Brando (48 page)

On
The Godfather
I had signs and cue cards everywhere—on
my shirtsleeves, on a watermelon and glued to the scenery. If it was a long day and the director reshot a scene many times, I might know the lines by the end of the day, but I didn’t have to memorize them in advance. I also discovered that not memorizing increased the illusion of reality and spontaneity, a step beyond the groping for words and so-called mumbling that some critics complained about in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Everything about acting demands the illusion of spontaneity. When an actor knows what he’s going to say, it’s easy for the audience to sense that he’s giving a writer’s speech. But if he hasn’t memorized the words, he not only doesn’t know what he’s going to say, he’s not rehearsed
how
he’s going to say it or how to move his body or nod his head when he does. Whereas when he
sees
the lines, his mind takes over and responds as if it were expressing a thought for the first time, so that his gestures are spontaneous.

   Later, when I was making another picture, a stinker based on a novel by Steve Shagan called
The Formula
, I got rid of the notes and began using a better method to accomplish the same purpose: speaking my lines into a miniature tape recorder, then hiding it in the small of my back with a wire connected to tiny speakers that I stuck in my ears like hearing aids. When I was acting, I turned the tape recorder on and off with a remote hand switch, listened to my voice and repeated the lines simultaneously in the same way that speeches are translated into different languages at the UN. It took a little practice, but it wasn’t hard, and because the earphones were small and hidden, audiences didn’t know the difference. Subsequently I came up with a still better system: instead of a tape recorder, I hid a microphone under my clothes over my chest, put a two-way radio in the small of my back, and taped sending and receiving antennas on my legs. From about a hundred yards offstage, Caroline Barrett, who succeeded Alice as my assistant, now reads my
lines to me into a microphone. As she speaks, I hear them in my earphones and repeat them. Since she also has a two-way radio, Caroline can hear my voice, as well as the voices of the other actors in the scene, and simply follows the script line by line. When I repeat the lines simultaneously, the effect is one of spontaneity.

   People often say that an actor “plays” a character well, but that’s an amateurish notion. Developing a characterization is not merely a matter of putting on makeup and a costume and stuffing Kleenex in your mouth. That’s what actors used to do, and then called it a characterization. In acting everything comes out of
what
you are or some aspect of
who
you are. Everything is a part of your experience. We all have a spectrum of emotions in us. It is a broad one, and it’s the actor’s job to reach into this assortment of emotions and experience the ones that are appropriate for his character and the story. Through practice and experience, I learned how to put myself into different moods and states of mind by thinking about things that made me laugh or be angry, sad or outraged; I developed a mental technique that allowed me to address certain parts of myself, select an emotion and send something akin to an electrical impulse from my brain to my body that enabled me to experience the emotion. If I had to feel worried, I’d think about something that worried me; if I was supposed to laugh, I thought about something that was hilarious.

Sometimes, however, I had to experience an emotion I hadn’t felt, like the reaction to dying; then I just had to imagine it. At the end of
The Young Lions
, I was shot fatally in the face. It was a wound, I decided, that would cause my blood to flow out of my brain, and that was how I would die. I imagined how I would be affected by blood suddenly draining out of my brain: I’d feel energy ebbing out of me, then for an instant realize that I was mortally wounded and that my life was over—all this
within a few seconds. In the death scene in
Mutiny on the Bounty
, I wanted to appear to be in shock from having been fatally burned. I asked the crew to make a lot of ice; then I lay on top of it until my body was chilled and I was shivering and shaking and my teeth were chattering. While my body was responding physically to the cold, I also thought about how much I loved the Tahitian woman I had fallen for, what it was about her that I loved, and then about the pain, amazement and surprise of dying.

The bed scene in
The Men
also taught me to save my performance for the close-up, which usually comes at the end of the day. In a long shot you don’t have to worry much about getting your emotions right; the physical action is what counts. The camera is so far away that it won’t see the emotions you’re supposed to experience, though I learned that it’s always wise to check what’s behind you; in a scene with a busy background, audiences can easily lose you, so you have to do something to help them focus on you.

In a medium shot, your body language and gesticulations become more important, though you have to turn up your emotions a little. But it’s in the close-up that you really crank it up. The acting you do there is best conveyed by thinking, because if you’re thinking right, it will show. If you’re not thinking right, if you’re busy
acting
, you’re dead.

Correction: “think” is not the right word; you
experience
the emotion you want to convey. That’s when you reach into your spectrum of emotions and send a signal from your brain to execute one of them. The close-up says everything. It’s then that an actor’s learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away unconsciously at its experience of reality. The audience should share what you are feeling in a close-up. I have often reminded myself that I wasn’t working in “motion words,” but in “motion pictures.” The close-up reveals your thoughts and feelings by the expression on your
face, whether it’s the raising of an eyebrow, chasing a piece of food around your mouth with your tongue, or making a tiny, fleeting statement by frowning. In a close-up the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage. In a large theater it is the entire proscenium arch, so that no matter what you do, it becomes a theatrical event. When your image is so large and the audience has such an immediate perspective, the actor can enable the audience to experience his emotions in an intimate and personal way if he does his job right.

But as I’ve said, there are some parts where less is more, and underplaying is important, and never more so than in the close-up, when your entire face fills the screen. An example is the scene in
The Godfather
in which Don Corleone dies while playing with his grandchild in a garden. A few moments before he collapses, he surprises his grandson by stuffing a piece of orange peel into his mouth to simulate a set of teeth. I invented that business with the orange; I simply made it up on the spot. I used to do the same thing with my own kids; it’s funny under almost any circumstances because it changes your personality hilariously, but in that scene it had a resonance that made the Godfather more human, and it was the kind of thing I thought the gentle character I had in mind would have done.

   When I saw
The Godfather
the first time, it made me sick; all I could see were my mistakes and I hated it. But years later, when I saw it on television from a different perspective, I decided it was a pretty good film.

   I had a lot of laughs making
The Godfather
. Mafiosi were always dropping in to watch us, and there were a lot of playful high jinks. In a scene in which the Godfather’s family bring him home from the hospital after a failed assassination attempt, they must carry him up a flight of stairs on a stretcher, and before we did the shot, I told the cameraman to give me three
hundred pounds of lead weights. Then I hid them under my blankets, which made the stretcher weigh over five hundred pounds, but nobody knew this except the cameraman and me. My family started carrying me up the stairs, but they couldn’t make it; they were strong, but before long they were wringing with sweat, huffing and puffing and unable to get up the stairs. I said, “C’mon, you weaklings, I’m gonna fall off this thing if you don’t get me up there. This is ridiculous!”

The camera operator nearly fell off his stool laughing, while Francis barked at the four men to hurry up. One of them kept muttering, “What the hell’s going on? How can this guy weigh so much?”

After five or six takes, I raised the blanket and showed them the lead weights.

   After we finished the picture, Sam Spiegel’s secretary called me and said that an FBI agent wanted to interview me and would I be willing to talk to him? I said I would, and she told me that the agent would call me from San Diego. He did so, and we had a five- or six-hour conversation that covered a lot of ground. He wanted to know everything I knew about the Mafia, about making and financing
The Godfather
, whether I’d made any secret contributions to anybody, and so forth. He gave me lots of opportunities to rat on the Mob, but I smelled a different kind of rat.

“Listen,” I said finally, “I have children and a good life, and I wouldn’t want to see anybody hurt or threatened, so if I knew anything, which I don’t”—this was not entirely true—”I wouldn’t tell you.” I’d decided that he was probably a member of the Mafia trying to find out whether or not I’d given the FBI any information that would hurt them. I’d gotten to know quite a few mafiosi, and all of them told me they loved the picture because I had played the Godfather with dignity. Even today I can’t pay a check in Little Italy. If I go to a restaurant for a plate
of spaghetti, the manager always says, “Come on in, Mario, your money’s no good here.… Look, everybody, here’s the Godfather, the Godfather’s here.”

   A few years after
The Godfather
, I went back to Little Italy for
The Freshman
, a comedy in which I played a benign gangster with a striking resemblance to Don Corleone. When I was dining one night with some of the crew, a man came over and said, “Mr. Gotti would like to see you and say hello. He’s right across the street.”

“That’s nice,” I said. I was curious, and with four or five other people from the picture, I went across the street to a shabby storefront or club house of some sort filled with mafiosi and decorated with a big sign that proclaimed
THIS ROOM IS BUGGED
.

With a silver pompadour as sleek as his silk suit, John Gotti was playing cards with several other men, and I went over to his table and said, “How do you do.”

Gotti extended his hand but didn’t get up. I think he didn’t want to lose face in front of the others by appearing to be respectful, so he sat there with a smile and introduced me to his friends, an extraordinary group of characters straight out of the Mafia yearbook.

I’ve always liked to do magic tricks and often carry around a deck of cards with me, so I pulled one out of my pocket—it was a shaved deck used by magicians and card sharks—and said, “Take a card, John.”

When he did so I told him to put the card back and then shuffle the cards. While he shuffled, I said I wanted to borrow a handkerchief, and instantly all of the mafiosi pulled out white handkerchiefs and waved them at me so that the place looked like a washline on Monday morning. I chose one, held the deck in my hand and told Gotti to pull away the handkerchief. When he did the only card left was the one he’d picked. As he looked at it, I said something like “You know, you could make a living this way.”

I didn’t say anything more because suddenly the whole room had become as quiet as a tomb at midnight; the only noise was some shuffling of feet.

Suddenly I realized what everyone was thinking: had I tried to make a fool out of the boss in front of his crew? They didn’t know what to believe. They looked back and forth at each other, trying to decide how to respond. I could feel the cerebral energy in the room as they mentally threw back their shoulders and asked themselves, Is this guy trying to show
disrespect
to John? Apparently no one thought it was funny.

“Thanks a lot, Mr. Gotti,” I said after an awkward pause. “It was nice to talk to you,” and I left without saying anything except good-bye.

Later one of the mafiosi called and said Gotti wanted to invite me to be his guest at a prizefight, but I told him I was too busy and couldn’t make it.

   Many articles about
The Godfather
called it my “comeback.” I never understood what they meant except that it was a picture in which I played the title role and it made a lot of money, while several of my last pictures hadn’t. Everything in Hollywood is measured in terms of money. If I had been in a stupid picture and it made millions of dollars, I would have been congratulated everywhere I went on my success. But because a good picture like
Burn!
didn’t make money it was considered unsuccessful. In Hollywood they congratulate you on your ability to transfer currency from the pockets of the audience to theirs because that’s their only measure of success. Any picture that makes money, no matter how stupid, vulgar, childish or inane, is embraced as a triumph.

It is different in other parts of the world, where making pictures of quality is as important as the box office. It has always
been a mystery to me why countries like Italy, France and England, which have produced fine directors and fine actors, have never been able to capture much of the film market. The British have made many wonderful films, but have seldom had a financial blockbuster. British television is the best there is—a giant compared to our network dwarfs—yet Hollywood still rules the television and film market throughout the world. It is a tragedy.