Your role in Lovely, Still is such a tricky one in some ways, because he seems like such a placid character initially, and then there's a shift an hour in that really forces you to reevaluate him.
That's what attracted me to it. The interesting thing about both my character and Ellen's is that if you see it a second time, you see a different film. It's not unlike The Sixth Sense, in that you'll see things and hear things that you missed. The trick, really, is not to give any of that away, and Ellen and I were basically acting on two levels at once.
How do you do that without it seeming artificial?
In film, there are always things that could conceivably create artificiality, in any performance. Dialogue is what a character's willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren't willing to share is what I do for a living. You know, people don't walk into a cocktail party and say, "Hello everybody. I'm terribly embarrassed, and I don't know anyone in the room." They do everything they can to conquer the embarrassment that is going on.
People do not necessarily reveal what is going on -- only bad actors do. Bad actors try to cry, and good actors try not to. Bad actors try to laugh, and good actors try not to. Only bad actors play drunk -- good actors play drunks playing sober! They don't want everyone in the room to know they're drunk, and if you've ever seen a drunk pick up a glass to his mouth at a bar, it's the most studied, controlled thing you'd ever see, as opposed to the sloppy kinds of drunks you see played everywhere. There's a real amount of bad acting around that is considered good acting, and I see at the Actor's Studio every week stuff that far excels what I see on Broadway or television or film.
You've had a career that spanned many changes in acting style. Do you think there's a sort of acting that's preferred by Hollywood now that's untruthful?
I'm not talking about style, because style is style. Truth affects an audience, and when there's a lie, that's what I'm talking about -- something is not organically correct in the context of what you're seeing. I'm very, very aware of the changes that have occurred over my career in theater, television, and film. If you take Ed Wood, for instance, that's Bela Lugosi, but it's also a Tim Burton movie made fifteen years ago. I couldn't play Bela Lugosi as a kitchen-sink character -- it needed a certain theatricality. It was Lugosi in the sense that I told Tim Burton, "If five minutes in, the audience says, 'Landau's doing a good job,' we don't have a movie. They've got to forget it's me and think that it's Bela Lugosi." By the same token, it's Bela Lugosi theatricalized, extended, larger than he was. So it's not about style, it's about performance succeeding so that the audience is affected in the way you want them to be affected.
Crimes and Misdemeanors, I told Woody before we started, "If you see anything theatrical, stop me." Because we had that conversation, he never had to. I wanted that character to be every man, I wanted the audience to feel that there was not an actor playing the role. Woody invited me to dailies, but I didn't go, because I didn't want to see it from the outside. I can see a comedy that's released right now and laugh if it's funny, and if the audience laughs, it's accomplishing what it set out to do -- although there's a lot of gar-baaage out there, pardon my French. Some stuff would only make a vampire laugh.
I just read an interview in the LA Times where you said you haven't really received direction in twenty years. Is that because you do so much preparation ahead of time?
Yes. I think, "Why does this author want this character in this?" and then I choose things and I do them. I figure, if the director doesn't like it, he'll stop me and tell me what to do -- and they don't stop me! [Laughs] I mean literally, Hitchcock never said "boo" to me. In fact, I felt left out, because he'd whisper something to Cary Grant, he'd say something to Eva Marie Saint or James Mason, and then he'd pass me by. So I went up to him and said, "Is there anything you want to tell me?" And he said, "Martin, I only tell you if I don't like what you're doing."
I chose to play that character as a gay character, and it wasn't written that way -- it was written as a henchman. Because he wanted to get rid of Eva Marie Saint with such a vengeance, I thought it would be much more interesting [to play him as gay]. It was the fifties, and I'm not gay, and to make a choice like that, people said, "Are you crazy? People will think you're gay!" And I said, "If they think I'm gay, that's fine with me, because I'm not gay and this is not the last thing I'm going to do." It was the right choice for the character, and it brought some mystery and intelligence to a character that was really just sort of a grunter, as written. I've always thought, "How can this be more interesting and how can I embrace what the writer wants to the best of my ability without calling attention to myself in a way that is destructive to the piece itself?"
Like Hitchcock, I've always heard that Woody Allen isn't much for giving direction to actors, either.
Not at all. He wants to talk about the Rangers or the New York Jets -- he doesn't want to talk about acting at all. No! Jon Lovitz came back from working with him and said, "How the heck did you do it? I didn't have nearly as big a part as you did, and he never said a word to me about the role!" I said, "Well, he never said a word to me about the role." I know that if he doesn't like what you're doing, he fires you. [Landau tells a long, off-the-record story about several famous actors who had been let go from an early Woody Allen film.]
Did you know that he was capable of that before you started working with him?
Oh, I did, because [redacted] was fired by him, and I did a movie with her! So I said, "I'm gonna come in with all my guns loaded and do what I do." He liked it, fortunately -- otherwise, I would have gotten the pink slip. His whole attitude is basically that he's hiring you to do what you do, and that's that. He doesn't really know how to talk to an actor. He'd only confuse one! He kept saying that my half of the movie was working and his wasn't, because he kept reshooting everything on his half of the movie and hardly anything on my half. Actually, again, Jerry Orbach was not initially cast as my brother. I worked for three days with another actor -- Jeff Bridges was his first choice, but he was unavailable at the time -- so this other actor, who's a great actor, played my brother for three days. We did all the stuff in the car about the murder, and Woody fired him and brought in Jerry Orbach and I reshot all of it.
That's interesting. You think of him as such a particular, specific director, but he does have those stories -- like how Annie Hall was a completely different movie before he started editing it, and not really even a comedy.
And he doesn't want to talk about it. If you go to ask him about anything, he's evasive. He just wants to go home early and watch a ball game! [Laughs] I used to beg him for another take! The scene on the telephone where my brother tells me the deed is done, I rehearsed it once, shot it once and went into the bathroom spontaneously to wash my face because I felt dirty after the phone call, and then he lit the bathroom and we did it once more. I said, "Let's go again, I'm just warming up," and he said, "No, no, no." I said, "What do you mean, 'No, no, no'? Give me another one, Woody!" He said, "No. Both of those are beyond my expectations. If you do a third one, I'll have a nervous breakdown!"