There won’t be a lot of talking; that is a given, but his taciturnity still comes as a surprise. “I might,” he says, setting the terms of his availability with great economy, his blue eyes scanning the room with that elusive shuttered quality you see in his films.
Think about it. Buck Barrow, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, Bill Daggett, even Avery Tolar, all men tight as safes, ulcers in the making. This much is true-that bottled-up quality girding all of Gene Hackman’s performances springs from a deep personal reticence, a Midwestern modesty, a loathing of exposure. Talking to the actor, even over lunch in his trailer here in the Arizona desert, even at what is arguably the apex of his career, is like robbing a bank. Whatever goods to be gotten will be under duress and passed through a very small window.
“Well, only because I don’t like talking about myself,” he says, relenting for a second or maybe just pausing to swallow some iced tea, pensive in the winter light pooling on the little Formica table, on his restless, ruddy hands. “I just-I don’t know-I guess I’m a private person. For me, acting is a kind of private thing, and I just don’t like sharing it.”
For those who know him, this is nothing new. Hackman, they’ll tell you, is one of the champion loners, a kid from east-central Illinois who left home when barely 16 and is still hellbent on not keeping in touch. Acting is his escape and his solace, his craft, as he likes to think of it-happiest when he has some acting problem to resolve, wary when it is examined too closely.
“When I’m acting, when I’m actually doing it, I think it’s great, and I like it,” he says. “But to watch it or any of the other parts of the business is so alien to me; I don’t get it.”
He grips the glass between his hands, staring into its blue plastic depths, not so much confessional as unknowable even to himself.
“There is part of you emotionally that says, `I don’t know why they bother to ask me to work.’ The intellectual part says, `Well, you have a body of work, and you’ve done this, that and the other, so they’ll ask you to work again.’ But when I see my films every once in a while, I’ll say to my son, `I don’t understand it, I don’t understand why I’m doing this and why they keep asking me.’ “
Up until he made “The French Connection” in 1971, Gene Hackman worried, the way a lot of actors do, that he would never work again. This even though he was 40 years old, had starred on Broadway, made 13 films and been twice nominated as best supporting actor (“Bonnie and Clyde” and “I Never Sang for My Father”). But it wasn’t until he won an Oscar for playing the raging detective “Popeye” Doyle that Hackman crossed that line in his own mind. He was finally a star. “Once I got through `French Connection,’ I felt pretty good about what I was doing.”
Hackman is now 63, with nearly as many films to his credit and a second Oscar (for “Unforgiven,” last year), old enough and in demand enough to contemplate retirement rather than unemployment. He is known for working a lot, and maybe too much. “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Lucky Lady,” “March or Die”-these he made just for the money, he has said. Sometimes he regrets that, “but only for a minute or two, because it really doesn’t mean that much.” Mostly, he says, he doesn’t want to become “one of those guys who hang around just out of ego because they can’t stop.”
Not that that seems remotely likely. If his name no longer sells tickets on its own, as any studio head will attest, you hear him described in hushed reverential tones as one of the greatest American actors, a modern-day Spencer Tracy, another Midwesterner who brought his unvarnished plainspokenness to the big screen. Hackman remains that Hollywood conundrum, an actor more celebrated by his peers than by the public.
“Everybody I know wants to work with Gene,” says Mike Medavoy, former head of Tri-Star Pictures and Orion Films, which produced more than half a dozen of Hackman’s films. “If Gene’s in a movie, you know its quality; he puts his stamp on a film.”
Of all the alumni hailing from Danville-an oddly impressive roster that includes Dick and Jerry Van Dyke, Bobby Short and Donald O’Connor-Hackman is without a doubt the most respected. Warren Beatty, who hired him in 1966 to play his brother in “Bonnie and Clyde,” considers Hackman the best American actor working. So do Dustin Hoffman and Clint Eastwood. Robert Duvall has called him America’s “Everyman.” Even now, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio, two of Hackman’s co-stars on the film he is currently shooting-“The Quick and the Dead,” scheduled for a fall release-agreed to the film largely because of the chance to work with Hackman. “I don’t know when you get in the league of people like him,” DiCaprio says.
“Gene is not your run-of-the-mill actor,” adds Sydney Pollack, who directed Hackman in “The Firm” last summer. “He’s really special, and right now he’s at the top of his form, almost at a Zen-like place in his acting where he’s so comfortable with himself you don’t see the effort.”
Indeed, while many of his contemporaries have resorted to age-parodying comedies-Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in “Grumpy Old Men” and Duvall and Richard Harris in “Finding Ernest Hemingway”-Hackman presses on, armed with an ambassadorlike stateliness, playing generals, sheriffs and lawyers, regal tough guys, even though he is a Depression-era kid, a high-school drop-out from Danville. While Hackman had a less-than-happy return to Broadway in 1992 in Ariel Dorfman’s political drama, “Death and the Maiden,” his second Oscar for his performance as the coolly cruel sheriff in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” was a most public rebound after a two-year hiatus due to an attack of angina and subsequent surgery that left the actor and some-time sketch artist determined to move to Italy-to Carrara and its fabled marble quarries-and become a sculptor.
But “Unforgiven” changed things, reminded Hackman how much he likes to shoot long complicated, dialogue-rich scenes. And the Oscar brought renewed attention that was, predictably, seductive. “You’re offered a lot of things,” he says, “and it’s attractive in a way. Then you get tired, and you think, `I don’t really need to do this.’ “
He does, however. When friends tell him to cut back, be more selective like his old pal, Dustin Hoffman, Hackman rebuffs them: “Dusty doesn’t like to act as much as I do.” He can’t sleep past 5:30 a.m. anymore, so eager is he to attack some sort of artistic problem, some puzzle, or redesign yet another house, build an airplane with his 31-year-old son, Christopher, paint someone’s portrait. But mostly what Hackman wants to solve is the perennial challenge of bringing a script to life, finding those ideas, the behavior “that will convince the audience over the course of two hours that this could be a real person. That’s what interests me about acting,” he says-“playing the game.”
So he is a regular player in the current craze for westerns, turning out four in the past two years, including “Wyatt Earp” (to be released June 24) and “The Quick and the Dead,” this summer. If Hackman doesn’t think the genre suits him particularly well-“I think the best scenes are always interior ones because you have more control as an actor, and westerns by definition have to be shot outside”-it is not surprising, given his subtly shaded, emotionally dead-on performances.
When Hackman started out, an ex-Marine and fabled barroom brawler, his work was distinguished by a manic energy, a palpable unease. He was an early devotee of Marlon Brando to the point where he would cut acting class to play the bongos on the roof of the Pasadena Playhouse with Hoffman, a fellow student, “just because we knew Brando did,” Hoffman recalls. He was never mistaken for an ethnic New Yorker, not with his Midwestern Everyman face, the sandy hair and brilliant blue eyes, but his technique was Brando-esque-seamless, invisible, slightly menacing-perfect for playing jumpy instinctual men such as Buck Barrow and “Popeye” Doyle, less perfect elsewhere. He was fired from “The Graduate” because he had “so much juice and vitality,” director Mike Nichols recalls, energy that was all wrong for the burnt-out shell of a man he was supposed to portray as Mr. Robinson. Even when Hackman appeared in comedies, most vividly as the prissy Lex Luthor in the “Superman” series, his mania was filtered through an implied sense of threat.
“Gene always has an element of danger about him,” Pollack says. “You’re never completely sure of what he’s going to do, you can never get ahead of him.”
Indeed, it was in his later, less-flamboyant roles-and his two favorite performances, the paranoid intelligence agent in “The Conversation” and the eccentric ex-con in “Scarecrow”-that Hackman used his flinty unpredictability in subtle yet more-daring ways, turning it inward on himself. Some have called it honesty. “Gene always has a truthfulness about him,” Hoffman says.
Hackman has a reputation for being difficult; run-ins with directors, if not quite legendary, are well-known. His authority problem, as he still refers to it, dates to his troubled youth, his mother’s difficulties with alcohol and his father’s abandoning the family, the source of the anger that colored his early years and still fuels his acting. Despite Hackman’s aloofness, his demurrers about his personal life, there is a melancholy about him that suggests an ongoing ambivalence about his sepia-toned past, a lonely youngster caught in an unhappy household in a Depression-era town. While acting was his ticket out, it also became the de facto lightning rod for all those turbulent memories.
Even now, when Hackman says he is more relaxed than at any point in his career, he can be distant on a set.
And the terms of this interview, the first he has agreed to in nearly four years, suggest a persistent uneasiness: two lunch meetings of approximately 30 minutes each and whatever other casual conversations on the set he is prone to. That’s it. No dinner, no drinks, no rides in the limo. Not even a follow-up phone call.
Indeed, privacy is what Hackman craves, whether on a film set or at home in Santa Fe, a modest two-bedroom adobe he restored himself and which he shares with his second wife, Betsy Arawaka. He is selfish, he says, with his time. He doesn’t see many people, mostly just his grown children-a son and two younger daughters-and he likes enclosed spaces, reading for six hours straight in his living room, hunkered down in a racecar or the cockpit of a airplane. “He’s not your basic extrovert,” Eastwood observes.
Mid-December on the high desert just east of Tucson, the wind can really kick up, enough to drive cast and crew on “The Quick and the Dead” to don hats and parkas and transform the set’s Main Street into a bitter-cold, snowless winter resort. Not exactly ideal conditions for the complicated series of shots director Sam Raimi wants to get this day-tricky, tilted closeups of Hackman and DiCaprio drawing their guns, shots that require a special camera and motorized dolly and what seems like endless technical adjustments.
He has already shot several frames of Hackman, outfitted in boots, topcoat, silk tie and an enormous felt hat, drawing his ebony-and-gold-handled revolver. But actor and director are unhappy with his positioning of the gun. “I’m going over to shoot a bit,” Hackman says, turning from the camera and heading across the street. “You can come if you want to.”
Thell Reed, a champion marksmen and consultant on the film, is already putting DiCaprio through a few practice rounds out beyond the corral when Hackman strides up, spurs jangling in the wind. “Hey, I want to check out Gene,” says his slender 19-year-old co-star, pushing his corn-silk-colored hair out of his eyes.
Hackman faces the distant mountains, plants his feet and squeezes off a few rounds, yanking his gun from the holster with a practiced thrust of his hips.
“When did you start quick-drawing?” DiCaprio asks, squinting up at Hackman.
“This is the first time.”
“But you did it in `Unforgiven.’ “
“No, I just drew one time. There wasn’t even anybody on the set when I did it.”
He shoots in silence for several minutes, the shots echoing across the vast plateau. It seems to matter to Hackman that he not be seen as an expert marksman, but at the same time, he is precise about his technique and more than a little competitive.
More than 20 years after making “The French Connection,” he has returned, in some measure, to the kind of violent films that first brought him prominence. In “The Quick and the Dead,” a potential fall blockbuster co-starring Sharon Stone, Hackman plays Herod, an outlaw with a penchant for killing kith and kin. It will be his most visible role since he played the violent, amoral sheriff in “Unforgiven.”
He wasn’t going to make those kinds of films anymore, had sworn off them after his heart surgery. Because of his kids’-or maybe it was his agent’s-advice, he said. He turned down the Hannibal Lecter role in “Silence of the Lambs,” and when Eastwood came calling with a script he said was anti-violence in its violence, he initially refused. “His agents didn’t want him to do it,” Eastwood says, “but I need Gene because he can make an unsympathetic character sympathetic, and I told Gene to read it again.”
For Hackman, taking a role has to do solely with the inherent acting challenges. “When I read a script and I think there is no way I can make it come alive, I don’t do it,” he says simply. He is famous for crossing off stage directions, letting his imagination go to work, finding his own ways to bring angry, inarticulate guys to life. He almost quit “The French Connection” because he couldn’t figure out how to play the rage belonging to a New York City narcotics cop. Now, on “The Quick and the Dead,” he is playing an almost abstract portrait of evil for the sheer pleasure of being able to do it.
“Each scene, I look for something that isn’t written down, some behaviorial kind of business that my character as well as the audience can relate to and make him emotionally accessible,” he says. “The more you put yourself in a corner with characters, the better chance you have to make something come alive.” Oh, yeah, and you have to be relaxed about it, he adds.
Behavior, emotional-accessible, relaxation, these are the buzzwords of a Method-trained actor. A disciple of the fabled Stanislavski technique, Hackman as a young acting student would stand on Manhattan street corners with early colleagues Hoffman and Duvall and argue technique. “We’d get into these huge fights about whose acting teacher was more right,” Hoffman recalls. “Gene was always quite stubborn about what was acting and what wasn’t.”
He was adamant because after a frustrating year trying to master the by-the-numbers approach taught at the Pasadena Playhouse, Hackman blossomed under George Morrison, a former teacher at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York, the de facto American center for Method acting.
Morrison helped Hackman discover the usual Method tools-relaxation techniques, sense memory, behavior. But his breakthrough didn’t come, Morrison says, until Hackman began to work in improvisational theater and off-Broadway comedies in the early 1960s. “That’s when he learned to use his own energy.” By the time Hackman appeared with Sandy Dennis in the 1964 Broadway comedy hit, “Any Wednesday,” he was a stage star, eliciting Walter Kerr’s famous description about his “wonderfully light-footed habit of stepping off a joke before it begins to complain.”
His transition to tough-guy roles came later in his first films, including “Lilith,” in which he met Beatty. But his real breakthrough didn’t happen until “The French Connection,” from which he tried to quit, according to Morrison, “because he was afraid of playing his own anger.” Sticking with the role, playing through his fears and subsequently winning the Oscar “was the turning point for Gene.” Hackman, he says, is now “way beyond technique.” The only classroom habit he consciously retains: “Before every shot, Gene sits in a chair and relaxes, as he has done a thousand times before.”
Or, as Hackman puts it, having finished gun practice, “I guess I better get back there and concentrate a little bit.” Back on the set, Hackman resumes his place in front of the camera. He is supposed to be squaring off with DiCaprio, a gun battle with his own son, but the younger actor is not in the shot, and Hackman, his face a mask, stares at a sea of milling crew members.
“OK, people,” Raimi calls, “let’s clear the sightlines.” Like many actors, Hackman prefers a clear field of vision when he works. “Most people think acting is having to do something overt, but that isn’t necessarily true,” he says later during a break. “I think `understandable’ is maybe the key word; if you make a character understandable, people will discern that as acting.” Making eye contact “with somebody who’s not in the picture or who isn’t thinking what you’re thinking” disrupts that mental process.
For several minutes, Raimi shoots take after take as Hackman scowls and draws, again and again. “This is unusually technical, a lot of waiting around for minuscule things to happen,” Hackman says during a break. He is clearly frustrated by the day’s hurry-up-and-wait pace.
Yet the delay seems to loosen something in him. While Raimi huddles with his crew, Hackman stands off to one side, breathing lightly, his leather boots squeaking as he shifts in the wind. He is almost conspiratorial, whispering even, as the conversation becomes, for a few moments, intimate.
“I don’t have a big emotional bank,” he says, softly. “I think it’s difficult for men; their emotions have more layers on them, so they’re harder to get to.”
It’s why he likes to keep his distance from other cast members. “A lot of times, there are real emotions going on, real anger, real love, but unless you’re supposed to be husband and wife or with some other close relationship, I think it’s better to stay alone or at arm’s length. You’re more apt to be easy with someone if they’re a friend.”
The same goes for directors, he says. Though he prefers to work with men of his own age and experience-Pollack, Eastwood and Arthur Penn, who directed him in “Bonnie and Clyde” and two other films-he says it is never wholly comfortable for him. “I’m a funny guy,” he says, chuckling softly. “I didn’t have much of a dad, so directors are always authority figures to me.” Even when they are, as Raimi is, about his own son’s age? His chuckle deepens. “I’m always a little suspicious about them. It’s sick, but . . . .”
“Gene?” Hackman is suddenly summoned back to the camera. Instinctively, he reaches up to adjust the brim of his hat. “You have to have a certain amount of ego in filmmaking because the camera will pick up a lack of energy quicker than almost anything. You have to get in front of the camera and think that it’s all yours, that it’s all about you.”
He gazes out at the crew, his face tightening, his eyes growing distant. “Once you’ve done that, it’s really hard to shift gears and be a decent person. Sometimes you just don’t bother.”
Because he is so tall and still moves with the athletic grace of his Marine days, Hackman tends to walk on ahead of others. All over the set, you can spot him striding along, either alone or with somebody dogtrotting along trying to keep up. You see a lot of his back, as now, when he leaps up the tiny aluminum steps into his trailer, some 35 minutes from being sprung for the weekend. When he emerges from the trailer bedroom a few moments later, Hackman is dressed in his own clothes, casual trousers and V-neck sweater with a logo from Gleneagles resort in Scotland, where Hackman recently played in a celebrity golf tournament. He seems embarrassed by this revelation, that even his hobbies are the source of scrutiny. But in his pastel-hued sportswear, he seems older, less able to hide behind his film persona. “I played all the normal things in high school-football, track, basketball,” he says, adding that in a lot of ways he takes after his mother’s side of the family.
He was taller than his father for one thing. And even though they shared the same name, Hackman was known back in Danville as Gene Allen to distinguish him from his father, the first Eugene Hackman, a pressman at the local paper. Hackmans had staffed the Commercial News for generations; his uncle and grandfather had been reporters, but his father didn’t carry that kind of rank.
Danville wasn’t a wealthy community by any stretch, a town of front porches, local factories and neighboring farms. But even by those modest standards, the Hackman household was a poor one. The family lived with Hackman’s maternal grandmother, shared her house that was divided into two apartments by a single door. There were fights, he remembers, between all the adults, and his father often took after him with his fists. Hackman spent a lot of time in the basement, trying to find some space for himself.
“I would make up this little cardboard room that would be all cozy and contained,” he says. “I had a little telephone system set up with a can and some string with the guy across the street.”
Saturdays, he escaped to the local movie theater, entranced by the serials and actors such as Errol Flynn and James Cagney. He identified so strongly with what he saw on screen that he was shocked to see his own face in the mirrored lobby. “I would see this kid and be so stunned,” he recalls, “because I really felt that I could do what they were doing.”
If he treasured any dream of becoming an actor then, it would be a long time in coming, years in which Hackman would join the Marines, nearly cripple himself in a motorcycle accident, bounce around on the country on the GI Bill, trying his hand at various jobs-radio announcer, TV cameraman. He even studied painting for a while in New York. Much of it now seems like a long anguished prelude to the career that would eventually channel his restlessness, his anger, into art. Anger that crystallized, when Hackman was barely a teenager, on the day his father drove by his son in the family car as he was playing down the street, gave him an odd little wave and never came back until long after Hackman himself had left home to join the Marines when he was not yet 16.
“I don’t mean to belabor that,” Hackman says now, “but it was just a very vivid memory of him.” His father had left behind a wife with a drinking problem and two sons, 13-year-old Gene and 6-week-old Richard. “Acting,” Hackman says, promised the means “of finding some way to get this thing inside me out, whatever it was, or is, if it’s art or energy or whatever. That’s all I ever thought about and to some degree still do.”
He won’t say it, but that anger has served as his artistic ballast. He was busted in the Marines for fighting, a practice that continued to dog him years later when he was getting acting jobs in New York, working part time as a mover, hauling refigerators strapped to his back up six flights of tenement stairs to support his first wife, Fay Maltese, and his baby son.
“We’d go see a movie, get some dinner, and then Gene would stand on a corner and say, `I gotta go,’ ” Hoffman recalls. “He had to get in a fight. He’d go into some bar, and the next day I’d see him like nothing had happened.”
Later, when he was a successful movie star living in a succession of big houses in Los Angeles, he took up expensive, risky hobbies-racing cars, flying airplanes. And like that kid in the basement, he would still withdraw. He took a two-year hiatus, moved to Carmel and painted in earnest after lackluster commercial receptions to “Scarecrow” and “The Conversation.” During that same period, his dad, who had moved to Los Angeles and kept in infrequent touch with his son, rode a motorcycle from Los Angeles to Carmel to see him on the set of “Zandy’s Bride,” but Hackman never once spoke to him, never came out of his trailer.
And there were worse times. The suicide of Norman Garey, his lawyer and closest personal friend. His own divorce, a long time brewing, when his youngest daughter, Leslie, graduated from high school. And, worst of all, the death of his mother in a 1972 fire, set accidentally by her own hand. She died an alcoholic in bed.
Now, Hackman will speak only about his children, the guilt he feels about having worked so much and so far from home all those years. “That was selfish and unfair,” he says. “But there is nothing I can do about that now.” About the rest of it, he is silent. The last time he was in Danville was for his uncle’s funeral two years ago. The town, Hackman says, “was prettier than I remembered it.”
“Gene’s dealt with some of the stuff from his past,” says one longtime friend. “But not all of it.”
Some of those close to him think Hackman has finally found in his career a measure of peace, not only as an actor and an artist, but as a man who has unconsciously replicated his father’s own peripatetic life. “Acting,” Morrison says, “is Gene’s way of being with others and yet still being alone.”
That may explain Hackman’s ambivalence about working now. “We’re trained as actors, and maybe that’s what we should think in terms of, that there is no retirement,” he says. “But I really think it’s time for me to stop. Films take so much out of you. . . .” Hackman lets his voice trail off. It is near the end of the last lunch conversation he has agreed to, and in his pastel-hued sportswear, less exotic. When he confesses he wants to get his hands “on a serious sailboat for an extended cruise,” it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. His wife even wants to bring the dogs. Just so long as there is no crew. He did that once, on his first boat and a trip to the Bahamas. “They were nice guys, sitting around drinking beer, having a great time,” he recalls, “but I was stuck with them.”
So he will go alone. And you can picture Hackman that way, a solitary figure on his deck, content finally, unreachable.
