It was not a one-on-one interview.  Rather, the magazine sent him a list of questions via audio cassette, and he answered them at his apartment in New York and then returned the tape.

 

I do consider myself as belonging to a particular school of acting, but I think that if you say you're a 'method actor' to people, people do not understand it, because they don't understand the techniques involved.  It has been, I believe, misrepresented almost entirely by writers who don't understand it -- and who would like to.  Writers don't seem to like actors very much; they seem to want to partronize them most of the time.  So, it's a little difficult to describe technically what school I belong to because, as I say, I don't think most people understand the techniques involved.  But I've taught method techniques, and I'm a method actor.

 

I think possibly the theater is more difficult, simply because it's a sustained effort.  I also think, in some ways, that it's easier, because in motion picture acting, you can get so involved in one moment of the script that you're not playing the entire script.  In other words, that you're making too much of that moment.  It's kind of like...I suppose the best example is a soap opera, where every moment is intensely experienced, usually because the actors are having trouble with their lines.  You know, they've learned them the night before, and they get on their feet, and they're more or less really a little insecure in their lines, so they tend to give more emphasis to each moment so that they can think of the next line.  Film can become like that because you can forget that the scene ends, really, at the airport, when you're playing it here at the house, and so you try to end it here.  You try to give it many, many values that it doesn't really have; whereas on stage, you have that 'through line'.

 

 

 

That 'mew' was Minna, my cat.  I have two cats: one is stately, plump Buck Mulligan, and the other one is Minna Gould.  Minna Gould is all yellow.  They're both named for characters in James Joyce's Ulysses, which  probably seems a little pompous...but, why not?

 

 

 

 

I liked Frank Savage.  There were certain Frank Savage scripts that I enjoyed very much.  One by Dean Reisner called "Interlude", which I thought was a marvelous, marvelous story -- marvelous script -- and I enjoyed doing it.  Dana Wynter was in it.

 

I don't know.  I suppose my favorite Shakesperian play is Hamlet, in which I would not want to play, mainly because I think that, for me, the definitive Hamlet was Nicol Williamson's.  A brilliant, brilliant performance -- loved that one!  I would like to play Richard III, because I don't think that's been played terribly well since John Barrymore played it.  Olivier more or less copied Barrymore's performance.  I'd like to play around with that one sometime.  I'd like to take a look at Lear as I get older -- some other ones. 

 

 

Neither of them have much to do with acting at all, but they're both very enjoyable.  They're not extensions of acting at all, by the way, and I would never go on to directing instead of acting or something.  They just don't have much to do with each other.

 

The most hazardous incident in my career was when we were doing The Man Who Never Was, and I decided to do my own stunt on the Ferris wheel in Vienna, and I climbed into the Ferris wheel without being wired, and so on, which is just plain dumb.  I think I had a hangover at the time.

 

 

 

I don't know.  I think possibly, if I'd had the education...I don't know.  Maybe this is just thinking about it in later years, but I would have loved to have done something that I consider of more immediate service -- like medicine or something.  I have no idea what other profession.  I'd like to paint, but that's...you know.

 

 

 

I sometimes...somehow don't consider all of the -- the ability to represent various things in a wide scale of colors as being perhaps my most important criterion for acting.  I consider those actors who amaze me are somehow less attractive to me than those actors who move me.

 

Of course, there weren't any diving scenes, there were scenes swimming with Namu.  There wasn't a stuntman.  The man who owned Namu, who had trapped him, whose name I've forgotten, did a great deal of it.  Then, after the picture was over, they allowed me to do some of it, some of the shots that way.  Some of the close-ups they did, of course, with a mock-up of Namu, but I did ride him, and I did play with him.  He was a marvelous, marvelous animal.  There was a...I always felt a great intelligence with Namu.

 

 

 

I think I've already named those.  Before this past year, there's False Face, which is an independent.  There's Bittersweet Love, which is Avco-Embassy, with Lana Turner.  I have a very small part in Bittersweet Love, by the way, although I'm starred in the picture.  It's kind of a nice picture, though.  There's a marvelous performance by the girl in the picture -- Meredith Baxter-Birney -- it's quite nice.  Then a picture called Acapulco Gold, which is an independent.  I think it's going to be released through Columbia, but I'm not sure at this point.  And the picture I've just finished, which is AIP, which is a Bert Gordor horror movie called H.G. Wells' Empire of the Ants, and that's with Joan Collins.

 

 

 

My two cats.

 

 

 

 

 

Foreign languages?  Not any well enough to get along.

 

James Joyce, James Joyce, and James Joyce.  Now, let's see...who else?  How about Willa Cather?  I don't really know.  I have probably... Books are, I guess, the largest... The most difficult decorating problem that I have is getting all the books into the house.  I have one, two, three, four seven-foot bookcases, so I can't tell you who my favorite authors are.  I like a lot.  I'm reading Mel Row right at the moment -- I like him.  The Ability to Love, that's a good one.  Ethan Fromme, that's a beauty!  That is a really good book!

 

 

 

I don't like all cats, like I don't like all people, I guess.

 

 

 

No, not entirely.  But, then, my friend who does all of that stuff says that you can't tell anything by just a sun sign anyway.  That you have to have the three of them all together.  And apparently, let's see...my rising sign, I think, is Sagittarius, and my moon is Capricorn.  She says I'm close to Sagittarius.  What that means, I really don't know, because I haven't looked it up.

 

 

 

I hope not, because every time in our history that a less advanced, or less technologically advanced race... The more technically advanced race wipes out the other ones, so I hope we don't run into anybody then. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How much money they have! (Laughing)  It depends upon the person, you know.  If it's a beautiful woman, the first thing I want to know, to learn about her, is something different that if it's some professor of psychology at NYU.  I don't know.

 

(Amused laughter) Well, that depends upon whether I'm in the mood to talk at the moment or not.

 

 

 

 

 

I would tell them to get their education and try to think about doing something else as a profession because it's not much of a profession any more, it's sort of a rich man's hobby.

 

 

I'm sure it -- I suppose it helped.  I don't think of it in terms of career quite that way.  I really think of it in terms of enjoyable parts I've played.

 

 

 

Thank you for asking all of the questions, and I've enjoyed it.