Steve Head 1/8/04 IGN
Malcolm McDowell: Good afternoon! Hello, hello!
Q: Hello!
McDowell: First I want to say Alberto! [McDowell acknowledges an assistant.] He didn't give me the name of the damn character! I never can remember it. (Laughs.) Alberto! I want to call him Arpino [Gerald Arpino, Artistic Director of Chicago's Joffrey Ballet], but I'm not Arpino. Oh, well.
Q: Antonelli is his last name?
McDowell: Yes, Antonelli. Antonelli. Of course I was on camera this morning, on television, and I couldn't remember the name of the guy. (Laughs.) Oh, well. I'm not really going nutty.
Q: What were your feelings about ballet before getting involved in this film, The Company, with director Robert Altman?
McDowell: I've always sort of admired dancers. I think because when I was a young actor, I worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London that was next door to the Royal Ballet. We shared the same pub. And I've always, to be honest with you, fancied the ballerinas strongly, and was always very happy to find out that most of the male dancers were gay.
Q: Less competition.
McDowell: Exactly. However I have to tell you, I didn't do very well on that
but I did try. (Laughs.) But my interest in dance goes back to those days
somewhat. I did go and see the Royal Ballet. I saw Margaret Fontaine when she was still
dancing. But I wouldn't say I was an aficionado of it. I'm not really a
connoisseur of dance. But when Bob put this to me and asked if I would like to
do this film about dance, he said, "Can you dance?"
And I said, "No." (Laughs.)
And he said, "Well, you don't have to."
Q: That's pretty much a typical Altman conversation, wouldn't you say?
McDowell: Yeah! He'd ask, "Have you learned the scene?"
"Yeah."
"Well forget it." (Laughs)
"What is it then?
"Call them together and inspire 'em!"
"OK."
Q: So it was a lot of improvisation?
McDowell: Yeah, I mean, but you know we couldn't have done it without the script as well. It sounds like an oxymoron but it isn't because the script was a sort of road map, a skeleton to which you could apply the flesh and all the rest of it. So you needed that. It was very important to have that.
Q: Isn't it true that improvisation without structure usually leads just to self-indulgence?
McDowell: Exactly. There was a lot of stuff cut out of the film. He shot miles of it. Actually, it wasn't film, it was tape. Tape is cheap. And I kept saying, "Tape may be cheap, but I've run out of things to say. (Laughs.) If I have to do a twenty-minute take once more. I'm wracking my brains here!" (Laughs.)
Q: High-definition tape was really the answer for filming this movie?
McDowell: It's the only way he could have shot the film because he had to shoot these dancers and things went on for twenty-odd minutes. We couldn't have afforded it on film. He couldn't have possibly done it with five cameras. They couldn't do take after take. One take. They're done. They're exhausted. They have to have an hour and a half break. You couldn't do many takes. Film was impossible to do and [Altman] did it in high-def video for the best reasons. And they would have done without this special filming process that brings out the highlights and the color more and takes away that flat feel of tape.
Q: But you've still based your character on a real person.
McDowell: It is, yes. Well, of course the Joffrey of Chicago exists. They're
in the film. They're the stars of it, actually. And I think we really serve to
support them. The company itself is the star of the film. I feel that those
dancers are the stars of the film; there's no question about that. And it's a
film about purely dance. And I think that is what makes it so unique. It doesn't
have a sort of linear story to it.
For me, it's sort of like a piece of jazz. It's like a riff;
it could go this way or that way. It was fun for me because I have my own way of
working, of course, honed over forty years or whatever it is I've been working.
So, to come into this Altman kind of orbit and to be told to forget that because
this is the way we are going to do it - it was so much fun to do; you were
really flying by the seat of your pants; you're walking the plank; you don't
know what's coming out of your mouth next; and you're having to really react in
the moment. In stead of really thinking through the character through the scene
and being like three or four lines a head, being fully in control of it is what
I'm really saying, it that this way you had to really listen, because you had to
make some smart comeback, or whatever it was. It was that spontaneity about it
that was terrific to do. And unique, really. I can't think of any other
directors that would do that.
Q: Not even Lindsay Anderson?
McDowell: No, Lindsay was much more structured. Brilliant, but very different. Very, very different. He was a great believer in structure, in the workings of a scene coming to the climax and moving on, and being very clear about it; bringing the moment in the scene into absolute focus and then moving on.
Q: There's a scene in The Company where your character is kind of burlesqued, or lampooned by one of the dancers, in a roast; which for your character is almost inevitable given the way that your performance is sort of made to be imitated. Alberto is sort of flamboyant and self-conscious. In performing the role, how did something like that inform your approach to Alberto?
McDowell: I never saw the roast until I saw the film, and I heard they were
having a bit of fun. I suppose he comes over as quite a flamboyant character,
but I never really saw him as that, to be honest with you. Here you have a man
who, in the eyes of the dancers, is a god. There is not question about it. They
are so dedicated in what they do and the emotional and physical commitment that
they have to dance is so total, and so reliant on this artistic director, this
man - because he is founder of the ballet company, he has choreographed most of
the work that they do. Arpino. It's that one look from him at a dancer can
reduce them to tears. So, their whole life is in his hands, basically. I've seen
him demolish through really very little.
You'd think, "Wow, they're very sensitive people."
But it's just so highly tuned, and of course very political and all that. It's
sort of a microcosm of anything else. I could have turned it up in this part.
Let's face it, I could have played a wacky gay screamer, which was a choice. But
it's more interesting, this way, for me.
Q: The part was written as such leaving room for your interpretation, a lot of interpretation?
McDowell: Well, it was written only in part. That bare bones were there. I think the only speech that was really written was the one to the Italian-Americans, when (Alberto) tells him not to get onto their kids about being a dancer and all that - which really happened to Arpino, and he kind of turned it on them.
Q: You'd worked with Altman on The Player as well...
McDowell: Briefly. I was in there a night.
Q: Do you have any relationship with him as such?
McDowell: We have been, I would say, good friends for thirty years. When I first met him he was working on Images in London. He shot it in Ireland with Susanna York. I think I'd finished A Clockwork Orange and I was working on O Lucky Man with Lindsay Anderson, or I was working on the script or something. We got to know each other quite well in London. And wherever we'd sort of meet-up in a city somewhere. I'd hear Altman was in town, or he heard I was in a play, or whatever - we'd get together. He showed-up in Rome when I was doing Caligula, so we had a bit of fun about that. (Laughs.) He came to a party that Guccione gave and I said, "I've got to introduce you to this Guccione." I took him over and Altman said, "I hear you make shoes." I said, "No, not Gucci. Guccione." (Laughs.)
Q: As an actor, and doing as such an improvisational film, do you trust your instincts?
McDowell: I only work on instincts. I don't give a shit about methods, doing any research, nothing. I just do it... on... instinct. That's one thing that I've learned works. Never listen to anybody... just go by your instincts.
Q: Is The Company truly an Altman film, or is this a Neve Campbell film with a very good layout?
McDowell: Altman. Absolutely. Could Neve Campbell direct a movie like this?
Q: It's her passion.
McDowell: Yes, it's her subject matter. And Neve is incredible in the way that she got Altman to do it. She was smart enough to know that he was probably the only man who could do this film in this way. And she didn't want a conventional, sentimental dance movie. Good for her! Because she has come up with something very interesting. She is very tenacious and she never let it go. I think they showed him the script four of five times before he said, "OK." It's just down to Neve and Barbara's (screenwriter Barbara Turner) persistence in getting to him. I commend her.
Q: Then when Altman took over, it was his movie?
McDowell: It's always the director's movie. It's Altman. I just think Neve knew she wanted the kind of movie that Altman would produce for her.
Q: Any thoughts on what the audiences' response to the film will be?
McDowell: Well, my son's girlfriend, who's fifteen and loves to dance, she loves this movie, she went nuts. But whether it will go over with the hard-hats in the Midwest, I don't know. This is the most extraordinary film about the artist process that I have ever seen. What I like about what Altman did was: you actually see them working in rehearsal and then you cut to the performance. And you see the grind of the rehearsal, the grind of getting it right, and the perfection in it. As for the value of it: what's the value of looking at a painting? You'll look at it and think it made me think about it all in a different way.
Q: The process enriches the result.
McDowell: Oh, absolutely. And you may think, well, maybe now I'll go and see a dance company.
Q: Both are artists, however, have you taken note of any similarities or difference between dancers and actors?
McDowell: I never heard a dancer complain. If you want an actor to complain, just get him a job. (Laughs.)
© 2004 IGN
Archived w/o permission 2004-08 by Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net