thing some thought. Shit, I’da never thought of something like that had I not been a voracious student of the Marlon Brando School of Acting! It was kinda nice to see that he approved.
Meanwhile, Marlon, without the sanctuary of Tahiti, was robbed of that last place on Earth where he could truly find the solace he so desperately craved. By the time I met him, he was somewhat of a tragic figure. Somebody who, in spite of whatever he tried to do to create a peaceful world for himself, was just destined to have it elude him. I got all of that from watching him in his quiet moments, from watching him fight back the tears when he knew nobody was looking because of what he was going through at the time. I could see the heaviness visit itself on him and would watch him wrestle to distract himself from it. I saw all that. And I felt for him, for how deeply I could see him caring about things he couldn’t control, but only when nobody was watching. I adored the guy . . .
I never pursued a relationship, even though I probably could’ve. I’m sure that if I had knocked on his door and said, “Hey Marlon, let’s have a drink,” he would have welcomed me in. A few weeks after we had shot that scene I started wondering what else there was for me to do on the movie. Frankenheimer answered me before I even got a chance to ask the question: “Do you know why you’ve been here this long?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know, John. I’ve been wondering about that.”
“Because every time we talk about our approach to a scene, Marlon says, ‘Have the guy from Name of the Rose do it. Give this stuff to the guy from Name of the Rose.’” Apparently Marlon had loved Quest for Fire and Name of the Rose and watched them multiple times. He never said this to me, of course, but he did say it to Frankenheimer, who related it to me. He said, “You mean Ron Perlman?” He said, “Yeah, the guy who played the hunchback in Name of the Rose. Take it away from Val Kilmer and give it to fucking Perlman. There’s a guy who could actually handle it.”
As I said, Marlon was a guy you could talk to about anything in the world. He was an information junkie—anything except of course the one thing everybody wanted to talk about with him: acting. And those who either didn’t know this rule or did and decided to ask anyway would see him grow cold, distant. Now little Fairuza Balk was playing his daughter in the film. She was Moreau’s pride and joy but also his most flawless creation with, unlike all his other creations, almost no evidence of having anything other than purely human features. Well, Marlon had a weakness for beautiful women and was not shy about making his predilection known. So little Fairuza got nothing but affection and warmth from him. So she decided, “Well, if anyone can cross the line, it’s me.” As they’re getting ready to shoot their most important scene together, in which the true dynamic of this deeply emotional bond is really on display, Fairuza said, “Marlon, can I ask you something?”
“Sure, baby, anything you want,” he said.
Now because Marlon was doing a performance that he was making up as he went along, anyone who acted with him had no way of knowing what to expect. So Fairuza said, “It’s really important for me to know more about our relationship as you see it so I can play our scene together more effectively. How do you see our relationship in this film?”
Sure enough, the sweet old man’s sweetness drained out of him. “Relationship? Did you just ask about our relationship? Okay, imagine a basket the size of Wyoming. And imagine that basket filled all the way to the top with dollar bills. Got it? Well, that’s how much they’re paying me to do this fucking turkey. And that’s our relationship, baby!”
I guess if you search far and wide enough you could find exceptions to this rule. Maybe when he was younger, when he was still enthusiastically playing the game, I don’t know. I do know one story, though, in regard to this that’s worth telling. Ever since Eddie Albert Jr. did an arc on Beauty and the Beast he and I turned into fast pals. Eddie virtually grew up at Uncle Marlon’s knee, ’cuz Eddie’s dad, the great Eddie Albert Sr., did a few flicks with Marlon when Eddie Jr. was a tiny kid. So they had a really close bond.
Anyway, Eddie Jr. had just finished doing a piece-of-shit action flick in the Philippines that was destined to go straight to DVD. The movie kicked Eddie’s ass. So he decided to stop off on the way home at the neighboring island of Terraria to see if Uncle Marlon was around, maybe stay a couple of nights, kick back on the beach, charge the battery. He showed up at Uncle Marlon’s door unannounced, and Marlon came to the door in a sarong, his preferred mode of dress, particularly in his later years, and was just delighted to see him. “Eddie! What are you doing here?!”
“Uncle Marlon, I just had the snot beat outta me in the Philippines. Mind if I hang out here for a coupla nights?”
“Of course not. C’mon in. I was just makin’ dinner.”
Dinner was a pot of boiling water with a can of Campbell’s soup heating up in it. Meanwhile, Uncle Marlon opened up a rare bottle of gorgeous Bordeaux, and they got off to what turned out to be a scintillating evening. One bottle of Bordeaux led to two or three more, and they were having a beautiful night and the conversation was flying, and that’s when Eddie figured, okay, it’s now or never. “Uncle Marlon, you’ve known me my whole life, right? And I know what the rules are. I know you as good as anybody on the planet, but Uncle Marlon, I’m an actor and I care about acting.”
Marlon said to him, “Eddie, don’t fucking do this. I just spent two thousand dollars worth of wine on you. Don’t ruin the evening.”
But Eddie said, “Marlon, you can excommunicate me, you can disinherit me, you can kick me the fuck out and send me packing to the airport. I’m going to ask you one question because if I don’t ask you this one question, I’ll never be able to live with myself because you’re the only guy I would ever be interested in the answer to this from.”
“Eddie, you’re fucking me up here. You’re ruining a perfect night, and if you keep goin’ down this road, I am gonna throw you the fuck out.”
“Uncle Marlon, throw me out, whatever you gotta do, but I’m going to ask you the question. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but I got to ask on behalf of every actor I ever worked with.”
“All right, Eddie. Because you are your dad’s son, because I love your dad so much, I’m gonna let you ask one question. But just one. And if you ever tell anybody what my answer is, you will be excommunicated.” Then he said, “What’s the question?”
“Here’s the question, Uncle Marlon: how do you know when it’s working?”
So Marlon said to him, “You had to ask me that one, didn’t you?”
“Yup,” Eddie said. “That’s the only one I want the answer to. How do you know when it’s working?”
“All right,” Marlon said, “I’m gonna give you the answer, but if I ever find out you’ve told another actor this, you’re toast, ya hear me? You’ll never hear from me again! Deal?”
“Of course, Uncle Marlon, deal!”
Marlon said, “I check my asshole.”
“Come on, be serious.”
“I am being serious, motherfucker. I check my fucking asshole.”
“You check your asshole?! That’s the answer you’re going to give me?”
“Yeah, that’s the answer I gave you and I’m giving you.”
“What kind of fucking answer is that?”
So the first thing Eddie did when he came back to the States the next day? He found out I’m shooting some piece a crap some place in downtown LA and paid me a visit. And the very first thing he did when he saw me is tell me the story—word for word! He said to me, “I knew you would fucking love that story, so I hadda tell it to you.” So then I proceeded to tell every single actor I’ve ever worked with, from that moment forward, the asshole story. And so now, between Eddie and me there are, I swear to God—and you can ask around—there are generations of actors all over the world right now who, when the AD says, “Roll camera,” they put all their attention on their assholes. And if you’re on the set with somebody else who knows the story, you say, “Checking?” and they say back, “Checking!” To this day, even though it doesn’t work at all, I check my asshole whenever anybody says, “Roll camera.” And that was Marlon’s big fucking joke on actors everywhere. Like, “You fucking idiots, how am I supposed to know when it’s fuckin’ working?!”
(CHAPTER 21)
Piled Higher and Deeper
Funny how life works. Actually, lemme rephrase that: funny how my life works! In fact, now that I’m well onto the wrong side of the hill, among the many wonderful things I have obtained is perspective. I would imagine that it was the prime driver that led to my even entertaining the idea of ultimately sitting down and putting thoughts to paper. Writing enables so much perspective. It brings with it the beginnings of objectivity, which, as I tried to identify through all the years I’ve described here, was what I craved most, even though there was no way of knowing that until I actually began to have it. Because, clearly, what I was in the midst of living was an incredibly blessed life. It was as easy to see it as the nose on one’s face. I’m sure it was obvious enough so that everyone around me could see it. Everyone except me. And why I’ve identified the nineties as the most tumultuous of periods for me is because of how close I was growing to—with apologies to Jim Morrison—breaking on through to the other side. Looking back, the closer I got to finally reaching some semblance of happiness, balance, and self-worth, the more anxiety that possibility triggered. I don’t know, maybe no matter how fucked up a thing in your life is, the notion of changing it, of letting it go, is obviously way scarier than living with it. I mean, Christ, you see it everywhere you look: people stay in bad marriages, bad jobs, cities they don’t belong in—why? Because any alternative to what is familiar, that “undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns,” is terrifying!
So if you look at my life in the nineties with any objectivity at all, it looks fucking beautiful, carefree, and dreamy most of all. So why could every muthafucka see it but this muthafucka?! I mean, you just look at the series of events, the body of work, and the people I got to be around, it musta looked like I was set for life. And yet . . . and yet! But hey, good news! I had already opened the box wherein lie the genie. And I was close, way closer than I even knew. The thing, the one thing that could put me over the top was determination. A determination to square up finally these absurd incongruities. ’Cuz let’s look at it: A Few Good Men on Broadway, Cronos, City of Lost Children, Bus Stop on Broadway, Alien: Resurrection, Enemy at the Gates—that’s not a good decade; it’s a GREAT one!!! So how in God’s beautiful world could I still be calling Phil to essentially discuss the merits and lack thereof of being a loser?
Phil never looked at it like that, never put it in those terms; in fact, he never put it into any terms at all. Why would he need to when I was so good at it? No, he would just spend those first fifteen minutes of the session doing what I chose, that time totally fashioned according to my needs, my urgency, my call to make the appointment, and he would listen, unprejudiced. I say fifteen minutes ’cuz that’s how long it generally took to describe the malaise du jour, and certainly he never needed more time than that to identify the disconnect. Because that’s what it was: a disconnect. A viewing of a set of circumstances that I was immersed in that in fact had nothing to do with what was truly happening and only to do with how I interpreted what was happening. It was baggage, and it was old baggage at that. How it got there, why it got there was none of Phil’s concern—only that it was there. And in being there, it was in the way. And the process Phil was able to bestow on me to get me to rearrange the wiring and, in turn, reinterpret the perception, objectify it, show me how little if any I even had a part in what I was describing was simple and effective. It was usually accompanied by a diagram that was passed down to him from one of his gurus, either Jung or Steiner, and the very fact that there was a diagram for exactly what I was describing was indicative of the fact that, shit, I must not have been the first one to feel this way, a fact that in and of itself granted comfort. But the tool that accompanied the condition illustrated in the diagram was really simple, really user-friendly, and really easy to do, and, once I did it, it completely granted relief. One hundred percent of the time.
So the late nineties were like grad school. I began to sense that if I devoted myself voraciously to allowing Phil to one by one address each of these distortions I carried around with me like old friends and I used these completely effective tools like I used the barbells in the gym, in which with each rep I got faster and stronger, I would create for myself more and more moments of real peace through clarity. It was good! Good . . . it was genius! It was the best I could hope for. Because, as I said earlier and as Phil intoned religiously, there is no life free of pain, loss, despair, confusion, violence, and, yes, even death. To make it a goal to think you could ever live a life that avoided all these things is pure folly, and you can only fall short. What there is, however, is the ability to manage one’s way through these things so that, in addressing them, you remain as whole as possible, as present as possible, as undaunted as possible. For that is the closest you are ever gonna get to real, real contentment. And if that ain’t the name o’ the game, well, I just don’t fucking know!
So, yeah, I got back from Australia, and, sure enough, a whole shitload of time went by before something happened to replace the feeling that that gig gave me. That gig or any gig, in fact. Because no matter how fucked up the circumstances are on the gig, they’re a lark compared to the downtime, the not knowing, the wondering how to manage the money ’cuz you’re not sure when the next batch is coming, the between gigs. There are loads of reasons ya don’t wanna be outta work, but when the work is the direct link to your self-worth, then what would normally be an annoyance looms into something way larger, with overtones ya don’t, once you’ve had a bellyful, ever wanna revisit again. Plus, I’m just happier when I’m working. I love the stimulation of it, the amount of me that it engages. I love the mind part of it, in which fitting myself into a picture is tantamount to solving a riddle. And I love just being on a movie set, ’cuz like the song says, “There’s no people like show people, they smile when they are blue.” And because I’m a bit of a clod in real life, I love how well I know my way around when I’m on a movie.
But never did this dilemma come into such stark relief as it did in the late nineties. It had been too long getting fixed. And the determination I was putting into it demanded a follow-through that I hadn’t heretofore applied. So I used those years to double-down with Phil Stutz. I became obsessed with closing the gap between the reality of how good my life really was going and this nagging feeling that it wasn’t going well at all. Nothing could have provided me as great an opportunity to bring all the elements to Phil that ultimately needed addressing than the lead up to the actual shoot and then the aftermath that was Alien: Resurrection.
I heard about the project when I got a really strange call from one of the higher-up production executives at 20th Century Fox. They were preparing to launch what would be the fourth installment of one of the most successful franchises ever. They were putting together a list of possible directors for the movie, and very high up on the list was m
y old friend Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with whom I had done City of Lost Children. Having done only independently produced movies in France, no one in Hollywood had a handle on JP’s ability to wield a big-budget important studio franchise flick. So, knowing I was the only American who had ever worked with him, they gave me a jingle to ask about my experience with him. Of course, my report was glowing: not only was Jean-Pierre a brilliant, innovative filmmaker, but he was also a devoted movie buff who had a real feel for international cinema and adored the great early American movies. Plus—and this was the surprising thing—he had confessed to me a real desire to make a big studio movie one day in Hollywood. I thought he would be a perfect fit and said as much.
He ended up getting the film and returned the favor by helping me win the role of Johner in the movie. The character was an over-the-top loudmouth who fashioned himself a badass and had the attitude to prove it. As a guy whose work on big Hollywood studio movies is limited, needless to say, I was thrilled. The film also boasted Winona Ryder, who was at the peak of her powers then, and a coupla guys who remain friends to this day, Leland Orser and Raymond Cruz, great dudes, both!
Unlike most of the studio movies I’d made, this one shot right on the Fox lot in Century City, so I had the extra added luxury of sleeping in my own bed every night for a change. So I was able to take advantage of this good fortune by folding regular visits to Dr. Stutz into my schedule. And trust me, there was plenty to talk about. For instance, there I was, a forty-seven-year-old father of two, with a long successful marriage and a pretty decent résumé under my belt, and yet I can’t tell ya how much time I spent thinking about how I really didn’t deserve to be there. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I got through the movie just fine and for sure no one except me and Phil knew of these feelings, but they were there. So Phil and I handled those. Then there were the instances in which whenever anything went the slightest bit wrong—and trust me, the pressure on a big-budget studio movie is palpable—I always knew it was because of me. Unfounded? Of course. But I never referred to myself as rational.