Nick Nolte Now

I get the feeling that Malick was pressing all the right buttons on this shoot. Nolte nods and says, "When a film is working, it's bigger than everybody in it and everyone can feel it. Everybody's quaking with energy. It's a delicate, group thing. It's no fun to be brilliant if the other people around you aren't. You don't want to have to worry about who's upstaging whom. You want to be with a bunch of ballplayers who want to play ball. When that happens you're in this creative process that's just shimmering. I try for that feeling on every film I do. When you leave a film like that, you're rejuvenated.-When you don't have that, the films take from you. They damage you. Those kinds of films have been the most miserable experiences of my life."

While Nolte won't say which films damaged him (most reports suggest that I Love Trouble, the romantic comedy he made with Julia Roberts, qualifies), he will say that the last time he got involved in one of these fiascoes ("three or four years ago"), he actually suffered from an irregular heartbeat which turned regular again as soon as the shoot ended. "Sure, afterwards, you can take your $10 million and buy a house and some motorcycles and travel to the Riviera, but then this godawful movie comes out and you've got to face the press and they're asking, 'Why'd you make this fucking film?'"

"So what do you look for in a script?"

"I look for that story that has deep meaning for me. I may not know exactly what that meaning is, but I can feel it, and that's the work I'm compelled to do. When Paul Schrader first called me about doing Affliction, I knew I wasn't yet ready psychologically to go to the places this character has to go. I wasn't feeling enough pain. I was fearful I might act it. I don't like to act. To me it's all about being. That's where the catharsis comes. That's where the payback comes. To act it means to withhold. It's comfortable for the audience, but you never hit the major strings."

"Sounds like you've read a lot of those Jung and Freud books."

"I've read some. Jung's Man and His Symbols, Freud's thesis on artists. If you haven't read that, you should. Freud says the artist tries to convince himself and the people around him of his self-importance so he can get laid. I don't agree with him. I don't doubt that some artists get laid, but it'd probably happen sometime in life anyway."

Freud, being a student of human impulses, would probably have approved of Nolte's method of selecting scripts.

"I don't think in terms of career," he says. "I don't think about what the studios want. My agents long ago gave up trying to tell me what to do."

No wonder. Nolte turned down Superman reportedly because the producers didn't agree with him that the character should be played as a schizophrenic. He turned down Indecent Proposal because he didn't think much of the story. "I think I've only done one or two scripts that came through agents. If a script grabs me, I do it. Working on a film should be a life-affirming experience. The material and the people involved are more important than money when you do a movie. Because when you're in your grave, they're not gonna write, 'His film made $200 million.' But they might write, 'He made On the Waterfront.'"

"So why'd you do Another 48 HRS.?" For the first and only time during the interview, he looks sheepish.

"I don't think we should have, but we all cashed in. It didn't serve the audience." You get the feeling he'd like to send out letters of apology.

In Affliction, there's a scene in which a drunken father hits his son. When I ask Nolte if this struck a nerve, he says, "Now don't get the idea that I was beaten by my father. But we've all been hurt. I didn't see my father for my first three years."

Nolte's father was fighting overseas when Nick was born in 1941, in Omaha. Pop returned in 1944, and became a traveling salesman. Nick played football and baseball in high school, but was kicked off first one team, then another. In 1962 he was arrested for selling phony draft cards and received a suspended sentence. Then, having read On the Road, he hit the highway. "I didn't have much of a connection to the bohemian world, but I got a glimpse of it in this book. It was an important part of my taking off in 1959. I got in my MG and drove from Nebraska to Arizona. In those days, you didn't leave your hometown that much. But after that I was hooked on driving." He spent the next 14 years driving from place to place, acting in regional, community and repertory theaters from New York to San Francisco, from Phoenix to Minneapolis. Along the way, this shy, nomadic, underachieving loner figured out that acting was much more than just a job. Amazingly, Nolte says he never perceived this apprenticeship as a means to some sort of Hollywood end. He wasn't hungering for fame and fortune. "I was chasing the same thing then that I'm chasing now. The story. I wanted to find a connection between me and the material. I remember in Greeley, Colorado, I had a little apartment on the square, four stories up. I'd eat out of tins of spaghetti. During my free time, I'd take the play I was doing and write it out in longhand. That way I could find out why Tennessee Williams chose the words that he did. Because even if you've read a play five or six times, it's not the same as writing it out. Writing it allows you to penetrate the choice of words and you can see the connections." Most years, Nolte was doing 16 plays a year. Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge, interspersed with the occasional light comedy like Harvey or Don't Drink the Water. He roamed the back roads and theaters of America until he was 35. Can you imagine an aspiring actor today committing to that kind of regimen?

It was while Nolte was doing a William Inge play in Los Angeles that he was noticed and signed by an agent. In 1976, he played the role of Tom Jordache in the TV miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man and after that there were no more spaghetti tins.

When he turned down the sequel to Rich Man, Poor Ma_n, Nolte was told he would never work in this town again. That was like telling Galileo he was wrong about the solar system. And indeed, Nolte has been with us for so long now that for film fans his filmography may seem as familiar as the McDonald's menu. For those of you who've been hiding in the jungles of Borneo since World War II (and who didn't find work as an extra in Nolte's film _Farewell to the King, about a soldier hiding in Bomeo since World War II), let me recap some of the high and low points.

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