He has the look of a ravished angel and a talent that's insisted on its own way for over two decades in Hollywood. Here Nick Nolte talks about his new work in Affliction and The Thin Red Line, reminisces about the old days when Jeffrey Katzenberg served him coffee and explains why he's told blatant whoppers to unsuspecting journalists.
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Nick Nolte has been living on this quiet, two-lane road with dirt shoulders and overhanging trees for 20 years. He started with one house and then bought the one next door, and then bought a third house which used to be owned by Tommy Chong and then the Eagles. He's now got a six-acre estate complete with tennis court, guest houses, gardens and lagoons. Birds caw and butterflies are everywhere.
When I arrive at the door, I'm greeted by four yapping dogs and a secretary/assistant who tells me she'll try to find Nick. I wander around the living room which is chockablock with books. Nolte didn't read much in high school and never finished college. Now, the shelves of this autodidact brim with tomes on psychology and history: the complete works (in hardback) of Freud and Jung, Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization, Dumas Malone's six-volume biography of Jefferson, a section on the Civil War, Nietszche, Ayn Rand, Shakespeare, Sam Shepard. The secretary returns and says, "I can't seem to find him," and disappears again. I keep looking around. The paintings in the room look very similar to the ones Nolte pretended to paint in New York Stories. From somewhere I hear water gurgling. The secretary returns once more. "He's still among the missing," she says. Against one wall is a shiny, black upright piano where Nolte took lessons for five months so he could play "Claire de Lune" in his role as a renaissance bum in Down and Out in Beverly Hills.
Now 57, Nolte has been acting in feature films for almost a quarter century. Along the way, he's defied chemistry, gravity, producers, lawyers and Katharine Hepburn, and he has remained incredibly durable, seldom dropping off the Hollywood radar screen for long. He's a brand-name actor who, from the beginning, has made idiosyncratic choices and today still has no qualms about lending his alliterative name and explosive talent to low-budget, defiantly uncommercial fare more often than to the high-budget films most stars of his stature stick to.
Nolte's latest indie challenge is an austere sort of murder mystery called Affliction, which is directed by Paul Schrader (remember him? American Gigolo, Cat People). It's a powerful meditation on fathers and sons and drinking and violence, but why on earth would anyone float a film called Affliction? Was no one home in the marketing department? Not even the perpetually afflicted Woody Allen would inflict a title like that on his audience. The film's adapted from a frigid, New England-based downer of a novel by Russell Banks, who wrote The Sweet Hereafter. In it, Nolte gives a searing, anguished performance as a small-town cop bloated with booze. True to form, he gained 50 pounds for the role, and he shows us, incrementally, the source of the guilt and the rage simmering beneath the sagging flesh. Schrader says, "I stood in awe as Nolte peeled layer after layer off the character. During rehearsal, Nick directed the scenes as much as I did."
A trimmed-down Nolte can also be seen playing a colonel in The Thin Red Lin_e, a story about the bloodbath at Guadalcanal in World War II, adapted from the novel by James Jones and directed by Terrence Malick (remember him?), the 70s legend who directed _Badlands and Days of Heaven and then disappeared.
Even before I see Nolte, I hear the voice. Gravelly. Husky. Rasping. Unmistakable. These are vocal cords that have been marinated in spirits, swaddled in cigarette smoke and frayed by impassioned soliloquies and real life lovers' quarrels. If grizzlies could talk, they'd sound like this. Then Nolte rounds the corner of the fieldstone fireplace. Even though it's afternoon he looks like he just woke up. He's wearing running shoes and what seems to be some sort of pajama-like getup. The handsome face is, of course, not the chiseled masterpiece it once was, but the body is lean and the great, blond mane is thick and tousled.
Nolte makes his disheveled entrance and plops down three water bottles on the table. A typical day at home, he tells me, will include reading, writing, bike riding, weight lifting and picking tomatoes. He is not married now. He has a son, Brawley, who divides his time between Nolte and his mother, Rebecca Linger, who is Nolte's third ex-wife. "I'm an introvert," says Nolte. "I can be comfortable alone." In one of the guest houses, Nolte's nephew is writing screenplays. "I see him walking across the lawn muttering to himself," says Nolte. "It's always fun to pop in and see what his mental state is."
As far as Nolte's mental state at the moment, he's feeling great about his work on The Thin Red Line.
"Did Malick call you and ask you to do the part of the colonel?"
"He called, and we got together, but after we talked, he said he wanted to cast younger all across the board still. I met with him a few more times. I didn't bug him, but I hung in there. Then he asked me to do a role that wasn't to the book. Probably one of the offshore general. So I started to do research on what that role could be and I fed this information to him. And we started exchanging books. Four or five months later, we were having lunch, and he blurted out, 'You should play the colonel.' And I said. 'It's about time.'"
For an actor who has, for the most part, shunned action pictures, The Thin Red Line would seem to be a departure. Nolte doesn't agree. This is not his idea of an action picture. He says he realized early on in his career that he had no interest in becoming an action hero. "You don't want to get stuck in a category [like that], because it's too limiting. Not only that, I can't relate to those characters. If you ever got deeply into any of them then you'd have to speak to the nature of what it is to pull the trigger."
"Do you enjoy watching a film like Die Hard?"
"No. If I want to examine heroics, I like to do it from a real standpoint. I ask myself, 'What situation would I find myself in where I could exhibit an act of selflessness?' That's what The Thin Red Line is all about. It's about that moment, in the middle of battle, when you're standing next to your buddy, firing at the enemy, knowing you could be killed, and in that moment you give up all self-interest. Jones said that you love that guy next to you more than you've loved anything in your life. The love for a child is a close second, but it's not as selfless."
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.
Nolte's first starring role in a major film came in The Deep, a box-office smash in which he was upstaged by Jacqueline Bisset's tangible assets. The antidote to that depressing experience was to play the role of a merchant seaman caught up in the Vietnam War drug trade in Who'll Stop the Rain, an adaptation of Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers. Along with Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty and director Karel Reisz, Nolte created magic. It's one of his great roles. Then he did a turn as a pill-popping flanker in North Dallas Forty. He was so determined to get that film made that, for a year, he turned down all other offers even though the project was in turnaround and $1 million in the red from all the various screenplays that were gathering dust. "Pete Gent and I rewrote the script and then, out of the blue, I got a call from Michael Eisner, who'd been one of the 10 VPs at ABC when we did Rich Man, Poor Man. He was now over at Paramount, and he gave me the go-ahead. I don't imagine Eisner calls too many actors these days."
When North Dallas Forty proved to be less than a blockbuster, Nolte's lawyer/advisor, Gary Hendler, tried to explain to him how Hollywood works. "You do a couple big studio pictures which then earn you the right to do what you want to do." Nolte said, "I'm already doing what I want to do, and I'm going to continue that." So he did Heart Beat, in which he played On the Road author Jack Kerouac's inspirational sideman Neal Cassady.
Occasionally he'd backslide into a big, successful studio picture, as he did with 48 HRS. in 1982. This film costarred a skinny kid from Saturday Night Live named Eddie Murphy and at the first script meeting, the guy who served the coffee was named Jeffrey Katzenberg. Three weeks into the shoot, the Paramount executives wanted to fire Murphy because they didn't think he was funny. Nolte offered to give up screen time so Murphy could go off on a few improvisational riffs.
A forgettable film called Grace Quigley is notable for the fact that Nolte costarred with Katharine Hepburn. One morning he rolled in after a night of carousing and Hepburn ripped into him saying, "I hear you've been dead drunk in every gutter in town, and that has to stop." Nolte responded, "I can't stop. I've got a few more gutters to go." (According to one of Nolte's friends, the drinking stopped when he came home drunk one night and scared his son. Ironically, friends said his going on the wagon was the beginning of the end of his marriage.)
Meanwhile, big-time directors were lining up to work with Nolte. Paul Mazursky (_Down and Out in Beverly Hills_), Martin Scorsese (_New York Stories_ and Cape Fear), Sidney Lumet (_Q & A_) and Barbra Streisand, who decided, because of "the pain behind his eyes," that Nolte was her Tom Wingo for The Prince of Tides. That film earned Nolte his first and only Oscar nomination.
"Did you go to the ceremony?"
"Yeah, I went, because I didn't have the courage not to. But I have trouble with awards in general. Winning is the worst, because after you win you start thinking, 'What can I do with this?' But being nominated and not winning is almost as damaging." Moreover, leaving a shoot to participate in the Academy Awards was "like interrupting sex."
The '90s also saw Nolte playing an Italian father in search of a miracle cure for his son (_Lorenzo's Oil_), a Bobby Knight-type of basketball coach (_Blue Chips_) and our third president (_Jefferson in Paris_). He sang in James L. Brooks's I'll Do Anything, but Brooks later cut all the music. He played a purported Nazi sympathizer in Mother Night and welcomed Julie Christie back to the screen in Afterglow. He's made so many films, he can't remember when he filmed what. Now he's preparing to do another Peter Gent book, The Last Magic Summer, which is all about the father-son relationship that Nolte continues to wrestle with. "I think kids miss their fathers. Let's face it, if you're a studio executive out there making $2 million a year, you're not going to have time for a family. You're not going to have time to help your son make the transition from boyhood to manhood. Athletics used to help with that, but now there's too much money in sports. I guess a bar mitzvah is a kind of transition ceremony." There's too much money in that, too.
Since I am a journalist I have to ask Nolte about his habit of lying to the press. One notorious whopper he told Bryant Gumbel (and others-- it was printed in GQ) was that he had had a testicle tuck because his scrotum was sagging and he kept sitting on his balls. He told another interviewer that his first wife had been a trapeze artist, which was news to her. "He's nuttier than a fruitcake," said Nolte's mother.
"So, are your testicles where they've always been?"
Nolte smiles.
"Why all the phony stories?"
"When it comes to the written word, there's a filtration process. What I say goes through the writer and what the writer writes goes through editors so that what eventually is printed is not from my own mind. And there's a kind of shame when you read what's written about you. You're embarrassed by it. To avoid that feeling, I decided to tell stories that weren't true. Then I wouldn't have to go through the embarrassment of being misunderstood. Instead of dwelling on my divorces, the press printed that my wife was a trapeze artist. It protected me. I also realized that nobody who's interviewed tells the fucking truth. Nobody's showing you who they really are. It's all a facade. Look at Larry King. On TV he looks as solid as a rock. In fact, the guy's had seven marriages. Life has an illusionary quality that doesn't allow us to penetrate the truth. I don't know how I became who I am."
"So why do interviews?"
"Because I feel an obligation to make a connection with the public to say that Affliction and The Thin Red Line are pieces of material that I value--take a look at them."
"Do you ever pop Who'll Stop the Rain into your VCR?"
"Yeah. I feel just as proud of that film as I did when I made it. The trouble is you can't chase this thing, this kind of epiphany If you chase it, the further away it gets."
I suspect there will never be another career like Nolte's because the souped-up hype machine has made it too tough to nurture one's talent out of the glare of Entertainment Tonight. On the other hand, for all of Nolte's purity of motive, his choices are, in a way, as selfish as, say, Redford's are safe. Nolte is in it to test himself, stretch himself, learn, explore. If we want to go along for the ride we pay our $8. If we have trouble with the story or Nolte's acting or his accent (as did many who saw Lorenzo's Oil) that's our problem.
Regarding the accent, Nolte gets huffy. "If you put on a tape of the character I was playing and then listen to me, you can't tell the difference. The criticism's idiotic"
There are, of course, the Nolte films in which, like Streisand, you feel the pain behind the eyes and you watch this tortured soul rise or fall and you get the kind of big-screen jolt that no other actor can provide. That's when you realize you're watching someone special.
"If you died tomorrow, what regret would you have?"
"Not loving as well as I could."
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Jeffrey Lantos interviewed Carla Gugino for the August 98 issue of Movieline.