Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir Read online

  20th Century Fox pulled off an incredible feat of backstairs maneuvering and handed the movie off to a Canadian company to produce, with the understanding that once the movie was finished and in the can, the movie would revert back to 20th Century Fox for worldwide distribution. But that the movie was going to be produced, for all intents and purposes, as a Canadian film. So it was a foreign film, which meant that American actors could work on it. And the Screen Actors Guild agreed that those conditions were fine. They signed off on it and they let us go. Instead of going to the original first location of Iceland, we started in Scotland. We did three weeks there and then segued to Africa at the end of November of 1980 and spent five weeks there. And then we went on a break for about four months, to wait for it to get warm enough in Canada to finish the movie. We had another month and a half to two months to go, shooting in Canada. If you’re working on a Canadian film, you are obligated to shoot a huge percentage of it in Canada. So that’s why we had to do that.

  Once in Scotland it was clear before the first scene was shot that this certainly was not One Million Years BC. We realized we were doing something that had an incredible amount of integrity to it. Annaud brought in Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange, to create a glossary of prehistoric words for us. Aside from being a giant in the fiction world, Burgess was a teacher of linguistics at Oxford University. Then Annaud brought in Desmond Morris, the man who wrote Man Watching and one of the most highly regarded anthropologists of his day, as a consultant. He taught us the behavioral ticks that most likely characterized humans of eighty thousand years ago. During that epoch mankind was almost Homo sapiens, but not quite. There were still elements of chimp behavior and chimp movements. We were not fully upright, but we were almost upright. Desmond Morris gave us the template for movement as well as behavioral traits. That began to explain all those long, tedious mime sessions to find that perfect intersection of prehistoric and modern man. Annaud was making the quintessential evolution movie, with the best team he could assemble.

  So the guy I wrote off as a handsome French trust fund baby, once on set, was as serious as a fucking heart attack. But this newly formed lovefest was about to get a major test. Jean-Jacques’s notion was that he needed to make the shooting conditions as brutal and uncompromising and unpleasant physically as anyone could imagine. He wanted us to be in the same environment humans had eighty thousand years ago. The conditions he put us in were flat-out punishing.

  Even if Jean-Jacque is now one of my dearest friends on this earth and one of the true and abiding benevolent angels in my life, back then it only took a week into shooting before the handsome, dashing Frenchman and I butted heads. Big time. Allow me to set the stage . . .

  (CHAPTER 9)

  Wanna Set the Night on Fire . . .

  Quest for Fire pinpointed a moment in time, some eighty thousand years ago, when conditions existed in the evolution process to make possible the major strides leading up to the final modernization of mankind. The film was set somewhere around the Pyrenees, where, just to the north, due to rugged climate and tough topography, the tribe’s development was a bit stultified, whereas tribes to the south enjoyed the luxuries of more languid, temperate climes and, thus, easy living, which in turn allowed them to develop at a slightly quicker pace. So the basic conceit of the film is that the northern tribes, one of which our three heroes call home, regarded fire as a possession—you either had it, or you didn’t. Whereas the southern tribes had already discovered the secret, one that has since been passed down to Boy Scout troops the world over: the ability to start one’s own fire.

  The film opens with a furious attack on our heroes’ tribe, thus causing the loss of their most precious resource, fire, and a circumstance that critically threatens their very survival. The three fiercest warriors are chosen to go on a journey to find more. The clock is obviously ticking, as the longer this quest takes, the more compromised their loved ones back at the cave become. So they travel south, desperate to save the day.

  As for the making of Quest, the honeymoon that had characterized everything leading up to the start of principal photography was about to take a major and dramatic turn. The peace-love-brotherhood environment that marked the preproduction process, what with the dinners, the parties, the gatherings, and the words and gestures of encouragement, were about to be replaced with, “Holy shit, lemme just get the fuck outta here alive!” For as we were to learn, from the very first day of shooting Jean-Jacque’s notion of recreating the hardships of a group of men with no modern-day comforts was to completely and irrevocably remove all semblance of comfort, thereby leaving us with a set of circumstances that were as uncomfortable as was humanly possible. He wasn’t satisfied with creating just the illusion of hardship; he wanted actual hardship itself. So he went out of his way to make sure we were just completely victimized by the elements. He truly believed the poignancy of the story was how the environmental elements were always going to be the thing that won the day because mankind was not yet equipped to be the master of his own fate: humankind’s early destiny was decided not by him, but for him. The harnessing and creating of fire was to be the primary discovery that ultimately allowed us to survive as a species, and the locations he chose for the film were picked to duplicate the harshest conditions possible.

  The benchmark of this film was that we were always kind of in the middle of nowhere. We had to use locations that had never been civilized, that had never been built upon, and had no signs of twentieth-century comforts—no electrical lines, no homes. It made for incredible imagery, but it was brutal for us. It was the most uncomfortable film—to date—that I have ever been on. Everett McGill and I both ended up with frostbite on our hands and feet. Nameer El-Kadi, who remains one of my dearest of friends to this day, says he’s fine, but I think he’s bullshitting me. We were barefoot and walking through frozen tundra, we had to run through fields of three-foot-tall heather that had literally turned into icicles, and we had to stand in streams that were 33 degrees Fahrenheit, just at the point at which they’re ready to freeze. For most of the film we were in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t have tents, dressing rooms, or Winnebagos we could go to for warmth. We would get finished with a take and be completely compromised, shivering and out of our minds. The only thing that kept us warm were the wardrobe girls who wrapped us in these huge blankets and sleeping bags, as we stomped our feet and blew into our hands to keep the circulation going. My lasting gift from that, my very first movie, was that whenever it’s the slightest bit cold, I lose feeling in my fingers and toes. Glamorous Hollywood, am I right?

  So cut to the first sequence we’re going to shoot. We were in a barren freezing area of Scotland during November. The sequence has our group walking along when we find a little stream and stop to take a drink. We’ve been on the quest for weeks and weeks and weeks to find fire, but to no avail. We’re hungry and pissed off, and all of a sudden we see two saber-toothed tigers stalking us. Turns out they were even hungrier than we were! The script dictates that we haul ass and start running. We’re running, the tigers are running, and this sequence builds up to this frenzy until you see, off in the distance, this one sole tree, like a miniature, midget fucking tree, slightly larger than a toothpick, with about seventeen leaves on it, and that’s all there is separating us and certain death. We run and we run and we run, and we make it to the tree.

  The script had us hauling ass up this tree as high as possible so as to prevent the tigers from having us for lunch. So we’re up the tree, the tigers are on the ground trying to outwait us, and we gotta survive for three days on seventeen leaves. Okay good, okay fine, sounds easy enough, right?

  That sequence was rather complex and scheduled to be a three-day shoot. After four hours in the makeup chair we were ready to begin at seven in the morning. Our group, now in costume, does the establishing shot with us running in the frozen three-foot heather; that was the first thing to get my attention. I realized I’m hauling barefoot through plants tha
t had literally turned into ice sculptures or actual stalagmites. They were cutting right through my feet, and we were being asked to run at twenty-five miles an hour because we’ve got these fucking tigers on our tails.

  So right off the bat, the Perl is in “what the fuck?!” mode. But hey, let’s just get through this, ’cuz it’s bound to get easier—it has to! After we get all the running shit down and make it to the tree, my man Nameer was the first to climb to the top in a snap, and even big, lumbering Everett managed to get up just enough to make it look plausible. What they—and I—hadn’t realized is that this Jew from New York had never climbed a fuckin’ tree in his life. The only thing I ever climbed was when I once jumped over the fence of the schoolyard so I could play ball because it was locked on Veteran’s Day or some shit. I didn’t know shit about climbing shit, trees especially. So we spent the entire first day with me not being able to pull myself up into this puny, little muthafucka!

  We spent half of the second day attempting to do the same. It wasn’t working. We broke for lunch, and they finally sent out a team of carpenters to put pegs in the back of the fucking tree so I could have something to fucking hold on to. Meanwhile Jean-Jacques Annaud is so fucking pissed off at me because now he is on his second day and has somehow managed to be two days behind shooting, and that’s costing him serious money. On day two! Yes, that’s right: after two days of filming we’re already two days behind, and he’s blaming me, this fat Jew from New York who can’t fucking climb a tree for this whole behind-schedule fucking debacle. Finally, at the end of two days, I’ve gotten up in the tree, and we now have to do in one day—in order to get back on schedule—what we were supposed to do in three.

  That night, after shooting, everybody from the crew was in the dining room at the hotel. I noticed that Jean-Jacques refused to make eye contact with me and, when he did see me, just turned away in absolute avoidance. He was so fucking pissed off, he looked like if he had a gun, he’d fucking shoot me. ’Cuz I am now the bane of his existence. After all, 20th Century Fox was already sending communiqués to Scotland saying, “You better get your fucking shit together son, ’cuz we’re fucking pulling the plug on this whole thing.” Annaud, rightfully so, had nobody to blame but this fucking fuckup who couldn’t climb a muthafucking tree.

  So he wouldn’t look at me, huh? Well, screw this, I thought, and I walked up to his table as he was having coffee at the end of dinner and said, “Can we talk?”

  “I do not think that is a good idea!”

  “Really?”

  “No! I’m so mad at you. I may kill you right now. So, please, do yourself a favor, and do me a favor, and walk the fuck away.”

  I didn’t budge. “I really feel as though it’s important that you and I come to some sort of an arrangement. Because obviously what’s happened these first two days is not good for anybody!”

  “You think so?!” He started yelling and screaming. “Look! It’s not my fault you can’t climb a fucking tree.” He started attacking me to the point at which he was completely not interested in engaging on any rational level. You could tell that the pressure he was under was so palpable, it didn’t compare to anything I’d ever experienced before. I had never been on a movie before, and I never realized what’s at stake and how expensive every shooting day is. And when you get behind a day, especially on a movie like that, in which you only have these locations for a limited amount of time—if you don’t stay on schedule, disaster lurks just around the corner.

  Yes, it was partly my fault, but what I wanted to tell him was that if he had planned this differently and had taken into account his actor’s needs and enabled him to give a performance rather than be challenged into doing difficult physical tasks in a compromised state, it would all go smoother. I wanted to communicate to him that if you just figure out a way to empower me to play this character in a way in which I’m actually in control of the elements rather than the elements being in control of me, I can maybe give a performance, and then everything would work out way better than you can imagine. I started to explain that to him. But he was having none of it and instead was looking to make a quick exit and leave me to my own miserable misery.

  I said, “Hey! Hang on! You yelled, now it’s my turn!” Remember, I’ve never been on a movie before. Here I was yelling at the director, and people were turning their heads in the dining room, going, “Oh shit . . . Perlman . . . oh my God, he’s about to be on the next plane back to fucking New York. They’re gonna dropkick his ass for sure.”

  Jean-Jacque stopped and listened as I explained that if an actor is completely compromised by the elements and all he’s thinking about is his own survival, you’re just going to get a guy thinking about his own survival, not a performance.

  He then said, “Do you think that I’m going to pull up a chair and sit back waiting for you to do whatever it is you are going to do, when all you’ve done for the last two days is completely fuck me and my movie?”

  “Jean-Jacques, do yourself a favor and get yourself a fucking chair!” And I walked out.

  Jean-Jacques and I did not speak for the next three weeks. Well, that is not entirely true: we spoke, especially him to me in order to describe the day’s work. But there was a palpable tension. On that third day of shooting the first sequence, we were up in the tree, doing all these scenes—this interaction between us and the tigers, us eating leaves out of sheer desperation, the ultimate departure of the tigers, and our eventual dismounting of the tree. So it’s a lot of stuff on that third day in order to make up for the time we had lost. Well, not only did we get it all in the can by four o’clock in the afternoon, but we also had enough time to do this beautiful improvisation that was not even in the script but was phenomenal because we caught the most beautiful light of the day, with us exiting the tree and playing out the relief of having escaped with our lives. There was a palpable sense of relief from both the crew and the cast because, just like that, we were back on schedule. I had stayed up very late the night before figuring out what I needed to do to give the performance. I had just dared Annaud, and I knew if I didn’t deliver something akin to a miracle, I was toast. I knew that. And on that third day the tide got turned, and frenzy was replaced by order. And calm. And from that moment on, there was an obsessive determination on my part to prove my theory that with a modicum of concern for safety and well-being, mixed with copious amounts of planning and homework, a detailed, nuanced performance could be given that would include but not be overpowered by the elements. And with that, there began a subtle evolving into the dynamic of my once-contentious relationship with Jean-Jacques.

  Then, about three weeks into filming, when we’re finishing this one location, we got to this other scene. And suddenly something remarkable happened. As we got ready to rehearse the scene for the crew to watch, instead of staging the scene and designating camera angles, Jean-Jacques said, “Everybody take a seat. Let’s see what the actors are going to do.” And I froze for a moment: let’s see what the actors are going to do! Holy shit! That’s the first time he ever said that. And we improvised the scene, and he said, “Wow, that’s very nice. Okay, let’s just shoot it. We’ll put one camera over here. We’ll put one camera over there . . .” And for the rest of the movie that’s how it went: instead of directing a scene before he got a chance to see what we were gonna do, he actually watched what we were gonna do, and then, if he saw something that needed clarification or a different interpretation, he would give us notes and we would all be on the same page. But when he said nothing and we just went into shooting mode, that meant he was happy. And, as they say in France, the rules of the game were forever changed.

  When we finally finished shooting our first leg in Scotland, Jean-Jacques and I had slowly and fantastically evolved into becoming the best of friends. This complete and amazing trust evolved between the two of us. There was now a division of labor. He realized that he didn’t have to do everything; he could let the actors do the acting, he could do the directing, an
d we can both be on the same page and both be making the same movie. And his transformation happened right in front of our eyes. I’ve now done three films with Jean-Jacques Annaud, and there’s no one on the planet—he’s tied with Guillermo—who has given me greater roles, respect, adoration, and love. He’s as close to being a family member as anyone I’ve met along the way. And I think we both believe we are so close to one another because we started off so rocky. But at the end of the day he’s an incredibly fair-minded guy and talented guy. He’s just a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant man. A tried and true genius. But he knew what he wanted and, prior to that, had never imagined he could give over to the actor and the actor could supply not only what he was looking for but also maybe even something he hadn’t even imagined! I like to think there was a huge learning curve for both of us. I know there was one for me, because I came away from that experience believing it’s the director’s job to drive you to the point at which you can do nothing other than bring your A Game.

  You can hate a director for that or you can love and admire a director for that because he’s actually pulling the best out of you. And it was with Jean-Jacques, on that movie, that I learned this. But I also watched him discover that the actor has spent a lot more time thinking about how to pull off this moment than even the director has because that’s his job. So to participate in this evolution of bringing together two different artistries to paint one picture . . . well, I can’t speak for Jean-Jacques, but there is a satisfaction to that convergence that rivals even the greatest of sensations. And the more detailed and bold the choices I was making, the more vivid the mutual wavelength we entered became, thus making him able to augment it, to vary it, to enhance it, and merge it into his vision for the rest of the picture. Jean-Jacques has just turned out to be one of the most sensational, magnificent, generous people I’ve met in all my travels. And as you will see, this was only the beginning of what would turn out to be one of the richest relationships of my lifetime.