by Val Kilmer
I am sorry for the digression, but I want you to understand how it wasn’t magic when I was shown how to use the AR-15 by our secret assault team members amassed from around the world by Michael Mann. I was immediately assigned to assisting the actors who knew nothing or very little about the weapons and how to safely break them down and build them back after each heavy practice session, as I had taught myself for years. This was the way I had come to be, by my grandfather and his father before him, making sure his weapons were safe from the gunk that builds up inside a grease-hungry weapon, a weapon used by my grandfathers’ era only to survive and defend. There was no money in our family by this time to shoot for marksman ribbons at county fairs. No, all that was left of the Kilmer legacy was that I was such a fast shooter and reloader of the weapon of choice of the last men living out an impossible dream of a valid Wild West.
I have heard, from more than one person, over at Pensacola’s naval training camp they show the shootout scene in Heat, the sequence of me firing and reloading this terrifying weapon—so fast it’s faster than they require, or can expect their greatest frontline warriors to reload. Their instructors humiliate their best and brightest with such taunts as, “You children, you pawn scum, you motherless excuses of war weapons”—I’m pretty sure the armed services have altered their style of education to something more sophisticated than humiliating and berating our fine military cadets, I’m just sayin’ what I heard—“you gonna let some Top Gun beach bum actor livin’ la vida loca in Hollywood beat you at reloading your own weapon?” That scene was presented without a cut, Michael Mann later told me, because they were all so proud of this dedicated killer elite he had created the image of.
With actor Tom Sizemore in Heat
Michael is a ridiculously impassioned man. I love ridiculous passion. One time for research he had Robert De Niro, Tom Sizemore, and me case a bank in bulletproof vests and fake weapons, and the only employee he told was the manager. This I still find hard to believe because of the inherent danger. What if someone who had a concealed weapons permit saw Bob’s fake pistol sticking out the back of his Armani? Whoa boy, can you imagine the headaches if not the actual life-threatening drama? This kind of research is like a dream. It must be a dream. Michael never wants to sleep. He wakes in the middle of the night with cinematic visions. He’s all tenacity and grit, no sheepishness, no half-baked musings. Michael was methodical to the point of, well, infinity. We would still be shooting Heat if they had let him. We shot two entire versions of the famous bank robbery scene, the first with stand-ins. That allowed us to study the whole arc of the scene before we enacted it. I thought that the stand-in version was better than the real take. Michael didn’t care. Like a great actor, Michael was always in the moment. He can be guilty of overthinking but always returns to raw instinct as a guide. I loved working with him, even when he insisted that I visit Folsom State Prison, where my character had once been incarcerated. That made little sense, since by then the movie was half-shot and I had already formed my character. But Michael wouldn’t back off. So me and his secret weapon, the artist and photographer Gusmano Cesaretti—who has been with Michael since his Miami Vice days—flew up to Folsom, where the air was thick with despair. It was the heaviest vibe I’d ever felt—heavy with angst—convincing me that my crazy director wasn’t so crazy after all. The visit gave me an edge that I could lend to those final scenes I shot. Besides, no one pays the actor to do research, ever. Getting paid to do research after the film has started? That’s just beautiful. I love you, Michael. Always have, always will.
One final Michael Mann story that people in Hollywood have admiringly passed around for years:
He was directing The Last of the Mohicans and shooting through the night. Michael was in full manic mode, ready to shout “Action!” for the next scene, when he started panting and whisper-yelling, “This light. Who hung this light? This isn’t right. Get me the gaffer. I’m firing his ass. Who hung this crazy light?”
A producer gently walked over and whispered, “Michael, it’s the sun.”
Of course the glory in doing Heat was the master class put on by Bob and Al. After watching them at close range, I’d sum it up like this:
Al is Jackson Pollock. He throws it all out there. It lands where it lands. There’s no holding back. Bob is Vermeer. Painstakingly, he lays one brick after another until the construction is solid as a rock. Both Bob and Al get to the same place—they embody the characters they play—but they take radically different paths to arrive there. Like children at a funeral, Bob, Al, and I giggled our way through the long nights of this dark movie.
Birth & Death
Jack Kilmer came into this world on June 6, 1995.
Glory, hallelujah!
Much like the birth of my daughter, Mercedes, the birth of my son required that Joanne have a walking labor routine. This time it occurred over two days, not three, and there was no horse suffering a colic convulsion. There was, however, the complication of an especially difficult breech birth—feetfirst and upside down—that seemed to require a caesarean.
We were hard at work reassuring Joanne that a caesarean was a totally fine, normal option and clean operation. The doctor who arrived had answered a 911 call and run to the hospital straight from the gym in neon-pink shorts. She looked sixteen. But she informed us she’d delivered over five hundred babies and that Jack had actually now turned around, poised to be born without any assistance. The moment had arrived, and our doctor looked at us wide-eyed. Joanne screamed, “What do I do now?” And we all screamed back, “Push!” The nurse breathlessly whispered, “It’s a miracle,” as he was born, as if we were in a Frank Capra melodrama.
Oh, Jack. You didn’t want to leave the sanctity of that warm eternity, but once you realized your destiny, you flew.
Joanne never looked more gorgeous. What is more incredible than a woman being all she can be? That’s it for me.
Carly Simon used to call James Taylor her husband long after they divorced. I asked her why. She replied sweetly, “Val, once you have children, you never really separate. It’s just a different kind of marriage. Either a good marriage or a bad one. James and I will always be married through our children. There’s nothing else at the end of the day.” I never did forget it. I wish I had the maturity to live by it.
The birth of a precious child coincided with the unraveling of our union. I’m not sure blame is a helpful term. Blame implies judgment, of myself and Joanne, and I’m inclined to avoid both. I mentioned before how when we first married I was convinced that the survival of our relationship depended upon our being together during every movie each of us made. When that plan withered, so did our rapport. I felt shut out of my parental role. I remember Joanne suggesting I take down some artwork by my baby brother, Wesley. I should have shut up and done what she asked. It was too much for her to cope with every day, walking past his dark archive of genius, a strange challenge or impossible competition. But rather than try to empathize, I took it as rejection. I felt that one day, along with Wesley’s drawings, I’d be asked to leave as well.
Surely Joanne has many reasons we couldn’t make a go of it. Given her intelligence and sensitivity, I’m certain those reasons have merit. I am not an easy man. She is not an easy woman. Artists are rarely easy. Actors are never easy. Something between us had died long ago.
I learned about her decision to divorce while watching television in Ireland visiting Brando to discuss a movie we would soon start shooting—our first together. It was broadcast on CNN as a hard news story. Such was my fame at the time after the success of Batman Forever. I could have wished for a gentler mode to convey the message, but Joanne had made her decision and had moved to Los Angeles without telling me. I had made mine as well. I was off to Australia to make The Island of Dr. Moreau.
The Island Is Dr. Moreau
Shot in the stifling humidity of a lush Australian rain forest, The Island of Dr. Moreau was as sublime as it was ridiculous. The sublimity had everyth
ing to do with Marlon. Emotionally, I was a wreck. The implosion of my nuclear family left me more vulnerable than I had been at any time in my life. Marlon sensed that and became my dad. He listened to me for hours on end. He comforted me, less with words than his understanding heart. He didn’t pry, he didn’t look for reasons, he steered me away from regret. Like a guardian angel, he nursed me back to emotional health.
Our bond had been built since his son Christian shot to death the boyfriend of Marlon’s daughter Cheyenne. Marlon and his team of lawyers convinced Christian to plead guilty and cut a deal with the DA. Such a turn of events would have made the sanest man mad, but Marlon handled it. During that horrific period, we took a couple of long rides around the city where he weighed the consequences of a trial versus a plea. He was there for his family and I tried to be there for him.
That had happened some five years earlier. Since then, Marlon had done all he could to protect his children. He had struggled courageously and found his way back to his profession. He saw Moreau as a character he could play with his own brand of dark, idiosyncratic humor. “Absurdity,” he said to me, “will set us free. At least for a few months.”
In those initial days, Marlon was in an expansive mood. He was looking forward to the film. The Island of Dr. Moreau is a science fiction novel written by H. G. Wells in 1896, a masterpiece of the genre. This was its third adaptation as a major motion picture with a huge budget. Richard Stanley, who had dreamed up the project and written the screenplay, was also directing, for the first time. But among a thousand other moving pieces on that set, he was replaced just a few days into production by the legendary John Frankenheimer, who had gained major Hollywood clout for films like Birdman of Alcatraz and The Manchurian Candidate. Bruce Willis was originally the costar but dropped out when his wife, Demi Moore, filed for divorce. Divorce was in the air.
As Dr. Moreau, Marlon played an insane Nobel-laureate scientist who crossbreeds humans with animals that he manipulates with a remote control. I stumble on his island and become his unwilling assistant. Early on, I saw a little-person actor who I thought might serve as my assistant. Marlon liked the idea—another lark—and decided to adapt it for his character. I lost my mini-me to Marlon but didn’t mind. Marlon used his collaborator to great dramatic effect.
Marlon was covered in white cake makeup, reminding me of how he had looked when we first met. On his head he wore an enormous bowl which he had dumped the fruit out of in his trailer. He put in false teeth and turned to me, unable to hold his laughter, and shouted with arms out and wild jazz hands, à la Jimmy Durante, “Oh Val, we’re going all the way with this one.” I fell on the floor and laughed till my sides hurt. What else are you going to do with a script that really doesn’t work? Here we were, two shattered but courageous costars, and a third, an actor I had lobbied heavily for, David Thewlis, whose acting had made Mike Leigh’s Naked an independent classic.
Marlon Brando on the set of The Island of Dr. Moreau
On our first day, Marlon asked me to his trailer and instructed me to assemble everyone in the film. He wanted to meet them. It didn’t take me too long to assemble what I assumed was “everyone,” which I took to mean the stars, cinematographer, first assistant director, and other crew who most interacts with the talent. When these fifteen or so people were assembled outside his trailer as instructed, he peeked out through the venetian blinds and mumbled, “What the f—, Val? I said ‘everyone.’ There are only a dozen people out there.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you meant just the people important to you in the film.”
He looked at me with one of those tough guy looks he invented that can wither metal.
“Everyone’s important to me,” he said.
So I went out and apologized and redirected the crew to please assemble everyone, from the drivers to the cooks to the wardrobe to the grips and gaffers to the electrical and lighting and camera departments—the entire cast and crew, a couple hundred people. They happily, gleefully lined up to meet the maestro. Everyone wanted to meet Marlon, and Marlon knew it, and the most efficient way to do that wasn’t to interrupt the flow of filming—people shuffling up to him and coyly asking for an autograph. No, meet ’em all and get the lay of the land.
When all that was done, we settled into the first scene we were to shoot, which was Marlon’s first scene in the film. Which had lots of writing problems. Effortlessly, Marlon solved each and every one of them like the genius he is. He sang a song in Yiddish then another ditty in German and spoke in about seven different languages—French, Spanish, Italian, and a perfect English aristocrat dialect, which is often attempted and rarely successful. He took the curse off my character’s clunky exposition, and made the whole introduction to his character nothing short of the feeling of watching a three-ring circus performed and announced by only one man. Marlon Brando was a genius at improv, and it was one of the greatest virtuoso live acting performances I have ever witnessed.
But I told you when we started that this is a blues tone poem so get ready for some serious heartache.
All this was our rehearsal, and I had begged our new director to film it. I’d spent enough time with Marlon to know he doesn’t repeat himself, and he’s easily bored or distracted. And it’s Marlon Brando for god’s sake. And film is the cheapest commodity on a set. Roll it, man, ’cause it’s never going to be the same twice.
John Frankenheimer didn’t roll it.
After Marlon had finished, the applause from the crew was deafening. I looked at John. He, too, was clapping, though, it seemed to me, cursorily. I was a little concerned about that, and about Marlon’s health because he had after all just met about two hundred people, and although we were in the shade it was still summer in Australia in a rain forest where the humidity might as well have been one hundred percent. Sweat was pouring off him. I wanted to get him inside some air-conditioning. I was delighted to hear John was thinking the same, as he invited Marlon and me to join him in his trailer. At least, I thought that’s what he said. Then I realized he invited us to meet in Marlon’s own trailer.
This wasn’t right. Trailers on movie sets are like Switzerland. Really, they’re private property—space on loan from a studio. If an actor doesn’t want to come out of their trailer, no one can make them short of threatening a lawyer or withholding their paycheck.
Once Marlon and I were in his trailer, he instructed me to let John in. “The Weisenheimer,” Marlon used to call him in the sanctity of his trailer, and so we all sat in the suddenly heavy air John brought in with him. Damn, what could make this guy so unhappy after having witnessed what we just had? It would have been like if you were a baseball fan and were able to see Babe Ruth knock one out of the park with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth in the last game of the World Series. I ain’t lyin’, Marlon was coming in at around four hundred eighty pounds, but he floated around that set like he was Baryshnikov onstage at the height of his powers.
As we sat, John put both his index fingers up his massive nose for some reason, which immediately captured Marlon’s attention, and he looked at me as if we were about to wrestle a leopard, thrilling but oh so dangerous. I could tell Marlon would never forget this moment, this gesture being something he had never seen before. But he had to have known it was really bad news we were about to hear. Marlon had X-ray vision and knew the human heart so well you might as well say he was clairvoyant. Perhaps he was. I only saw him be wrong about someone’s motives or objectives once or twice in my whole life. He just never missed.
Could we make it through this meeting without bursting into laughter and destroying this fragile man’s ego? What was he doing with two index fingers up his nose, the rest of them folded in clear prayerful supplication? Neither of us had ever seen this before. John spoke, index fingers still safely shoved up into their resting place:
“Marlon, I can’t improv the movie.”
I wasted no time. “My God,” I said to John, “do you own an island? Marlon does,
just like his character. Do you speak eight languages? Marlon does, just like his character. Are you crazy? Marlon is, just like his character. Are you a genius? ’Cause Marlon Brando is. Just like his character. Why don’t we listen to him and do whatever he says? The script just doesn’t work well enough as an acting experience and never did, and there’s nothing we can do about that except let the genius loose, man.”
Marlon surprised me with his cool. He simply leaned back and said, “I understand, John. No worries, mate.”
That night Marlon said to me, “It’s a job now, Val. A lark. We’ll get through it.” I was as sad as I’ve ever been on a set.
Marlon was always upbeat on set. But at night, he mourned his life’s private tragedies in silence. Sometimes he invited me to sit beside him. He’d ask me to read him a poem. It might be Yeats or Walt Whitman or a Shakespeare sonnet. It didn’t matter. He just wanted to hear the sound of beautiful language. Sometimes he would weep, but never for long. Eventually, he’d ask me to tell the director that he was ready. Courageously, he completed the film.
John Frankenheimer went on to blame me publicly for ruining the movie. I always thought it an odd thing to try to do, blame me for his failure to make an entertaining film, because my character dies halfway through, and the last half of the film sucks as bad as the first. So how do you work that out? I don’t blame John for its failure, but he also could have been its savior.
