I Blame Dennis Hopper Read online

  “Billy Wilder?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes, saying, “Someone that could hire you. Someone that would put you in a movie!”

  I said, “Not everything is about getting a job. It’s the privilege of meeting someone whose work you admire. Plus I have an in.” Billy had worked with my grandfather on Ninotchka. A few days later Jay called me with Billy Wilder’s home phone number.

  The fact that I can write that I actually called Billy Wilder still gives me a thrill, but I am a little mortified about how the conversation went. Mr. Wilder himself answered the phone. He was friendly but curt: “Young lady, I appreciate very much that you would like to meet me, but I’m in no position at this time to offer you a job.”

  “No, I understand that, Mr. Wilder. I was just hoping to talk to you about some of your movies. You wrote Ninotchka—my grandfather, Melvyn Douglas, was in it—I would be very curious to know about working with him and also Ernst Lubitsch.”

  “Young lady, I am no longer directing pictures. You should be spending your time meeting directors that will put you in pictures, not talk about the pictures.”

  There’s nothing like being lectured by Billy Wilder. Still, in that one brief phone call, I felt like I got a taste of what it would probably have been like to be directed by Billy Wilder. He would have had very little patience. Sentiment would make him uncomfortable. He was easily frustrated by actresses looking for jobs. I always wondered, If I had identified myself as a director, would the conversation have gone better or made more sense to him?

  The next example of how my relationship to directors changed once I became an actress involves an equally impressive director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. He was charming, witty, engaging—all the things I expected. A good director needs to feel like he is directing. A good actress needs and wants to be directed. It’s a symbiotic, often seductive relationship.

  So it’s probably a good thing I never worked with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who was rumored to have had love affairs with most of his leading ladies. Joseph Mankiewicz was right up there with Wilder for me. Some of my favorites films of his are the pitch-perfect All About Eve, A Letter to Three Wives, and the romantic The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. I had seen Mr. Mankiewicz at a number of Peggy Siegal’s premieres, most notably Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam. The after-party was held at the legendary restaurant ‘21’, which was prominently featured in All About Eve. When I saw Mr. Mankiewicz walking through the very rooms that he had so brilliantly captured in some of that film’s most unforgettable scenes, I thought: Once again, movies and real life have collided. We were looping The Last Temptation of Christ, and Marty was impressed that I was reading the Mankiewicz biography Pictures Will Talk, by Kenneth L. Geist, but he winced and said, “It’s not a very flattering book” and brought me one he much preferred, More About All About Eve, by Gary Carey with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, along with his own biography, Scorsese on Scorsese. Interesting way to court someone. Stop reading the book about the other director. Here’s a book about me. Thought Joe was a bastard? What do you think of this guy?

  Obviously Marty admired his work, so around the time of Cape Fear, I asked Marty if he might reach out to Mr. Mankiewicz and invite him to the premiere, and then we could have dinner with him. One of the things that was endearing about Marty is that whenever I would suggest meeting some of these Hollywood greats, he would suddenly become insecure.

  “Why on earth would Joe Mankiewicz want to see Cape Fear?”

  That’s when I’d remind him that first of all, he was doing it for me, and second of all, “Um … you’re Martin Scorsese! You’re a great director. I’m sure he’d be thrilled to meet you, and see Cape Fear!”

  Marty was always surprised whenever he found out that another director admired his work, too. He looked at Mankiewicz as if he were in another pantheon of Hollywood history.

  Well, Mr. Mankiewicz did indeed attend the opening of Cape Fear, and a few weeks later, we arranged to meet him and his wife, Rosemary, for dinner at a restaurant he loved near his home in Bedford, New York.

  Marty was meeting him as the director of Cape Fear. Mankiewicz gave him an overall critique of the film, which was very insightful; Marty was humbled by his praise. They talked about cameramen and lighting. Technical things. Then Mankiewicz turned to me, the actress. He proceeded to completely dissect my character, Lori Davis. He broke down every choice I had made; he read deeply into my character’s psyche. Now, I hadn’t even told Marty some of the homework that had gone into my emotional choices, but Mr. Mankiewicz had picked up on little nuances I had played as if he were a psychic. His blue eyes bored into mine. As he spoke it seemed there was no one at the table but the two of us. He wanted to let me know that he, and he alone, understood me. I felt like I was being redirected in Cape Fear by Joe L. Mankiewicz himself, which did not go unnoticed by the other director of Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese, who was glaring at us across the table.

  When he finished, I said, “Mr. Mankiewicz, did all of your leading ladies fall in love with you? Because I think I’m in love with you right now.”

  He smiled and said, “All actresses want to be psychoanalyzed. They don’t know who they are, so they want to be told who they are. If a man can do that, then any woman will fall in love with him.”

  He said it in jest, but I thought there was tremendous truth to it. I was certainly putty in his hands, and he knew it. Tell me who I am, Joe? Tell me who you want me to be, Joe?

  We took some pictures, and he said he would sign them and send them along to us. A week later they arrived. I am sitting next to Mr. Mankiewicz, and I have a huge smile on my face. So does he!

  The caption read, “For Illeana—twenty years ago this pose would be blurred!” At first I didn’t understand what it meant, but Marty grabbed the picture away from me.

  “Blurred! How dare he!”

  My other director explained it to me.

  “Blurred! You would be moving around! Get it!?”

  Marty refused to let me hang up the picture. I loved that he was jealous of an eighty-one-year-old, even if it was Joseph L. Mankiewicz. And what a memorable, sly line written by this witty screenwriter/director to his actress.

  Still, looking at the picture, and Marty’s reaction, I realized that’s all I was to Joe. I was the “actress.” I had lost the ability to communicate one-on-one with directors as I had when I was working for Peggy Siegal. I was conflicted that I would be on only one side of the camera now. Luckily for me, one director changed that. He was the director of To Die For: Gus Van Sant.

  In the 1990s, Gus Van Sant was the one director with whom I dreamed of working. I loved watching his films, but I could not put into words why they touched me so much. There was an emotional sensibility to which I related but could not place. The movies played like dreams, with haunting images and gritty performances. I remember seeing Drugstore Cowboy and thinking, What the hell was that? It was an assault to the senses. It was like listening to Pink Floyd in a darkened bedroom. He had the audacity to take a matinee idol, Matt Dillon, and make him a drug addict, and the artistic vision to film an ending with him where death seemed almost welcoming and romantic, like Juliet’s swallowing poison.

  Then came My Own Private Idaho. It was not so much a film as an experience. I could feel the cold and desperation of these two hustlers. This was a movie that took you somewhere. I could actually smell this film. The embers in a fire, the dirty leather coats that smelled of smoke, the old houses and the open fields. Again, I’m going to say images. Images set to music. Houses falling from the sky. The safety of the home smashing to bits on the ground.

  Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues may not have been well received critically, but the images and color of that film, and the boldness and daring of the filmmaker, stayed with me. This was a director who was part Nick Ray, part Warhol, part Bergman. Gus Van Sant? Was he even American? I wondered. When I met Gus at my audition for To Die For, he was quiet and completely different from what I had expect
ed. Soft-spoken and unassuming. He was from Connecticut, for God’s sake. Grew up in a town very near me. He would go on to be nominated twice for an Academy Award, for having directed the quietly brilliant Good Will Hunting and the historically powerful Milk. His directing style appears to be simple, and that may be part of his genius, because the emotional depth of his characters is boundless.

  But this was 1994. He was directing To Die For, based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Maynard. I had dreamed of working with him, and now it was happening. I was playing the part of Janice, a professional ice skater and the sister of Larry, played by Matt Dillon.

  We were in Toronto shooting the ending of the movie, in which I skate over Suzanne’s body. I had grown up ice-skating, but for the movie I had trained for six weeks to be able to perform like a professional ice-skater. Back in New York City, Gus had sat in the living room of my apartment while he and the costumer Beatrix Aruna Pasztor and producer Laura Ziskin chose outfits for me to wear in the movie. For the final scene I would be head to toe in a tight, form-fitting black-and-gold ice-skating outfit. It was stunning and very close to what I had seen the real ice-skaters wear when I was training. The day before the shoot, Gus decided to change my beautiful outfit to this absolutely nutty pink fuzzy sweater, with a scarf and poodle skirt. I looked like a little girl in the 1950s—not the beautiful and evil black widow. I was trying it on for him in my trailer, and I was looking at him as if to say, Gus, this is nuts, I look like cotton candy. At least can we lose the pom-pom on my woolen hat? Gus was his usual sort of quiet and understated smiling self. He said, “Oh, really; I kind of like it.” That’s all he said. And Gus was very collaborative. I could have probably got away with wearing my black outfit, but I trusted Gus, and I wanted to be a vision of what he wanted me to look like, even if I didn’t understand it. After all, he was the director.

  It was snowing when we shot the scene. I passed by David Cronenberg, who had just finished shooting his scene as the hit man the Marettos hire to kill Suzanne. Buck Henry, the screenwriter, stood to the side and took pictures. I was in this crazy outfit. The wind was whipping across Lake Simcoe and it was hard to just stay upright on my skates. The camera was attached to a LUNA crane, and as it rose above me, it was shaking so much that I thought it was going to come crashing down. Again and again we shot it, with Gus standing behind me on the ice in his parka. I was a skater in the zone, if not in a trance, as I glided out to my position trying not to blow away. Then the sun came out, and we finally got the shot. Of course when I saw it in the movie, it all made sense. I was in one of Gus’s visions, surrounded by crystals of ice; I was frosty white and pink. The goddess of death. Smiling innocently. Just stunning. It is one of my favorite images of any film I’ve ever been in. Quietly powerful, like much of Gus’s work.

  That night I was at the bar with Gus and Buck Henry. Buck was telling stories about Catch-22 and The Graduate. I made fun of Gus because he drank whiskey sours—straight up. It reminded me of Connecticut. How could someone as hip as Gus drink whiskey sours? I thought, Why would I be anywhere else but here? Making a movie during the day, hanging out hearing stories at night. I was always seeking out Buck Henry for stories. One day I saw him at lunch, and I had my tray about to sit down, and he said, “Illeana, you can sit here, but you can’t ask me any more questions about my movies.”

  I had never really socialized with a director on set besides Marty, and Gus blurred those lines by hanging out with the actors, letting them see dailies—which was verboten with many directors. All that artistic stimulation I had missed from being just “the actress” came flooding in. Gus created an environment of collaboration, and he was never threatened by opinions. I remember shooting one of my first scenes with Nicole Kidman. Let’s stop for a minute and remember how friggin’ great she is in To Die For, shall we? She had a black hat and veil on. She asked me rather directly, “What about you, Illeana. What do you think?” I saw the costumer, Beatrix, nervously looking over her shoulder, but I did not want to lie, so I said, “I think it looks like you just killed your husband. It’s too much.”

  She said, “That’s what I thought” and took it off, adding, “Thank you” as she smiled at me.

  That camaraderie of looking out for each other was a reflection of the environment Gus created. At times, To Die For felt like a home movie. One day I was kidding around with Matt, and he accidentally broke my thumb. Gus, rather than hiding it, wanted to incorporate it into the movie. “We have to take advantage of it,” he said excitedly. “It’s real. She’s a skater, and she fell and broke her thumb.” It worked for the documentary feel of the film. When you look at a movie like To Die For, you can tell how Gus was breaking the rules as a director, because it’s really an independent film mixed with a studio film. Juxtaposing the documentary style improv within a Buck Henry script. Brilliantly casting people such as Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, myself, opposite the china doll beauty of Nicole Kidman. I always thought To Die For was wrongly identified as a black comedy. To me, it was more of a film with a social commentary. Part Mankiewicz in its storytelling (for example, the flashback technique used in A Letter to Three Wives), part Wilder in its cynicism (like his very dark film about fame, Ace in the Hole). A fascinating look at American values told through the eyes of its victims and its victorious murderess, Suzanne Stone. True, the film’s “You aren’t anybody unless you’re on television” no longer plays as satire. In that way, To Die For predicted the future and the culture of celebrity.

  I always kept mixtapes that I would listen to in my trailer to get me in the mood for various scenes. Gus would come in sometimes just to hear what I was playing, which for that film was usually a ’60s mix of the Beatles, Neil Young, and Donovan. That sort of thing. Gus was in my trailer when he heard Donovan’s “Season of the Witch.” I was thrilled when it turned up in the movie’s last scene as the background music while I’m skating.

  Another time we were shooting Matt Dillon’s funeral scene and Gus came to my trailer and said, “Do you have any sad music?” In the scene, Nicole plays a song for everyone at the graveyard. Well, the song I picked out was “Imagine” by John Lennon. We did the scene, and it evoked strong emotions. Gus said it worked so well that they would have to get the rights to use it. It turns out that “Imagine” cost too much, and that’s a shame, because boy, did that song work for that scene. In the end, they used Eric Carmen’s “All by Myself,” which, if you notice, is slightly incongruous with everyone’s performance, but I was thrilled to be able to contribute some musical ambience, like an emotional DJ.

  I learned so many things from Gus Van Sant as a director, but one of the most important was trust. And lenses. We were shooting one of the scenes in the ice rink. Gus was playing the off-camera interviewer of the fictional documentary about the murder. It was the first time I’d done a movie in which I was essentially acting along with the actual director. In the scene Gus is the insensitive nosy reporter asking questions about the death of my brother, but he was also directing me.

  Normally you tell a director what you are going to do, but because he was the antagonist in the scene, interviewing me, I stayed in character never letting him know how I would answer the questions. He also threw a lot of questions at me that were not in the script, and I was answering them in character as Janice, not Illeana. What I thought might be an emotional moment was coming up in which I say, “And that’s the last time I saw my brother.” I had noticed that whenever reporters were interviewing victims of crimes the cameraman seemed to sense when the person was about to become emotional—and zoom in for a close-up. The victims would be asked about their childhood, and they would be laughing, in the middle of this happy memory, and all of a sudden they would form a mental picture of the person, and be overcome with grief, realizing that the person was dead and never coming back. And then they would apologize for crying. Why do people apologize for crying? I wanted to do something like that, but I didn’t want to tell Gus I was doing it. I wanted
him to be caught off guard and see how he’d handle it.

  We are doing the scene; Gus said, “Tell me about your brother.” I started to share these wonderful stories using an emotional preparation of my own to form my own mental picture, and I started crying and said, “I’m sorry; can we stop?” Just as I had suspected, the astute director of photography, Eric Alan Edwards, and Gus did not stop—they even zoomed in on my crying face and just let the camera go, waiting patiently for me to continue. And I was truly emotional. It happened very organically. Finally I said, “That’s the last time I saw my brother.”

  Gus had not expected me to start crying, but he had reacted like a documentary director photographing his subject, catching me in this seemingly private moment of grief. A sense of relief washed over me, because I knew I had nailed it. There was some discussion with the director of photography and then Gus pulled me over to the side. He was, again, his quiet and understated polite self. He said, “Man that was … that was really good.” He was smiling, and I was happy.

  “But we had the wrong lens on. Do you think you could do that again?”

  Wrong lens? What did that mean? It was the first time I had ever heard that from a director. I remember my takes on Alive were ruined because they were out of focus. Now it’s the wrong lens? To this day, whenever I’m doing an emotional scene I ask two questions: “What lens is that?” and “Are we in focus?” Then it’s “OK, good to go.”

  My heart sank. We were standing on the ice rink and I kicked my skate into the ice. I said, “No, I can’t do that one again. That was perfect, but let me see what I can do.”