Pop Culture Confidential

Episode 20: Listen to Me Marlon

Marlon Brando was one of the most acclaimed and influential actors of all time. He also was one of the most elusive and enigmatic. In the new documentary Listen to Me Marlon, written, directed and edited by Stevan Riley, we get a powerfully absorbing portrait that dives into the inner space of Brando’s mind. The film features exclusive access to Brando's previously unseen and unheard personal archive of private audio tapes the actor recorded at home, in business meetings, during hypnosis, in therapy, and during press interviews. And Brando doesn’t hold back as he reflects on his childhood, his movie career and the people he worked with. No talking heads, no interviewees: just Brando on Brando. We speak to director Stevan Riley to hear about his process making the film, what Brando felt about celebrity and his own appearance, his relationship with Francis Ford Coppola and the myths of Apocalypse Now - and much more! This year Listen to Me Marlon has been nominated for “Best Feature” at the 2015 International Documentary Association Awards, and is one of the documentary features submitted for the 2016 Oscar race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duration:: 24m
Broadcast on:: 20 Nov 2015
Audio Format:: other

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hi, I'm Kristina Yerling-Biro, a street car named Desire on the waterfront, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now. These are just a few movies with iconic Brando performances. Before watching the new documentary, Listen to Me Marlon, my perception of Marlon Brando was perhaps quite similar to many other film lovers. One of cinema history's greatest actors, a master of his craft, but Brando was also a reluctant celebrity who became increasingly difficult to work with and suffered much tragedy towards the end. Reading that this new documentary was Brando himself in a free-flowing narration, I was thinking, are we going to be hearing the ramblings of Colonel Kurtz for two hours? But I was totally taken aback by the Brando speaking in director Steven Riley's film. How smart, funny, narcissistic and damaged, sure, but with an incredible understanding of the human condition, his own and in general. This is not so much a biography as it is a life journey. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Marlon, let your mind drift back, way back in time. To a time when you were very young, it is like a wonderful soft dream. Since I don't do anything else well, I might have put all my energies into being as good an actor as I can. You bring part of yourself to every character, but some parts are closer to us than others. Everybody's got something they're hiding. For the making of Listen to Me Marlon, director Steven Riley got access through the Brando estate to boxes and boxes of Brando's personal material that have been in storage for a very long time. It turned out to be over 300 hours of audiotape recordings, conversations, diaries, even self-hypnosis. In the film, these are mixed with excerpts of Brando's films and archival footage. The result of hearing Brando tell his own story is really quite emotional. Marlon seems haunted by memories of his childhood, an alcoholic mother, an abusive father, a longing to understand and better himself. And I found it revelatory to not have other interviews or talking heads giving their side of Brando's story. Here Marlon owns his story, even after death. Listen to Me Marlon is one of the documentary features submitted for the 2015 Oscar race, and I'm very happy to be joined by director Steven Riley. I started by asking Mr. Riley what Brando kept in recorded and why he thought he kept all this personal documentation. Not just Kate, but you know, everything within his drawers, around the house and his cabinets and the cupboards, they filmed the interior of his home after his passing, and within the drawers I mentioned there was objects and knickknacks and all sorts of things that he'd categorised and store, that stuff he would collect were his audiotapes, but he'd record those for many different reasons. He was dyslexic, and I think that he would prefer to keep an audio record of things rather than write things down, and the kind of things that he would record would be business meetings that he would take, he would record just little notes to self, things he was interested in, maybe they'd line some books or vocabulary. He would have had many extensive preparations, creative preparations for all of his roles, which was interesting. He didn't really pay much attention to his acting, but he very clearly did. And he would also take you record with his family, answer phone messages, the lot. What is the self-hypnosis, what was he actually doing, and what did he want to achieve with that? Well that was one of the earliest tapes that I listened to in fact, which helped me formulate an approach to the film, a creative approach, I listened to a tape where I wasn't really sure what was going on initially, but it became apparent that it was Marlon speaking to himself, trying to take himself into a state of hypnosis, and regressive hypnosis, where he would venture back into his early chart that was trying to locate the source of his problems, which he thought that go through the entire course of his life, and how damaging those early years had been to his character, and the habits that he picked up. So those regressive hypnotherapy tapes were incredibly personal, and it's almost too personal in regard. Kids feel was very strange listening to those. He does self-analysis, and it revolves around a lot about his childhood. Tell me a little bit about what his father was like that you found. Well, Marlon speaks about his dad as being a very severe man, very masculine in terms of his approach to life, he was not particularly sensitive when it came to his kids, and Marlon felt very much unacended to, and unloved in his early years, and developed what he calls a very deep sense of inferiority from his dad. The dad was short on praise, and even when Marlon won his Oscar on the waterfront, as a revealing film interview that you see in the documentary, where the dad is being asked on a talk show about how he feels about his son's Academy Award, and he's very telling in how he describes it, you know, he's not proud of Marlon at all for that. Estella Adler, the great acting coach, became sort of a surrogate mother, which seems fitting because method acting, if I'm not mistaken, seems to be very psychoanalytical by nature. Celebrity was obviously not his cup of tea, but what did you think acting did for him? I think it was his passion. I think he was certainly an artist, and really did care about his work, and that really dispels one of the major myths about Brando, that he wasn't bothered. I mean, certainly he's responsible for a lot of that myth, taking hold because he would always seek to defile his status as a big celebrity, and would diminish his work as an actor. But in these private audio recordings, you find out that he was very much an idealist when it came to his work. And acting was a real cathartis for him, I think in a creative sense, but also in a way to exercise emotions that he said, I mean, acting allows you to express yourself in ways that you can't do in real life. You might be otherwise inhibited to reveal, but that was a double-edged sword too, because when you hear him talking about his experiences in streetcar, and the stage production of that, and in fact, that method acting, that re-enacting all the problems of his childhood, because his character, Stanley Kowalski, had real parallels to his own father, re-enacting that violence of his dad every night actually was too much, and is what caught into lethal theatre. So acting was, yeah, provided a way to express, but it was also, you know, they weren't always things that you really wanted to revisit, you know, it wasn't always part of his childhood that Marlon really wanted to dwell on. You do it beautifully in the movie that there seems to be very much connection with his life and what he's talking about to the movies he's choosing, and at the period that he does them, like you were mentioning, Stanley Kowalski and his father, is that a connection you made, or do you think he was doing this kind of consciously or subconsciously choosing these roles? And Marlon actually mentions, he says in the documentary that you bring part of yourself to every character, but some parts ended up being closer to him than others were, and certainly, you know, with Stanley, you know, he talks, he says that the character was derived from his experiences when he was young, and the anger of Stanley, you know, would be motivated by him, remembering his father hitting his mother. So that was laid bare, you know, and he talks about his father representing the beasts and the animals, you know, and it was that same kind of feral quality that Stanley Kowalski had. Brando did his best, you know, at the time, then afterwards, to distance himself from the character of Stanley, saying that's not what he wanted to be like, which was true because he never wanted to be like his dad, but what is also fascinating is that Brando then started admitting to himself his own beast-like qualities, and then started using the adjective of the beast in reference to himself with the final conclusion that sometimes you can't escape the behavior of your parents, and how much that influences your own behaviors. Right, right, which gets very apparent towards the end of his life with his own son, of course, but we talk a lot about women's appearances in the movies, and you have a beautiful shot in the film, I think it's a screen test, correct me if I'm wrong, where he's like turning around in the camera, and he's just beautiful, and I was noticing how beautiful his teeth are also. What was his relationship to his looks during his life? You were mentioning it, he got very, he did get very heavy at the end, and food addictions and... I think there was a mild vanity, I think, maybe not much difference, you know, most of us, but it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't stifling for him, and I guess he, you know, he did do lots of exercise in his younger, but otherwise just effortlessly good looking, calls himself, you know, he said he was kind of attractive, which was obviously an understatement because, I mean, women were falling his feet, you know, I suppose there was so much confidence and security in his physical self and his appearance, that maybe that was the problem when he started transitioning to being too overweight, that had never been a problem in his life, and I think he felt that he recognized that it was going out of control a bit too late, and he talks about that, you know, he said that it was a bit of a definite issue, he said after someone last time go, he spent a lot more time, you know, at home reading books and lying on his bed, so he wasn't nearly as physical as he was previously, and those things ended up creeping up on him, food was also provided comfort, as it did even when he was a young boy, he was a definite comfort eater, I think, when things were depressing or threatening within his home as a kid, he said he used to retreat to the kitchen and, you know, go and meet Charlie Cheese and all the different snacks and treats in the fridge as a way to distract himself. No doubt this is a one-sided story, it's his version, you've, he's narrating his own story through your thing, but between the lines you can hear that, I mean, many people were heard along the way, I'm sure many women were, and he talks about his children, how self-aware do you think he was of this? I think very self-aware, and that's almost kind of what redeems him in a sense, is how on his team he is about his own behaviours, I mean, he talks about the fact that, you know, in his early years that he was a, you know, serial womaniser, that he was cheating on his wife, but, you know, I mean, he doesn't excuse his behaviours, but at least he talks about it, and at least he's the person addressing that and recognises that it was wrong. So, you know, there was a lot of damage in his wake, but then, you know, but Martin, in some respects, was a victim too, I think that he always struggled to form relationships, he wouldn't indicate, he had issues with the mother figure, you know, his mum had, he felt had abandoned him for alcohol, and I think it was always a sense that, you know, other women would abandon him too, and it's, again, the lack of security you'd have in relationships was very surprising, considering he was, you know, the best catch on the planet. And similarly as well, you know, his relationship with his dad meant that he had issues of authority and would, you know, as a woman, but like, came to a film set and is dealing with producers and directors, you know, that didn't help either, so, but he diagnoses that, you know, he goes to that, he investigates those parts of his character, and I think he really wanted to find solutions and become a better person, and, you know, for him, therefore, it's very important to figure out the origin of these negative values. When what you are is unwanted, then you look for an identity that will be acceptable. A good kind man can fool anybody, the first person that you fool is yourself. You lie for peace, you lie for tranquility, you lie for love. I feel as though I'm coming closer to what it means to me, shall we? You are the memories. Hit 'em! Knock 'em over. With an attitude, with a word, with a look, everybody feels like they're a fan, everybody feels they could have been a contender. One of the things that you, that I have to admit, coming into the movie that I was sort of one-sided for me, I had sort of always grown up with the copula version of the apocalypse now, when Brando came to the set, and then the problems he caused, and the money that was spent waiting for him, and so on. And here you let Marlon for the first time, he gives his version, and it's quite different. Were you surprised? Yeah, I was, and I had really investigated that quite thoroughly, because it did, yeah, it does reverse conceptions of him. I'd watched him half of darkness, and Brando's made out to be, you know, he's the crazies, playing up, he was behaving badly on set, and all rather delaying things, that he was overweight for the film. And I just think it was quite a bad rap, and Marlon's also, too, when you hear him launch and centurade against Coppolo, we sort of actually portrayed him. He loves Coppolo as a director, I think Coppolo's on the few directors that we really respected. But he felt hurt when there was various reports where Coppolo was quoted as saying, and as you see here in Hearts of Darkness, you know, rubbish in Brando. But Brando felt that he, yeah, that was a bad rap, and that he was largely responsible for rescuing the movie, which I think is, you know, not too far-fetched a claim, because he, you know, I had access to his audio preparations for the character of Kurtz, and yeah, he was all the stream of consciousness stuff that Marlon was interested in that was quite different to the script, you know, where Marlon was really trying to investigate the nature of pure evil. I mean, he'd really, I mean, he was fascinated by good and good and evil, and the hypocrisy of those who think they're good, because we all have potential for, you know, for bad, and he wasn't, you always wanted to be keen to point that kind of thing out to illuminate our own behaviors. But with Kurtz, he wrote and added lids, a lot of that, a lot of the script which Coppolo admits he was struggling to close, you know, he didn't really have an ending to the film, so he says in Hearts of Darkness, you know, what do you do? Do you halt the production, or do you spend a few weeks improvising with the best acts from the planet? And that's exactly what he did, and it worked out, and over around by a week or so, I'm not making that. I just thought, you know, can Marlon really be blamed for that? It was so interesting to hear him, and he was doing these recordings sort of at the same time that it was happening, and it felt very much, it was just, it's one of those pop-cultural things that being a big film fan, and you've been watching Hearts of Darkness many times, that it was like, whoo, he had this, it was so interesting to get that outside of the story in his voice. Well, I mean, it's not like, you know, Brandon was so overweight at that point, I mean, you know, definitely put him away in the later years, but he was no kind of more chunky than, you know, some of your other American generals, like Norman Schwarzenegger, I'm sure he had more pounds than Brandon is for the pop-lits now, and Brandon actually, you know, did affect the lighting, or the entire lighting, and then the DOP backs that up, that the whole idea of shade and light, you know, was Marlon's direction for those bits, and you know, and arguably Marlon might have been, you know, even though Marlon was in addictions, he might have been the most sober person on set at that point, when he arrived. Well, yeah, Hopper had definitely taken that prize. Yeah, exactly, you know, and I think, you know, there was correspondence between them, you know, a couple of, you know, I apologise into Brandon, so he was misquoted, but you know, as long as some of those quotes ring loud and clear, then I think Marlon definitely had a right to respond, you know, as respect to who he was of Coppola. Well, Marlon Brando, he became quite old in a generation, he was 80, correct? In a generation was sort of James Dean and Marilyn, and you start the movie when, in his older years, when great tragedy has struck, that we remember, his household, a murder that happened there. So it must have been quite hard in his older years. Was that your impression from the tapes? I think, well, certainly the self-hypnosis tapes, they were from the last several years, so the killing that you mentioned where Marlon's son shot his half-sisters boyfriend in the family home would lead to his son Christian going to prison, and then later on his daughter would commit suicide as well related to those events. And so Marlon, yeah, I mean, from, in his last nine years, I think he was undergoing severe amounts of stress, and he had physical symptoms, too, you know, there was, he talks about panic attacks and high heart rate and blood pressure, and I think he was, you know, I think those meditation tapes and self-hypnosis tapes were a genuine attempt to calm himself down and to alleviate those symptoms, and, you know, of course, he never got over the grief of losing his daughter, but, you know, he did say that meditation, and, you know, did do a lot of good as well, and helped to, and helped to, you know, alleviate the symptoms, as I mentioned, you know, quite a lot by the time of his death and provide some measure of peace. And this is sort of what you were mentioning earlier, that, sort of, thinking about his own childhood and how things are inherited down through generations and that type of behavior that he seemed to be thinking about a lot at that time. Yeah, he really did believe that the formative years of our life, you know, have a massive effect on, you know, right the way through to, you know, our demise, and that he kept quoting the fact that, you know, that if you, the Jesuit phrase, you know, give me a boy until he's seven, I'll give you the man, and he mentioned he spent the entire, his entire life trying to repair the negative behaviors picked up in the first, the first years of his life. And as, and then he, you know, as such, you know, he ascribes a lot of his own sins to his dad, but he says that his father also didn't stand the chance because his father was, you know, from a, from a broken home to, and didn't have, didn't have his, his mother around from an early age, and then, you know, in that dynastic progression, you know, arguably, as Marlon says, you know, I think some of his own sins and his father sins would then pass on to his own son Christian. So yeah, there's a real Freudian thread running through all of that. Lastly, on, on a sort of happier note, I was surprised he's in that he has an incredibly fun sense of humor. Could you describe it? Yeah, I was always entertained by Marlon in the edit, you know, he'd have a great turn of phrase. I mean, arguably there's not enough of his humor in, in the film, but that's a part of his, you know, the course of the, the narrative took. But there's definitely like you say, I mean, but you can feel it coming in. Yeah, I think so. And he was at a very developed and sophisticated sense of humor and he had a real purer all sense to, I mean, he loved, you know, fart gags and fart machines and all this kind of, and all this kind of stuff. But otherwise, you know, he had quite sophisticated sense of, you know, of, of irony and, and, and, and, and, you know, and, and, and humor per say, which I think actually was a, was a salvation in a way. I think that's what kept in me said that, you know, a good sense of humor is a real sign of, of, of mental health insanity and, and he, and he retained that right the way through to his last years. Mr. Riley, thank you so much for joining me. The movie will be shown four times here at the Stockholm Film Festival in November and premieres on Showtime on November 14th. That's right, right? Yeah, that's right. On the 14th, exactly. And it's in cinemas in the UK from the 23rd of, of, of October. Thank you so much for taking this time and, and again, for this great movie. Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much to director Steven Riley. Listen to me. Marlon is out on DVD and Blu-ray on November 23rd here in Sweden, and it's actually showing at the Stockholm Film Festival four times. If you go to our website, popcultureconfidential.com, you can get all kinds of information and links to where you can see the movie. And there's lots more happening on our Twitter @podpopculture. So go check that out. This show was edited by Tom Hanson, music by Call Boy, and produced by Renee Vittishtet and myself. I'm Christina Yerling-Biro. Thank you so much. Hello podcast fans. It is I, Bruce Valanche. For over 25 years, I worked on the Academy Awards, so you didn't have to. In that time, I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly felt. And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win, why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work. This is the Oscars. What were they thinking? Available wherever you get podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]