Ellen Burstyn: a life in film (original) (raw)

SH: Thank you very much for being here.

EB: It's my pleasure.

SH: Your film biography is not only very extensive, it is also very impressive, and that's before we begin to talk about your television work and stage performances... I would like to go back to the beginning and ask you how you decided that you wanted to act, what made you choose that career path?

EB: Well, I think the first time that I was ever on stage was when I was at St Mary's Academy boarding school in Windsor, Ontario, and I was six years old. And I guess it was a Christmas programme, and we did, you know, little nursery rhymes, and I was Little Miss Muffet, sitting on her tuffet.

I remember my mother came to see the programme, and I just have this one image of being on stage, looking out into the blackness of the auditorium and not being able to see any faces, but knowing where my mother was - sensing her presence in a particular place. There are no thoughts or anything from that time, it was just that moment of looking out into the darkness and feeling my mother there. It was like something imprinted on my brain. It was like my destiny or something was established and any time I went on stage after that, I got that same kind of feeling.

I remember my first audition in New York - I should actually tell you how I came to have an audition. It was kind of funny really, when I started working after I got out of school I was first a dancer, in night-clubs, and then a model, I modelled for several years in New York. Then when I was 23, I think, I said, 'All right. I've made up my mind, I want to be an actress. I want to do a Broadway play this fall. Does anybody know how I can get an audition?'.

And it was, you know, innocent and foolish and probably a little stupid, except that someone did get me an audition and I did get the part. It was a lead on Broadway, and that's how I became an actress. But at the audition I remember going out on stage - the play was called Fair Game, and I was playing a model - and the audition scene was her first day in New York, having come from the midwest, to become a model.

Just as I had come from the midwest, Detroit. So I got on stage, and I was at the Paramount theatre, and the director and the producer were up there, and I thought to myself, 'Well, here I am on my first day in my new apartment in New York, I remember what that was like'. And I was just about to begin and I said, 'OK. My first day, my first apartment. In New York. And I'm in it now'.

Then this voice in my head said, 'No. You are on the stage in the Ethel Barrymore theatre, auditioning for your first Broadway play'. And I got so excited that it gave me everything I needed to play the scene. And I didn't realise it then, but I found out years later when I went to Lee Strasberg, that that's method acting. That it's using the truth of the situation to stimulate you to play the fiction. That's the kind of kernel of the technique. So, um, I don't know, but I think that my destiny was established in that one little moment, but I didn't really decide to do it until I was 23, or 24, I can't remember exactly.

Later I realised, when I was reading a book called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Suzuki, a Buddhist monk, that what I had done was what's called Beginner's Way - where you don't have enough information to do it wrong, so you just blunder in and do it right. And later, when you start learning a little bit about it you think, 'Oh dear. Maybe I shouldn't have done that'. And then you lose that ability to just do it. So that was when I started going to classes and taking acting lessons and learning how to do what I was bumbling into.

SH: You mentioned Lee Strasberg, and you went to the Actor's Studio. Can you say a little bit about that experience, and what you think you drew from that.

EB: Well, after that play I had a career. I was working on Broadway and on television and in radio. I went to Los Angeles - not because I wanted to, but because my husband dragged me there - [Laughter] - and I was working in television and I did some films, and my career was sort of advancing. And then I got a good part, a co-starring part, not a starring part, in a movie called Goodbye Charlie, with Debbie Reynolds and Walter Matthau and Tony Curtis.

I was sitting on the set one day and I had been sort of assembled. I was wearing an old wig of Shirley MacLaine's and Debbie Reynolds' brother Bill painted my face in a way that I almost recognised and I had this lovely dress, and I felt kind of put together to fit this character. And I was sitting on the set, Vincente Minnelli was the director, and I looked around, it was at 20th Century Fox, and I said to myself, 'Alright. This is it. This is the big-time', the next step would be to play the Debbie Reynolds part. And that same voice that spoke to me at the audition said, 'I don't wannit.'

And I was absolutely startled. There was no thought process that led up to it at that time that said I didn't like the path I was on. It was just at that moment. I knew I didn't like the way my career was developing... not just my career, but my talent. So when the film was over, I packed up my things and left California and went back to New York and met Lee and started his private classes. I didn't go straight into the Actor's Studio, I studied with Lee for several years before I auditioned for the Actors' Studio and got in - and working for him was one of the most important experiences of my life.

I don't know how many of you have had the experience of being exposed to a master teacher, but it is one of the really profound things that can happen to you, because they don't just teach you about your art, whatever it is, but they teach you about how, as you develop in your art, you are developing your own humanity.

When I first worked for Lee - I'll tell you the first exercise we did. It was to create, with your senses, a sense memory exercise, whatever you had for breakfast, a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, or whatever it was. And you had to pick up your cup and feel it and feel its weight and the heat of it and whatever you did. So I was doing my cup, my first exercise for Lee, and I saw him look at the cards in his hands with the names on them, and I could feel he was focused on me and I thought, 'Aaarrhh, here he comes'. Because he had penetrating vision, you know, he really saw.

So after a while he said, 'Do you ride horses?' and when he comes out of leftfield like that you know you're really in trouble. So I said, 'Well, I used to.' And he said, 'Did you ride well?', and I said, 'Well. I had my own horse and I rode well at that time.' Then he said, 'Well, you don't have to ride that cup!'

[Laughter]

I was... shocked! I looked at him and thought, 'What?' He said, 'What if you made a mistake? Go on. Let me see you do it. Make a mistake.' And I started crying, and I cried for about two weeks. And I can't even say in logical terms what it was that transpired there, but he saw something in me that I wasn't aware of - that it had to be perfect. And only when I learnt how to relax that, and not to ride the cup, that to be in the moment in all of its imperfections, whatever that entails, was I able to begin to learn how to act. I hope that's meaningful to you!

SH: Around about that time, when you were going through that process and your career was starting to take off, that period during the early 1970s we now tend to see as a very significant time for American cinema. A time when there was a sense of there being a new energy. Did it feel like that then?

EB: Well, you know, I remember a couple of years ago reading something in a newspaper about the 'golden age' of cinema in the 1970s and I thought, 'Was it? I had no idea. Someone should have told us when we were doing it!' But it was a very fertile and fervent time in America. It was the time of the Vietnam war and the protests and everybody was very fired up - with LSD too - and Watergate, and all of the things that were going on at the time in the country.

And we were all very active with this new energy. I think that somebody said once that only a small percentage of the population needs to do something like take LSD and everybody goes into an altered state. And I think that happened in America at that time. There was a sense that we were really contributing to culture and government and to what was happening. So I think that the cinema reflected that. I don't think that it was only happening in the cinema, but what was happening in the cinema was in the context of the time. [Listen to the sound clip (1min 31)]

I feel like that there is a return now to that time, and I give a lot of credit to Robert Redford for starting Sundance because he intentionally made it possible for there to be a place for young film-makers to develop. And it was after the 70s that the corporations came in and took over the cinema, and it stopped being an art form in America - not completely, of course, but to a large degree - and it was people making films, not because they like to make films, but because they like to make money with films.

I think that Robert Redford, and all the people that came out of that movement and are in it now, are taking the art form back, away from the corporations and now making films like the Yards by James Gray and Requiem for a Dream by Darren Aronofsky. They are film-makers who really love films. When James Gray offered me the part in The Yards, it was such a low offer my agent asked for more money.

The studio wouldn't change the budget, so James offered to pay the difference himself. When he did that, of course the studio came up with the rest of the money! And he didn't get much money himself, so there is a passion in film-makers today, which I am pleased to see because that means that there are roles for me again.

SH: If we can go back a bit to The Last Picture Show, which was your first Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actress. Can you say a little about working on that film with Peter Bogdanovich?

EB: Well, I'll tell you a couple of stories that come to mind. First, the audition. There were three parts in that film I could have played - Lois, Ruth and the waitress in the restaurant. When I was sent to read the script I was asked to read for the waitress. I went in to meet Peter and I told him that I was happy to read the waitress, but I really wanted to be Lois. He said, alright, read them both. And then he asked me to read Ruth too.

So I read and he said, 'OK, you're in the movie. Now we just have to figure out what part you're gonna play!' He called me at home and said, 'Look. I know you wanna play Lois, but I have a couple of choices for her, and I don't have anyone to play Ruth, so I really need you to play that if I don't find someone.' So I said I would. And then he said, 'You know, that's the Academy Award part.'

[Laughter]

He did! And I said, 'You know, I just don't want to play that type of character right now.' I was going through a divorce, I was very unhappy and I wanted to play a character who was a little more on top of it rather than beneath it. So, lucky for me, he found Cloris Leachman, and she did win the Academy Award, but I got to play the part that I wanted. The scene you saw [ Lois advising her teenage daughter not to marry her boyfriend as life would soon become monotonous and dull] because it was shot in a little bedroom, there was no room to put the camera to do a master shot.

Normally you would do the whole scene and then break it up into small pieces. But I was moving around the room a lot and there was no room for the camera. So there was just one set-up for each line, and each line was in a different place, so there were 10 camera moves. So I had no, kind of, run at the scene.

I would just go to one place and do one line, and then he would say 'cut' and then we'd move the camera to the next place and do the next line. So it was a bit tricky to get continuity in it, because I had to do the transition from one moment to the next at the beginning of each set-up. I had to remember what I had just said and do the transition. Which I did.

When it was edited together Peter showed it to me, the film wasn't edited yet, but he said he wanted me to see this scene. So when the lights went up he said, 'Do you like it?', and I said, 'No.' And he said, 'Why not?' and I said, 'Well, you've cut off all my transitions.' And without stopping he turned to the editor and said, 'Put the heads and tails on each of those takes, will ya?' And he put them all back on and that was what he used. I was always very impressed with him for being able to do that.

Oh. One other wonderful story. The first time that we all got together to read the script, we were in a hotel outside San Antonio. It was like a Holiday Inn on the freeway and just massively depressing.

[Laughter]

We all got together around a table in a low-ceilinged room, and we hadn't met before, none of us knew each other - we were all unknown at the time. As the reading went along this feeling in the room began to grow, like, 'Come on! What have we got here?' and I remember as we finished the last line and closed our scripts there was a pause, and then somebody said, 'You know. This could be a good movie!'

SH: I wanted to ask you a little about The Exorcist. It is one of the roles you've been most widely seen in. It must have been very demanding - physically demanding, apart from anything else.

EB: Yup! It took us nine months to shoot it, I've never done any other film that took so long. Six day weeks, twelve hour days for nine months, it was really very, very stressful. And difficult in so many ways. Emotional heights that had to be hit and then sustained.

When you do a master shot you have to hold on to what you've just done while they reset everything for the close-ups and I remember I had, because it was 1973, a big headset that was a radio and I would put that on so I could listen to some music and turn my chair to the wall to help keep me in whatever mood we had just established.

So it seems to me that one of my main memories of that film was looking at a wall, listening to music. Because it was quite difficult to maintain that level of terror for so many hours and days and weeks and months. It was a big event in my life. [ Listen to the sound clip (1min 47) ]

SH: Let's talk about Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. You won an Academy Award and a Bafta, and also it seems as though that was a very personal film that you were committed to getting made.

EB: Well, while I was shooting The Exorcist, Warner Brothers was the studio and John Kelly was the executive. John was looking in the dailies every day back in Los Angeles - we were in New York and Washington - and he decided that he wanted to do another film with me, so he started sending me scripts. Now at that time, 1973, it was early in the woman's movement and we were all just waking up and having a look at the pattern of our lives and wanting it to be different.

With that in mind, and what was happening to me and my own consciousness, as I looked at the scripts they all reflected the 'old position' of women. They were either victims, dutiful wives or prostitutes, or... well, that was pretty much it. I wanted to make a different kind of film. A film from a woman's point of view, but a woman that I recognised, that I knew. And not just myself, but my friends, what we were all going through at the time. So my agent found Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, the script by Bob Getchell.

When I read it I liked it a lot. I sent it to Warner Brothers and they agreed to do it. Then they asked who I wanted to direct it. I said that I didn't know, but I wanted somebody new and young and exciting. I called Francis Coppola and asked who was young and exciting and he said to look at a movie called Mean Streets, which hadn't been released yet.

So I looked at it and I felt that it was exactly what the script of Alice needed, because Alice was a wonderful script and well written, but for my taste it was a little slick. You know - in a good way, in a kind of Doris Day-Rock Hudson kind of way. I wanted something a bit more gritty.

When I saw Mean Streets I felt that Martin [Scorsese] was the person who could do it. So I asked to meet him and he came to John Kelly's office - this very small, nervous little guy, he was very young then - and I told him how much I liked the film but I said, 'You know, it's hard to tell from that film what you know about women. Do you know anything about women?' and he said, 'No. But I'd like to learn!' So we went to work together and it was just one of the best experiences I've ever had. Marty has a way of providing a creative atmosphere on the set wherein the actors can do what they know how to do best.

So the script is basically how Getchell wrote it, but with a lot of improvisation in rehearsal and a lot was added to it from our own lives. And a lot from my relationship with my son at that time worked its way into the film. [ Listen to the sound clip (3mins 01) ]

SH: That was something I wanted to ask you. What leaps of the screen is that incredible relationship you have between you and Alfred Lutter, who plays your son. I was interested in how you worked to get that.

EB: Well, a lot of the things... well, I'm embarrassed to say that the clip you saw [ when Alice orders her son to write down all the bad things in his life on a piece of paper] actually happened between me and my son when I was at my wits' end. When I look at it now I think, 'God, I was being rather rough with that boy!'

Alfred Lutter was a very bright boy, very bright and very bratty. He was very in the moment and very fine to work with. My son was on the set too, and he played the boy next door. And he wasn't a great fan of Alfred Lutter, actually. So there was a kind of feedback between the script and my life.

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