Who are you calling a star?
Gene Hackman has been Hollywood's most consistent and powerful
actor for 30 years but, even with three new films, he admits he still
doesn't know how to play the part
David Edelstein
Sunday January 27, 2002

Observer
Seen back to back to back, Gene Hackman's three leading roles in
three current movies offer a clue to his nervy greatness: he seems
energised by messing with his directors' expectations. In Wes
Anderson's comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, he plays the self-
absorbed patriarch of a family of despondent geniuses, and his
airy cunning is in dry counterpoint to Anderson's arch, storybook
compositions.
In John Moore's Behind Enemy Lines, he's an admiral who mostly
squints into monitors and assures a trapped young soldier that
he won't be abandoned. But instead of John Wayne-like breast-
beating, Hackman seems eaten up by the character's impotence,
quietly riven by opposing inner forces of military discipline and rage.
In Heist, he transcends the stifling universe of the writer and
director David Mamet, in which spontaneous feeling is trampled
under a procession of double-, triple- and quadruple-crosses.
Hackman supplies a strain of uncertainty; in a sea of duplicitous
masks, his is the only human face.
Called 'the hardest-working thesp in showbiz' in a recent issue of
Variety, Hackman doesn't disappear into these hugely dissimilar
roles, effecting dazzling transformations in the manner of Gary
Oldman or Meryl Streep. Neither does he make his roles disappear
into him, like those capacious eccentrics, Marlon Brando and Jack
Nicholson. He doesn't project charismatic ease with himself, like
Paul Newman, and he doesn't give off live-wire Method sparks like
Al Pacino or Robert Duvall. At 71, Hackman continues to occupy
a middle ground between character acting and movie stardom that
has earned him, over the years, the bland appellation 'Everyman',
a strangely inapt description for an actor who claims to be
comfortable only when he finds the edge. Even at their jauntiest,
Hackman's performances have volcanic undercurrents. It might
be that the secret of his singularity is that his comfort zone is a
scary and volatile place.
Consider his most vivid scene in Unforgiven (1992), in which his
character, a sheriff known as Little Bill, welcomes a hired gun
played by Richard Harris to the town by kicking him to a bloody
pulp up and down Main Street. Often, Hackman prepares for a
scene by doing an 'affective memory' exercise, a Stanislavsky-
derived technique that involves reliving a past experience, usually
traumatic, to infuse a moment with emotional truth. But he prefers,
in action scenes, to use whatever's in the air; in this case, Harris,
who had appeared with Hackman 26 years earlier, in Hawaii,
unwittingly provided a key.
'We had a long conversation,' Hackman recalls, 'and there was
a moment where I could tell he didn't remember having worked
with me, but he said he did; he tried to fake his way through it,
which all of us do at one time or another. Of course, I wasn't really
angry with him. I love him, I think he's terrific. But I remember
thinking, "Oh, I can use this". I just took that disappointment and
did this kind of transference.'
So Harris wouldn't forget Hackman the next time they work together?
Hackman laughs - that familiar, slightly sinister 'heh-heh-heh' that is
the one common note in his performances. 'Exactly.'
When I spoke to him, Hackman was at his home in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. He was candid, gracious, easygoing, a different sort of
person than he is, by his own admission, on a set. Between jobs,
he steers clear of Hollywood and has, at various times, been
consumed by stock-car racing, stunt flying, deep-sea diving and
painting, the sorts of activities one does to escape the self that, in
Hackman's kind of acting, must be fearlessly (and fearsomely)
plumbed.
He has a reputation for chewing up directors that he doesn't entirely
dispute. He speaks of his battles regretfully, of the estrangement he
sometimes feels from his colleagues, of the cost to his physical and
mental health. He admits that he sometimes puts his own process
ahead of the movie, reasoning that he can only reach the truth of a
role in his own way, and that it won't do a film any good if he's terrible.
It's odd that what he mostly fights for is the time and space to relax,
to get comfortable enough to revisit those wrenching injuries that drove
him to become an actor in the first place.
'Dysfunctional families have sired a number of pretty good actors,' he
points out. In Hackman's case, there was a father who left home in
Danville, Illinois, without explanation when the boy was in his early
teens, waving enigmatically as he drove away.
There was the sudden death of his mother, killed in a fire before her
son had made good. There was an unpleasant stint in the Marines,
on which Hackman clearly draws - both in his bearing and his pained
demeanour - in innumerable roles as sergeants, captains and, of late,
generals and admirals.
A year of training at the Pasadena Playhouse in California ended with
his embarrassing dismissal, along with his classmate and buddy,
Dustin Hoffman. In New York, he didn't cotton to Lee Strasberg at the
Actors Studio. 'He played with peoples' heads a lot,' Hackman says.
Working as a doorman at a New York hotel, he was recognised by his
former Marine sergeant, who said he was a sorry sight. Only more
colourfully.
'That was a turning point for me,' Hackman says. 'I was so embarrassed
by what I was doing in New York. And the fact that somebody cared
enough to say something like that.'
It doesn't sound, objectively speaking, like an altogether caring remark,
but it has clearly served as a kind of power pack for Hackman, a
galvanising moment that can be accessed whenever shame (or who
knows what else?) is required.
Hackman did end up learning the Method, not from Strasberg but from
George Morrison, his original director in the 1964 Broadway production
of Any Wednesday .
Morrison was fired in rehearsals when the producers thought he was
taking too much time laying the psychological foundation for what was
supposed to be a breezy, boulevard comedy. But Hackman felt those
foundations enabled him to take big risks onstage for the first time. He
sought out Morrison for private instruction and credits him for relaxation
techniques that he practises to this day. Morrison also taught him to ask
two fundamental questions about every part: 'How am I like this person?'
and 'How am I not like this person?'
A characteristic Hackman motif is visible, in embryo, in his first significant
film part, in Robert Rossen's Lilith (1964). In his only scene, Hackman
greets Warren Beatty with a hick geniality out of which oozes slowly,
but with increasing intensity, a stream of bile. Hackman gives the only
grounded performance in the movie, an opinion shared by Beatty, who
would tap him, three years later, for his breakthrough role as Buck Barrow,
Clyde's brother, in Arthur Penn's tragicomic shoot-'em-up Bonnie and Clyde .
It was here, says Hackman, that he learned to mine his own discomfort to
fill out his characters. In an early scene in which a conversation with Clyde
lapses awkwardly, he laughs and beats on his legs to fill the silence, and
the gesture captures something essential about Buck: that he can't afford
to stop and think too much. He's a friendly, not-too-bright guy who never
connects with the horror he perpetrates; so when he's mortally wounded
and he staggers around bleeding, clutching his gut and wailing, animal-like,
it's the most painful death in a movie full of painful deaths.
His first leading-man role came three years later in the chamber drama, I
Never Sang For My Father (1970), and he had trouble with it. As the helpless
son of a dominating father (Melvyn Douglas), he had to be emotionally naked,
and he didn't especially want to open himself up to the grief of his non-
relationship with his own father.
'I didn't think a lot of the project and was taking it very lightly,' Hackman
recalls. 'Then Melvyn Douglas came up to me and said, "Gene, you'll never
get what you want with the way you're acting" and he didn't mean acting -
he meant that I was not behaving myself. He taught me not to use my
reservations as an excuse for not doing the work.'
The advice came in handy with his next big role, which Hackman none the
less tried to back out of. 'Popeye' Doyle in The French Connection (1971)
was based on a real New York narcotics detective named Eddie Egan,
described by some as a big Irish blowhard who didn't think Hackman had
anything like his own bullying force. Yet it is the most physical of Hackman's
performances, a sneering, finger-jabbing, cyclonic hero-monster.
The role, and the Academy Award that followed, made him a bona-fide star,
a tag with which he struggles to this day. He professes not to understand his
appeal, hates watching himself on screen, and hasn't seen the majority of
the more than 80 features in which he has appeared, most of them with his
name above the title.
'I can tell on the set if a scene works,' he says. 'But, for the life of me, I
couldn't tell watching the finished performance.' One performance he didn't
need to see, and hasn't, was in the 1972 disaster picture, The Poseidon
Adventure . 'That was my idea of being a Hollywood movie actor,' he says
of the role, in which he was called upon, with a straight face, to direct the
women to tear off the lower halves of their dresses for their own safety, an
edict that mysteriously didn't apply to the character played by Shelley Winters.
'When I was working on it, I was kind of ashamed of myself. I had to have
my hair poufed up at the end and slicked over. And the producer, Irwin Allen,
was one of those guys who used to comb his hair from one ear across the
top of his head, and I just didn't want to look like him.'
The next years would see Hackman hit an artistic peak and become a rich
man. He considers his best performance to be in Jerry Schatzberg's
Scarecrow, a casual, intimate 1973 drama in which he and Al Pacino
play Beckett-like hobos travelling cross-country to open a car-wash. It's
a role that uses all of Hackman: his capacity for violence but also his joy
in improvisation, of getting and staying on the same wavelength as a fellow
Method titan. But almost no one saw it.
Amazingly, audiences didn't show up for Francis Ford Coppola's The
Conversation (1974), either, although many consider Hackman's surveillance
expert, Harry Caul, his most virtuoso portrayal. With his forehead lengthened,
his eyes hidden behind thick glasses, his body concealed by a plastic
trenchcoat he almost never removes, even in bed with his kept girlfriend,
Teri Garr, Hackman's Harry seems reduced to a pair of ears.
Hackman claims The Conversation was 'great fun to work on', an assessment
contradicted over the years by Coppola, who has described Hackman as
miserable inside Harry's emotional straitjacket. 'Well, yeah,' Hackman
concedes. 'He was really a constipated character. But the misery was
partially Coppola's fault because he had let it be known that he wanted Brando
for that role and Brando didn't want to do it. I loved the idea of the role, but I
also knew that I was second choice.'
Did Hackman use that knowledge to feed Harry's paranoia? Of course. 'I don't
mean to live my roles,' he says, somewhat haltingly, 'but sometimes I supposed
it's not comfortable to be around me.'
The mid and late 1970s saw Hackman taking more and more money jobs,
among them the role of Lex Luthor in the Superman series. Fed up with his
roles, he announced his retirement in the late 1970s, determined to devote his
life to his family and his high-speed fun.
After a year and a half, he couldn't take the leisure anymore. Hackman accepted
a cameo in Beatty's Reds (1980) and found that his joy in acting returned,
especially in character parts. He took a lot of well paid jobs in the late 1980s,
too, but his triumph (and second Oscar) as the fascistic sheriff in Unforgiven, a
role that his agent had to persuade him to accept, kept his popularity high.
Hackman has had heart problems, but you wouldn't know it from watching his
three most recent performances. Although he claims not to relish the chafing
against directorial authority, he's not about to suppress the instincts that have
served him so brilliantly. 'Doing the Mamet thing wasn't a lot of fun,' he says of
Heist . 'It wasn't necessarily David. There's a lot of repetition in the lines and
many times they're misdirected or purposely obtuse, so that's difficult for an
actor to fill up both emotionally and intellectually. It was the toughest shoot I've
had in quite a while. Emotionally, not physically.'
He had reservations about the ironic context of The Royal Tenenbaums, but once
he started working he knew he could connect with the reality of the part. 'I don't
think I'm as bad as the character, but there are times that I've been fairly insensitive
with my children and with my ex-wife, so maybe I was more right for it than I realised.'
But enjoyment for Hackman still seems to be double-edged, his best work rooted
in tension. 'There was great love on the set,' he says. 'Yet at the same time I was
very conflicted because people were much younger than me and I felt left out or
ignored. And that wasn't even true. I knew it wasn't true, but I used it anyway.'
Hackman now plans a year off from films. A few years back, he collaborated with
the underwater archaeologist Daniel Lenihan on a high-seas adventure novel,
Wake of the Perdido Star, and they've begun to write another, less melodramatic
yarn. He'll do more diving and painting. He knows the itch to act will return, but
the battles of the last few movies have left him winded. It's part of his artistic
temperament that he worries over the appropriateness of his roles. Even in the
melancholy 1998 mystery, Twilight, in which he played an ageing Hollywood
actor, he had lingering doubts. 'I was very pleased to do it,' he recalls, 'but I
wasn't ideal casting. I don't really know how to play a movie star.'  
http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,640019,00.html


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