“Yes,” he said.
“And did you solve it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said again, and smiled.
This lovely and normal-seeming guy had a mind like nothing I had ever known before. And although my character was not supposed to be him, just based on someone like him, that was what I tried to put into my performance: a sense that even people with the most complex and brilliant minds can still be what we think of as “normal.” They speak in surprisingly simple sentences; they experience the same range of emotions as the rest of us; they love their families just like anyone else.
At the after-party for the European premiere of the movie, at the Odeon Leicester Square in London, Kip introduced me to an even more extraordinary mind, belonging to a unique person. I was walking along the corridor to the Gents and saw Kip walking towards me pushing a wheelchair. In it a tiny man was screwed into an almost impossible position, with his face in a quite singular grimace. “Michael, this is one of my closest friends,” Kip said. “Stephen Hawking.” I knew Stephen’s story and that he had a brilliant mind trapped inside an almost completely paralysed body. He could communicate only through tapping out words using the one body part he still had control over: a muscle in his right cheek.
As I stood there, probably with my mouth hanging open a bit in awe, Stephen Hawking tapped out on his pad, “I’d like to meet your wife.” My wife is a beautiful, intelligent and charming woman, so I could understand the request. Stephen followed that up with requests to meet my beautiful Interstellar co-stars, Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway, who were drinking cocktails in impossibly glamorous frocks on the other side of the room. I made the introductions and Stephen wound up having a conversation with them and completely ignoring me. I saw that, despite our different intellectual capacities, he and I did have some things in common: our desire to make the most of our lives and every opportunity presented to us, and our deep appreciation of female beauty.
Whether I am playing a real person or not, I will always try to observe real people who resemble my character in some way to help me to research the part. For Zulu, I had lunch every day in the officers’ mess of the Grenadier Guards: although I had had plenty of interaction with officers as a private in the army, I had never observed them interacting with each other. As my character’s privileged background was an important part of his character, and as I hadn’t had a privileged background, I also decided to study the Duke of Edinburgh, who was the most privileged person I could think of. What I noticed was that he walked with his hands behind his back. I figured that he was so powerful, well guarded and well attended-to that he didn’t need his hands to defend himself or indeed to do anything at all. I played the part with my hands behind my back. (I have to warn you, though, that my brilliant characterisation was somewhat misunderstood: “Actor playing Bromhead so bad doesn’t even know what to do with hands. Suggest you replace him,” said the telegram from the producers when they saw the first rushes. They came around in the end but those were tense days.)
For the part of Frank in Educating Rita, I based my characterisation of an alcoholic university lecturer on three people. The first was the professor who loves Marlene Dietrich, unrequitedly, in The Blue Angel. The other two were friends: Robert Bolt, the writer of A Man for All Seasons and a great teacher, who had a particular way of talking and explaining; and my business partner Peter Langan, who behaved like an alcoholic of quite majestic proportions. Within five years, at the age of forty-seven, Peter was dead following a fire that he had started when drunk.
My performance as Jack Carter in Get Carter was based on a gangster I had known in my earlier life. Not that I ever told him that. In fact, when he told me he thought the film was a load of crap I just nodded and agreed with everything he said. If you’ve seen Get Carter you’ll understand exactly why. And Alfie was based on a guy called Jimmy Buckley, a charismatic friend of mine who always got the girl and would have been perfect to play the part himself, except he was always too tired.
And even when I played Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol I did my research. You have to play comedy seriously. That’s what makes it funny. So I played Scrooge straight, as though I was playing him for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the National Theatre. I researched him by watching CNN and following the trials and tribulations of all the Wall Street cheats and embezzlers of the time. There were plenty of them, as there always seem to be.
More generally, I observe people all the time. In the early days it was on the bus and the Tube. Now it’s in restaurants, at the airport, in the doctor’s waiting room. But wherever and whenever it is, I’m looking out for mannerisms, listening in for turns of phrase and watching how people respond to each other. Not just the obvious: I’m seeing whether I can discover something new. Over the years I have become an expert at reading body language. I remember in the 1960s when Russian agents were being discovered all over the British establishment, Kim Philby was being interviewed on television and the journalist said, “Answer me truthfully, are you a Russian spy?”
Philby turned his gaze down into his lap, then up again, looked the interviewer straight in the eye and said, “No.”
“He’s lying,” I said to myself. He put his head down to get his face ready, to prepare the correct face of innocence. If he had been telling the truth he would not have needed to do that, he would just have said no. And I was right.
We can probably all benefit sometimes from trying to understand what is going on in other people’s heads, what the world looks like from their point of view and what their mannerisms and expressions are telling us. I always find it helps me to feel more sympathy for others, and reminds me of my own good fortune. Also it means, however long I’m kept waiting, I’m never bored because I’ve always got something useful to be doing. But the main point I am trying to make here is: whatever form it takes, do your homework!
Learn your lines
Confidence comes from experience plus preparation. Experience and preparation are your safety net, your insurance against a freefall off the high-wire. They are what you need to conquer your nerves and relax into a great performance. If you don’t yet have much experience, it’s even more important to focus on the preparation. Alfie was a huge opportunity for me and I was terrified I was going to screw it up. The nerves don’t show on screen, though, because I knew my lines like I knew how to spell my own name. But even now, after more than a hundred major movies, preparation is still crucial. I will still learn my lines until they’re a reflex, until saying each line on its cue is as automatic as saying, “Bless you,” to a sneeze. Any actor who wants their career to endure has to do the same.
To learn my lines I would always say them to myself over and over. Walking down the street. In the shower. Making my dinner. It was absolutely continuous. Once I knew my lines, I would rearrange the furniture at home or in my hotel room to be how I imagined it might be on set, and mock up props and practise using them. Then I would go over my lines again, but adding in movement around the set. Once we were shooting, I would go over my lines again and again in my dressing room between takes. Apart from anything else, it directed my nervous energy into useful activity, something I could control.
It’s a matter of repetition. Not just the words, but the thoughts and the feelings behind them, and the gestures, mannerisms and movements that accompany them. (Keep anything physical simple and logical so that it aids your memory rather than acting as another burden on it.) Over and over until your cue makes you say, feel and react to the whole cycle of events it sets in train.
All of the techniques that applied to learning lines for an audition apply again once you have the part. Say your lines out loud. Practise until the line sounds perfectly natural. Convince yourself, and don’t be a pushover. Be hard on yourself. Keep asking for more. Remember, this preparation is the work. Know the rest of the dialogue but don’t have someone read the other parts for you. Retain an element of surprise so that you can truly listen and react naturally on se
t. You will need to try your lines in different ways. Think through the various ways to express each thought. Work them all up, then decide on the one that strikes you as the most valid and commit to it. Keep the others ready, though—you may need them. And don’t overlook the possibilities in a mundane-seeming line. A good test of a restaurant is how well it does the basics—the literal bread and butter. And a good test of an actor is how much meaning they can get out of a simple line.
OTHER ACTOR: Did you have a coat?
YOU: Yes, thank you.
There are so many possibilities here. Maybe your coat is your most valued possession and you’re surprised and offended because the question implies that the other actor hasn’t noticed it. Maybe you’re ashamed of your tatty coat, and mortified that the other actor is going to examine and handle it. Perhaps you feel that the question is a passive-aggressive way of asking you to leave when you’re having a great time, an insinuation that your current outfit is not appropriate so needs to be covered up, or a suggestion that you might not own a coat. Perhaps the question indicates the other actor is socially nervous and awkward, because it’s the middle of summer and obviously you wouldn’t have a coat. Whatever your interpretation, it should start showing in your eyes on the word “coat.” There is no need for a line ever to be boring.
In the movies, you will probably do all of this before you have the chance to discuss the role with the director, or see the set, or meet your fellow actors. But don’t make the mistake of imagining that, because there is so much you cannot know in advance, you might as well not prepare. Somehow it is much easier to change one well-planned course of action for another precise course of action on the spur of the moment than it is to turn a vague idea into a concrete one. And as you gain experience you will find that a lot of your best guesses about things you cannot know in advance turn out to be right.
The goal of all of this preparation is that by the time you get to the set you will have reduced the chances of something going wrong from high to remote, and transformed your mental state from abject terror to clear-headed readiness. I am never worried that I might forget my lines, so the energy I could have spent worrying over that, I can instead put into really listening to the people I’m acting with (of which more later), and into flexing my performance to cope with whatever sweat-inducing matters arise on that particular day. Because I’m prepared, I can perform at my best.
I might, for example, need to put my energy into reacting to a director’s vision. I will turn up to a film set not only having learnt my lines but also having taken countless decisions about how I’m going to play them: pace, pauses, gestures, emphases. When you are about to be called to the set to discover the director’s intentions for you, terror can strike all too easily. Knowing that you know your lines—and that, should your favoured interpretation not cut the mustard with the director, you have some alternatives in your back pocket—helps to keep the heart beating at a normal pace and the terror level somewhere below abject. My brain can make the leap the director is asking me to make, because it is not having to work to remember what I’m going to say.
The next day I might need to react to a director altering the script at a moment’s notice, or changing his mind mid-shoot about how he wants a scene to play. I might need to keep my nerve and behave as though I’m getting exactly what I want from another actor, even when I’m not. The director might even ask me to improvise. (This doesn’t happen much: directors are notorious control freaks. But I did enjoy ad-libbing the supermarket scene in The Ipcress File, where my character Harry Palmer is shopping for food to make dinner for a woman he wants to seduce while talking to the spy master, who is also pushing a supermarket trolley, and the very funny scene where I was drilling local recruits, including one spectacular incompetent, in The Man Who Would Be King.)
Or I might just be dealing with really challenging working conditions. If I know my lines back to front, I can still deliver exactly what the director requires of me in searing heat, wearing a crippling costume and surrounded by a distracting crowd of locals, determined to take in the bizarre and fascinating circus that has come to town.
And, by the way, don’t do what I did and only prep for today’s scenes. Plan ahead for tomorrow, and the days after that too. Learn your lines for the whole film before you start shooting, and keep studying whenever you get a break. I got caught on that once, early in my career, and never made the mistake again. In 1971 I was shooting Kidnapped, an adventure film based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s book. We were on location on the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland and, for once, the weather conditions were perfect. So much so that at lunchtime the director, Delbert Mann, announced, “The light is brilliant. I want to shoot your last scene this afternoon.”
“We aren’t scheduled to shoot that scene today, Delbert,” I said, panic rising in my throat and tightening my chest. My last scene was an extensive soliloquy about my deep feelings for Scotland and I hadn’t even looked at it.
“Michael, we have to use the weather,” said Delbert. “I want to shoot it after lunch.”
“Give me an hour,” I said. Lunch was abandoned as I holed myself up in my trailer.
In the end I did it in one take. But I would have saved myself an hour of anguish if I’d prepared all my lines before the shoot began—if I’d thought ahead and given myself the ability to be flexible as plans changed. (Mind you, I would have saved myself several weeks of anguish if I hadn’t made the picture at all. It was a dud, and the only film I’ve never been paid for.)
Be like a duck
Ducks look calm as they glide along the surface of the water but they’re paddling like hell underneath. When you’re doing your preparation right, it sometimes looks so good that people watching you make the mistake of assuming it’s all natural and effortless. In my experience, it never is. Some of the most “natural” performers are the hardest-working, and some of the most apparently spontaneous performances are the ones that have been the best-rehearsed. To get to a natural performance you have to go right through acting and come out the other side into real, and that’s a long, tough journey, underground, with no scenery.
In 1984, Woody Allen directed the movie Hannah and Her Sisters. The movie was a commercial and critical success and my performance in it as Elliot won me my first Academy Award. His films appear very naturalistic, and it would be easy to believe that parts of the dialogue are ad-libbed. The truth is the precise opposite. It takes an enormous amount of work to achieve the levels of naturalism that Woody does. He works on his scripts for months before a shoot, and the dialogue is then carved in stone unless you can come up with something better than the material he has spent months perfecting. Which you can’t.
Once everyone is on set, everything is very deliberate and calm and he rehearses exhaustively, with almost no distinction between the energy of the rehearsal and the energy of the take, which makes for relaxed actors with a very naturalistic kind of energy. He also has an incredible eye for detail and minutiae, knows exactly what he wants and will work quietly but relentlessly until he has it. For example, one day I did a rehearsal, then a take. Woody cut it and asked, “Why didn’t you do that movement with your hand that you did in the rehearsal?” I had no idea what I’d done with my hand but he showed me and we shot it again. Other times he would just say, “Do it again, Michael.” I would do it again and he would say, “Yes, that’s it. Print.” I wouldn’t know what was different, but he would have seen some tiny thing. (The allegations about Woody Allen have come as a great and terrible shock to me. The Woody I knew was kind and gentle and I learnt a great deal from his craft.)
In 1988 I made a movie called Without a Clue in which I played a comedic Sherlock Holmes to Ben Kingsley’s Dr. Watson. The producer, Mark Sturdivant, observed Ben and me on set and decided that we were two very different kinds of actors. I remember he reported that “Michael is very instinctive, Ben is very intellectual.” As evidence for this he described how, during a read-through, s
omeone would call out, “Scene ninety,” and Ben would instantly be going through the script, checking what had happened to his character before, so that he could get into the right frame of mind. “Meanwhile, Michael would be slumped on the couch, picking balls of fluff off of his sweater.”
I’m not claiming that my Sherlock Holmes was one of my best or most naturalistic performances. But Mark had got me wrong. It wasn’t that it was all instinctive. It was that I had already done my thinking. I already knew what my frame of mind was in scene ninety. The rehearsal I had done on my own, before arriving at the set, was the thinking, the working. Now that we were on set, this was the performance and I was doing my relaxing.
Movie acting is a delicate blend of preparation and spontaneity. If you do enough preparation, you can put in a performance that appears brilliantly instinctive and natural. The same goes for most performance, in the widest sense of the word. All of us have to perform at times. Far from destroying spontaneity, careful and thorough preparation will enable it. When you have learnt your lines, when you know your stuff, you have the firm foundation you need to be your best and to listen and react truthfully in the moment.
7.
Less Is More
“I told you. You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.”
The Italian Job, 1969
LIKE I SAID BEFORE, whatever role you’re performing in life, you have to know your craft. So, at the moment when the cameras roll and the director shouts, “Action!,” what do you really need to know? In movie acting, it’s a lot of little technical things, and two great big things: you have to listen and react; and you have to be real.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 8
