Jack Nicholson Interview - Part 9

by Peter Bogdanovich

from Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin

You had a 20-year reunion?  
Danny had one and we looked at the picture. Looked great. We loved it. It holds up. Two Jakes., was [scenarist Robert] Towne’s and my literary affectation. We always wanted, and Towne thought, we would make 3 movies with that character [from Chinatown.]. It was intended as a trilogy. Towne sort of knew all three stories right from the very beginning. What we wanted to do was make the movie so that I was the difference in age since the last story. No one had done that. So, Two Jakes. is sort of the middle part of a trilogy. It has a more pastoral quality. Roman [Polanski] was very complimentary - he felt it was a perfect fit with the first picture. It was a collaboration. It’s a job that I did more out of expediency, I would have preferred if we made it the first time and Towne directed [as planned], that would have suited me much better.  
 
He lost his confidence on that [Towne refused to use Robert Evans in the film just before shooting started].  
I can’t interpret that. For me, before, during and after was: “Please, we’ve got too many backstage stories about this thing. Too much of the wrong kind of interest. We’re gonna kill ourselves with it.” From the very beginning - because it was complicated - I said, “Don’t talk about it.” It’s not like spies in World War II, so I’m sure I had talked about it. I could write a book - let’s put it that way. Once I’m in the blocks, I just do the picture. And I was delighted, it’s my favorite period - I love the forties and all that. I liked what Towne had observed: America is moving now, the war is over, the men are back, they’ve got past history but they clearly wanted to get on with it. They clearly wanted to go forward. I know it well. I was a kid, but those were beautiful times.  
 
You were happy with Chinatown..  
Beautiful picture. Roman’s a world-class director. You could eat his setups. And extremely, academically Eastern European. He’s by the book on one hand, and totally individual on the other, which to me is the bulls’-eye. The style of Chinatown may have worried people in terms of “What’s the audience gonna do?” Passenger. too. But I felt that Chinatown. would be well-received by an audience. I had confidence in it in ways other people mightn’t. I had an interest in what the French New Wave called “the new mystery” - what McLuhan was talking about - entropy in communication. You know, that you draw an audience in with less information, rather than overly satiate them with more.  
 
When you’re talking about work, it’s the way you work. The beauty of the movie business is: Yes, you have connection and concerns with the total universe and the world and everybody in it - but you know you’re inside something that has a different standard. There are no real guns. Yes, people get killed making movies - the saddest thing that can happen to you - to be around that. But, there’s no guns in the movie business. That’s why you’re freer to say this or that or the other thing - I don’t care. It’s inside and yet you’re trying to emanate universally.  
 
How did you feel about The Fortune. [1975].  
Carole Eastman’s script. She gets attracted to different things. She liked the extreme stunt level of that period. That’s why the crazy, goofy quality of Osco, my character, and his curly hair was some kind of an homage to Houdini, a leading light in period. He’d read magazines of a guy who sat on a flagpole. You know, flagpole-sitting, marathon-dancing, all this kind of stunt stuff was very much the fashion of the period. That’s why when he’s frustrated he goes outside the plane. He’s not an admirable or courageous person. In fact, under pressure you see him collapse and confess. These are very idiosyncratic non-traditional kind of characters. Warren [Beatty], who I have always thought was one of the great comic actors, is hysterical in the movie. He was much funnier than me in the picture. I laugh more at him automatically - if everybody’s doing good and you’re one of them, you’re gonna find the other person easier to laugh at.  
 
Was that re-cut by the studio?  
No, Mike [Nichols] had final cut.  
 
And after that you did [One Flew Over the] Cuckoo’s Nest..  
There’s another one - I “knew” this was a commercial picture. We had shot a day or two before we had all the money. “Michael [Douglas, the producer], I’ll take their position. Don’t worry about this.” I was that confident and Michael knew it. They saw the first day’s dailies and that was the end of that discussion. There was a reality and they saw there was something good there.  
 
What made you think it was commercial - the story?  
Yeah. Story. Don Devlin and I actually inquired about the rights when the book came out. I was too young to play the part. But, as a producer, I thought of this as an - “oooh”!  
 
Kirk [Douglas] was going to do it for years.  
He’s the person we found got it. We were told, “Yeah, the rights are available for $200,000,” whatever it was. I did not have the money. We just made the off-chance inquiry. Because we thought it was very commercial - I’ve heard some of the stories about its early history. I knew Kirk wanted to do it - that’s why he did the play and invited everybody from Hollywood. The reaction to the mental illness element of it frightened that audience he had put together. Someone had somebody in that situation - it was an unlucky thing. He’s still furious that he didn’t do it. He wanted to do it for years. I turned it down with Hal [Ashby], for instance, whom you know I love working with. I had very real ideas about how the book should be adapted.

Hal came to you with it?  
Yeah. I turned it down with Michael, when he first came to me. I turned it down a couple of times, I had 20 years of knowing it was great but I knew the script had to be right. Then Michael brought Milos [Foreman] back, Milos started as a screenwriter. And it wasn’t like really complicated, it was very specific what I thought about this. When I told him a couple of these adjustments that I felt needed to be made, and then they went and made them and when I read it - I’m in.  
 
Do you remember what the changes were?  
A couple of very simple things. The main one being: The movie has to be less expressionistic. You don’t want to go into weird monologues with the Indian and rolling mist. You want to photograph the reality of the person having that hallucination. The objective reality as opposed to an expressionistic thing. As opposed to trying to do a special effect where a razor turns into a gnawing beast and do it that way. You just photograph the actor who was having this experience, that was the main thing. Get this script to where you’re photographing objective reality, not expressionistic imagery - which the book is filled with and the scripts always were.  
 
That was a big governor. Milos is a good writer, took it, did it, script fine. The other thing - from having had the advantage of seeing the play once - I knew that the play stopped with the Indian monologs. In the play there are long monologs for the Indian. I never thought that they could work in a movie. Incidentally, all of the different productions of the play had been very successful with the audience.  
 
So you asked for the Indian monologs to be taken out?  
Yeah, I suggested that they shouldn’t be in the script. There were other things about it. I felt very strongly about and felt that I was correct. We didn’t have the ability that we have today to turn an electric razor into a gnawing beast. The special-effects revolution hadn’t occurred, so I see a bunch of hinky makeup in my mind and fake stuff, you know. So in terms of what the scenes are and what the camera is going to be actually seeing, I felt this had to be strictly objective reality, that there was more than enough that would be interesting. I like when I’m in something that I think, “Ooh, this is gonna get ‘em.”  
 
Was that the most successful picture you’d been in up to then?  
It was the most successful picture in history up till then. It was the top-grossing picture in history up till then. The Star Wars. reign, those kinds of pictures came later. The championship didn’t last long.  
 
Is it true that Coppola asked you to do The Godfather.?  
Yes.  
 
Why did you decide not to do it?  
The same year I turned down Godfather and The Sting. A lot of that was because of what else I felt I had to be doing. I was perfect for The Godfather. - I don’t think I would have turned it down today. But at that time, it was like Tony Franciosa and Ben Gazarra were the only Italians acting. I felt like, the Italian actors should have it - it was very idealistic of me.  
 
You felt you weren’t really right for it?  
I felt I was very right for it. I understood completely why they wanted to cast me. Actors read certain books, Godfather was one of them, Lonesome Dove., Before anybody’s making it - the actors start asking, “Who’s gonna make it.” This was, in actor’s terms, a can’t miss.  
 
What was [Elia] Kazan like on The Last Tycoon. [1976].  
Fantastic.  
 
You didn’t have a big part in it.  
No, but it was fantastic. It was more of a favor, but I wanted to work with Kazan, whom all actors totally idolize. I knew him already. I played tennis with him down at [Robt.] Evans’ - very competitive guy. This is what I loved: I’m sitting waiting, he comes right in, he looks me in the eye and says, “Now I’m gonna tell you exactly what we were doing in this period about all the communists and all that business. I’m gonna tell you exactly what we were doing, why certain people did what they did,” including him, and exactly what this guy, whom I visually based on a real-life guy who came out to inform the studios what they were gonna do.  
 
Some of these guys they were half-union, half-socialistically inclined. Hard to know. He told me exactly what these scenes were about. Exactly why the guy did what he did, what he had come out here to do, what he would do. In about 15 minutes he told me everything. And pretty much, that’s what I did. I don’t even remember the shooting that much because I pretty much laid on Kazan. It was a short part. To me it was the first friendly communist ever done in a Hollywood movie. You know what I mean? And I pretty much played it the way Kazan thought it was.  
 
Why do you think the picture didn’t work?  
It’s a love story and the middle’s soft. The frame of that picture is extremely good. Mitchum, all of the other - people, casting, more star actors around. You read these things and you know there’s something intentionally pastel, even with the novel. It’s the Great Gatsby., it’s the style of that particular novelist [F. Scott Fitzgerald]. This movie needed real heat in the middle of it, in the love story. We often make the mistake of honoring a concept of a character, of an element, of a movie that doesn’t serve it as a movie. It’s a choice you make. To some degree after the first picture - I felt I had to allow myself to be more confined by the narrative than I had been. I had to be clear. I tell a very rambling story myself in life. And that’s the way I like to tell a story. But I felt like, “Okay, I have to accept some certain rules here.”  
 
Well, that’s what you were doing on Cuckoo’s Nest. - you wanted to focus.  
 
Well, that story’s as clear as a bell. Yeah, focus, right. The style of the book would not serve the movie. And I felt it very strongly. Well, there’s a lot of things. As an actor, when I write, I almost don’t want the meaning of the line too clear. I like to leave space for the performance.