Malcolm McDowell Toronto Star Interview for The Company 1/30/04

The old ultra-cool
Malcolm McDowell has had 100 acting roles, but there's still a lot of Alex in him
Peter Howell - Toronto Star 1/30/04

    It's midway through last September's Toronto International Film Festival, and a breakfasting Malcolm McDowell has just read something in his morning Toronto Star that greatly disturbs him. "God, you're even obsessed with David Beckham in this country!" he says, tossing the Sports section to one side. "He's not even a great footballer - or soccer player, as you like to call them."
    McDowell, though, is a great soccer fan ("I watch all the games in California on satellite") and a Star scribe worries for a moment that the British actor, still fearsome at 60, might hold him personally accountable for the paper's interest in the disputed Mr. Beckham. McDowell might administer "some of the old ultra-violence," to quote his thug savant Alex from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.
    Perhaps "appy-polly-loggies" would be in order. But no apologies are necessary, because McDowell is in a mood to talk - and he doesn't mind revisiting the character of Alex, still the most famous of his 100-odd film and TV roles, some 33 years after the fact. He's played everyone from H.G. Wells to Caligula, from "Royal" Harry Flashman to Edgar Allen Poe (that one's coming up) but no one can forget him as Alex.
    Type McDowell's name into an Internet search engine, and before long you'll be pulling up images of him dressed in the style of Clockwork Orange, with his crotch-hugging pants, his head-kicking boots and his incongruously dapper bowler hat. McDowell's iconic Alex is also the front-cover image for Juergen Mueller's Movies Of The '70s, a new book on a most lauded decade for film.
    "I love that character," McDowell says, without hesitation. "Alex was a rogue, an absolutely rogue. A delightful one. Of course, he was a murderer and a rapist, but we'll just slide past that. But, as he said (McDowell affects Alex's smarmy accent), `An accidental killing, suh! An accidental killing of a person, suh!'" McDowell roars with laughter, and smiles that knowing Alex smirk.
    "Yes, he was a great character. There were great redeeming things about him, his love of music and all that. And there was also a great vulnerability to Alex. Which is what really made it work. At the time, we were attacked. We were attacked by the liberal elements in the press, because he's basically a fascist. When you think about it, it's a fascistic kind of story. You are manipulated to feel sorry for a rapist and murderer. They couldn't get past that, really. They just couldn't get past it. And hey - when you think about it, that's what makes great drama. That's a great film. And A Clockwork Orange has lived through the ages. People still find it relevant."
    There's a lot of that Alex mojo in Mr. A (or Alberto, if you want get familiar), the benevolent dictator McDowell plays in The Company, the new film by his close friend Robert Altman that was initiated by Neve Campbell, the Guelph-born actor and dancer.
    The Company is a bit of a stretch for both McDowell and Altman, neither of whom had any real prior interest in the subject. It follows the daily dramas of a major ballet troupe, one modeled very closely on Chicago's famed Joffrey Ballet, which supplied settings, inspiration and much talent.
    McDowell's character is even more true to life, since the Joffrey has a Mr. A in charge: Gerald Arpino, the choreographer and dancer who co-founded the troupe in 1956, and who is still its artistic director. It might seem daunting to attempt to play a character who is still alive and kicking - and who was frequently on set to administer instant praise or criticism - but McDowell took it all in stride.
    "It was a lot of fun," he says. "It's what I do, so I don't look at it as being difficult. It just was so much fun to get into a world which was so alien to me. And really, I just love these dancers. I love what they do. I'm absolutely in awe of them, really, how they can do that physical work, be so disciplined and the whole thing...I suppose there are common areas between actors and dancers, but mainly actors don't have to literally work out for two hours to warm up and stretch before they can start rehearsing. Dancers have to really work out every day to keep limber. Because otherwise they couldn't do it. Putting their legs up here (he puts his hand up in the air). It's mind-blowing, and they don't get paid very much. They're very dedicated. If you're a dancer, of course, you can't do anything else. The decision is taken out of your hands. Because it's such a drug, I think, such an adrenaline rush when you're on stage flying."
    Altman took a similar headfirst approach to the project.
    "That's what made it a good one," he says in a separate interview. "Going into areas you don't know. Going into the fog. But this turned out to be just great. I had the time of my life. I like doing things that are slightly illegal."
    McDowell freely modeled his character on Arpino.
    "Not his physical being or any of his mannerisms, that's not what interested me about him. It was his dignity, his love of dance and his fierce loyalty to his dancers. But he can very cruel to them. It's tough love."
    McDowell drops his confident manner for a second and allows that it was a little difficult playing a non-fictional character, especially one who is still very much a part of the scene.
    "Well, it was tricky. But what we did was, in the script I was called Mr. A., which alluded to Arpino. Bob just said, `Malcolm, you are Mr. A, you are Alberto...forget Arpino.' So really, I got the best of what I wanted from him. Because really, I knew that the dancers are the stars of the film. So when they come over to my bits, you want people to have a little smile on their faces. To see a sort of dictator at work, however benign, is fun. In their own world, they're all-powerful, and outside, they look rather ridiculous."
    Arpino, in fact, was very gracious about having McDowell play him. He even insisted that the actor use the trademark white wooden chair that he sits in when making pronouncements to young dancers.
    "The chair is Arpino's. The white chair. He insisted all the time on that: `Malcolm, you have to sit here.' So I'd sit in his chair, and it's still there. I was there rehearsing last week, because I'm doing a narration for him, and it's all the same. Arpino is an amazing man, and I really got to like him. He's a very different sort of person than I'd ever met from that world before. I admire him tremendously. Everybody has their sides, but I think he's one of the most extraordinary people I've met, really. He's kept that company together by sheer will when, honestly, bankruptcy was staring him in the face. You know, with the arts in the U.S. of A, it's tough. There's no public funding at all. It's brutal. Savage."
    It also wasn't that far removed from the rough-and-tumble filmmaking that both McDowell and Altman practice. The two first met in London in the early '70s, shortly after they both rose to prominence - McDowell as the star of A Clockwork Orange and Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man, Altman as the director of M*A*S*H - and they've been friends ever since. McDowell has appeared in one previous Altman film, The Player in 1992.
    "We've been great friends for 30 years. We've always been in contact. Whenever we're in the same city, we get together for dinner. It's been one of those things. I don't do it with anybody else, or any other director. It's just him, and I don't know why. I really love Kathryn (Altman's wife). I've been through all their things and they've been all through mine...different wives and all that."
    He doesn't subscribe to the popular view that The Company, which is less character driven than Altman's previous works, is a different kind of Altman movie.
    "I think it's very much an Altman film. There's nobody else who could have directed it this way. It's not a linear film. But he's still experimenting, with his high-def video and his other processes ... he's completely in tune with all the technical advances. Bob realized he couldn't shoot the dancing on film because it goes forever. He needed to shoot the whole thing on five cameras, and that would have meant 100,000 feet of film or something. The only way he could have done it is with high-definition video. It's amazing."
    McDowell has had a lot of experience with film technology and techniques, although mainly as an observer. He tells an anecdote about the late Stanley Kubrick's antics on the set of A Clockwork Orange.
    "I remember the first dailies we saw, he went ballistic because there was no sound to them. The sound had broken down. The poor soundman was put over the coals. He was ready to quit. He was practically in tears, red faced and having a breakdown. And it was some bullshit thing to do with Stanley's equipment, all Stanley's fault. The sound was perfect. In fact, that was the soundman's last professional job. Stanley had driven him so insane, he then quit and became a teacher."
    Quitting moviemaking is something that has never occurred to McDowell. He's busier than ever, appearing in several films that will open in the months ahead - including the upcoming new Viggo Mortensen western Hidalgo, and a film about spooky poet Edgar Allen Poe. He also has films coming in which he plays the journalist who discovered golf great Bobby Jones, and a serial killer in a film set in Russia.
    "I think I'm a better actor today," McDowell says, his blue eyes sparkling. "I find it a lot easier. I'm much more relaxed about the thing. I feel there's really nothing I can't do now, really. So I'm looking for new challenges al the time, something that's a little more out there. I like to walk the plank, because otherwise I get bored. I get bored very easily. So I can't keep doing the same thing. That's why I'm not good on television. I mean, I've done it, just to say I've done it, but it's not something that I would seek out."
    It's that walking-the-plank side of him that appealed to Altman, when he was casting the role of Mr. A. He was so confident in McDowell's abilities, he allowed his star to ad lib much of his dialogue.
    "I just thought he was the kind of guy who would get it," Altman says. "What he said (in the film), I don't know where it came from. I don't know if there was a script or not ... Malcolm would come out and I'd say, `We're going to do that scene, where you do that speech about the '60s. Get onto one of those raps.' And it just sort of came out of him. He was, I'm sure, prepared. He was always prepared. So he had a bottom line backup: `If all else fails, I can go to this.' But I didn't discuss it with him."
    McDowell is very much a take-it-as-it-goes kind of guy. He's been in ongoing discussions with another veteran actor, Christopher Lee, about appearing in a film together.
    "I'm supposed to be doing Sherlock Holmes to his Moriarty. But he can't do it now, because of this Star Wars thing he's doing."
    McDowell imitates Lee's formal British accent: "I kahn't do it now, we'll have to do it next year. When will you be free? We want you to do it."
    Lee will just have to take a number. There are a lot of people who want McDowell in their films.
    "Yes, I'm much more interesting now than ever before," McDowell says, cracking another Alex smirk.
    "I think I've grown into this face, finally. I was always youthful looking, and now I'm old and decrepit. It's perfect."