Paul Sutton: Before Lindsay Anderson cast you in if.... you had been actor for four years?
Malcolm McDowell: Yes, and four years is a long time when you are twenty two. When I was eleven, I stepped on stage in a school production of Aladdin and I felt at home. I suppose it was the showing off. The headmaster was a devotee of the theatre and he took me to The Old Vic, not just me but a whole group.
PS: What were you like as a schoolboy?
MM: Very confident. Even when I was beaten, and I was beaten regularly because I had a Northern accent and an attitude. Whenever I was asked to do something I would always ask why?? don't ask why? just do it! Why? There was that period of adjustment of learning the rules. The headmaster was very smart because he made me a prefect. He gave me a position of responsibility a year before he should have done, so that he pulled me in to his side and got rid of my rebellious tendency. I had a lot of energy which I could then channel into the school instead of kicking against it. I was very sad to leave. I spent my holidays in Aintree in Liverpool, which was a great place but I was desperate to get out into the world. I went to The Royal Shakespeare Company and I was there for eighteen months. I loathed it. I did half a season at the Aldwych and the other half at Stratford, playing small parts. I certainly didn't learn anything about acting when I was there. All I learned was how to control my laughter on stage because there was nothing else going on of any interest to me. I thought the productions were poor and the actors uninspiring, except for Ian Holm.
PS: When people talk about Ian Holm they often say that in films he has not fulfilled the potential he showed on the stage.
MM: I agree. I think that's true. For me there's no electricity in his film
performances but his stage performances were staggering. I don't think I have
ever seen a performance quite like his Henry The Fifth.
PS: Lindsay is said to have hated the work done by the Royal Shakespeare Company
at this time. He accused it of being full of pretension; of actors striking
poses.
MM: Yes. He hated that. But I watched Ian Holm every night and he was riveting. He was exciting. He was the only star actor at Stratford I watched at all. Scofield came in at the end but I didn't get to work with him. I've always admired his work. But the actors I really admired were John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.
PS: I get the impression that Gielgud and Richardson were almost pushed into Lindsay Anderson's circle. They were perceived as the antithesis of what he was doing.
MM: They sort of were but he loved that. And he loved working with them. It was a great delight for him to direct them. And he really helped them. They gave fabulous performances in his production of David Storey's Home. With Lindsay there was no riding on reputation. For instance, I remember when I did a revival of Entertaining Mr. Sloane the production started off at The Royal Court and I agreed to transfer to the West End only if Lindsay Anderson was hired to re-jig it. The production wasn't right and if I was going to do another six months I wanted it right. They agreed and Lindsay came in. In the first notes session we had him he said to Beryl Reid, who had made her name with the play: Beryl, no more Widow Twanky. She talked about it for months afterwards: ? can? believe he said that! No more Widow Twanky! What he meant was: Get it in the bounds of reality. She needed to tone it down.
PS: I've never really been a fan of Joe Orton.
MM: Joe Orton is the finest playwright England produced in that period. He is the most important, the most influential, and he is the reason I act the way I do. I am a Joe Orton actor. When I read his stuff, I realized that what I do as an actor he did as a writer. He looks for the absurd and he pushes it.
PS: There's a lot of Joe Orton in Britannia Hospital?
MM: There is.
PS: There's a scene where Leonard Rossiter has to negotiate with Robin Askwith and the kitchen staff who have gone on strike. He makes a speech about working together. Lindsay stages it with the workers standing in a circle and Rossiter standing on an upturned soup tureen. Your ordinary director wouldn't go that far but Lindsay and his screenwriter, David Sherwin, go further. They put in the Joe Orton touch: every-one joins hands and sings Auld Lang Syne. It's amazing! All of his films with you are like that, full of Ortonesque moments where he plays beyond the scene to create something wonderful, like the scene early in O Lucky Man! where Peter Jeffrey sends you out on your first assignment then calls you back to give you an apple!
MM: Absolutely. And isn't it Epic? The giving of the apple is the Epic moment. It is the John Ford moment right there. It's amazing. Have you noticed also, in Lindsay's films, say when a character is going through the door, they look, pause, hold the door, and leave the hand on the door as they walk through it. That's a Lindsay Anderson shot.
PS: You see it in O Lucky Man! when you enter the church.
MM: That's right. And this is another Lindsay Anderson shot, looking round like this, the body facing away from the camera and the head turning to look at it. It is a very interesting angle. You are going on but looking back. There is something very Epic about it. When he was directing me in if.... his agenda was "Get Malcolm's confidence and I'll get what I want." He created the atmosphere in which I could act. And he does it so well that you don't even know he's pulling the strings. An example of a brilliant piece of direction he gave me was in the beating scene, which I think is one of his favorite scenes. When I get up, I wipe my eye, but with my back to the camera. That's Lindsay. Just this movement of the arm, from the back. He is so brilliant. Acting is all about movement. Most actors don't move.
PS: When he cast you as Mick Travis in if.... you were acting in an unadmired production of Twelfth Night Is it true he walked out when he went along to see it?
MM: He didn't walk out. He just didn't bother to stay for the second act. Which was my big bit, so I thought I've lost the part. I didn't know the man then, but he would never judge an actor by some silly production. He could see way past that. He would also never ever ask an actor to come in and read because that is such a load of crap. It so pisses me off that third-rate directors ask actors to come in to "read" a piece of text.
PS: You had to audition for if....?
MM: Acting out scenes. That was different. I was a young actor hustling for roles, rushing to every audition that came along.
PS: Carrying your portfolio and wearing your Lucky Man smile?
MM: Exactly. I was working as a messenger boy in Victoria Street, which allowed me time off to do the auditions. I had an agent. He saw me walk on in a production of Henry The Fifth I didn't have a word in the play but the part got me an agent! a guy called Al Mitchell, with a company called Hazel Malone. She had a stable of young actors, the most famous being Judy Geeson. She had Robin Askwith, I think. He was in if...?
PS: I've read his biography. It was a good laugh. He seems a good chap.
MM: Oh, he's funny, Robin.
PS: Lindsay Anderson saw him in a school play and hired him for if.... on the strength of it.
MM: Really?
PS: Yes. And though he only had a small part in the film he said he was required to be on set every day.
MM: Yes, he was around. It's funny but the set of if.... was very cliquey. Shooting was exactly as it was in the film. The three rebels and Christine hung together, and the small grotty boys kept themselves to themselves. It was just like school.
PS: With the extras stuck away in dormitories?
MM: All the extras were kids who went to Cheltenham College. We got those for free. Or they got a sticky bun or something. Those were the days.
PS: I think the soundtrack to if... is quite inspired, both the use of the Congolese Missa Luba and the music scored by Marc Wilkinson, where did he come from?
MM: He did the music for the productions at the National Theatre. I wanted to put a copy in the record store in A Clockwork Orange. It's a really good soundtrack, Stanley. Can I put it over here? But Stanley wouldn't let me.
PS: I adore the way Lindsay uses the music to feed on from the astonishing scene of Arthur Lowe in his bedroom, with Mary McLeod -
MM: Playing the recorder. Oh, fairest isle... It's beautiful. Haunting. Fantastic!
PS: Yes. He brings in the score to lift the notes and the film to a higher, poetic, level. He cuts to Mona Washbourne in blissful reverie then, naughtily to the two boys sweetly in bed together.
MM: if.... is a masterpiece! End of story! And it made a lot of money. It was hugely successful.
PS: And it's reputation grows with every screening. It's up to No.11 in the BFI list of great British films.
MM: And where is O Lucky Man! There's a Carry On film on that list and not O Lucky Man!?
PS: It's because O Lucky Man! has not been widely seen.
MM: We've got to get the word out. I saw the film again today and I was amazed by it.
PS: In 1994, when it was screened on television, Dilys Powell, writing in the Sunday Times, picked it as the film of the week and said: It's a film we should be boasting about. If we analyze it, it is the portrait of England told through one man's smile, which is why the poster image (of you smiling) is so important. At the start of the film, which is the start of your character's adulthood, he has the perfect smile, a smile you can trust, and it gets him a job selling coffee in the North East of England. At the end of the film, having taken part in adventures beyond the imagination of all but the blessed, Adventures That Tell of England, he has lost the ability to smile. At an audition for a part in a film, a film director, played by Lindsay Anderson, tries to get you to smile. He even hits you with the script. A smile breaks forth but it is a very different smile from the one at the start of the film. You've been Englanded to coin a term.
MM: He went on slapping me because I wasn't smiling enough. David Sherwin had written: Mick then smiles the smile of success. But you try smiling when you've just been hit with a ten pound script! They filmed and filmed. And I was slapped and slapped. And, of course, Lindsay used the second take or something. The enigmatic look. It certainly wasn't the "smile of success". You could take from it whatever you wanted.
PS: It's a great touch in a very intelligent film. It reminds me of Antonioni Avventura At the end of that film, a woman puts a hand on a man's shoulder, and the whole film is encapsulated in that touch. It's a touch that speaks of forgiveness and of comfort and we realize that the film which seemed to be "about" the search for a missing woman is really about the coming together of two lonely people. You can count the truly great films of world cinema on ten fingers and ten toes and Lindsay Anderson made two of them.
MM: You are right. You are absolutely right. O Lucky Man! is a very dense film. It is long and it's episodic - Lindsay called it "picaresque" He said is was pure Sullivan Travels.
PS: It's a film you originated. You wrote the first scenes.
MM: When he read the scenes I had wrote, which went up to the explosion at the secret rocket place, he said it wasn't very good, and it wasn't, but that didn't matter. It didn't matter what I had written because all Lindsay needed was a start. The scenes I wrote were just the hook to set the bait to get him back to work and involved. He didn't like to commit to films. Studios and producers offered him everything. And he waved them away. He read my piece and said: Is this meant to be a comedy? I said: You've got no sense of humor, Lindsay. You're a bloody Scot who lives in the South! He said: Don't be bloody ridiculous.?
PS: And David Sherwin came to the rescue?
MM: Lindsay was the auteur but he couldn't have done it without David. David was the bouncing board. He came over for dinner at my flat, with his first wife, Gail, and he said: Lindsay told me you wrote something. Can I read it? I said: Well, okay. Go in the bedroom. Read it. See what you think. He went away and read it and he came back to the sitting room and said: It's fucking brilliant! Malcolm, we are working on this! I don't know what Lindsay was talking about! This is brilliant! We went straight into working on it together.
PS: It's an astonishing film. The first Point of Astonishment is when Arthur Lowe, as the mayor of a Northern town, wearing a spivy moustache, invites Mick to a strip club and a performance of the local favorite, Chocolate Sandwich It's a truly incredible scene and it really does sum up The Northern Town.
MM: I know.
PS: I visited The Northern Town of My Birth recently and I looked in the local paper to see what was on. There were no cinemas. No theatre performances. There were only bingo halls and working men's clubs. Twenty-six working men's clubs!
MM: Incredible.
PS: And on the bill it is all "Male Vocalist, Girl Dancer + Comedian."
MM: Brilliant.
PS: Perhaps the most jaw-droppingly brilliant moment of the film is Arthur Lowe blacked-up as an African leader.
MM: Arthur Lowe is the best character actor I have ever worked with. He was fantastic in that part. And why not? Why not a black Hamlet? All the actors had several parts to play in the film but not me. I was in every scene but I couldn't see anything in the role. I actually went up to Lindsay's on the afternoon before we started filming and I said: I don't want to play this part.
PS: There's nothing like building the director's confidence.
MM: He said: What!? Lindsay, I am serious. I don't want to play the part. I hate the part. There is nothing for me to play. There are no real scenes. I have to wait all the way until the end before I get a decent speech.
PS: To the tramps?
MM: Yes, and I thought I rather blew it. By then we were all so tired. We'd been filming for a long time and I felt that I didn't quite pull it off. Later, Lindsay said: There is only one bit, Malcolm, where you are out of character, the little scene where you are talking to the women, the scene with Mona Washbourne outside Rachel Roberts' flat. I told Lindsay that what was going through my mind was that Mick wants to be one of the lads. He wants to make them feel that he is not an outsider. Lindsay said: That's not good enough and added: I missed it too, I'm not blaming you. So I was quite pleased when they cut it. Though they cut the whole reel. The scene with Rachel and the quoting of the poem.
PS: The poem is from a book of poetry given to you by the warden of a prison where you have spent five years having your soul cleansed and your "Innocence" restored. In the warden's fairy tale of life, the little book of poetry is all that you need. The whole point of the film is that you are not a part of society, you're an innocent reacting to events.
MM: Exactly. And how many reaction shots can an actor do?
PS: And over a three hour film? The acting instinct is to be the scene. Which is why it is such a difficult role to play.
MM: I found it a nightmare to do. It is the hardest thing I have ever done as an actor. It really is. Give me a psychotic any day because they are easy. O Lucky Man! was hard. I had to think of every little element, like coming behind corners like this, to give it a style.
PS: I love your acting in the scene in which you are tortured. You have got so little to do and yet it is fabulous. It's all in the face. You've got the cheeky smile and the bemused look.
MM: The thing overlying the scene is that Travis knows he is innocent. So he thinks that at the last minute they will realize he is innocent and they will release him, but they never do!
PS: That's where the writer and the director win, because the audience are thinking like Travis.
MM: Exactly.
PS: And Dudley Nichols comes in a with the tea trolley and charges him for the biscuit! The whole film is like that.
MM: It is. It's brilliant.
PS: I adore the scene where you move from the spectacular burnt earth of a nuclear explosion to the spectacular beauty of a wooded valley, and you fall asleep in a church decorated with food for the harvest festival. On waking, Mary McLeod gives you her breast to feed from. It's perfect.
MM: That's very Lindsay. Very Epic and poetic. I remember saying to Mary McLeod: "I'm very sorry about this." She said: "Oh, don't apologize, I rather like it."
PS: And the scene in if....when she walks naked through the school. It's glorious! It's psychologically true, and it's poetic.
MM: And only Lindsay used her! No one else employed her. I heard she was there at the reunion for the re-release of if.... I wish to God I had been there.
PS: That's your second bun! I saw you!
MM: Oh I know. It was savage.
PS: And the dead man's leg scene. Again, it's perfect screen acting.
MM: Yes. Dead Man's Leg today, Mrs. Kemp.?
PS: I think David Sherwin deserves a lot of credit. The way he writes for women is magnificent. In Britannia Hospital there's a wonderful rhythm to the lines said by Joan Plowright's character: "An insult to me is an insult to every unskilled operative in the hospital."
MM: She's a great actor. She's Lindsay's kind of actor, unlike, say Leonard Rossiter, who played the Hospital Administrator. Lindsay wanted a young Arthur Lowe but Rossiter wasn't on that wave-length. He's not an Epic actor, brilliant though he is. When casting the film, Lindsay looked at everybody.
PS: And everybody is in the film.
MM: Alan Bates is in it.
PS: Yes. You play Alan Bates later in the film, or at least your head and not his head is stitched onto the reanimated body.
MM: Yes.
PS: In the opening scene, three men are sitting round a picket fire and one of them is Robbie Coltrane, from the Harry Potter films.
MM: That's right. I'd forgotten that.
PS: And there is Brian Glover from "Yes", Mark Hamill from the "Star Wars" films, Gordon John Sinclair from "Gregory's Girl" And, of course, there is the full weight of The Great Lindsay Anderson Repertory Company.
MM: Including Arthur Lowe in his last film. He was very ill.
PS: A criticism of Britannia Hospital is that Graham Crowden's mad scientist is so large and commanding it threatens to upset the balance of the trilogy. He almost turns it into The Graham Crowden Trilogy.
MM: Graham is a master character actor, which is why you needed someone in the part of the Hospital Administrator who could balance it. With a different actor it would have been a different film and it would have had a different plight.
PS: You're exactly right. And it really misses the production design of Jocelyn Herbert. She was integral to the success of if.... and O Lucky Man!
MM: I agree.
PS: When you look at O Lucky Man! you really see what is missing from Britannia Hospital, for example, in the opening scenes, Jocelyn uses a lot of browns, the color of coffee, from the tan brown of your jumper to the black-brown of the coffee itself. In the factory scene with Christine Noonan, the factory walls are painted the same cheerful orange as the girl's overalls.
MM: Jocelyn is a great great artist.
PS: But there's no question that Britannia Hospital is not an interesting film.
MM: It's fascinating. It's incredible.
PS: And when you look closely at it you can really see the brilliance of its construction. In if.... Graham Crowden enters on a bicycle, singing "To Be a Pilgrim" the timing and the concept of his entrance is quite perfect. In Britannia Hospital his entrance is a variation on the entrance scene in if... This time he zooms in a Mercedes, scattering pickets as he goes. And stealing the nurses' parking spot. It is The Great British Trilogy.
MM: It is. Who else did anything as creative or ambitious? No one. As a person Lindsay could be the most cantankerous, belligerent son of a bitch you could ever wish to meet, and then he'd be the dearest friend who would get you through a difficult time in your life. There have been many great directors but very few poets in the cinema. Lindsay was both. He was The Master. No one touches the hem of his jacket. Nobody. And that's the truth.
PS: When Stanley Kubrick saw your performance in if.... he would accept no other actor in the role of Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Is it true that he even came to your flat to offer you the role?
MM: Yes he did. I didn't know that he didn't travel. I thought he was a regular guy. We were on the phone and I said: "Are you offering me the part?" Which apparently you never say. I wanted to stop all the pussyfooting about. After a long pause, he said: "Yes. Okay, Good." I said: "I'd like to talk to you more about it. Can you come to my house?" "Where is your house?" "In London, in Kensington. I'll give you the address." I gave him the address. He said: "Let me write that down." I had this incredible space, a studio, in a cul-de-sac in Kensington. All the casting was done in that studio. A lot of the writing was done in that room. All those things happened in this incredible studio. I wish I hadn't sold it now. It was a great place to live. Anyway, Stanley arrived in convoy. I looked out of my kitchen window and saw a land rover, a Mercedes, and another car slowly coming down the street. They took up all the parking spaces. Stanley gets out. He walked in and said: "Gee, this is a nice room. I could do the cat lady scene here." I said: "Oh oh, no, you can't!"
PS: You've often said how much you enjoyed working with Stanley Kubrick.
MM: Stanley was wonderful to work with. He was very freeing. He was like an artist throwing paint onto the canvas and seeing what sticks. If it sticks, great! If it didn't he would try another tack. He would just go for it. You've got go for it. You've got to throw the whole lot up there.
PS: It takes courage to throw the paint. If that is what Stanley did as a filmmaker, it is also what you did in that film as an actor.
MM: I really didn't know how to play Alex. I was very nervous about playing it. I knew it was a great part but I wasn't quite sure what I should do with it. On the Sunday before the Monday we started shooting, I got a call from Stanley. He said he had mumps. I was so happy, not happy that he was ill, but relieved that I had another week to prepare. I took the script to Lindsay and asked him for advice. He read it and said: "Thank God I'm not directing this!" I said: "That doesn't help me. That doesn't help." He said: "All right, Malcolm. There's a shot of you in if.... a close-up, when you open the doors in the gym, there's a nice close-up of you and you have this look, this smile, on your face. That's the way you play this part." And I went: "Lindsay, thank you." It was a masterful piece of direction. He had said something I could understand and knew how to do. And it gave me plenty of room to play with. It was a blueprint for the performance. The first scene we filmed was me in bed at the Ludovico center getting a shot in my ass from Madge Ryan. I acted it exactly as Lindsay told me to. And once I had done the first day I was home free. I was home.
PS: There are two parts to your performance in A Clockwork Orange the scenes in front of the camera and the voice over, the performance on the soundtrack.
MM: The voice-over is a performance in itself. I do that again in Gangster No.1 I try to make it totally spontaneous. As an actor I like to walk the tightrope. If I've got something difficult to do I work very hard on the text so that it becomes second nature. Then, when I play the scene, the words just come out. It is very important to channel a performance through the text. For instance, when I had to play H. G. Wells in Time After Time I thought I'd do some research. I asked the BBC to send me a recording of H.G. Wells' voice. They sent me one. I listened to it. He had a very high pitched South-East London whine. If I played him like that people would run out of the theatre! So you really have to serve the script. You break the script down into the scenes that you are doing, and you break those down into the moments that are important. It may be a line. It may be the space in between the lines. You make that decision.
PS: Yes see a lot of acting in the space between the lines in A Clockwork Orange. One moment that comes to mind is the climactic scene where you throw open your mouth so that the minister can feed you.
MM: Yes. Most great moments like that are not in the script. They are just ad-libs. Bless Stanley, actually, for letting me do it. Lindsay was very disciplined, very controlled, I could never have done that for Lindsay because he didn't require that kind of thing, but Stanley loved it. The other character in the scene, the Minister of the Interior, has a long expositional speech that goes on for three or four pages and I? just eating my food and listening. Alex knows he's got him by the balls, so he's getting a little cocky. I threw open my mouth. I only did it once, and Kubrick fell over laughing. He was laughing so hard he had tears running down his cheeks. We knew then that the scene would work. The movement of the mouth says it all. The movement really encapsulates the whole thing. It doesn't matter what the Minister is saying because you know everything you need to know from the way Alex moves his mouth.
PS: You know that Alex is cured and that Alex has won.
MM: Exactly. I'm particularly fond of the transition at the end. To go from This to That is cinema. It is comedic, it's stylized, but you get the humanity of the character. That's the dilemma of the film, this immoral man we adore. That's what's so great about it.
PS: And that's why it is so dangerous.
MM: That's why we were attacked by lefties and fascists.
PS: They attacked its ideology. The moral minority attacked its sex and violence.
MM: I don't think it is violent enough. It cops out. In the book the violence is harder. For instance, the passing of the cat lady. Stanley made her a mean old bird with a foul mouth: "You little shit!" And I'm scared of her! In the book she's nice and old and cherubic. In the film I kill her with a huge dildo for God's sake! and you are still feeling kind of sorry for me! I'm not saying that Stanley wasn't right because he was right. He made a film that will be watched forever. If I had made the film it would have had a shelf life of about ten weeks.
PS: And you thought you were making a comedy?
MM: It is a comedy, a very black comedy. All that stuff in the writer's home, in the retribution thing, when I'm sitting there in the weird robe and eating spaghetti, that's pure Morcombe and Wise, in terms of the timing and the delivery. I took it wholesale from Eric Morcombe. The writer's friends come in and I give them my name: Alex De Large, that? D-E-L-A...? The joke is set up and then I collapse. Comedians influenced me more than any actors ever did.
PS: One of my favorite scenes is when you are lying in the writer's bathtub and you start to hum and then to sing "Singing in the Rain" the song you sang when you raped his wife. It is frightening and it is cruel and it is clever and it is stupid and its funny. The sheer audacity is incredible.
MM: And then I start splashing!
PS: Yes! Your performance takes it to an even higher level. The splashing is one of those moments of inspiration that we talked about. When acting the part of Alex, you had to be true to the text, the text you were working from was the Burgess novel, and you had to encompass whatever angle Kubrick wanted to take.
MM: Well no, there are certain things I wouldn't do for him. I said: "No, I cannot take it any further than this. If I take it further it starts being pantomime and it stops being real. I will not do it if it is not real." He would push it and I would pull it back. He'd say: "Go on." and I'd say: "No, that'll destroy it." The performance had to have a style but it also had to be based in reality.
PS: No Widow Twanky.
MM: Exactly. And that is true to every performance I've ever given. That's the training and the discipline of working with Lindsay Anderson.
PS: The film is an astonishingly pure adaptation of the text.
MM: Absolutely!
PS: It is wonderfully faithful to the novel but what is great about the film is that it transcends the novel in the details. Many of the great images in the film have been created for the film, such as the porcelain phallus.
MM: The look, the eye-lash, the bowler.
PS: And it is the combination of these details and the moments of genius in the staging and the performances, such as the splash of water, that make the film a work of art.
MM: I agree.
PS: I read an interview with Stanley, in which Stanley was asked how much planning he did before he started to shoot a scene, and he replied: "As much as there are hours in the day, and days in the week." That was his work ethic.
MM: He was an obsessive, but I wish he had been a bit more generous. He even took away the billing from me and made me sign waivers because nobody's name was going to appear before the title. But his name appears before the title. It was outrageous that he would do that to a kid. There was no generosity there. Lindsay would have said: "You can have whatever you want." When I did if....he sent me and David Sherwin to New York to open the film. He ensured we went first-class and stayed in good hotels.
PS: How much pre-preparation did you do with Stanley for Alex?
MM: Months, but it was just the look. Nothing psychological. I asked him: "Stanley, what do you think he is like?" He said: "Who? the character, Alex.?? Gee, Malcolm. I don't know. That's why I hired you. I'm not RADA." I remember standing in the doorway of his house, talking. I was waiting for the car to go home. I asked him: "Stanley, what's your style of directing?" He thought about it and he said: "I never know what I want. But I know what I don't want."
PS: Which is all you really need.
MM: I'm pleased with the work I did with Stanley. I was a serious actor who could do the comedy, which he loved, though I'm not saying I'm a Peter Sellers. Peter was the perfect Kubrick actor because he was a very funny comedian and a very skilled actor. He could give Stanley ten variations of a scene to choose from. Stanley gave me enormous latitude and in the main we had a ball. We had so many laughs. You can see it in the performance. It's gleeful. It's joyous. It's infectious.
PS: Which it has to be.
MM: It has to be because if the audience didn't like that character that film would be dead in the water. I suppose Alex is my Richard the Third. It's my benchmark.
PS: It goes without saying that throughout the music is inspired.
MM: Oh yes. It is very important to get the soundtrack right and Stanley was a master at that. A master! He was the best there is.
PS: Amen. Did you shoot any scenes that were cut from the final print?
MM: We did a sequence in Aylesbury. The town square was decorated with giant rubber ducks, weird animals, they were huge, and we accosted an old guy from the library. I ripped out these priceless books that he had and I threw them up. I remember my line, it was taken from the book, it was: "There's a mackerel of a cornflake for you." The pages from the ripped books fall like confetti. The retribution was that Alex goes to the library when he is cured and all the old codgers in the library go: "You were the one!"
PS: Do you miss it?
MM: Not at all. The film is a classic with many classic scenes. And it is long enough.
PS: Squeezed in between the great films with Lindsay Anderson and Stanley Kubrick is Figures in the Landscape made with another great director, Joseph Losey, but it's not a film Losey is remembered for.
MM: That brought me down to earth with a great big bump.
PS: You certainly earned your daily bath; scene after scene of rolling around in the mud; crawling through burning crop fields; over frozen mountain tops.
MM: Yes. After working with Lindsay Anderson on if..., which was great; then having to work with a very competitive Robert Shaw in extremely trying conditions was very hard work. Robert decided to play it like Mifune, the great Japanese actor, and I figured he was doing enough acting for both of us. I decided to step back because there was nothing else to do. That's how I played it. I just kept out of his way.
PS: The film works for the fundamentally cinematic reason that there are many spectacular scenes filmed from a helicopter. Flying is interesting. Its why Imax films are so popular and its why they don't need stories. Put the camera outside a helicopter; fly around, film the landscape. It's interesting.
MM: That's true.
PS: I preferred it to your other helicopter movie, Blue Thunder in which you play a very English Vietnam vet.
MM: They wanted me to do it that way. I was happy to do it American but they said: "No, we like the fact he's English." Wherever there's a war there are probably English advisers.
PS: You were working alongside an actor, Roy Scheider, who is similar to you in that he can hold the screen without-
MM: Having to do a lot. Yes. It was fun making the film. It was one of those parts though that wasn't quite enough. The character was too simple.
PS: The title, Blue Thunder refers to a super helicopter which, early in the film, is given a big set-piece in which it shows off all its hardware. It's The Big Scene. It's meant to make the audience say "Wow!" Then, to maintain the drive and the momentum in the next scene the filmmakers bring in the star. They bring in you. And the audience, which is on a high, are taken higher.
MM: I’ve never thought of it like that.
PS: It’s cleverly constructed, but juvenile. They use the hardware for spying on pretty women.
MM: John Badham is a very good director. You make these films and you pour your heart and soul into them and they are dismissed in a paragraph, even ‘O Lucky Man!’. When it came out it was dismissed as “A self-indulgent piece of trash.” That’s what they said! Scandalous!
PS: A film of yours which wasn’t dismissed, but which hasn’t yet been given the credit it is due, is ‘Royal Flash’, which you made for Richard Lester. I first saw it when I was fourteen and I liked it very much.
MM: That’s the age group it was made for.
PS: I saw it again recently and I enjoyed it even more. I liked its cheekiness and its scale. The settings and the locations are spectacular.
MM: It was photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth.
PS: Of ‘2001’ fame. And the film has an incredible cast - Alan Bates, Alastair Sim, Britt Ekland, Henry Cooper (who knocked down Muhammad Ali), David Jason, Michael Hordern, Bob Hoskins, Oliver Reed.
MM: I loved Oliver, but he was out of control unfortunately. He was a wonderful actor who never ever reached anything like his potential. He really should have been a great star. I’m not saying that he didn’t give great performances because he did, but he couldn’t sustain it. In his later life he couldn’t really carry a film because he had become too unpredictable. When you are making a film, you have to be on set at seven in the morning and be prepared to work. I enjoyed working with Oliver on ‘Royal Flash’, though I feared for my life. Alan Bates told me that he improvised a lot of the wrestling scene in ‘Women in Love’. I was scared he would improvise and kill me with his sword.
PS: It’s a film that ties in well with your great films of the period, in that the second part of the film is an attempt by ‘society’ to change your character’s character. At the point of Oliver Reed’s sword you are compelled to become someone else, in this case a member of the Bavarian royal family.
MM: That’s interesting. When I did the film I was very depressed. A certain part of my life was over. My career in England was over. I felt a certain shift. I can’t remember what I did after that; nothing of any interest for years.
PS: It was probably ‘Voyage of the Damned’, one of Lew Grade’s successful attempts to sink the British Film Industry. You had the Leonardo DiCaprio role on board a pre-wartime ship filled with guest stars.
MM: That was the only job on offer in England. The Americans had left because of the oil embargo and there were no producers left in England. The Americans were the engine room of our industry. It’s a shame because there are so many ideas from England and so much talent. But there is also an atmosphere of pessimism and hopelessness, and ‘ambition’ is a dirty word. Perhaps it comes from being an island and losing an Empire.
PS: It’s a country that obliges you to run the ranks of rejection. How did ‘Cat People’ come about?
MM: I was doing ‘Look Back in Anger’ on stage here (New York City). I like the audiences better here. I love the energy of New York. If the first night is a failure they take you off the next night. I love the danger of that. It’s great. You know where you stand. I was doing ‘Look Back in Anger’ and Paul Schrader and Jerry Bruckheimer showed up in a big limo. I read the script and I was ambivalent about it. I really didn’t want to do a horror film at that time. My daughter had just been born and I thought I should be spending my time being a parent. Anyway, Schrader and Bruckheimer took me to dinner, and in the end I said: “Why not, I’ll do it.” Nastassja Kinski, who had done ‘Tess’, was absolutely beautiful. It was shot in Hollywood at Universal and in New Orleans.
PS: The production design of the zoo is very striking, the cages crowned with statues of the big cats. Were they part of the location?
MM: No, they were made for the film.
PS: When I’m asked to define cinema I usually mention a scene in ‘Divorce Italian Style’, a short scene in which Sophia Loren walks down the street and everyone turns to look at her. There is some of that in ‘Cat People’, ‘real cinema’ scenes of Nastassaja Kinski walking the streets.
MM: He’s very stylish, Paul. I’d like to work with him again.
PS: He moves the camera very well and he writes well.
MM: He is one of the very few real directors in America. I used to say that the only reason I did ‘Cat People’ was the challenge of learning to act backwards. There’s a scene where I come in the door and fly out. It was all acted backwards. And they reverse the film. I start off on a bed. I jump down. Out of the door. Down the stairs.
PS: There is a scene where you jump through a glass door.
MM: Yes. I only wanted to do it once so I made sure I came flying through it -
PS: Like a man about to turn into a panther?
MM: Yes. Boom!
PS: I like the start of the film. The golden yellow world.
MM: It’s beautifully done. And Bowie’s song is tremendous. I think it is one of the best things he’s done.
PS: It has a real atmosphere. And, like helicopters, Big Cats are interesting. You can’t take your eyes off them.
MM: Yes. There is a shot where I am standing next to a panther. It was actually a Californian mountain lion, which we have on our property back home. They sprayed it black and it was supposed to be trainable. I had to lean right next to it. At one point it threw out a claw and I jumped a mile. If you look at the shot you can see me leaning pointedly away from it. It was getting a bit hungry or something. They’re fascinating creatures.
PS: In ‘Cat People’, as in many of your films, there is a scene when you are handed a small object, such as an apple, and you do a little juggle with it.
MM: Do I? It’s to give the scene a bit of movement.
PS: I read that Nastassja Kinski was upset by the extent of her nude scenes.
MM: Did she not realize there was film in camera? I’ve no sympathy with that. She signed on and she knew she was going to bare ass pretty much throughout.
PS: John Heard is good in the film, but he is one those actors who never quite made it.
MM: He’s a superb actor and, because he doesn’t show how he does it, he does it very simply, people tend to forget that he is actually working. It’s a great compliment to him. But you don’t win awards for performances like that. If you make it look as though you are that person people think you are that person. People used to think I was Alex in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. I swear to God.
PS: The fanaticism of fans adds to the pressures of being a star. That’s why the press has a responsibility not to fan the flames of fanaticism.
MM: The press kowtow to the popular beliefs. I read a shocking piece about me in The Evening Standard. It was beyond belief. I’d talked quite pleasantly with the reporter for about an hour then he went away and wrote a horrible made-up piece. I shouldn’t have showed up because they didn’t need me there. What he wrote was bullshit.
S: It’s as if they are purposely seeking to undermine an actor’s confidence. And acting is all about confidence.
MM: Yes it is. And thank God I’ve never lacked confidence.
PS: I enjoyed your performance in ‘Get Crazy’. You play a rock star performing at an end of year show. You perform with a lot of wit and a lot of sincerity.
MM: Doing that film gave me a tremendous respect for rock stars! It is an odd little film but I must say I’m fairly proud of it. Allan Arkush was a very nice gentleman and he’s very talented. His term of reference was the last concert at the Filmore East. Lou Reed is in it and Paul Bartel and Daniel Stern. Danny was with me in ‘Blue Thunder’. He’s a very good actor. ‘Get Crazy’ was fun. And I got to sing my own songs. Twelve years later I was shooting a film in Cracow in Poland. My wife and I were upstairs in a restaurant. When we were leaving, a guy sitting at the bar looked at me and said: “How’s your manager?”
PS: A reference to the strange last scene.
MM: It stopped me dead in my tracks.
PS: Were you going to direct ‘Bopha!’?
MM: No. I was going to direct a film called ‘Dugmore’, which was a very similar subject but we were pre-empted by the end of apartheid. I offered it to the lead singer of Fine Young Cannibals, Roland Gift, but his manager said ‘he isn’t black.’ I think I would make a good director but I probably don’t have the concentration needed to stick with a single subject for two years, or the inclination. I have such a good life flitting from one thing to another, diving in, giving it a hundred percent, and then moving on. I really rather like that. I’ve become used to it. It’s a very nice way to work.
PS: You have to make a difficult entrance scene in ‘Bopha!’. You don’t have anything to say, your face is hidden by dark glasses. You are called upon to just walk in and walk out and do it ‘With Presence’.
MM: Yes.
PS: Later in the film you are given some terrible lines: “Kill the children! Go for the small ones!”
MM: I do a quite passable South African accent, which I’m quite pleased about, but I know what you mean. I’ve been recording for ‘I Spy’ and it is all: “Get them now! Kill them now!” We are down to that. But that’s part and parcel of being an actor. You can’t shy away from it. You have to dive it and do it. I am proud of the fact that I will take anything on. I’m a professional. You make it work as best as you can and then you move on. I’m not worried about what people think about me. I’ll do ‘Caligula’. I’ll do the difficult roles. The script in ‘Bopha!’ lacked subtlety but I enjoyed making the film because it allowed me to work with Morgan Freeman, who directed it. He’s a better actor than he is director, but he is one of the sweetest guys you could meet.
PS: It’s photographed by David Watkin (‘The Devils’, ‘Gandhi’) and it has some of his characteristic long shots, little filler montages between the action. It has a strong central character played by Danny Glover, a black policeman in a white man’s force, and they get the ending right. It doesn’t cop out.
MM: It’s strength as a film is that is tells the story of apartheid from the blacks’ perspective.
PS: Unlike ‘Cry Freedom’ and ‘A Dry White Season’.
MM: Exactly. But I was in Africa making ‘Bopha!’ when Lindsay was making his epitaph, ‘Is That All There Is?’ I just missed it. I was so pissed off. I wanted to be in the party on the boat.
PS: ‘The Caller’ got good notices. People seem to like it.
MM: The Caller? Do they? Bloody hell. It’s a weird film. It was a good idea. It was well written by Michael Sloan. A two-hander. I play an android but you don’t know that until the end. We did it in Rome in three weeks or something. I agreed to do it because I wanted to get back to Italy. It is really fun taking a bit of dross and making it fly.
PS: It holds the interest but it’s not a classic. ‘Tank Girl’?
MM: Not very good. Badly directed. The director had no idea.
PS: But you do have a great scene, ‘drinking’ the man who failed you?
MM: That is a good scene, that’s really the whole performance, and that was my ad-lib: “Lovely.” The director was a very bright producer who took it upon herself to direct the film but she was not really a film director. She got pregnant and they brought in another director and it threw the film. I had a good character but they didn’t give me anything to do. It was a wasted opportunity.
PS: Lindsay Anderson died when you were promoting ‘Star Trek Generations’ and Paramount were annoyed that you cut short your promotional duties so that you could attend his funeral?
MM: They were outrageous. They couldn’t give a fuck. And what do they care anyway? They got enough publicity. But all that is in the past now. In the film I played a great character. It was a wonderful part, something I could really have fun with. A real obsessive. It was interesting.
PS: ‘Firestarter 2’ has been well received on the fan sites. Lots of positive feedback from teenagers.
MM: Really? They liked it? I’ve got a copy at home. They want to do a series and they are trying to get me to do it. I may do a few of them but I want to be more independent. I don’t want to be stuck doing that. ‘Fantasy Island’ took nine months to shoot. We did thirteen hours of stuff. Did you see any of it?
PS: No, I don’t think it played it England.
MM: It wasn’t very good unfortunately. They didn’t have the writers. They suck you in with the pilot. The Weitz Brothers wrote the pilot. We had a great director, Michael Dinner, who is the number one rated director for one-hour films on television. We went to Hawaii, shot it in twenty days instead of eight, and they spent seven million dollars on it. They sold it to Germany on the strength of the pilot and it was picked up. It was like a little movie.
PS: You appeared in two episodes of ‘South Park’ narrating tales from Dickens.
MM: I thought I’d do ‘South Park’ because everyone loves that show.
PS: It’s rude, very funny and frequently inspired. A major movie we’ve not yet mentioned is ‘Assassin of the Tsar’?
MM: It is the best performance I have ever given on the screen. It is the best.
PS: I was very moved by the film. It has real grandeur, not of scale, though it is resolutely authentic, but of emotion, and I don’t mean sentimentality. It’s the most unsentimental tragic film I know.
MM: It’s a pet project of my great friend, Mike Kaplin. He wants all of America to see it.
PS: The screening at the festival in New York was a real triumph. It really had an impact.
MM: It was the first Russian film many of the audience had ever seen. In Russia there were no worries about deadlines. It was a Mosfilm production, a state production, which meant that the director could take as long as he liked to get what he wanted.
PS: And what a glorious image at the end, the camera closes in on your face, you have led the slaughter of the Russian royal family but you’ve taken no pleasure in the killing. You are standing alone in a field in the early morning light. Behind you smoke rises from fires burning the bodies of the damned.
MM: I’m very proud of the film. The director was Karen Shakhnazarov.
PS: What other performances which we haven’t mentioned are proud of?
MM: An interesting one is ‘The Light in the Jungle’ in which I played Albert Schweitzer. No one has ever seen that. The script was plagirized so they had to cut most of my performance and juggle it around. I’m not sure it survived. In its original form it was one of the better things I’d done. I played it without prosthetics and made people believe I was seventy. I did wear a prosthetic mask in ‘The Little Red Riding Hood’, a fairy tale theatre thing in which I play The Big Bad Wolf. I’d forgotten all about it until somebody put it in the retrospective I had at the Mill Valley Film Festival. I think I made a lot of it up, but everything about screen acting is there. I have heavy make-up on and I come right through it. The changes of mood and tempo. The pathos. The vanity. The fun. The movement.
PS: And the danger. It changes from lightness to darkness almost instantaneously.
MM: Yes. That’s as good as I can do it. I can’t do it any better than that. A little children’s thing shot on videotape, but it doesn’t matter. As an actor you have to give what you’ve got.
PS: Who produced it?
MM: Shelley Duvall. She did a whole series of them. My ex-wife played Ms Hood. Fabulous fun things.
PS: I enjoyed ‘Time After Time’. Your performance really connects. It engages the audience on an emotional level. You fall in love with the character and when danger comes calling, in the guise of Jack The Ripper, you really fear for him.
MM: David Warner was brilliant. The director, Nicholas Meyer is a good writer, a good ideas man. I don’t know what happened to his directing career. It’s a great shame.
PS: He really captures the chemistry between you and Mary.
MM: My favorite scene is the one in the revolving restaurant when you see him falling for her. It was a nice change of pace for me. It’s disappointing that the film didn’t do well financially. They sold it as a Jack The Ripper movie. This is how market researchers have killed our business. They say: “Have you ever heard of H.G. Wells?” No. “Have you ever heard of Jack the Ripper?” Yes! So they put it out as a Jack The Ripper movie. It’s the stupidest thing.
PS: ‘Caligula’ You’re on the edge of a lake. The sky behind you is black with smoke because they’ve set fire to a corn field and you have two hundred naked men running about pretending to be invading England. What’s going through your mind?
MM: Oh God. Get me out of this fucking mess! I’m telling myself to take it one day at a time. I’m trying not to think about how long the shoot is. I had to write a lot of my own stuff for ‘Caligula’. I came up with the idea of the ‘Simon Says’ game. “Caligula says, ‘Off with his head!’. I got Ted Whitehead to come out and help me with it. He’s a very good writer. He wrote ‘Alpha Beta’ which Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts did on stage. He helped me enormously. Helen Mirren was also very supportive. I remember her saying to me: “Just go for it, Malcolm.” And I did. I took the performance right to the edge of where you lose control. I went fucking bananas and I almost pulled it off. Almost.
PS: The cast is right. The script is fine. The set design is magnificent but the film is just so badly directed.
MM: It’s appalling.
PS: Tinto Brass films it like theatre with the camera planted at the back of the stalls zooming into and away from the action. You are called upon to carry scene after scene after scene, acting alone in a big warehouse, with no help from the director, the editor, or the director of photography. The lighting is poor. It is lit like theatre.
MM: It wasn’t his fault because Tinto Brass used four cameras on zoom lenses. How do you light that? You have to light a three acre set. It’s impossible.
PS: Your performance covers a lot of ground. When I was watching it I jotted down adjectives to describe your character - lithe, impish, imperious, mischievous, mad, petulant, ruthless, comic - and at the end you are perfectly sane.
MM: Yes. I wanted that.
PS: And that’s what makes the ending work. The film concludes with this fantastic image of red blood washed down white steps, but the director and his editor throw it away.
MM: I know. There’s a terrific film in there somewhere. There are some good scenes in it.
PS: And there’s Peter O’Toole. You always get your money’s worth with Peter O’Toole.
MM: Absolutely. He’s wonderful. I love working with him. You can’t not love working with Peter.
PS: Naked boys in the water on one side of him, naked girls on the other, and a demand for you to dance for him.
MM: “Dance for me, Caligula!” He is brilliant. And John? What did you think of John Gielgud?
PS: Wasted. Channel 4 screened a creditable restoration of the film. Quite an epic.
MM: Did they cut the hard porn? The close-up fucking?
PS: Yes. There were no erections in it.
MM: Good. Totally unnecessary.
PS: Helen Mirren who was with you in ‘O Lucky Man!’ had worked with you again in ‘The Collection’. The Harold Pinter film you made with Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates. Who would have thought there could be sexual tension in a scene with you and Alan Bates!
MM: I know, it’s extraordinary!
PS: It’s made for television with most of the technical limitations that that implies but some of the photography is good; the colorful deep focus in the scenes where Michael Apted films from the shop and you can see the street outside.
MM: It’s at its most interesting when I end up seducing the husband.
PS: It’s the look on your face. You are sitting there in a chair, with an air of rudeness and confidence. You know he wants you and you are absolutely loving it. And you’re going to tease him. There’s so much tension.
MM: I’m going to put him through Hell. It’s hilarious!
PS: Questions about sword swallowing.
MM: “What’s this? A cheese knife. Just a knife.” It’s full of great little touches. “What should I do with the pips?” “Put them in your wallet!” It’s a weird piece; a television film, an hour long, but God bless Laurence Olivier who I thought gave a stunning performance. As young actors we all used to rag on ‘Sir’, and I’m sure young actors will rag on us now. I used to go and see him at the Vic. My God was he chewing scenery but how brilliantly chewing the scenery could you get? It is worth the price of admission just to hear him go through the ‘Slum slug’ scene! I’m proud of the fact that I worked with The Three Knights, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier. They were magnificent.
PS: Michael Apted is a real lost talent. His big films are not as interesting as his little films.
MM: That’s true of Jack Gold.
PS: ‘Aces High’ isn’t too bad. You get all the movie star close-ups.
MM: It’s a film I haven’t seen in years.
PS: You have been very complimentary about the team you worked with on ‘Gangster No.1’.
MM: I’m a working actor so I work a lot if I can, and I’ve done a lot of work. Occasionally I get to act in something I’m proud of, and I’m proud of ‘Gangster No.1’. It is very violent and very profane. It was a play, a four-hander, four monologues, and I sort of do the play in voice over. A gangster looking back on his life.
PS: What I like about ‘Gangster No.1’ is that although it came from a theatrical source it is conceived visually. From the very first shot you can see that the director is thinking in visual terms. We are at a boxing match in a hotel. There are faces at the edge of the frame that are in focus and faces in the center of the frame that are out of focus. There is a lot of split screen. A lot going on.
MM: The director, Paul McGuigan and the writers did a clever job on the visual design and on opening it up.
PS: I like the structure. We see you in the first scene, we need to see you because we need a face for the voice which narrates the story, which is told in flashback. When the story and the central character, your younger self played by Paul Bettany, reaches its peak, in the slow slaying of a gangland boss, the only way for the writer and the director to sensibly take the film forward is to do a ‘Blue Thunder’, bring in The Face, the Star. And that’s what they do.
MM: Right.
PS: And you bring with you a lot of energy.
MM: The part required it. I, of course, didn’t think of it in those terms when I was making the film. The part was on the page and I had to deal with it as I saw it. I knew it was imperitive to play this character like a wound-up spring, ready to burst out of his skin, almost. I knew that for the voice-over I couldn’t do the Gangster I’d been doing in front of the camera, because the material is now inside his head, it’s a different sound. They are two completely different performances. But did I really think it through? No. It’s instinctive. I didn’t know how Paul McGuigan was going to put the whole thing together and though I had an inkling of what he was looking for, he had cameras on bungee cords, I didn’t really know what style he would be shooting the stuff.
PS: The camera moves about a lot but it isn’t steadicam.
MM: Right. It’s interesting.
PS: It creates a nervous energy. It looks naturalistic but it is heightened.
MM: That’s right. It is interesting as an actor to work in a style and still make it believable. I suppose it is what Lindsay Anderson was harping on about all those years ago when he called me ‘a Brechtian actor’. “Is that good, Lindsay.” “Of course it’s good!”
PS: You do quite a bit of acting to the camera.
MM: It’s fun doing that. Though it’s dangerous. I do like that little scene in the bathroom: “What do you take me for? A cunt?” I don’t think it’s the perfect film but I do think it is good. It is stylish piece of work. Paul McGuigan comes from a stills background. He knows his compositions. He knows his shots. He picks some incredible angles and uses some unusual lenses. Such as the split lens you mentioned which he uses in the opening scene. There were times when I was acting with a lens this close to my face (very close).
PS: He uses the locations well. He shows London as we’ve never real seen it before. The skyscraper that looks two centimeters thick.
MM: I know, it’s an incredible shot.
PS: And the shot of you on the balcony with the tower block rising in steps behind you almost like an Aztec temple.
MM: Yes. Very stylish.
PS: And it was very badly distributed by Film Four.
MM: They opened it during the Euro 2000 football tournament. They could have sold it to an American distributor and got it on before ‘Sexy Beast’, which I don’t think is as good a film.
PS: Ben Kinglsey is good in it.
MM: He is, but the real performance for me is by Ray Winstone. He acts without showing you how he does it. He’s a real actor. He’s the real deal.
This excerpt is from Camera 2 which contains exclusive photos of Malcolm and the full
12-page career interview and can be bought by sending $14 (includes Airmail
shipping) to
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© 2002 Paul Sutton
Reprinted by permission 2002-08 by Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net