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By AMY LONGSDORF; Times Leader Correspondent
Sunday, January 10, 1999 Page: 1G
BEVERLY HILLS- At first, it seems like a classic piece of miscasting: Nick
Nolte, vital and eccentric and irreverent, playing “The Thin Red Line’s” Lt.
Col. Gordon Tall, the aging, by-the-books commander who is willing to risk the
lives of his men for personal advancement.
Initially, even Terrence Malick, the movie’s reclusive writer/director, was
wary of using Nolte to symbolize the status quo.
In fact, two years ago Malick cast the actor in one of the film’s many
cameo roles. Just like Woody Harrelson, George Clooney and John Travolta,
Nolte was supposed to have one scene in the epic, which is based on the James
Jones novel about World War II’s pivotal Battle of Guadalcanal.
But Nolte launched a stealth attack on Malick. “After I met Terry, I went
home and started doing research into the army,” the actor recalls. “Every
couple of weeks, I’d have lunch with him. After a couple of months, Terry said
to me, `Nick, I think you should play Tall.’ I said, `It’s about time.’ He was
the character I wanted to play all along.”
As it turns out, the film, which is scheduled to open in area theaters on
Friday, allots most of its screen time to Nolte (and newcomers Jim Caviezel
and Ben Chaplin). Meanwhile, the top-billed Sean Penn plays a supporting role.
And others, like Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman and Adrien Brody, have been cut (or
all but cut) from the final film.
Just as Nolte snuck up on Malick, he has made a habit of sneaking up on
Hollywood, doing his best work when his career was at its lowest profile.
In the wake of flops like “Three Fugitives” and “Farewell to the King,” he
turned in his Academy Award-nominated performance in “The Prince of Tides.”
Now, four years after delivering unfocused turns in failures like “I Love
Trouble” and “Blue Chips,” Nolte has a shot at being an Oscar contender again
for his work in “The Thin Red Line” and “Affliction,” which just earned him
the Best Actor prizes from the New York Film Critics and the National Society
of Film Critics.
Nolte chalks up his recent success to a vow he made to go cold turkey on
junk pictures. “I just decided I was only going to do things I really loved,”
says the Omaha native who made a splashy movie debut in 1977’s “The Deep.”
“If it meant I’d go broke, I’d go broke. If it meant I had to downsize, I’d
downsize. What keeps an actor stuck in the Hollywood thing is that they have a
lifestyle they’re afraid of letting go. I became aware that my lifestyle was
causing me to make films that I knew weren’t very good. The idea was to make a
lot of money. But that wasn’t why I became an actor. I dropped all that with
`Mother Night,’ and every single film since then has been a passionate
affair.”
It wasn’t only Hollywood which screwed up Nolte. The actor admits to
playing a prominent part in his own undoing. Nolte, who spent years hooked on
cocaine and alcohol, remembers pulling himself together after a meeting he had
several years ago with “Thin Red Line” producer Mike Medavoy.
“Mike said to me, `Nick, I’m tired of watching you slowly die. I won’t do
it anymore. That’s it.’ And he walked out on me. That stopped me in my tracks
and changed my behavior. I was of the mindset that I could do anything, which
was part of the problem.
“It’s like my son said to me after he played that small role in `Ransom.’
He said, `You know, Dad, I don’t think I’ll do another film,’ And I asked him
why. He said, `Well, you get a lot of friends you don’t know.’
“It’s true. You begin to think these strangers are your friends. You begin
to think that you can do no wrong. Your ego is fed to such a degree that you
lose grounding. It’s painful and confusing and you turn to the booze and drugs
to escape.”
The newly clean-and-sober Nolte cuts a dashing figure as he sweeps into a
Beverly Hills hotel suite. Gone is the Nolte uniform of yore: pajama bottoms
or surgery scrubs, topped off by a winter coat.
Instead, the actor is clad in a conservative gray suit. The only hint of
his idiosyncratic style is his long, fly-away hair, which is streaked white
for an upcoming role.
“Everybody asks about the wardrobe change,” says Nolte, 57, laughing. “I
don’t know why there’s so much interest in my pajama bottoms. They’re
comfortable. Don’t you wear pajama bottoms? I used to wear ones Calvin Klein
gave me. Of course, I don’t think he expected them to be worn as regular
clothes.”
Nolte’s conversations are nearly as outlandish as his former wardrobe
choices. His first order of business, he admits, is trying to trick reporters
by passing off tall tales as the truth. “Oh yeah, I lie all the time to
journalists,” says Nolte who has been married four times and is now dating
“New Radio” actress Vicki Lewis.
“One of the lies I told was that my first wife was part of a circus bigwire
act. `Vanity Fair’ printed that one. I’ve also said that after my father died,
they gave me his wooden leg, and I got terribly drunk in New Mexico and lost
it. It’s a sad story. Of course, totally untrue. But I’m saving it for those
really sad movies that I have coming up.”
Nolte should get a lot of mileage out of his sad stories in the next couple
of weeks. In addition to “The Thin Red Line,” he stars in Paul Schrader’s
“Affliction,” an intense drama based on a novel “The Sweet Hereafter” by
Russell Banks.
The story of a small-town sheriff struggling to avoid making the same
mistakes as his violence-prone father (James Coburn), the movie is something
of a companion piece to “Red Line.”
“I was very reluctant at first to go where I had to go in `Affliction,”‘
Nolte says. “I had to admit to myself that I am the killer. I had to take
responsibility for violence. I like to think of myself as a nice person, not a
violent person.
“The core of the movie is Russell Banks talking about this rage within us.
He believes that not only is violence passed down from generation to
generation but that it’s a genetic factor. Nature gave us this capacity for
violence because at one time we really did need to combat things like
saber-toothed tigers and giant bears.
“As we socially integrated, violence became an arcane emotion. But we have
this residual rage within us. So we began to turn that emotion on each other,
and waged wars. And we still have wars today. In fact, we killed more people
this century than at any other time in history.”
As far as Nolte is concerned, “Thin Red Line” is an anti-war movie with a
powerful message about the real meaning of love. “What James Jones says in the
book is that when you know you’re going to die, the fear is so pervasive that
everything falls away, all conditioning, all hints of your personality. All
that you’re left with is an unbearable compassion and love for your fellow
man, for the man standing next to you.
“It’s so ironic that in the middle of this horror Jones discovered this
unbearable compassion and love. Terry structured that theme all through the
movie.”
Malick is the most unconventional director Nolte has ever worked with,
which comes as no surprise given Malick’s strange history. The filmmaker made
two of the best pictures of the 1970s, “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven,” and
then retreated to Austin for the next 20 years.
“Terry hints at things,” says Nolte, describing Malick’s method of working
with actors, “It’s not that Terry is eccentric, it’s just that his mind is
extremely wide. He can talk on bird-watching and Homer. He can talk history,
and he can talk contemporary. You’re a little in awe of him, which creates an
ambience that you really want to work hard for him. Scorsese is like this
too.”
Another Malick tic: shooting miles and miles of film. After discovering
Nolte once performed a scene 75 different ways for James L. Brooks on “I’ll Do
Anything,” Malick decided to give the actor a similar test.
“We shot the scene where Tall tells John Cusack about his son maybe 10
times,” recalls Nolte. “I said, `Terry, I think we have it.’ He said, `What
about the 75 takes you did for Brooks?’ We ended up shooting the scene for the
rest of the day. It went from a scripted dialogue scene to me making up
dialogue to total silence to John making up dialogue to Terry shouting
dialogue at us during the pauses.”
At any given moment during shooting, Malick would have five or six scenes
dangling, awaiting completion. “It frustrated the actors because they were
afraid they wouldn’t be able to get back into the state they were in when the
scene was begun,” says Nolte. “It was a good idea, though, because it gave us
a chance to mature into a scene. Sometimes, we’d go back and shoot the
conclusion of a scene at a different location. Terry would say, `Let’s just
shoot the close-ups here because it’s golden light. If you notice, most of the
scenes end in golden light.”
At the moment, Nolte seems bathed in a golden light of his own creation,
There’s the Oscar talk for “Thin Red Line” and “Affliction.” Then there is a
series of fascinating projects in the pipeline, including Sam Shepard’s
“Simpatico” with Albert Finney, Sharon Stone and Jeff Bridges; “Breakfast of
Champions” with Finney and Bruce Willis; and James Ellroy’s “White Jazz.”
“I respect myself now,” says Nolte. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m
proud of myself. But there was a time when I didn’t respect myself at all. You
can’t harm yourself like I did and still like yourself. But I’m hoping these
dark days are behind me.
“Somebody asked me about how I was going to celebrate Christmas. Holidays
don’t phase me. It’s a holiday all the time for me.”