Jack Nicholson Interview - Part 8

by Peter Bogdanovich

from Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin

You meanSyriana.?  
Yeah. Nobody could follow all the plot of this picture. Particularly in that kind of a situation. The audience may never receive your actual reality.  
 
What did you think of the picture?  
I enjoyed it. Here’s a simple example. I’m very good at, and love following, convoluted plots - take great pleasure, in fact, in explaining it to other people who may not have understood it when we went to the movies together. You may not remember this, but just the choice of shot right near the end of the picture - I didn’t understand who was returning to George Clooney’s house. It wasn’t particularly well-articulated in the picture. The person may have wanted to be more obscure at that point.  
 
But it threw the following of the picture open to unrealistic possibilities for me as an audience. Among others, maybe George Clooney wasn’t killed in that explosion, no matter how big the explosion was. Made that impossible. I enjoyed the ambiance of the sociology of the movie. It was a good, fresh slice of that area. This was the strength of the picture and I enjoyed it.  
 
What was it about the Scorsese picture that most attracted you?  
Well, you know, I had turned the script down a couple of times and then Leo [DeCaprio] came and asked me if I would talk to Martin about it. There was no real part there, which was where I thought it would go in the discussion, but then it kind of evolved through talks. What I liked about the picture was all the people that were involved, of course. I’ve known Leo for quite a while. I did a show with Matt Damon - Hemingway’s show for Lou Adler and Page Adler’s Blue Turtle Camp. And what I liked about it for Marty is that it’s very demanding from a plot point of view, and entertaining; you know, it’s his genre, the gangster picture. But it was different - slightly more symbolic - and I felt it would bring out the best in Marty, you know, to have to be clear about the plot. He’s an auteur. director and you know he will idiosyncranize a picture. But, in this case, I felt the restriction of the complicated plot might force us into some areas, and we had to push the envelope with it, we knew that. And I, sort of gradually understood that was part of my job, and I always enjoy that.  
 
How do you mean?  
Well, you know, having the fact that there wasn’t really a part there to begin with; so the collaborative talks with Marty kind of evolved into what part this would be. We wanted to create a kind of really bad man, basically, a villain who was pretty flamboyant, and somebody who you wanted them to get pretty bad.  
 
And, it evolved through that particular setup. There’s a gangster that the people kept wanting to associate this part with, which I didn’t want. I wanted to do it in universal terms, so I did no research on the guy that I’d hear about all the time.  
 
Who is that?  
Whitey Bulger. I wanted to be more universal with the part. What was interesting about that is whether you want to do research or not, when you’re shooting a picture, you attract anecdotal information. And I found, interestingly enough, that a lot of the things that evolved as we worked on the part also were true of the guy. Things that we hadn’t heard - sex dens. I didn’t even know he had a girlfriend. I didn’t know that they also murdered her, you know, pulled her nails out, all those things. I would have turned over in regular research - maybe not used - but working on the part from a different, more universal point of view, what’s interesting to me was how many specifics we landed on anyway.  
 
You didn’t shoot that long, did you?  
No. I think it was six, seven weeks, something like that. But, you know, when they schedule like that, I worked all the time. I worked with Marty, outside the day’s shooting. I haven’t worked much with him in the editing, or not as much as I do sometimes but, you know, the movie tested so high that pretty much when they test that high, they’re gonna do fairly well. So, I mean, what better time to turn loose an auteur - who certainly deserves to be turned loose, then on a picture like this. I haven’t seen it since the first time I saw it. But I more than trust Martin Scorsese.  
 
The release date was moved up.  
That’s good. I think the picture is set up good. I think there’s a lot of want-to-see about it - all the things you’d hope for - then you see what happens. You can’t ever tell - I had a movie I directed open on the day OJ ran on the freeway. It didn’t do that much business the opening weekend, let’s put it that way.  
 
Was that The Two Jakes?  
Yeah - oh, it was a nightmare. I couldn’t believe it. The day he was running on the freeway. Couldn’t even watch the NBA (National Basketball games], they took that off too.  
 
But I think that one of the most exciting things for me on The Departed. will be that Leo kind of coming of age and filling up his skin in this picture. I think he does a wonderful job. I think the people will get a big kick out of him in the picture. I feel lucky that they talked me into it. I didn’t think they could make the deal - because a lot of people were involved. But we all worked, including Alan Horn [head of Warner Bros. pictures]. You know, everybody moves a little bit - I just fell into it. I had a great time creatively.  
Did you write much of it?  
Well, I don’t know how to put that - I’d rather not touch that one.  
 
Well, did you guys improvise on the set?  
Yeah, some of the behavior, and some of the scenes. But when you’re kind of doing on-the-day rewrites, that comes from talking improvisation. But, eventually, we got most of it down on paper. The picture’s so tight and so heavily convoluted, you didn’t have a lot of time for just extraneous behavior or so-called improvisation.

You mean the plot is very demanding?  
Yeah, and the style. The movie’s got a style, you know, and it’s an elegant little mobster movie. It’s got its theme. You don’t always put that in the forefront - because the story is what everybody follows - but it’s got a serious undertone, too.  
 
How is Marty to work with as an actor?  
Great. Great, because he’s very loose, free. You know, I mean, we did some pretty outlandish things. Now, what will remain of that, I don’t know to this moment. Last time I saw it, and it was an early cut that I saw but, you know, it’s entertaining.  
 
It sounds like a more structured picture than he’s done lately, in sense of plot.  
Yeah. Marty finds the movie while he’s making it. And I think that’s the process. It should go on till you’re done, and he’s got a high amplitude in that area. He’s kind of fearless. I love that. We work great together.  
 
Did you have most of your scenes with Leonardo?  
No. I had about an equal amount with Matt and Leonardo and others. We brought a kind of naughty little, you know, female partner into the picture. One of my ideas in how to broaden the character. They don’t most often deal with the sexuality of the mobster, you know. It’s not a ton. But it’s in there. You know, he’s corrupt in every way.  
 
Did you enjoy directing Drive, He Said. [1971]?  
Very much. Most pictures, up till then, that did a sport - the sport itself wasn’t believable. You know, Anthony Perkins doesn’t look like a baseball player [in Fear Strikes Out.]. In the time they were made, this was an acceptable convention. We had six different basketball teams. Yes, you can do a lot of long-lens wild photography on football, baseball - but basketball’s indoors. You have to light it.  
 
And you can’t get that far away.  
Well, you can get far away, but you have to prepare. You can’t steal things, or get lucky with things quite as much. But I loved being in that position the first time - directing - dealing with all the hundred thousand decisions a day that you have to make. BBS was a wealthy movie company then, but you still had to make it within a certain economy.  
 
It wasn’t a very expensive picture.  
No, not at all. Or a very successful one. But I love it - I loved the picture. Some of the footage in that picture is stolen from student riots on the campus at Eugene [Oregon]. The producer was still making legal appearances years later because we would not give the footage that we stole of the student riot over to the FBI. They didn’t like it. They thought they’d like to have it - but we stonewalled. Some of that footage is actually in the movie.  
 
Bill Butler shot it - he’d done a lot of documentary photography in Chicago before he came out, I was having tea while they were shooting something inside a truck when somebody came running in and says, “There’s a big riot on campus.” I grabbed Bill and a couple of actors, “Look, no matter what happens to me, you two guys, you go out there, get in this, inner-react to it, but you keep your eye on, and you stay, with Bill. And Bill, freeform, shot a lot of that riot footage.  
 
I didn’t realize you did it that way.  
Well, I certainly hadn’t planned it. I had set pieces about this element. All of it was about things I knew were actually happening.  
 
When you directed the two pictures you starred in, Goin’ South. and The Two Jakes., what was that like?  
Well, particularly in Goin’ South., the distance felt important to me. That’s why the opening shot is so long - where the guy starts in the foreground, and he looks back, mounts his horse, and then rides straight out on very flat ground until you can’t see him. What I guessed would be the length of the credits. One shot. But it wasn’t just for the title. I wanted to establish that it wasn’t that easy to run away because of the space - you could easily be seen or caught. The problem for the director/actor was: the first time it timed out over 30 minutes. To do it and reload it. In that situation you couldn’t do two jobs at once. I liked the movies. On Two Jakes., you’re committing to do both of these jobs properly. You get up at a certain hour, when you gotta get on the set and make sure the shot is right. This is long before I would be coming to work as an actor. And then dailies: Well, you’ve worked an unavoidable twenty hours in a row and you ain’t taken a shower yet. When you accept that commitment you better understand: be ready for this. There’s no way to avoid months of 18-to-20-hour days.  
 
I would prefer to direct and not act, but I like it the other way as well. There’s things about it: I don’t have to worry about disagreements on my acting interpretation. It’s hard to say just how crazy you are about yourself in any context. I liked all the movies I directed. On Goin’ South., I looked at it as sort of an easy task. Other than the physical part. The top of the genre is Destry Rides Again [1939]. I did’nt have to beat Sierra Madre. or Bicycle Thief. [1948] to be in the ballgame. I was sometimes overly, intentionally, obscure in everything I did around the period of Drive, He Said.. Hey, it’s there. If they get it, fine. It’s there, if they don’t get it, it’s not my problem. In other words, I was a bit cavalier in that area.  
 
It’s the momentum of doing things - that’s why things are different - why you do take different approaches. My metaphor for Goin’ Sout.h was a Whitman’s chocolate box. It was, very specifically, commercially inclined: It’s a romance, it’s a comedy. I thought, “Well, this is a piece I like, it says a lot, it’s on a good subject, male-female relations, it’s based in reality - this law did exist after the Civil War. Comedy comes from real.” I cast the picture, so I love the cast. I don’t think any other movie’s had as many new actors in it who would prove to be the million-dollar-actors shortly thereafter. I felt good about that. I’ve never done any picture where they had a 20-years-later reunion, which they had. Danny [DeVito] threw one - he decided he wanted to do it. I still call all this company, whatever position they had, the ex-Moon [his character’s name] gang.