by Tom Sizemore
While Juliette and I haven’t talked since the late 1990s, I hear she’s sober now. I know she’s somewhat off the map, but I think, knowing her the way I did, that that’s a conscious choice. She plays in a band called Juliette and the Licks, and the sense I get is that she didn’t want to do movies anymore. I think her early success and all the drugs and getting involved with Brad Pitt and then having him become such a mega star made her feel like the world of being a motion picture star was a hurtful place to be. She always loved music—she wrote and sang a song called “Born Bad” in Natural Born Killers and she also sang in Strange Days. I think she saw the music world as kinder than the movie one. And who knows—she may be right.
CHAPTER 4
LOSING IT
IN MANY WAYS, once Juliette and I weren’t involved anymore, my life started to feel normal again. I was still doing heroin but considerably less than when I was with Juliette, and my agents and managers seemed very positive about the direction my career was headed in. But I had no idea just how well things were going until I got a call one day from my agent at the time, Bryan Lourd.
“Robert De Niro wants to meet you tomorrow night at the Monkey Bar for dinner,” he said. Of course I didn’t believe it—Robert De Niro had been my idol since I’d first seen Taxi Driver, so I thought it was somebody playing a joke on me. I said, “Who is this? This isn’t funny.” But it was Bryan, and he was serious. Some people think I’m egotistical, but I’ve always been somewhat insecure about my work, and was especially so back then. I just couldn’t believe it.
I had met De Niro before, when I did a movie called Guilty by Suspicion in 1991. On that shoot he was all about the work, and I only had two scenes, so we didn’t get to know each other too well. But two years later, when I got this call from Bryan, De Niro and Michael Mann were putting together Heat, and I guess De Niro had seen True Romance and Natural Born Killers before their release. He had been interested in Quentin Tarantino—he was thinking about Jackie Brown already—and he wanted to see Quentin’s work. Quentin had written both Natural Born Killers and True Romance. Natural Born Killers was actually the first script Quentin sold—Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy bought it from him when he was still working at a video store and selling scripts out of the trunk of his car. Don Murphy told me the story. Don was renting a Japanese movie from the video store where Quentin worked, and they started talking. Quentin said he was a screenwriter and gave him copies of Natural Born Killers, True Romance, and Reservoir Dogs. Don called up Jane and said, “There’s a genius working at the Manhattan Beach video store.” And they bought Natural Born Killers.
Anyway, De Niro apparently really liked my performances in True Romance and Natural Born Killers so he asked Michael Mann if he knew of me. Michael didn’t, so Bob had the two movies screened for him and said, “It’s your choice—you’re the director,” but he made it clear he wanted me to play Michael Cheritto.
But I didn’t know any of this at the time. Once I realized Bryan wasn’t joking, I asked him why De Niro wanted to have dinner with me. Bryan said, “I don’t know, but I’m sure he’ll tell you.” I was terrified and told Bryan I didn’t want to do it. But I got it together and showed up that night at the Monkey Bar. I was extremely nervous, so I just sat down with De Niro and said, “Before we start, I have to tell you something. I’ve had a picture of you on my wall since I was fifteen, and I still have it on my wall even though I’m a grown-up, and it’s the first thing I see every morning.” It was true. It’s this huge poster that I bought through a magazine, and I still have it to this day even though it’s really torn up.
He said, “What?” And I thought, “I’ve said the worst thing ever.” I felt like a dipshit. So then I said, “I can’t believe I’m sitting here, I’ve been a fan of—oh, fuck it, man.” Thinking I’d screwed everything up, I got up to leave. And he just said, “What are you doing? Sit down.”
I felt even worse so I just said, “No, I’m going to go” again and he said, “I don’t mean to make you feel bad—it’s really nice that you’re a fan of mine.” So I sat back down and asked, “Why am I here? What do you want?”
He said, “If you give me the opportunity to talk, I’ll tell you.” It was true; I hadn’t given him a second. I just said, “Hey, before we start,” right away because I was nervous. So then he said, “I saw True Romance and Natural Born Killers,” and I said, “Oh no you didn’t,” because they hadn’t come out yet, and I hadn’t even seen them. I wasn’t too savvy yet and didn’t know that people could screen movies before they come out; I’d never been invited to a screening. He was very patient and found my naïveté charming, I guess. And then he said, “Do you know what a wonderful actor you are?” I wanted to believe him so badly. This was a really seminal day in my life. I mean, I knew I was working a lot and Natural Born Killers was a big thing, but other actors were in it, and I hadn’t seen the movie yet so I wasn’t sure at that point how much I had ended up in it—if my part had been cut significantly. And I really wanted to be a movie star and not just an actor. Not to compare myself to somebody like Kobe Bryant, but my attitude was “I want the ball.” I don’t trust anyone else, and as an actor I knew what I was going to do: I’m going to take the ball down, muscle it up, and either make the fucking shot or get fouled. It’s that moment where you’re either going to win the game or not. This was a moment where I thought I might end up winning the game.
And once I met Michael Mann, I was cast in the movie. It was the first time I didn’t have to audition for a part—something I’d long dreamed of happening.
To prepare for my role, I spent time at famous Folsom Prison, the maximum-security facility near Sacramento, California. I wanted to gain insights into criminal psychology and felonious “crews” like the fictional one my character was a part of. I said to this one convict when I was there, “Your rap sheet says you killed five people. You wanna talk to me about that?” He responded, “I only killed two people.” I said, “Well, it says here five.” And he goes, “Oh, those others were cops.” He said it in a really nondramatic, flat-toned way. So I pressed him and said, “Well, I don’t know how you view them from your world, but I think most people would think that police officers are people—with wives and children and loved ones.” He just looked at me blankly and went, “Uh huh.”
We first gathered in December 1994 and there was a very lengthy training time for us to get comfortable with the guns—about nine weeks, the majority of which we spent practicing at a gun range out by Magic Mountain. It may have been overkill on Michael’s part, but that shoot-out scene would never have been as effective without all that training. In my opinion, it’s possibly the best shoot-out scene in the history of movies, and in some ways it’s the centerpiece of the movie.
I became good friends with De Niro during the training because I had no experience at all with weapons, and Bob had done The Deer Hunter and other movies where he’d used them. People think I’m this gun guy because there have been guns in so many of my movies, but, especially back then, I was afraid of guns; I didn’t know how they worked or anything. In True Romance I come into a room and say, “Put your gun down,” and then get shot. In Natural Born Killers, I pull a gun out and get shot by Juliette Lewis. But I hadn’t done much gunplay myself until Heat. Later of course, on Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, I learned how to use weapons even more. In any case, I liked the training because I enjoyed knowing what I was doing in movies, and Bob was very helpful because he could tell I was gun-shy, so to speak.
But at the same time that I was prepping to star in this big movie and becoming close with the man who had essentially made me want to become an actor, I picked up heroin again in a pretty major way. I cut down on using when I initially left Juliette, but then, overwhelmed, I think, by these incredibly exciting things that were happening in my career, I got right back to using large amounts fairly quickly. I just started doing it the same way I had on Natural Born Killers, buying just enough to get by when I was workin
g. One of the gun trainers—a guy named Mick Gould—was really helpful. He not only helped me with the weapons but also with confidence. He knew I was struggling with drugs, and he would talk to me about trying to get my body and mind working together. He was a really good guy, and he’d say things like “Let’s get your body strong again—let’s get these drugs out of your body.” But I was addicted and, while I appreciated what he was trying to do, I knew there was no way of getting the drugs out of my body then.
De Niro didn’t really know the extent of it and he was really wonderful to me. I learned a lot from him about how to behave. He was never late, he never bitched or complained, and he never pulled any movie star shit. Al Pacino was the same way. They were both just incredible, sweet people who knew everybody’s name on the set.
The shoot, which officially started on March 3, 1995, went eighty-six days over. That was nearly twice as long as it was supposed to be, which was ninety days. I remember on the third day, when Michael Waxman, who was the first assistant director, said, “We’re five days behind,” I asked him, “How is that possible? It’s only day three.” And he told me, “We haven’t even set up day two’s work yet.” I looked at the call sheet and saw that half of the call sheet from day one was still on the call sheet of day three. But this wasn’t because Michael was irresponsible—it was actually the opposite problem; it was because of the exacting standards of Michael, the director of photography Dante Spinotti, Bob, and Al. All four of those guys were really involved. Bob had directed A Bronx Tale by then, and he had plans to direct more, so he would be behind the camera, and you had four guys who had to agree that they had something the way it should look. The studio was getting worried. Bob Daly and Terry Semel, who were running Warner Bros. at the time, would come to the set at least every week because they were worried. But I don’t think it could have been done any other way.
Val Kilmer and I became good friends during the shoot even though we argued a lot. We’d argue about the stupidest things, too, like why I laughed at some joke De Niro made about Val playing Batman. We’d get in these fights and act like two girls and say things like “Don’t call me again” before stomping out of the room. We hadn’t interacted at all on True Romance but I’d actually met him on the set of The Doors when I was there to see Oliver, and another time years before that, but he didn’t remember. When I was still a waiter I saw him do ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Juilliard School in New York and went backstage to meet him. At the time, he was the best young actor I’d ever seen. I told him I was an actor as well, and he looked at me like, “Yeah, sure,” and walked away; he had bodyguards already.
We ended up having a falling-out on Red Planet, and then we became friends again. Val was very supportive when my life fell apart later, but then he mysteriously disappeared. I’ve reached out to him numerous times, but he’s really inaccessible now.
During the shoot, Val and I would go out at night together, and I remember one time we were at a place called the Formosa. I think I was still mystified by the fact that my fame afforded me the opportunity to get away with all kinds of things with women. Most normal people, if they were going to talk to a girl in a bar, would say something like “How are you doing? My name’s Tom. Can I buy you a drink?” or “What’s your name?” Or something. But I was just an animal, so I said to this girl, “What’s your pussy look like?” And the saddest part isn’t that I said it—although that was sad—but that when she walked away, I actually thought she was going to the bathroom to check and see what her pussy looked like so she could come back and tell me.
Val looked at me as she was walking away and said, “Tom, what’s wrong with you?”
I went, “Val, she’s going to see what it looks like.”
He shook his head and said, “She just left the bar, asshole. The bathroom’s the other way.” And he was right. Of course he was right. What I said was so ludicrous that she didn’t even bother saying, “How dare you” or “You’re an asshole.” If some girl came up to me and asked me what my dick looked like, I’d say, “You’ve lost your mind, girl, something’s wrong with you.” Believe me, I never said that to a woman again.
The truth is that I was always awkward around girls, even though girls tended to like me. In many ways, I don’t think I learned how to really talk to girls until recently. I said a lot of dumb shit. And I was high pretty much all the time, which made what was happening not feel entirely real and also like I wouldn’t really ever suffer any consequences for my obnoxiousness. I was rarely high high but I was almost always impaired to a certain degree.
One night, De Niro invited me to the Monkey Bar, where we’d first met, and he introduced me to Jack Nicholson, who owned the place. A lot of interesting people would hang out at the Monkey Bar: Warren Beatty, Buck Henry, Charles Grodin, different filmmakers. And they were the only people allowed in. No riffraff—unless they were very pretty. Jack would say, “Pretty riffraff is fine with me. Just don’t let any cocks in the henhouse—there’s already enough in here.”
The night I met Jack, a bunch of us, including Sean Penn, went up to his house, and from then on Jack and I became close. For my birthday one year he gave me the Spanish poster for The Shining and wrote on it: “To Tom, fellow freedom fighter, more good times.”
Being at his house was a trip. He’d say something like “Find someone to give me a cigarette,” and four people would jump up to do it. It was like sitting with Picasso for me. I was intimidated but he makes you feel really comfortable.
Marlon Brando lived next door to him, and one time when I was at Jack’s, he said, “Hey, kiddo, you wanna meet Marloon? Oh, it’s a trip, come on.” Jack actually called him “Marloon.” Jack nicknames everybody. He called me “Scagmucci” after my character Scagnetti in Natural Born Killers because he liked the name Scagmucci better than he liked Scagnetti. He called his assistant “staff.” And he called NBA coach Phil Jackson “Cap.”
I’ll never forget what Brando said to me the night we went to his house: “One day you’ll mature and quit acting. Myself, I haven’t.” That’s exactly what he said. I told him, “But I love acting because of you.” He took us into a room where he could see all the rooms in his house on video camera, and he’d touch a button and turn a light on, and his dog would chase the lights from room to room. He did that for a long time, and he got a big kick out of it. Then he just got up and walked out—no explanation, no nothing. I think Marlon’s father had, for the better part of his young life, excoriated him. Marlon went to New York and became a star so fast, he never really adjusted to it. The sense I got was that he enjoyed the license it gave him to do whatever it was he wanted to do, as I think a lot of us do, but there were parts of the life he had that he never could fully accept.
I met Warren Beatty through Sean Penn; years later, when Warren was looking for an after-hours black nightclub while scouting locations for Bulworth, Sean and I went with him. I was pretty much in heaven. And Warren was very funny; he doesn’t drink or smoke, and when I asked him why, he just said, very casually, “Because of the way I look.” He was very matter-of-fact about it. He told me I should just drink water, and I think I just laughed.
Sean grew up in L.A. but he really wanted to break out of the insular Malibu world that he’d grown up in, so he’d made an effort to know the real Los Angeles—the cultural landmarks. He’d say, “We’re going to go to this restaurant in Boyle Heights, to have the best Thai food I’ve ever had”—that kind of thing. Sean also introduced me to Charles Bukowski. Sean was fascinated with writers and poets and Bukowski actually dedicated one of his books to Sean.
But, as I said, at the same time that all these completely surreal, amazing things were happening in my life, I was also becoming a full-blown heroin addict. And by the time filming wrapped on Heat, my problem had only grown worse. When my brother Aaron came out from Detroit to visit me, he saw me doing heroin and coke at night and later found me passed out on the bathroom floor. Even though I never missed a day of
work on Heat and was never even late, my brother saw that I was in trouble. He told me that he thought I could die any day.
While I was doing all these drugs, I was still juggling a lot of women. But the relationship that was starting to become the most important to me was the one I had with Maeve. And one day I drove over to her apartment on Doheny Drive and basically just said, standing there on her doorstop, “I need you. I’m in trouble and you’re the only girl in this town I know who doesn’t do drugs and can help keep all these cockroaches away from me.”
I had all these sorts of bottom-feeders who were circling me—the type of people who circle everyone who’s coming up in Hollywood. People like that can be very pushy, and I could already feel myself acquiescing in ways I didn’t want to. Maeve was instrumental in pointing these people out to me and showing me how they were users. And I was just sick of it. I was sick of all the girls, the drugs, the booze—the bullshit. Maeve was the opposite of those people, and I really believed she could protect me from them. And in many ways she did—but that came much later.
That day she said she would help me as a friend but that she couldn’t be involved with me romantically. I asked her what I would have to do to get her to actually be with me and she said, “To even get a Chinese dinner, you’d have to go to a thirty-day rehab the day Heat wraps,” because we’d always go out for Chinese food when we first met. I wanted her back. And I didn’t want to be a drug addict. So I said yes to rehab, and her friend got me registered at a place called Sierra Tucson in Arizona for when the movie was over. Sierra Tucson was supposed to be the one rehab you couldn’t escape from, but I’d actually heard that Downey had escaped from there—even though it’s a thirty-eight-mile walk off of the top of a mountain to get to Tucson after you crawl through a mile of barbed wire. Downey supposedly did it and got on a goddamn airplane in his hospital blues, flew back to L.A., and was in his house in Malibu the same day that Sean Penn and the rest of these guys had put him in Sierra Tucson. I was there for Downey’s first intervention, and I knew he was not getting clean. Later, when I’d visit him in prison—I’d go every third Saturday with his old friend Josh Richman—I never in a million years thought I’d end up in prison myself.
