‘Being Maria’ – and Being Marlon, Too

Re-creating “Last Tango In Paris.”

And the contrast — what you just said about your crew crying and such — there were some shots in Being Maria depicting the Last Tango crew. They were a little chilling, because the people are just sort of staring straight ahead, they’re very somber. Of course I don’t think the crew knew that she was actually being assaulted.

Well, that’s strange. I mean you read the script and you read the scenes you do that day, and the team reads it too because they have to know what you’re going to do, and this wasn’t written in the script. You can tell from people’s reactions that they understand something goes wrong, but they can’t say anything because of the time, which has changed since — because now we’re more of a collective, we work together. There’s no more hierarchy, this director that has all powers. Things are changing and I’m glad they do.

My thought was that in the crew’s minds they were working for the great Bertolucci. They were in awe of him and they’re not going to do anything or say anything that would go against — they’re trusting, in a certain way.

They do have the right, but it’s concerning when you think that way. That for the purpose of art, he could have done anything, that’s the major point, and that’s what the movie is trying to say, how far can you go for art?

You must have had a lot of trust in Matt, and the two of you must have gone through a lot together.

Yes, and for this scene we had an intimacy coordinator that helped a lot. She was very protective and she assured us that what is said is done and we’re not repeating history again, and Jessica was very kind and respectful. She wanted to make sure that it’s not a painful experience for us. Yeah, Matt was very understanding and supportive and listening. He was the best partner for it because I felt safe and at the same time we went very deep into the scene and the emotion, but with a balance of acting and respect towards the situation. We had the intimacy coordinator, and at that time if that job existed that wouldn’t ever have happened to Maria.

It’s interesting that Jessica was an assistant to Bertolucci, and she was 19, the same age as Maria in Last Tango. But it sounds like night and day in terms of the director and the director’s attitude toward the actors.

Yes! I mean we did it. As long as you consider yourself a good director, you should be able to take your actors wherever you want, without pain, without violence and aggression. Jessica was the most kind and generous director. I think she took Matt and I to a place she wanted us to go, and we gave what she wanted but we never suffered for it. So you can create art without suffering and without involving violence. 

Right, yes. It looked like you also had some fun maybe, like in the crazy dance scene. Matt told me you said to him, Don’t tell me what you’re going to do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Laughs.]

So all those giggles were real. 

Yes, they were.

Did you read Vanessa Schneider’s book?

Yes, I did. Before my audition.

That must have been an exciting day, when you got the news you had that part.

Yes. It was a long process. I did my first audition, then Jessica saw me twice. She called me and said, It’s not going to work; I’m searching for Maria. So she did a wild casting [call] and she was searching for girls that have never done acting before. She wanted to find Maria as her personality and physically, and she didn’t find her. She came back to me one year after, saying that she wants us to do it together. Of course at the beginning I felt frustrated because I wanted to portray Maria. Then she finally said that I have the part, then I had the pressure to not disappoint her and to make sure she made the right choice.

I’m sure she’s very happy with the choice she made. It’s a stunning performance. That’s interesting, though, because it sounds like at the beginning she was doing what Bertolucci was doing, looking for the person, the character, rather than the actor so much.  

I think sometimes when you’re doing a biopic you want the actor to look the exact same as the person, and I understand I’m very different from Maria. But I think then she realized it’s not only about appearance, it’s more about understanding Maria, understanding her pain and what she went through. She wanted to work with me because she has seen Happening. She said, Your character in Happening is very different from the character I want you to play, but I feel there’s a strength there that could drive the story in a nice way. 

That character has a steely determination — she’s trying to get an abortion in the early ’60s, when it was illegal in France. You almost wonder, where did she get this core of strength from? Both the movies — I remember when I saw Last Tango the first time, in the late ’70s, that scene, the butter scene, was very hard to watch, even without knowing it was an actual assault. In Happening there was a lot that was very hard to watch. I can’t imagine what you went through, portraying someone in such a harrowing situation. 

It’s challenging but it’s not painful when you do it with the person that gives you the confidence to go towards your limits and you feel safe by going there and you know that you are surrounded by people that also lift you up. I’ve never experienced trauma or pain. You dig for things like that when you’re an actor. You want to go in dark places and you want to experience things that you don’t have the opportunity to experience in your life — sometimes those dark spots of humankind.

That movie [Happening] was based on an Annie Ernaux memoir. I looked at the video you did with Chanel for their series “In the Library.” You’re a serious reader and I think you said you’ve read Ernaux the most of anyone. 

I think she shows the best woman portraits I’ve ever seen. She expresses what every woman could experience in her life, going through jealousy, desire, doubt. And I think she puts the right words on what we can feel and I like to find this in books I read or movies I see. Others’ truth makes me find my own truth and my own emotions. It’s so liberating to find what you’re searching for in yourself through others’ experience, and I feel that when I read Annie Ernaux, she expresses what I’m not able to express.

I heard the Being Maria producer, Marielle Duigou, say at a Q&A that you had just a 25-day shoot. That seems remarkable, it must have been long hours.

It was tough. We didn’t have much time, we didn’t have much money. We wanted to give Maria homage and sort of rehabilitate — rehabilitate?

Her reputation?

Yes. We were passionate about it. I mean I wish we had more time, [but] this emergency we had sort of matched the emergency Maria felt all her life. Maybe that was a good point.

You certainly got a good end product. That wonderful scene where you and Matt are talking, as Marlon and Maria, and Maria tells Marlon, I’ve learned so much from you about acting. Did you feel that way about Matt? He’s had a few decades of acting.

I think the admiration Maria had for Brando, I had it for Matt. He’s worked with Lars von Trier, Gus van Sant, Coppola. He has an impressive career and he is so generous. He searches a lot for his character and I don’t feel he takes things for granted, and it’s really interesting to see at his age; with his experience he still doubts and he still questions things. 

Still learning.

Yeah, always learning. And it was very simple and very humble. That was a nice experience to share the screen with him.

In the movie, when Maria sees her dad’s family, someone asks what Brando is like, and she says, “Très simple.” What does that mean in that context, uncomplicated? 

That means he’s a nice human being, very simple, not — I think what she meant is what I mean with Matt. Some actors with lots of experience feel like they know better than the director. And Matt wasn’t like that, he was very listening to Jessica’s intentions and what she wanted him to give. Being simple is that you’re receptive to the director’s desires. Our purpose is to serve what they imagine and just be here for the character. I think that Matt was here for the story and not here for him. 

You said in that same video about literature, “Reading political writing is important to me. I try to do the same with my roles in film.” These two movies we’re talking about are kind of making political statements, one about abortion and this one about abuse. Are those the roles you still feel like you would like to find?

Not only, I mean I’m not a politician so I don’t want to do movies like that. I feel these days for actors you can be asked to position yourself politically in any way. I don’t want to share that much of my opinions because I feel like my tribune is my movies, so you can know about me and what I stand for regarding my choices and I feel it’s enough.

Maybe a light comedy at some point?

Yeah, I’d like to do it. I mean I did comedy but it was dark comedy, it was Bruno Dumont’s The Empire. I want to do everything, I’m not closing doors.

There’s a scene toward the end of Being Maria where Maria is the aggressor. She attacks someone who loves her, Noor. I found that so disturbing. 

These are challenging scenes because you have to give a lot. She was a drug addict, and when you’re a drug addict you don’t control yourself even towards the people you love. I felt it was quite moving because she loves Noor, but at that moment she felt so broken that the only thing she could find an escape to was drugs. Noor gave her the purest love and looked at her for what she was and not for what people thought she was. But Maria still rejected love and attention. She just wanted to escape from everything. And yeah, she can be aggressive at that moment but it’s [from] an urgency she has to continue to take heroin, because when you take heroin you kind of shut everything down and you’re like in a bubble. You escape others’ gaze. You feel like you’re just alone with yourself. Maria needed to be alone at some point.

And they did get through that. Did she stay with Noor, do you know?

Yes, she stayed with Noor. In Vanessa’s book, you can understand that she followed her — Noor was there until she died. 

That’s wonderful.

◊ ◊ ◊

 

→ Matt Dillon ←

Mary Lyn Maiscott: I saw you last December when you were an emcee at the Jesse Malin comeback/fundraiser concert.

Matt Dillon: He’s always been such a great guy, a naturally great human being. It’s amazing how well that came together. Everybody just showed up, the musical acts; these people just like to play.

I wondered if you had ever played with Jesse.

I play congas, I play hand drums. I play certain folkloric Cuban music, that kind of stuff. That’s what I’m into and I’m not like a pro. Jesse, I’ve never played with him.

 

My dad liked Cuban music. In the late ’50s, before the revolution, he went fishing there and would go to the nightclubs.

Oh really?

Yes, and he brought home instruments. There was one that was a cow jawbone.

A quija. It rattles. 

Yeah, the teeth rattle.

It’s a folkloric but I think they also use it for Santeria ritual. They’ll use it for orchestras too. There’s a great song by Conjunto Casino called “La Quija.”

You made a documentary, El Gran Fellove, about the Cuban singer Francisco Fellove. Will that be available to the general public soon?

I was just talking to the producer of it. It’s a tough one because I finished it at the height of the pandemic, and we had it at San Sebastian and [other festivals]. I’m enormously proud of it. I spent an enormous amount of time on it, it stretched many years, but it was somewhat personal. It wasn’t like, I’m a filmmaker and I’m going to make this. It probably has more to do with my interest in music. It is film and I love filmmaking and I’m a director as well as an actor, but it’s really my passion, my obsession with that music, the diaspora of African music in general but it’s Cuban music that drove it. So eventually you’ll get to see it.

 

“If you’re playing the character you can’t judge the character from an external place.”

 

I know you’re a visual artist too. 

To draw I didn’t come from an academic background, so my experience with it is, if I know what something feels like — like I know what it feels like to touch the drum, to hit the drum, so I could draw it or paint it. It’s always about the weight of things. That’s very important. More than accuracy often.

Talking about the weight of things, you’ve never gone the safe route with your roles. I’m thinking of the racist cop in Crash, the Bukowski alter ego in Factotum, the drug addict in Drugstore Cowboy. And now you’ve taken on the role of Marlon Brando, who’s of course an icon and an iconoclast, in Being Maria. It seems almost meta to play an actor playing an actor playing a role, especially one who’s known so much for Method acting. I read that you went to Lee Strasberg yourself when you were very young. Did that inform your performance or were you not thinking about that kind of thing at all?

Yeah, of course it did. Listen, when I did my first film [Over the Edge], the director, Jonathan Kaplan, used more time [with me] because I wasn’t a professional actor — I was a kid, I was like 14 — because I wanted everything to be real. I wanted to do everything real. [Laughs.] He used to say, “All right, Marlon.” He used to call me Marlon because I was kind of already displaying some tendency toward quote-unquote Method acting. So he would call me Marlon, and of course I didn’t know as a young actor that Marlon Brando is sort of the one that we all — he changed the game more than once. In a funny way Brando’s been with me for all the years. That’s why when they came to me — I read the script and I thought it was good. He wasn’t portrayed as a monster, he was very human in a way — and I couldn’t resist it, to play Brando. I never even questioned whether I would or not until we were doing the movie, and then I was like, You idiot, especially when we were doing the scene with the butter, you know, it’s like, oh man.

Everybody knows about that scene, it’s so notorious.

When I saw the movie, I was younger than Maria, so I never saw her as being as young as she was.

She was only 19.

It’s one of my favorite films, it’s always been — in spite of that scene. The things that excited me about that movie were the acting — the performance that Brando gave is powerful and she was amazing and they were great together. That’s what I loved about it. The sensational stuff was not so interesting to me, like for example I didn’t have a moral position on the butter scene. To me it was another kind of strange sex scene.

You’re talking about when you first saw it, before you knew anything.

When I first saw the film, I didn’t have any knowledge of what happened on the set or anything like that. I was just judging the film based on its own merits. The thing that I loved about Last Tango in Paris — it gets touched upon in Being Maria — is this desire for the truth, for some kind of authenticity, which is what they were going for, I think. It’s interesting that the conversation Brando is having with Maria before that scene [in Being Maria] is about acting — she compliments the quality of his crying, it seems so real, and he basically says, “Because that bastard pulled it out of me,” about Bertolucci. The problem with [the butter] scene is that it’s not the kind of scene where you’d think actors, filmmakers would do what we sometimes would want for the sake of spontaneity: Don’t tell me what you’re going to do. It’s often agreed upon. Even in the case when we were doing the dance scene, Anamaria was like, Don’t tell me what you’re going to do. So this is something that we do. But you don’t do it with a scene like that. The original scene, not the one where they went off-script, was also pretty racy, but I think there’s an element of — it was very extreme, that scene. Obviously that was the one that affected her.

It was an assault since she didn’t know what was going to happen.

It was also because she didn’t have — listen, I started acting when I was young. So I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t have a voice, right? I know what it is to be objectified to some extent. So I’m sensitive to that, I’m empathetic to what happened with Maria ’cause I know what that is like. I think that a lot of the damage came — they were doing the film and it wasn’t a penetrative rape kind of situation but it was a violation for sure. But I think what happened after that — because it’s very powerful what we do in cinema. It’s very powerful as an art form because it’s so real. And what I heard later, people would make comments or jokes about it, and it was tough for her. She was sort of left on her own, she was young. I gulp at that. She did maintain a friendship or was in touch with Brando over the years. ’Cause I think Brando also felt a little that they went too far ’cause he revealed a lot of himself, which is what makes it a powerful film, but they went too far. They went too far.

Was it your understanding that it was Bertolucci and Brando who created that scene?

Yes, that’s my understanding.

One of the things I found disturbing about it both times — I saw it in the late ’70s and then I just watched it several days ago — are those lines that he makes her repeat, those sort of weird ritualistic lines, like “Religion educates savages.”

Yes, interesting, right? I actually wanted to make that clear. My concern was that Brando wasn’t — this was not a macho “c’mon, sweetie, you know you want it” kind of thing. This is something else, this is like a provocation of the Church, right? Which I think was coming from Bertolucci. That’s what got Bertolucci in trouble.

That particular scene?

Well, I think in a way — I mean it’s such an outrageous scene and was seen as totally obscene by the government [in Italy]. He got in a lot of trouble for that. They burned all the copies of the movies. There was a warrant for his arrest, Brando’s, and Maria’s. [Bertolucci] didn’t get arrested but he ended up losing his civil rights for something like four years. He couldn’t vote. I think it was a provocation of the Church, all those things that he’s saying. He’s saying “Church of good citizens” and you know — and so I ended up bringing more of that back in. We couldn’t say everything verbatim and it’s probably better anyway for a movie because it’s an interpretation of her life. I mean, Anamaria’s brilliant in the film, but she doesn’t look like Maria — but she’s great, it becomes her own thing. But that was important that that was what was going on there. Bertolucci and Brando had this thing and they were doing it, but there was no consideration about what her say was in it. And that is — I mean it wasn’t a scene about “I’m the guy, you’re the girl, I’ll show you, little girl.” Yeah, there’s a little bit of that, but what it really was was something else these guys were trying. Obviously they were pushing the envelope in the movie in many ways. The following sex scene that happens is almost stranger than that one. I’ve watched the movie a lot over the years and I couldn’t help but think it was Brando just grasping [at lines on] cue cards. He would do that, you know. He often liked to use cue cards. I don’t think it had to do with his memory, and his French was great.

Yours was good too.

No, that’s very kind of you. It’s not good. There’s a scene that’s much longer with a lot of dialogue. It’s fine that it’s not in the film. It’s just that I spent so much time learning the French. I learned in the past — because I’ve had to do other things where you have to learn scenes that aren’t in your native tongue — they take 10 times as long to learn what you have to say. But Marlon actually spoke French very well, I think he spoke it better than the character in the film did. There’s footage of him in the ’60s, black and white, where he’s doing interviews in French and it’s beautiful. I think it’s in a documentary, maybe the Maysleses did it. Meet Marlon Brando — it’s him when in New York and he’s doing all these interviews.

Did you feel as the character of Marlon … so he and Bertolucci conceived of the butter scene. Did you feel like you had to justify that to yourself, I’m talking about as Brando.

Well, I’m not — I didn’t feel Matt had to justify anything because I’m just playing the character, right? If you’re playing the character you can’t judge the character from an external place.

Exactly. That’s what I mean. Did you—

There’s the famous quote from [Jean] Renoir and of course I’ll mess it up, but he said, “The terrible truth is every man has their reason.” Everybody has their reason, so it’s a great thing in building a character. Like, when you open the paper and you see — of course they don’t read the paper as much, they get their news elsewhere — but when you see something and you go, Why would that person do that? It doesn’t make any sense. It seems irrational. Well, it may be irrational but it’s logical too, it’s logical to who that person is. What Brando was doing — there’s a reason for what [he and Bertolucci] were doing. And without me trying to justify it, I think what they were going for was some kind of truth, to push things, to provoke something. They weren’t doing it because they were just being sadistic; they were being highly insensitive doing it that way, but they were seeking something creative. So it wasn’t like this kind of diabolical thing, but it was totally without any consideration and I’m very empathetic about that for a variety of reasons. 

Your voice sounds a little like Brando at times. I just watched Drugstore Cowboy last night. There was one monologue that you did, something about signs—

I wasn’t thinking about Brando.

I’m sure you weren’t, I just found it interesting.

Listen, Brando is a gift to actors. I’m able to speak objectively and think what they did was wrong and I’m empathetic to Maria, but I’ll also say about Brando, for me and for actors it’s a gift for us. He might have had his issues as a person but he’s a great actor. For me to play him was like, I had to do it, I couldn’t say no. And then before I saw the film, I was dreading seeing it because those are impossible shoes to fill. But I felt good about what I did and also I felt very much that, look, I know who I am, I take risks. By the way, Brando took huge risks, he’s the king of that. But that said, I can live with myself — [I knew] even before I saw it — because this is what I do. I’m looking for something that’s going to be challenging.