‘Directors
have needed a book like this since D.W. Griffith invented the close-up’, wrote
legendary director John Frankenheimer about John Badham’s first book, ‘I’ll Be
in My Trailer’. ‘We directors have to pass along to other directors our
hard-learned lessons about actors. Maybe then they won’t have to start from
total ignorance like I did, like you did, like we all did.’
Along
with Frankenheimer, there were names like Oliver Stone, Michael Mann, Richard
Donner and Steven Soderbergh weighing in from the directors’s corner. Giving
the actors’s side of events, such luminaries as Mel Gibson, Frank Langella,
Richard Dreyfuss, Jenna Elfman, Dennis Haysbert and Martin Sheen.
Badham
had gathered some of the most celebrated creatives in Hollywood to give us the
benefit of their on-set experiences, and to offer advice about how these two
very different artistic types can work together successfully on a picture. Of
course, there was also plenty of anecdotal evidence that a film-set can be
highly combustable work environment if director and actor are not particularly
simpatico.
He
told me, ‘The first book came about after a talk at the AFI when one student
asked “What do you do when an actor won’t do what you want him or her to do?â€
And the entire room of fifty, sixty people suddenly sat up straight, and I
thought, “There’s a book here!â€â€™
His
second book, ‘On Directing’, presented his own hard-won experiences learned
over a 50 year- long career as a guide for budding young directors who may have
all the technological know-how, but haven’t yet learnt that building a good
relationship with your actors is the most important skill of all.
John
Badham should know. Taking off like a rocket following his second feature, Saturday
Night Fever, his name became synonymous with success after a long run of
big movie hits like Dracula, WarGames, Short Circuit, Blue Thunder and Stakeout.
In amongst those were smaller critically acclaimed films like Who’s Life is it
Anyway? and American Flyers. By the 1990s, he had built up a
formidable reputation as both a hit maker and an ‘actor’s director.’
A
second edition of the book, released in October has been expanded to include
Badham’s more recent experiences as a TV director; a resumé which boasts titles
like ‘Arrow’, ‘Psych’, ‘Supernatural’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Sirens’. The new edition
brings in new voices like Allan Arkush, Paris Barclay, Ryan Murphy and Michelle
MacLaren, who give their own no-holds-barred battle stories from the front line
of blockbuster TV in the 21st Century.
Despite
his brawny, all-American back catalogue, Badham is actually a Brit by birth,
making his debut in Luton while his father served here in World War II. Moreover, he spent many months as a child
staying with his grandparents in my own neck of the woods, North Wales. I
chatted with this highly respected Hollywood veteran (and honorary Welshman)
about his book, and about his 1991 hit The Hard Way, which has just been
released as a special edition on BluRay by Kino Lorber.
As
well as still directing hit TV shows, Badham is a Tenured Professor at Chapman
University in Orange, California teaching Film Studies. ‘I’m teaching directing
remotely which is fun. I’ve got people
doing scenes on Zoom - I’m getting very good at Zoom.’
You’re
the ideal candidate to have written a book about the relationship between actor
and director because you’ve always had a reputation as an ‘Actor’s Director.’ It’s
often the first thing any article about you says, including this one. What do
you think makes you so good at coaxing great performances out of actors?
JB. Well, my earliest training was at Yale
University as an undergraduate and later a director at the drama school. As you
can imagine, theatre is extremely actor-oriented and working with actors is one
of the key skills that you have to learn as a director. A lot of film directors
never really get that initial training with actors. They’re great with
machinery, cameras, lights, microphones: that all does what you tell it to do
but unfortunately actors have this annoying way of being human beings! And they
have ideas - at least a microphone has no ideas and won’t answer back.
So, this is just something that I learned early on.
Was
it a help being the son of an actress and the brother too? Did that give you something of an inside
track on how actors tick?
JB Somewhat. I think I have some acting genes in me, I just didn’t get the best set,
my sister did. (His sister, Mary Badham was nominated for an Academy Award for
her role as young Scout Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird (1962).) But I still love acting. I love to do it when
I get to an opportunity, and every single time it makes me appreciate how
difficult and how stressful it is for an actor, especially the poor guy with
one line. How can you screw up one line? Well, I’ve seen it more times than you
can say.
Hence
your advice in the book, recommending that you take as much time to chat to and
encourage the guy with one line as much as your main cast.
JB That’s right, he or she is the most
terrified one out of everybody! The guys
with big parts have probably long since gotten over their fears. They’re
probably less needy than the poor guy who’s come in for one day, who doesn’t
know any of the players, who hasn’t had a job in a while. Acting, you know, if
you’re not doing it regularly you can get rusty pretty fast.
I
think you’re especially good at getting very naturalistic performances out of
actors. I look back on films like Blue Thunder and Saturday Night
Fever, and no one seems to be acting at all. Is that a style that you
favour?
JB. I do. I want to really believe these
people and in those two particular films, I used a kind of quasi-documentary
technique in the acting scenes in particular. I always encourage the actors to
improvise and ad lib, and they know they have the freedom to try anything which
is very liberating. On Saturday Night Fever, the young cast were just
thrilled to be able to improvise. Many of the scenes that have become kind of
famous were just wonderful improvisations going on in the middle of a written
scene. So we weren’t being quite as stickler about the text as we would have
been had we been doing Shakespeare or Ibsen.
It
does show that you have an innate instinct for what makes a great screen
performance, as opposed to a theatrical performance. It reminds me of the story
of Frank Langella giving an all-guns-blazing performance opposite Olivier in Dracula,
until you showed him what it looked like in the rushes and he redid the entire
scene.
JB Oh yes, and it took him a while because
he’s so skilled as an actor on stage but he was trying to change a performance
that he had been giving for eight months on Broadway, y’know six or eight times
a week. Trying to change that is really tough. It’s like trying to teach a
golfer a new swing; their muscles only go one way after time.
You
talk a lot in the book about a natural animosity that exists between directors
and actors - something that for the most part you’ve managed to avoid. That
surprised me. I would have thought there was if anything a mutual
inter-depencency. Why do you think this relationship is so fraught?
JB I think that many actors have just had
bad experiences with directors who don’t know how to talk to actors, who speak
in terms of results - ‘Be happier, let’s have more fun with this scene,’ and
the actors privately, or publicly roll their eyes and they think that this
director has nothing to tell me.
Some
actors, like Brando, like to test their director on the first day of shooting,
just to see what they are going to have to work with. Brando would give the
director two variations of a performance, one of which he knew to be
terrifically dreadful, and see what the director did. And if he didn’t pick the
right one, in Brando’s mind he was done for the rest of the film. He told Richard
Donner he wanted to play Jor-El as a giant tomato! Before he’d even visited the
set of Superman, he went to visit Richard Donner and the writer Tom
Mankiewicz and shocked them with this, and it took them a while to find a way
around the idea!