Jack Nicholson Interview - Part 10

by Peter Bogdanovich

from Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin

It’s better dialog.  
It’s better dialog. You know, like so many scenes start in the middle of the scene, it’s not playwriting. “Here we are down at the Ice House,” or “My goodness, we better start moving fast.” This is the form of the no-play. “My goodness, here we are in the 15th century. Emperor Chiu was abdicated.” And somebody, like a Greek chorus, says these things. It don’t work in movies.  
 
Did you love working with Kubrick, what was that like?  
Loved it.  
 
Did it drive you nuts, the many takes he did?  
No.  
 
Ever?  
Well, the double-edged sword of his incredible, demanding nature - it can get you insane, definitely. But I was ready for it. A lot of that with him is pure technique. I’m lucky, I’m a good technical actor, understand it because of all the other jobs I’ve done. I knew him, we liked one another, I’d known him for a long time.  
 
Weren’t you going to do Napoleon. with him?  
Yeah.  
 
Whatever happened with that?  
A lot of his work on Napoleon . went into Barry Lyndon . [1975]. He had a lot of revolutionary ideas about how to approach a costume picture. I’d met him when he was here - he called me on the phone - he says, “This is Stanley Kubrick.” I said, “All right, who is this?” He says, “No, it’s Stanley Kubrick.” “Really? How are you?” “Fine.” He says, “You don’t know this, but I’m thinking of doing a film on Napoleon. And my plans involved having only English actors. But I broke my leg and while I was in bed I saw Easy Rider.. Because of your performance I’m going to adjust the way I do the picture. Would you be interested in playing Napoleon?” That’s where the conversation started. And then we talked and so forth. And even at the time when he finally told me he couldn’t do it because of the money, I felt pretty confident - even made some inquiries - that I could have got him the money. But for some reason, he didn’t do that picture.  
 
So, on The Shining., the number of takes - that didn’t bother you.  
That’s a double-edged sword. I’ve always said about that picture that what I loved about working with Stanley was - there was no pressure.  
 
Really? Even though you were asked to do so many takes.  
For an actor, all the pressure is, “Am I gonna be any good?” If you know for a fact - whether you agree or not - this particular director is not going to stop until he has it exactly the way he wants it, you’re gonna succeed. If it takes you 90 takes - it’s technically hard - like if you gotta eat a full breakfast, you can’t hide eggs and orange juice. So if you’re gonna have to eat 28 of ‘em, it’s gonna be difficult - a lot of things like that. But Stanley, I believe, loved making movies as his life so much that he proceeded from a very unique point of view, which is: The longer it took, the better he liked it. This is like blasphemy in the movie business. But I think he so loved movie-making and doing it that the longer it took, the better he liked it.  
 
He’s very complimentary about everybody else’s movies. He loves other people’s movies. He’s not terribly fond of actors. He’d come in with a brown paper bag and say, “Come on upstairs.” “Whaddya mean?” “I want to show you something. Don’t tell anybody I got this.” And he had some really wild morgue photos and they were, literally, in a brown paper bag. He said, “I don’t know if I should even show you this, but I have to show you what this actually looks like,” and he’d show it to me.  
 
And I was startled. Oddly, in England - you know this - the crew has to vote in order for you to shoot overtime. Stanley comes over and says, “I don’t know why I even ask them - they never vote to give me overtime. They never once said ‘Okay, we’ll shoot.’” Not once. And he grumbled to me about this. And they never would. Not once. They’d stop, hold a meeting of the crew. But he knew when he asked them. He said, “They never vote to give me that extra overtime.” And it wasn’t like they didn’t get paid for it - this was their reaction to his approach.  
 
Did he tell you what he wanted?  
Every scene we did, we rehearsed for a day. We never shot the scene on the day we started rehearing the scene. I don’t like rehearsing that much, but the double-edged sword - takes don’t bother me. It’s just another chance to do it good.  
 
Would he tell you something specific that he wanted different. Or would he just say, “Let’s do it again.”  
Depends. For instance, I hadn’t pre-thought the number of takes, so the first scene I kind of reached out in an improvisational vein and took a cheese sandwich off a passing tray. Well, baby, I didn’t know I was gonna eat 57 of them that day. A cheese sandwich, you can kind of fake it a little bit.  
 
I don’t know if I talked him into it - I may have done - but I strongly encouraged him to use the Video Assist. So, because of the Video Assist, he says, “You didn’t touch the cheese sandwich,” or some version of that. I said, “Oh, no, Stanley, I did.” “No, you didn’t.” “Well,” I said, “let’s look at it.” Once he saw that I had - of course, I know if I touched it or not - that was one of the things he may not have been so sure about A Video Assist. That might not have been why he wanted another take, is the point I’m making. He never challenged me about those things afterward. If I did something wrong, he’d tell me. He’s very exacting. In every way, not just with the performance the complete way he thinks the scene should be. I consider Shelley’s [Duvall] job the toughest job - other than you’re in the North Pole for two years - that I’d ever seen an actor have to do.  
 
Why?  
Because 40 percent of that picture, she’s out of her mind. Well, this is a 14-month shoot, so an actor’s going to work for 5 or 6 months knowing they’re coming in and going to have to be in believable, bloodthirsty, and technically correct, insanity. Stanley’s way with Shelley: “Go in the back room, you’re not getting ot - come up with it.” He’d browbeat her into the performance, more or less. It was, “Go in there, come up with it.” Fortunately, it didn’t affect her the way I imagine it would affect me. But if I had to deal with that - because, you know, I dream - I wake up dreaming - it don’t leave ya.

You mean you wake up dreaming of the role?  
Yeah. I was in a deep depression - I couldn’t go by the mirror during Schmidt.. Every morning I thought, “Shit, I gotta go in there now and shower - I’m going to have look at this.” It was a task for me.  
 
The negative task?  
Because I got into the age of the character.  
 
When you saw The Shining. - did he use the last take or not, usually?  
Pretty much he used them. Some things that were freer form - like me chasing her around with the bat, some of that behavior was improvised - he may have used different takes. The other thing was - whether by design or in reality - I felt reinforced by the fact that he pretty much liked what I was doing on any given day. And I could get to where he thought I should be. We only had a few discussions on the adaptation. The biggest one was, “Stanley, why did you take the sexual part of the relationship out of this.” I’m seeing Jessica Lange, he’s seeing Shelley Duval. It was a part of the book and I wanted the ability to include the sexual element in with the scary element - to me, makes it more scary. I said, “So why did you do this? You know, I don’t agree.” Other than that, it was an easy book to adapt, actually.  
 
What did he say to that?  
Very short discussions with Stanley. He says, “Here’s why. You can’t have somebody in that part that the audience doesn’t mind a little bit that you kill him. It’s too frightening. I want somebody in that part that’s a little aggravating. “Okay, I get it.”  
 
For Reds. [1981], did you have to do a lot of research on Eugene O’Neill?  
I read a lot of books on him. I did a lot of research on his character. The most interesting research was - I asked Oona [O’Neill, his daughter]. I tried to do a regular actor’s interrogatory, I said, “No, look, what can you tell me about your father?” She said, “Nothing.” I said, “No, no, no, I don’t want you to analyze it. Just things like, did he use a comb, a brush, a toothpaste? Anything that can be a seed for something to act.” And, nothing.  
 
Nothing.  
She didn’t have one thing about him.  
 
Really?  
They never saw one another from the time she went off with Chaplin at 18 - never communicated. He was a tough, black Irishman. That’s what I liked about him. And, I’ll tell you, if I was writing a movie about him, I don’t know how you would dramatize this. But the cosmic reality of O’Neill - that the only dramatist who’s ever won the Nobel Prize could only write with a pencil and paper. Couldn’t dictate, couldn’t type, he could only write with the pencil and paper. At the end, he couldn’t hold onto a pencil. He had to contrive a way of bracing himself in a chair, and very small writing. As I recall, Iceman Cometh. is written on 13 or 15 shirt cardboards. Emotionally flamboyant about his work. Given to tirades, hated all actors, except two. Mumbled in the audience. Went through these cycles: One play, he won the Pulitzer Prize; the next play, they’d say it was the most rotten thing in history - just bang the living bejeezus out of him. Emperor Jones. - there’d never been a great dramatic part written for a black actor in the history of American theater. Not only great - it was the first one. They’d never covered miscegenation on the stage.  
 
He was extremely revolutionary, even though you’d come across lines like, “Um, I have pesky cold.” As black as his heart may have seemed to some people who knew him well, his heart was in it. Mind you, the frustration of a man this exacting. In a fit of rage, he tore up 5 or 6 plays. He had conceived of a 13-play series, starting with Electra., on the history of America from that period onward. And had written 5 or 6 of them, and threw the only copies of them into the fireplace in a fit of rage. I’m not obsessed with research, but that was a piece of research that I enjoyed. I loved finding out about him.  
 
What was it like working with Warren [Beatty] as a director?  
Fabulous.  
 
You guys were friends.  
Absolutely. Dear friends. Another short conversation with a director: “You know, Warren, all America knows about Eugene O’Neill is the jacket cover of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. - this very thin, gaunt guy leaning against the mast of a sailboat. I can act anything but I can’t act thin. It just don’t feel right.” His answer was a great director’s answer: “After you play him, they’ll think Eugene O’Neill looks like you. That’s the nature of movies.” Whether that’s good or bad, it is phenomenologically true to a certain extent.  
 
You told me you knew Terms of Endearment [1983] was an Oscar part.  
Well, I said I knew, I’ve regretted it ever since. Just so I wouldn’t bore people, I’d express arrogance - you know, the way theatrical people do just to kind of stir it up a little bit. That was the kind of thing - “Oh, I’ll win the Oscar for this.” And then having to go wire-to-wire on it.  
 
What do you mean, “wire-to-wire”?  
Well, from that moment on till the year later I win the Oscar, it’s a long time.  
 
It’s a performance that seems natural, organic.  
I love working with Jim. It’s a brilliantly written part, but the organic part of it is: my sister/mother June’s husband was an astronaut. They didn’t have astronauts, but he was in the last group of top test pilots who flew and broke the sound barrier and all that. He was that kind of flier you read about in The Right Stuff.. They dazzled me. I remember Murray and his friend Slick Goodwin, who’s in The Right Stuff., arriving in Long Island together from Egypt. Well, there wasn’t anybody else in the world who could say, “We just flew in from Egypt today.” I’m 10 or 12, but it’s still like - wow! Look at these shining, gorgeous guys - heroes. So I knew from the inside a lot of the character.

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