I Blame Dennis Hopper (18 page)

Marty gets to the set, and finally Bob. The first assistant director immediately asks Bob if he needs water. He gets Bob water. Bob doesn't drink it, but it's there if he needs it. No one asks me if I want anything, but I'm fine. I don't need water. At this point I'm like a racehorse. I'm raring to go. I'm ready to act. My whole life has led to this moment. “Listen and answer under the given circumstances,” Sanford Meisner advises. We start to rehearse the scene, and I'm going for it. I say my first line—a little drunk, a little loud, and I'm laughing and banging the bar—and De Niro says very quietly, “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Yes. He actually said the words “blah, blah, blah, blah…”

I continue with my lines, which sound totally bizarre coming after his “blah, blah, blah.” We do the entire scene that way. I talk. He says, “Blah, blah, blah, maybe I'll move here … blah, blah, blah, I move over there.”

I have no idea what is happening. I mean, this never happened on the set of
Goodfellas.

I look at Marty, and he's nodding at Bob as if this is totally normal. He doesn't even make eye contact with me. Rehearsal ends. The director of photography, Freddie Francis, thanks Bob and he gets up and leaves, followed by Bob's hair-and-makeup team. Marty follows him. The first assistant director, Joe Reidy, smiles at me and says, “We will need you in forty-five.”

I slowly walk back to my trailer, thinking, I had all these things planned that I wanted to rehearse, and I don't even know what the hell just happened in there. So much for watching the Meisner documentary that morning. The basis of Meisner technique is listening and answering truthfully. I thought Robert De Niro would be great, like he always was, and I would just work off him. I didn't think I would have to do anything. The clock is ticking as I wait in my trailer, and now I start to get really insecure. I'm like all of the others I have seen fold before Robert De Niro. I'm like the guy from
Guilty by Suspicion
. I'm on the tightrope! I start to think, I'm awful; I have no idea how I got here; I don't deserve to be here; I'm only here because of Marty, and he's not even helping me, he's in the trailer with Bob, probably telling him to do the whole scene like that, “‘Blah, blah, blah' … Bob, it's brilliant!” and we have to do this scene in forty-five minutes. My first big scene in a movie. It's happening. This disaster will be filmed.

When I was at the Neighborhood Playhouse studying Meisner technique, the hardest thing for me was called Emotional Preparation. You imagined you won the lottery or your dog died for some emotional fuel, and then you began the scene. Sanford Meisner would look at you and say, “Start the scene again, and this time come in crying and make the bed.” You'd be standing outside the door, trying to make yourself cry, thinking, My mother is
dead
. My
mother
is dead! No, she's not. No, she's not. Finally you'd enter, put your hands over your eyes and fake-cry, and hope that your partner had something better than you had.

As I was sitting in my trailer, I began, probably for the first time in my life, really to emotionally prepare. I thought about my character, Lori. She was in love with Nick Nolte's character, Sam. They were involved and he had stood her up. He had humiliated her, made her feel unloved, and she was going to show him that she was attractive. That she could be loved. And she was self–destructive. She was going to hurt Sam by hurting herself. That emotional nuance was buried deep in my homework. For me, that was what the whole scene was about. I took Robert De Niro the famous actor—an actor I admired—out of the equation. I'd never met him before. Only I knew the outcome of my emotional preparation. I was going to sleep with the first guy who sat down next to me at the bar. I was gonna take that guy home. Something I had never done before in my entire life because I was a nice girl. But I was going to do it tonight. For fun. It just happened that that person was Max Cady. So all the flirting, all the laughing, all the drinking was to get him to take me home.

I had been profoundly affected by the murder of a classmate my first year at the Neighborhood Playhouse. She was walking home alone from seeing the play
Hurlyburly
. As she entered her building a man took her by knifepoint to the roof, raped, and murdered her. A classmate had offered to walk her home, but she had declined. That momentary decision cost her her life. There had also been the tragic “preppie murder” case, which also occurred while I was in acting school. A girl named Jennifer Levin went into Central Park with a boy after they had just left a bar. It was a bar near my school that a lot of us frequented. That clean-cut, good-looking boy, named Robert Chambers, was convicted of manslaughter after the half-naked and badly bruised corpse of Jennifer Levin was found. He claimed that she had died during “rough sex.” I was haunted by that case and how her decision, that innocent lapse of judgment to leave the bar with him, had cost her her life.

I always use music to prepare. There is usually one song, or a set of songs, that gets me into character, and for the bar scene it was Etta James. There is an undercurrent in her music that makes me uneasy. It makes me feel kind of boozy and out of control. I put my Etta James tape on, listening to it again and again till I began to feel drunk. People don't think training is important. Sure, when everything is working you don't need it, but when I find myself in trouble, I think, Thank God I can fall back on my training. Luckily, it worked that day. I listened to the music and did my emotional preparation. There was a knock on my door and this time I was really ready.

I walked to the set, like a fighter going into the ring. I could hear nothing except the Etta James playing in my head. I was confident this time because I had a secret. There was something I knew for certain. Robert De Niro was going to pick me up. He was going to pick me up, and take me home, and this was going to be the greatest one-night stand of my life. That's all I knew. I just had to do whatever it took to make that happen.

I sat at the bar and started to fake-laugh. Ha. Ha Ha. Ho Ho Ho. Let me tell you, you start laughing with a hundred people looking at you like you're an idiot, and it's a little embarrassing, but I didn't care, because I had a secret. It was like the more people were rolling their eyes at me, the funnier I thought it was. And De Niro was looking at me like he wasn't quite sure what I was doing, but he was intrigued, I could tell. A fire was in his eyes, and I was pretty sure I was causing it. He started topping me now, coming alive, and the scene started cooking. I knew I wanted to use this desperate kind of laughing. I kept on laughing, banging the bar, telling jokes, and somewhere along the way I was laughing for real. Pretty soon the whole set was laughing. It was wild. So many folks have asked me if I was really drunk. No. I felt drunk, though. I remember ordering a Sea Breeze in the scene because I knew if I said it, the props guy would have to make me one. It's something a drunk would do. I got my Sea Breeze. I think I drank fifty of them. The scene was going so well that Bob conferred with Marty, and they decided that the best way to shoot was with two cameras simultaneously so we could both stay in it but also ad-lib. We kept the plot points the same but improvised most of the scene. The cameras kept rolling, and when we got to the end, we just started again. Later, when I watched myself in the rushes, with everyone around me laughing, I couldn't remember half of the things I said. My favorite compliment came from Nick Nolte, who said to me, “Are you sure you've never done drugs?”

Bob and I sat on those bar stools for hours. When it came time for lunch, I didn't eat. I just stayed in my trailer, in my “drunken Etta James stupor” until we were ready to shoot again. I was ready to get back in there. Keep punching. I was in the zone. Fourteen, fifteen hours later, we are done. All day. One scene.

The next day, I got to the set, and I was walking along and now everyone was smiling at me, nodding at me, patting me on the back. “Good morning, Illeana. Would you like some coffee, Illeana? Can I get you something, Illeana? That was a great scene yesterday, Illeana.” They had a chair for me. It was a director's chair, and it had my name on it. I had seen my grandfather's name on the back of a director's chair on the set of
Being There
. Now I was seeing mine:
ILLEANA DOUGLAS.
People ask me, when did you know you'd “made it”? That was the day. The day after the bar scene in
Cape Fear.
When I felt like I had earned the right to be on a film set. When everybody knew my name.

You get into the ring with the greatest fighter of all time and hope that you become a fighter, too. You can run away, or you become what you most want to be.
That's
what it's like to work with Robert De Niro.

 

CHAPTER NINE

Happy Just to Be Alive

Welcome to set. A complete re-creation of the 1972 Andes plane crash, 12,000 feet up in the Canadian Rockies.

I was flying to Canada to start filming the movie
Alive.
It was based on the plane crash in the Andes of a Uruguayan rugby team. They had to resort to eating the bodies of their dead companions to survive and were finally rescued, seventy-two days after the crash, when Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa trekked for ten days through the Andes to find help. There were forty passengers and five crew members onboard, and only sixteen came out alive. It is an amazing story of the triumph of the human spirit, and one of the greatest survival stories of our time.

Looking out the window of the plane, I saw the snowy peaks of the Canadian Rockies, where we would soon be shooting. It was bittersweet. I was a working actress now, and that meant traveling from job to job, and yet everything I wanted was back in New York. Still, I hoped
Alive
would be like climbing a mountain and reaching the summit, finally finding that unattainable something that was missing in my life.

The previous year had been a roller coaster for me. I wrote in my journal, “My life is divided in two parts. Pre and post
Cape Fear.
” But there was spillover from starving actress to working actress.
Cape Fear
had not come out yet, and the day I was scheduled to be on my first talk show ever—David Letterman's show—I was still selling furniture out of my apartment to pay the rent. Dave had seen
Cape Fear
and loved it, but aside from him, no one really knew who I was when I went on his show. When I sold my last table just days before the movie came out, I signed the bottom
CAPE FEAR.
That's how sure I was that my life was about to change.

I had been invited onto
Letterman
because a friend of David's, Hank Gallo, had seen me perform as a comedian at Stand Up NY and recommended me. (Stand Up NY was originally owned by Cary Hoffman, who let me perform there and actually thought I had a future as a standup.) It was quite a break to be on
Letterman
—it meant national exposure, and Hank had risked a lot to get me on the show, assuring the producer, Robert Morton, that I was funny and could tell a good story. I remember being called for the longest pre-interview “audition” of my life, during which I proceeded to tell the producer every even remotely funny thing that had ever happened to me.

We settled on a
Zelig
-like experience I had had when the Secret Service occupied my dressing room in Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on the night that President George H. W. Bush came to see a performance of a play I was in, called
Black Eagles
. The morning after seeing our play, which was about World War II, the president started the ground war against Iraq. Like Leonard Zelig, we became a footnote in history.

The night I was on
Letterman
, which was my first national television appearance, I followed Jacques Cousteau, and he bombed. He sank. He was like a dead fish stinking up the joint. How many more bad aquatic metaphors can I give you?

I was in the makeup room, and Robert Morton came backstage, ashen. “Jacques was
not
funny,” he said. “Dave is
not
happy. Are you
sure
you're going to be funny?” I assured him I would be, but he wanted to go over everything I was going to say. He began coaching me on every line and joke. Suddenly he was like Warner Baxter in
42nd
Street,
shouting at me, “OK, Dave is going to ask, ‘How did you prepare for your part in
Cape Fear
?' and you'll say what?”

I would answer robotically with my prepared material, “I have older brothers; I'm used to getting beat up.” I hadn't been that nervous, but now, as we made our way down the hall toward the stage, I felt like an unskilled comedy surgeon, getting instructions from another doctor before I entered the Letterman operating room, famously kept at 58°.