Charlottesville Words

Meet Simon Callow, modern Renaissance man: In addition to a number of prime roles in excellent films (Amadeus, Four Weddings and a Funeral, A Room with a View) and stage productions (he was the original Amadeus), he has written several books, including biographies of Orson Welles and Charles Laughton and Being an Actor. Between takes on the set, he likes to while away the time with work on a translation or a screenplay or research for his next book. In the words of Dušan Makavejev, who directed him in Manifesto:

Simon Callow’s productivity is immense and I do not know how I feel or what I think about it. (Did he scare me? Make me envious? Did he get me to worry for him? Can we call it “Toomuchismo”?)

“Toomuchismo” describes Callow’s style perfectly. In the theater, he is able to use his dramatic appearance, his energy, his voice, and his manic personality to project a character like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart into the far reaches of the auditorium. By his own admission, however, the most frequent complaint he receives about his film performances is that they are “too much” — too loud, too boisterous, too flamboyant — and this particular criticism is keenly felt by a man who longs to be artistic, deft, and effective.

Callow’s sensitivity about his style and his relative inexperience as a film actor (before Manifesto he had appeared in Amadeus, The Good Father, A Room With a View, and Maurice) led inevitably to difficulties with Makavejev. Callow had been asked by his friend and publisher, Nick Hern, to record a “diary” of the shoot, later to be turned into a book. The shoot proved to be increasingly difficult and Callow’s evening tape recordings turned into alcohol-fueled gripe sessions. Callow’s main complaint was that he could not seem to find an interpretation of his character, a police chief, that suited Makavejev, or even one that was consistent from scene to scene. Everything he tried or suggested was “too much.”

After the completion of filming, Callow dutifully transcribed his tapes and, though believing the result was nearly unpublishable, gave a transcript to Makavejev, hoping he might agree to collaborate on the final result. Amazingly, Makavejev did agree. His brief and infrequent comments appear scattered throughout the text of Shooting the Actor. His philosophy of cinema was very different from Callow’s and not one that Callow could appreciate until he himself began directing movies. Incidents and situations that drove Callow mad appear to Makavejev as trivialities, business as usual. Makavejev found Callow’s focus on “acting” to be a narrow one:

Critical moments, cracks, explosions and catastrophes wait in the wings, and sometimes arrive in clusters. That’s why we love films. Two days or two hours are not alike. Film is made in a vortex of mutual uses and abuses, and it is simply wrong for an actor to concentrate on a director as an omnipotent and omni-supporting mirror. Staying obsessed (or concerned) about his “role” or “performance,” Simon unnecessarily boxed himself between the “text” and the “director,” as if in a one-way tunnel, instead of seeing himself in a spherical space in which he is both acted upon and being an actor.

And from a slightly different perspective:

When a tear rolls down the actor’s face, the tear is the actor and his facial skin is the stage, while his face is the background. Anything in the film can act, the tree, the boiling milk, the fly on somebody’s nose. It depends on the director’s decision.

I think that Callow was very brave to offer up this diary, and Makavejev was very generous in providing a commentary. Callow also gives brief sketches of his successful work with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, as well as analyses of a couple of roles that were not so successful. You will not come away from this book knowing how to shoot a movie or act in one — there are other books for that — but you will know more of how it feels to be in one.