by Teddy Atlas
When he finished the Cruise movie, Willem got ready to go to Poland to begin working on Triumph of the Spirit. He told me he wanted me to go with him. I hadn’t been expecting to go, and we had never discussed it, but he had decided it was important to him that I continue training him. He also thought that I should choreograph the fight scenes in the movie. At that point the producers hadn’t hired anyone.
I had no idea what I should ask for, in terms of money. I had been getting a thousand a week to train him in New York, but this was going to be full-time and much more responsibility; I was going to have to be away from my family for more than a month. Willem and I discussed it. He’d asked around, and we came up with four thousand a week as a fair number, albeit on the high end. He said, “Call Arnold and work it out with him.”
“You don’t think it’ll be a problem?”
“No. You’re going to get that because I’m going to back you up. To be honest, you could ask for whatever you want and you would get it.” Willem, who had just made a breakthrough in his career with Platoon, was getting a million dollars to star in this one (which was good money at the time), so he had real clout.
I went to Kopelson. I didn’t have an agent or a lawyer. I told him what I wanted. He said, “Why would you ask for that much? I guess you figure, ‘Why not?’” Kopelson had worked in the garment industry before Hollywood, and he had that rag-trade mentality that everybody was a hustler.
It hit me the wrong way, him saying that. It offended me. I said, “I don’t fuckin’ do that. I don’t make a price just to make a price. I gotta be away from my family and my work for a month, and that’s a fair price for what the job is, and if you don’t think so you can go get someone else.” He got very quiet at that point, and that was pretty much the end of the conversation.
Willem, meanwhile, had already gone over to Poland. When I talked to him, I told him what had happened. He went to see Kopelson, who told him that he had decided to use the stunt coordinator to choreograph the fight scenes instead of me.
“Teddy’s asking for too much money,” Kopelson explained.
Willem got very upset with him. He threatened to go home if Arnold didn’t change his mind. I think it even got to the point of him making plane reservations.
Kopelson got in touch with me at that point. He said, “Teddy, I think that we had some kind of misunderstanding.” He told me that he had always wanted me to work on the movie, and of course he’d pay me what I was asking for.
When I arrived in Poland, everyone there seemed to know that there had been some drama involved. I was a little bit naive and didn’t realize stuff like this took place on movie sets all the time.
Poland was still an Iron Curtain country at that point. It was a bleak place, very poor. You had people working on conveyor belts in factories for thirty dollars a month. There was a lot of drinking, a lot of vodka, and people passed out on the sidewalks. They didn’t use much oil heat, so people made coal fires to stay warm and the sky was dark with smoke and soot.
The production was giving us these Polish złoty for our per diems, handing it out like it was Monopoly money, which in a way it was, because they had gotten a black-market rate of exchange of something like three thousand złoty to a dollar. The waiters in the hotel where we were staying were making nothing, and I was giving them huge tips. Edward James Olmos, one of the actors in the movie, gave me a hard time about it. He said I was throwing off the whole economy. He was serious, too, he wasn’t kidding around. I said, “What the heck are you talking about, Eddie? There is no economy here.”
“You’re tipping them three months’ salary in a day,” he said.
“Yeah? So? What’s your point?”
“When we leave there’s gonna be a big crash.”
“A crash? They crashed here a long time ago. This country is in ruins.”
“But it’ll make them feel bad when we leave.”
“Hey, at least while we’re here they’ll feel good.”
Anyway, we disagreed about it, and that was that. I kept leaving big tips. It was the funniest thing, though. One day, we were in the hotel restaurant, me, Willem, and Costas Mandylor, and where were all the waiters? At our table. Meanwhile, Eddie was at another table, looking for a waiter, going, “Waiter! Waiter!”
Even at the best hotel in the city, some amenities were hard to get. Like toilet paper. So when the maid came by my room, I gave her a twenty-dollar bill, American, which was unheard of. Well, forget it. You remember that old Frank Sinatra commercial with the towels? That’s how it was with me and toilet paper. It was like a freaking toilet paper store in my room. Nobody else in the whole hotel had toilet paper. I had it all. People were coming up to me saying, “Teddy, I hear you have toilet paper. I was wondering if I could get a roll?,” and I was saying, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” “Teddy, come on, just a few sheets….”
WILLEM AND I TRAINED VERY HARD DURING THE MONTH I was over there. My job was twofold. One, to make Willem look, feel, and respond like a fighter; two, to choreograph all the fight scenes in the movie.
As far as getting Willem to where he needed to be, we hit a spot where he wasn’t responding very well. He was getting a little funny with me. We were close and he was always respectful of me, but he started to get a bit nervous, and that made him resistant to some of the things I was telling him. It was like a fighter looking for an excuse not to fight. He wanted to look like a fighter, but wasn’t sure he was looking like one.
Frequently, when you’re doing a thing, you’re only aware of the way you feel. You connect the way you feel with the way you must look. If you feel inhibited, which people often do when they’re performing difficult and demanding tasks, especially physical ones, then you feel that must be the way you look. You don’t realize that you look fine.
Willem was starting to fall into a bad way of thinking in that regard. It was making him trust me a bit less, because he was worried I wasn’t telling him the truth. One day, when his mood was particularly negative, I grabbed hold of him. I looked him in the face. I could smell something coming out of his pores.
Smoke. He had been smoking cigarettes. He was so nervous and stressed that he didn’t realize what that meant, that he was actually undermining himself, contributing to his worries about his credibility. Would his character smoke cigarettes, knowing that he was going into the ring and if he lost he would die? He would put a shotgun into his mouth before he would do that. He would eat razor blades. Yet here was Dafoe, doing something his character would never do.
“You’ve been smoking,” I said.
“How did you know that?”
“Never mind how I know. I know.” I looked him right in the eyes. I didn’t care that he was a movie star and that you’re not supposed to act in certain ways with movie stars if you want to stay employed. “Now starting right fucking now, you ain’t gonna smoke no more. You’re gonna act like Salamo would act, and you’re gonna act like a pro.”
You know what he did? He looked at me and said, “Okay,” and he never smoked another cigarette. From that moment on, we never had another day that came close to not being a great day.
The choreography was a different sort of challenge for me. I had never done anything like that before. I had to sort of make it up as I went along.
There was a scene where Willem gets into a fight with one of the Jewish trustees, who were in their own way almost worse than the German guards. The fight takes place while the inmates are laying train rail up on this elevated mound. In the script there was no description of the fight whatsoever. It was just left blank. So before shooting this scene, we went to the location to see how to do it. I was there with Willem and Robert Young, the director, and the director of photography and the other actors. It was clear that the fight couldn’t take place up by the tracks, because there wasn’t enough room. I decided that they could roll down the embankment and fight on the flatter ground. That was how we would solve the problem.
After we ha
d gone over the actual physical specifics of the fight, I realized I had to have a way of making sure that it would be consistent, that it would be the same every time we shot it. All of a sudden it hit me. I had to write out every step of it, every punch, every move. I wound up staying up all night to do it. I showed Willem what I had done. He said, “This is great. Now I know exactly what I’m going to do and I’ll be able to prepare for it.”
“Yeah, it’s gonna be just like a dance,” I said. It was funny that I said that. Maybe unconsciously it came from Twyla, I’m not sure. But it was clear to me that was how it had to be done. Writing it out that way also made me more comfortable and confident. In a situation like that, if the people you’re working with think you know what you’re doing, then it’s actually like you do know what you’re doing.
We rehearsed the fights in the movie every day, getting ready to shoot them. We got to the point where each fight was memorized down to the last punch. There was one particular fight that took place between Willem and this Polish actor. The Polish actor was a nice guy, but he was a big actor in Poland, and on this film he had just this small part, so he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Physically, he was bigger than Willem, and he kept getting a little rough with him. It bothered me because Willem was my guy.
I took Willem aside and said, “Listen, this time when you step to the side, you hit him on the jaw.”
“You mean the shoulder, right? I thought I’m supposed to hit him in the shoulder.” That’s what was in the script and was the way we had been doing it.
“No, you hit him in the jaw.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. You’re not that big a puncher. You’re not gonna knock him out.”
He smiled. “All right. You sure?”
“Yeah.”
They started shooting the scene. The Polish guy was moving forward with this little smirk because he’d been pushing Willem around. This time, Willem stepped to the side and bang, hit the guy, and the guy went down.
I was watching through the monitor with the director, Bob Young. All of a sudden I heard him asking me, “What’s that in his mouth?”
I leaned in for a closer look. “That? It’s nothing. Just a little blood.”
“Blood!”
“Yeah, Bob, c’mon, it’s not serious. Every once in a while, you’re gonna miss a little. But he’s fine.”
Willem helped the Polish guy up, and it was a little bit like what had happened with Donnie LaLonde and Johnnie Walker Banks. The Polish guy kind of tapped Willem, and it was understood, he wasn’t going to be rough no more. At that moment, Willem looked over at me and winked. I clenched my fist and gave him a little fist shake down low.
As the weeks went by in Poland, Arnold Kopelson and I actually wound up getting close. We’d eat lunch together on the set, him, Robert Young, Willem, and some of the other actors and me. Arnold and Bob Young loved to hear my boxing stories, especially the stuff about the smokers in the Bronx. In fact, Arnold was interested in doing a TV series about the smokers, but the negotiations fell apart, mainly because he was such a cheap bastard.
The funny part is that on the movie he came to recognize my worth. He saw that I was actually valuable and earning my keep. He even said to me one day, “You should have asked me for more money, Teddy.” That was his sense of humor.
The biggest fight scene in the movie was one between Willem and this German prisoner, Klaus Silber. We were using fighters from the Polish Olympic team in the movie, and we still hadn’t picked one to play Silber. Arnold and I were discussing it one day, and he said, “What about you, Teddy? You want to be in the movie?”
“Me?”
“Who could play it better than you? Just so long as you realize I’m not paying you anything extra.”
I smiled. “Yeah, all right, I’ll do it,” I said. “Free of charge.”
“The only other thing is, you’re gonna have to shave your head.”
“Shave my head? Uh-uh. That I won’t do.”
“Teddy, you gotta.”
“No fuckin’ way, Arnold. I’m not shaving my head.”
The thing about Arnold, once he made up his mind that he wanted something, he wouldn’t let go. He really wanted me to play Silber and he was very upset that I wouldn’t shave my head. He called up Mickey Duff and asked him to talk to me. So Mickey called me. He said, “Teddy, I hear you’re doing great on this movie.”
“Yeah, Mick, things are going pretty good.”
“Arnold tells me he asked you to be in the movie.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“He said he asked you to shave your head, but you wouldn’t do it.”
“That’s right.”
“Teddy, what are they paying you to work on that movie?”
“Mick, you know what they’re paying me. Four thousand a week.”
“You want to know what I think? For four thousand a week, I’d shave my balls if they asked me.”
Eventually, I relented. I agreed to get the haircut. When it came time, the girl who was going to cut my hair was very cautious. The truth is she was a little afraid of me. She used a pair of scissors instead of the clippers. She cut it short but like a real haircut. With everyone else, she had just used the clippers and buzzed off all their hair. Not with me. When she was finished, she held up a mirror and asked me, “How’s that, Teddy?” I still had a pretty full head of hair. I said, “Yeah, that’s good.”
Arnold came into the room at that point. His jaw dropped. He said, “What is this, a barbershop? This is Auschwitz!”
I had to hand it to him. He knew how to make me laugh, he knew how to deal with me.
“Teddy, they didn’t get the option in Auschwitz to say, ‘Just a little off the top.’”
“All right, all right,” I said. I looked at the hair cutter. She was in a tough spot, caught between me and Arnold. “Go ahead,” I said. “Take it all off. Don’t worry about it.”
She buzzed it clean. When she was done, Arnold said, “Shit, no wonder you didn’t want it all taken off. Wow. I thought you were scary before.” You could see all the scars on my head, where I was hit by a tire iron, and all kinds of other nicks and dings.
The night before the big fight scene, I wrote out the sequence of moves, the way I had done with the others. This was the biggest fight, the most dramatic, the most hateful—a German and a Jew. I wrote it up so that I beat the crap out of Willem for most of the fight, and then in the end Willem won. I showed it to Arnold the next morning, and he started reading it. Halfway through, he put it down and said, “Teddy, I love you, and I’d do anything for you, and I know you’re underpaid, but at this point in the film, I cannot afford to throw out Willem and make you the star of the picture. Willem needs to win this fight.”
“Arnold, Arnold, just keep reading a little longer.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, yeah. Just keep reading.”
He kept reading, and finally breathed a sigh of relief. “You had me worried,” he said.
“So you like it?”
“Yeah, I like it.”
We began rehearsing a while later. Everything went well, but at the end of the fight, instead of going down, I had it so that my guy, Klaus, gets hung up on the ropes and keeps getting punched. He never goes down.
Robert Young, the director, said, “It’s very good, Ted. I like it a lot. There’s only one thing….”
“Go ahead, Bob. Say whatever you want to say.”
“No, it’s good,” he said. “It’s just the end….”
“What about the end?”
“I’m just wondering why you don’t wind up on the canvas.”
“It’s a character thing. See, this guy knows that if he loses, he’s going to the chimney.”
“Right. But he’s been hit with so many punches, how does he stay up on the ropes like that?”
“Unconsciously, it’s so entrenched…,” and I started going through this beautiful explanation that was detailed and dee
p and I talked about this guy’s humanity and his stubborn will to live, and Bob went, “Uh-huh.”
Arnold was in the background, and he hadn’t said anything to that point. Suddenly he cleared his throat. “Teddy, could I say something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think it’s possible that you just don’t want to go down?”
“No! It’s the guy. He thinks he’s gonna go to the chimneys.”
“Yeah, but he takes all those shots. Have you ever seen a guy take that many shots and not go down?”
“Sure. Absolutely.”
Nobody wanted to say anything. I guess I was pretty intimidating, especially the way I looked with my head shaved. Finally, Willem said, “Don’t you think it’s just a little to do with you not wanting a schmuck like me standing over you forever on film?”
“No, no. I swear to God that’s not it.”
Arnold said, “What if we pay you more to take the dive?”
“Fuck you, Arnold. I ain’t taking a dive for no one.”
“So you admit it!”
“No, no…all right, maybe a little.” I mean, suddenly I realized that they were right. I wasn’t being honest with myself. I hadn’t realized it, but it was true. “All right, let’s do it again,” I said. So we went through the scene again, and we got to the point where I was supposed to go down, and again, I wouldn’t go down. I couldn’t.
Arnold was shouting, “Just fall! Fall! Come on!”
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t fall down. Arnold was beside himself. Willem was grinning, shaking his head. “Teddy, I promise I won’t tell anybody you took a dive.”
“I don’t know what it is. It’s a crazy thing.”
It took all my willpower, but the next time we tried it, I made myself fall down. The whole place erupted. I got a standing ovation. For falling down.
The funny postscript is that at one of the premieres, my young son, Teddy, said to Willem afterward, “You didn’t knock out my dad. He let you win because you’re the star.”