Gene Hackman on top of his game (article date - 2000)
At 70, the consummate actor shows no signs of slowing
By Alysse Minkoff

"I used to have to borrow my daughter's car to go to interviews in
Hollywood. Just a piece-of-shit Toyota and I'd have to park it a couple
of blocks [away] and walk so I wouldn't be seen as being that needy.
Yeah, I was in trouble in those days. I was six, seven million bucks in
debt; I had spent too much and I had a lot of tax shelters that didn't work.
I owed the government four million dollars. I was just barely hanging in,
taking pretty much anything that was offered to me and trying to make
it work."
 
The voice is Gene Hackman's, recounting one of the toughest periods
in his life--from the mid-1970s to mid-'80s, when the afterglow of his
Oscar win for 1971's The French Connection had faded through a string
of commercial failures. The anecdote places his resume in historical
context, and it is not an apology. For this private man who has always
made it look easy, these hard times were part of a process of maturing,
as a human being and an actor.
 
Today, at 70, Hackman occupies a rare place. He is both revered by his
peers and beloved by moviegoers. Thriving as an actor for more than 40
years with a unique body of work populated by a wide range of complex
characters, he stands apart from the typical Hollywood star that succumbs
to the implied demand that screen icons create carbon copies of salable
images in film after film. While many actors are busily serving up a career
based on that premise, Hackman's career is a study in diversity, a unique
journey.
 
There's the murderous rube Buck Barrow in 1967's Bonnie and Clyde and
rogue cop Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, one of Hollywood's
consummate antiheroes. He played a basketball coach who taught his
players about life in the 1986 film Hoosiers and brutal Old West sheriff
Little Bill Daggett in 1992's Unforgiven, a role that won him another Oscar.
Other memorable roles include Harry Caul, the surveillance expert who
hears too much and feels too little in Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic
The Conversation, producer Harry Zimm opposite John Travolta's loan shark
and Hollywood wannabe in 1995's Get Shorty, and Brill, the techno-genius
who saves Will Smith in 1998's Enemy of the State. And who can forget
"The Greatest Criminal Mind of All Time," Lex Luthor, in the Superman films?
Or the avaricious, seductively lost lawyer Avery Tolar in 1993's The Firm?
 
Even with that roster of great characters, the self-effacing and engaging
Hackman shuns examination, by his own hand or anyone else's. "I don't
look back," he says resolutely. "I don't watch my films unless I absolutely
have to. I get very nervous. It's more my perception of myself, or my desire
of what I would like to look like. All I see are the double chins and the bags
under the eyes and the receding hairline." Even under the harsh fluorescent
lighting in his favorite Santa Fe counterculture hangout, The Cloud Cliff Bakery
and Cafe, it's difficult to figure out what he's talking about. His lived-in face
looks the way a man is supposed to look: not nipped or tucked with artfully
arranged hair. He looks like the kind of guy you'd like to watch a ball game
with; but one who would go to the museum on the way home.
 
It should surprise no one that he rarely watches his own work, which now
totals 78 films. It's a healthy dose of male vanity, coupled with a desire not to
be forced into a position where he might have to second-guess his own self-
contained sense of creative ballast. "I feel like when I'm actually doing the work,
I know what I'm doing and I feel good about most of the stuff that I do. But when
I see it on the screen, I have no idea if it's good, bad or indifferent. I can't be
objective. I leave it up to other people to tell me." When some of Hollywood's
top character actors--Gary Sinise, William H. Macy and Kevin Bacon--all put
you at the top of their list of acting heroes, the message should be clear.
 
"Gene's a perfectionist. He never does anything in half measures. He's an icon.
A very strong guy, very tough, very straightforward and honest. He can't abide
indecision. Yet there's such a myriad of color and passion inside of him. When
he was younger, it was more on the surface. Now that he's older, it's more inside.
But he still communicates it; you still see it."
 
--Tony Scott, director of Crimson Tide (1995) and Enemy of the State (1998)
 
"I always wanted to be an actor," Hackman says. "That's all I ever wanted to
do from the time I saw my first movie. I loved Jimmy Cagney. I just thought he
was the best, probably because he's the kind of guy that could not be imitated.
Nobody could do what he did. And I liked Errol Flynn's panache and style. When
I would come out of the theater having seen one of these kinds of actors, I'd look
in the mirror in the lobby of the theater and be stunned that I didn't look like that
person. After having sat there for two and three showings of a film, I would get so
deeply into that psyche and those characters that I convinced myself that I could
do that. And then I would look in the mirror and I'd think, 'I don't look anything like
those guys, maybe I can't do it.'"
 
Hackman's dream of becoming an actor started taking shape during his childhood
in Danville, Illinois. Eugene Alden Hackman was the elder of two sons of a
newspaper pressman who left the family when Gene was 13. In an unsuccessful
attempt to win the heart of a local girl, 16-year-old Gene lied about his age and
joined the Marines in 1946, serving for six years in China, Japan and Hawaii.
After his discharge, the GI Bill financed his brief studies at the School of Radio
Technique and the Art Students League, both in New York City. After years of
odd jobs, Hackman, then in his mid-20s, moved to California, where he joined
the Pasadena Playhouse. He and fellow student Dustin Hoffman shared the
role of Petruchio in a tag-team production of The Taming of the Shrew, with the
two splitting each evening's performance. He and Hoffman shared a more dubious
honor: their class voted them least likely to succeed.
 
Returning to New York in 1956, Hackman studied with famed method acting
coach George Morrison. "New York was really great for me," Hackman recalls.
"I was very immature when I went to New York and by the time I left, I knew
how things worked and what it took to be successful. I think I would have been
out of acting if I had started any younger. I didn't have the discipline to do the
things that are required of you as an actor and I was just right on the edge of
being mature enough to understand what it took to be a good actor."
 
Working in summer stock, off-Broadway and live television, Hackman went on
to Broadway, scoring a hit with the 1964 comedy, Any Wednesday. But it was
a small role in the 1964 film Lilith with Warren Beatty that changed the direction
of his career. Beatty recalled Hackman's performance when he and director Arthur
Penn were casting the role of Clyde's brother Buck for Bonnie and Clyde. His
performance in the 1967 film garnered the first of five Academy Award nominations
for Hackman, with a second nomination to follow three years later for his work
with Melvyn Douglas in I Never Sang for My Father.
 
Four years and eight movies after Bonnie and Clyde, Hackman landed the coveted
role of Popeye Doyle in William Friedkin's The French Connection. "The French
Connection was just a lucky break for me," he says. "The studio wanted a star
in the film and the director, Billy Friedkin, wanted an unknown. And so I fell into
a funny kind of happy medium for everybody because I had done some films, I
had been nominated for Bonnie and Clyde a couple of years before, and I still
wasn't known to the public very well. I'll be forever indebted to Billy Friedkin for
not only giving me the opportunity, but for kind of putting up with me in a lot
of ways."
 
The problem? Hackman was having trouble finding a way inside Popeye Doyle.
"When we first started, I was pretty unsure of myself, because this guy had to
be pretty ruthless. In the early parts of the filming, I just wasn't up to it. When
we shot a scene with the drug pusher that I chase down the street in the first
scene of the movie, I wasn't very good; it was just kind of weak. And I went to
Billy and I said, 'I don't know if I can do this or not.' This was like the first or
second day of filming, and he would have been in big trouble if, after having
gone to bat for me, I couldn't have done the work. And he said, 'We'll put it
aside for now and continue on and maybe we can reshoot the scene later.'
And that's what happened." As for his earlier reticence for violent scenes,
Hackman got over it. "After having worked in the streets of New York for three
and a half months, when we went to reshoot the scene, I was very happy to
beat the hell out of that guy."
 
As much as Hollywood had seemed to embrace Hackman, the honeymoon
soon ended. "From the 1970s to the mid-'80s after The French Connection,
I did four or five films in a row that were not successful commercially, but
were thought of as being artistically OK. And then when they didn't work, I
thought, 'Well to hell with this, I'll just do whatever's given to me. I don't have
to read the script, just tell me how much money they are gonna pay me and
I'll do it.' So I thought I could get by, and I managed to fake it in many ways.
 
"I make it sound like I didn't care," he says, "but I cared a great deal and I
knew from my work in improvisational theater that I could be experimental,
although maybe not as consciously experimental as I would like people to
believe I was. But I would show up, find out what they were gonna do that
day, and during makeup learn my lines. And there was something kind of
spontaneous about my work in those days, so maybe it was a
growing period."
 
Eventually, it was Hackman's commitment to the business that provided the
foundation for his turnaround. And in many ways it still mystifies him. "I don't
know how it happened, but after I changed agents and found somebody who
would look at me differently, it started a whole string of films that seemed to
have been better for me. But it was a very tough time."
 
How tough? There were the big debts, as well as a divorce from his first wife,
Faye Maltese (they have three grown children: Christopher, Elizabeth and
Leslie). In a town fueled by insecurity, where any sign of desperation is
anathema to the hiring process, Hackman can now laugh about how bad
those times really were for him. "When I was about to do the publicity tour
for Hoosiers," he recalls, "I had to call the producer and ask him for some
money so that I should look presentable at interviews. I had to borrow a
thousand bucks to get clothes. I mean, I literally didn't have a sport coat."
 
Did navigating those difficult years make him a better actor? Ever the realist,
he replies again with a laugh, "Well it's a romantic notion to think, because
of tough times one has persevered and made a career of one's self, that your
work gets better." He adds with a wry smile, "I don't have the evidence that
because I went through tough times, my work got better. I'd like to think of
that, though."
 
"You get the sense that Gene is strengthened by his failures. The failure is
the catalyst that makes whatever he is going to do that much stronger. As
an actor, you've got to get the failure out of the way to get to the stuff that
works. It's an evolutionary process, and Gene's not perturbed by that or
distant from it. He acknowledges his own process and it keeps acting
courageous and fun for him. You never see Gene go through the motions."
 
--Danny Glover, costar in Bat*21(1988)
 
One of the turning points in Hackman's career was Mississippi Burning,
the 1988 film about the Ku Klux Klan killings of three young civil rights
workers in Mississippi in 1964. It's another career choice that Hackman
could probably do a nice hindsight spin on, but he refuses. "I'd like to be
able to say that I did Mississippi Burning because I felt strongly about the
cause, about the way people had been treated in those days. But in reality,
I think I probably did it because I felt it was a good role for me. That I could
do something with it. And that it was being done by a terrific director [Alan
Parker]." For that role, he was nominated for both the Golden Globe and
again for the Academy Award, and the Hackman Renaissance was in
full swing.
 
That same year he costarred with Danny Glover in Bat*21, a critically
praised film that was overshadowed by Hackman's work in Mississippi
Burning, Another Woman and Full Moon in Blue Water. Glover has always
said that Hackman's presence on the set gave him a sense of security, a
much-needed balm for the young actor. "When you're relatively new to film
acting, as I was 13 years ago, you're still trying to feel your way through it.
You're just hoping you're going to get through the scene without tripping
over your shoelaces," Glover says, reflecting on Hackman's influence.
 
When it came to his Academy Award- and Golden Globe-winning performance
in Clint Eastwood's 1992 anti-Western, Unforgiven, Hackman almost passed
on the project. "It had been sent to me before when Francis Ford Coppola
owned it and it didn't happen. When Clint sent it to me I didn't give it a lot of
thought. I thought it was just another Western. My agent, Fred Specktor,
convinced me to read it again and to think of it more in terms of a bigger scope,
a bigger picture. And he told me that Richard Harris and Morgan Freeman were
going to be in it, so I reread it and decided to do it."
 
Hackman credits Eastwood with the success that followed. "I think the interesting
thing about Unforgiven was that it was the opportunity to totally commit to a
character without having to think I was going too far or not to have to editorialize
or edit myself in terms of what I was gonna do. And I think that was due to the
atmosphere that Clint Eastwood set up. Clint understands what an actor needs
to do good work. If you hire somebody that is close to the type you want, let him
do it. And when you're given that kind of freedom and have the confidence to do
a character fully, then I think you see people's best work."
 
What Hackman needs most from a director is room to figure it out for himself.
"If a director leaves me alone, I'm great. I have my most trouble with people who
don't see what I'm doing. Now that sounds very 'actorish,' but I feel that if a
director watches what I am doing he will see some value in it. If he doesn't like it,
it's probably because he's not watching. It sounds like what I am saying is that
I'm precious, but I don't feel that way. But I do feel that if somebody has hired me,
they know the work I have done and they get the package. They know me and they
know what I bring to the work."
 
Who is high on his list of directors? "Sidney Pollack or Arthur Penn or Coppola or
Clint Eastwood. When they hire you they know what you can do. They know
you're right for the part and they let you do it. Your taste and sensibility permeates
that role and people perceive that as character. Also, at my age I think people
tend to give you a lot. They know you have performed all these years and they
think they know you and so they give you a lot when they come into a theater.
There's a gift there. And I think it can work the other way, too. If you disappoint
enough times, people are going to sit back with their arms crossed and say,
You're getting a lot of money for this and I want to be entertained. Prove
it to me.'"
 
Musing about whether acting should be considered an art or a craft, Hackman
says, "If somebody asked me if it was an art, I'd have to say no, it's a craft. But
in some ways, I also think that's a hedge. Because I think all of us actors would
like to think of ourselves as being artists. But having said that, you may feel that
you're being pretentious. It's a nice cover-up to say it is a craft. And I think a lot
of it breaks down to craft-like things: learning your lines, hitting your marks,
having respect for your costume and your makeup. But then if you can carry
that another step and make a bit of poetry out of the way you read a line, or the
way you relate to somebody, maybe it transcends the craft into art."
 
One of the keys to Hackman's longevity lies in his approach. Mostly, it's about
what he does not do. "I stay out of everything except what I do as an actor. I never
make suggestions about casting. Never. I feel that if I want to make a statement,
I have to do it as an actor. I can't do it as a producer or as a director. And I try
not to make too many suggestions, either. I think one of the dangerous things
that happens in this business is that when you become successful, you have
too much to say about what you're going to do on a film or who you're going to
surround yourself with. I don't think you can be that objective about what it is you
do as an actor to be able to cast the film and hire the director and produce the
product, as some people do."
 
While it sounds fairly practical and a good way to avoid unnecessary stress,
Hackman is all too aware of the egos whose artistic growth have been thwarted
by their own hubris, often to the detriment of creating a good product.
 
"It's about power. Everybody loves power. But I think that you have to direct
your power to where it's most valuable. And to me, your power as an actor is
most valuable when you're in the scene, not when you're over telling the director
the way you want a scene run or casting the film. I think that if you're a leading
man and you have that kind of career, maybe that's OK if that's what you want
to do with your life. I was never afflicted with that, probably because I was never
a leading man. I had the opportunity to do character things that were fulfilling to
me, so it's easy for me to say that's the way to go. I think maybe after French
Connection I might have had enough juice to finagle a very big commercial career
for myself. I don't think it would have lasted, though."
 
"Gene makes us look at ourselves. He can give you a well-rounded character;
he'll give you the dark side. He always finds, and he completely understands
and is interested in, the complexity of the darkness as well as the other parts
of the character. What I love about Gene is you get these shades everywhere."
 
--Roger Spottiswoode, director, Under Fire (1983)
 
While many of Hackman's characters always seem to be playing with the light
and dark sides of their psyches, creating the clear-cut heavy doesn't appeal to
him. "I don't think I can play just an out-and-out villain," he says, resolutely. "I
wouldn't know how to do that, because what's interesting to me is to do behavior
and human kinds of things to make somebody a fully fleshed-out character. And
in doing that, you end up not having a character be sympathetic, but having an
audience empathize with who you are playing.
 
"A character like Frank Ramsey in Crimson Tide is fun for me to do. He's not a
villain, but he's kind of a by-the-book guy and it's fun to portray somebody like
that. I suppose I probably have enough of that in me to be able to play that
character. I loved working on that film. It was very intense, really concentrated
work. Not only because it was claustrophobic but also the nature of the script
was that Denzel [Washington] and I dominated most of the dialogue in the film."
 
Musing about the changes he has seen over the past 40 years in the business,
he offers, "The cliché answer is to say that we're inundated with technology and
all that, but the acting hasn't changed. Regardless if you're in a space movie or
whatever and there's a lot of technical things going on around you, you still have
the basic problem of making contact with the other actors, making the moment
work, fulfilling the author's intent, satisfying yourself in terms of who you are as
a person or as an actor. So those things never change."
 
But as giant conglomerates continue to swallow up film studios and stock prices
become more important than quality filmmaking, there is one sensibility that he
doesn't share. "I think that there is kind of a creeping peril that is hanging over the
business. It's a 'green peril' that has to do with money, that has to do with schedules
and the bottom line. Not that it wasn't always true, but it seems to be much more
prevalent now that there's so much more money involved. It's hard for me to deal
with the 'business' part of acting because somehow or another I feel I shouldn't
have to. I don't like working with people who are constantly talking about money
and the bottom line. But there's nothing more satisfying to me than making a
scene work and knowing just that little thing that clicks in front of you."
 
That sense of story and character also led him to undertake a nontheatrical
project--a novel. Not surprisingly, the beauty was in the process of creation.
Co-authored with noted marine archaeologist Dan Lenihan, the novel, Wake
of the Perdido Star, was published in 1999. "The story came first," says Hackman.
"We were sitting here in this café talking about what we like to read and why
those stories weren't written anymore, and we found out why: because they're
hard to write and people just aren't interested in them anymore. Though we did
sell 50,000 copies, so I guess it wasn't that they weren't interested; it just wasn't
a runaway best-seller. We would each write eight or nine pages and come in here
and exchange pages and have lunch and talk generally and maybe read over some
of it. And then we would call each other and say, 'How about this or that?' And then
the last 50 or 60 pages we mapped out because we felt it was very important to
pull it all together."
 
Laughing about his own baggage in writing a novel, Hackman admits, "The hardest
thing to me was the editing. I've relied on my instincts so much as an actor that
there was so much resistance to change some of the things I had written, and
that was hard. But after a while I decided to let the chips fall where they may;
bad reviews weren't going to kill me."
 
Hackman costarred with Keanu Reeves in this summer's comedy The Replacements,
as coach of a team of National Football League strikebreakers. This fall, Hackman
will costar in Under Suspicion with Morgan Freeman. A labor of love, the movie took
Hackman nearly two decades to make. "I had the project 18 years ago and I sent
it to everybody I knew and nobody wanted to do it. I had worked with Morgan
Freeman on Unforgiven and ran into him about a year later and told him about the
project and sent him the French version of the film. And he liked the film a lot and
I told him I'd play either role. I'd leave the decision up to him."
 
In the tense psychological drama, Hackman plays Henry Hearst, a wealthy
pathological liar who is being questioned by a detective who is an old friend
(played by Freeman) in connection with the rape and murder of two prepubescent
girls. "What was compelling about the character is that we all fall into our own
clichés and our own ideas of who people are," Hackman says. "And that we
commit these crimes of the mind against them without really knowing if they're
guilty of certain things. What I love about the script was the idea that we have
these perceptions about people based on our own needs, our own idea of what
is fair in life. And life just isn't fair, you know. We many times find that we've
done all the right things and still get screwed. And many times anger drives us
to all kinds of decisions in life that are not always fulfilling."
 
Hackman is still unsure about the overall impact of the film. "I wanted to see if
I could play that multilayered kind of sophisticate. I never really got to where I
liked my work in this film, probably because we shot the film in seven weeks
under pretty tough conditions, and somehow I feel we just never got to it. I felt
pretty good in some scenes, but I'm not sure if the film works or not."
 
Costar Freeman agrees. "[Under Suspicion] really does create a dialogue and
that's a good thing, I know. But in something like this, you really don't know if
you really got to the tap root of the story, if you've really served it to its best."
 
At an age when many of his contemporaries are long retired, Hackman still
revels in his work, often making several pictures a year. "You know, it's wacky,
I've been doing this for so many years, but it's something I'm stuck with. What's
kind of scary is now I see that I may not have so many opportunities left to do
good work. I've done 70 films, and let's say I work another five years or so..."
His voice trails off as if he can't comprehend the gravity of his words, then he
continues. "If you enjoy it the way I enjoy it, then you'd understand what I'm
saying. I used to be able to go in and kind of not really work on a part and do
t out of pure instinct. But I feel like maybe I can do more now. I think I'm more
specific. More direct. I just feel that I care more now. Or I am more aware of
how much it means to me."
 
"At my age," he adds, "you have to love it or you can't do it. It makes me alive.
I never feel as alive as when I'm acting."
 
It is that passion for his work that puts the laughter in his resonant voice, the
vitality in his 6-foot-2 frame and a twinkle in his bright blue eyes. For whatever
it's worth, he sure doesn't look 70. Although the "age thing" creeps into his
conversation, Hackman appears to have made an uneasy truce with the
milestone and most of its ramifications.
 
"Physically, I don't feel 70. It's just a number," he says. "But it's a number that
is a wake-up call. You know that you don't have too many more decades."
Pausing for a moment, he takes care not to sound too earnest. "And that makes
it harder because I care more now than I used to, because you start seeing the
light at the end of the tunnel. I don't know how many more of these they're gonna
let me do. And I have to admit that there's something compelling to have this idea
hat you've maybe worked on and take that in and have 90 people standing around
waiting for you to do something. It's seductive. I like putting myself in the position
where I have to come up with something. Because there's still a sense of, 'When
are they gonna catch on?' I've always felt that. That's why when I have to watch
part of a film I've done, I think, 'Holy shit. I'm getting paid to do that? Why would
somebody do that?'"
 
Hackman has toyed with retirement. But life without the challenges of an acting
career just isn't something he's particularly good at. "I keep saying that I want to
retire, and the business is very stressful and long hours and all that, but I've tried
it before and it just doesn't work," he says. "So when I talk about retirement, it
has to do with if I can get out of bed in the morning. It's in very simple terms of
the physicality of the work and being drained in some ways after a film. One of
the things that happens is when you come off a tough film, four or five months
of really working your butt off with nights and long hours, you're finished. You
could quite easily walk away from the business because you're drained. I
supposeit's like being pregnant. You get over it. And then you want to go
back and do it again."  
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