Then there’s improvisation. In Sandro’s new book, he also includes a flash drive that contains short films you have made with him. Your first film together, Butterflies, has no dialogue. Just a premise.
That’s really all you need when you’re an actor. Things occur to you. You have flashes of things you’ve seen, of things you’ve lived, of things you’ve read, of things you’ve heard, of things you witnessed, and then they just all come out.
Do you ever scare yourself, in a situation like that? I don’t know if Martin Sheen scared himself when shooting the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, but he definitely scared the director and the crew.
No, I don’t scare myself. I think people are basically capable of almost anything, really, including many terrible, regrettably awful things. And I think I’ve always had to give myself the permission to say, Well, I think this is like that. I don’t necessarily want to be that, and I don’t necessarily think it’s my fault that I think that is like this. I have to be free to use whatever experience I have and observatory powers or inclinations or inklings to be able to say, This person behaves this way in this situation. If it’s a play, you’re maybe only saying this person behaves this way in this situation tonight. Tomorrow night might be different. The matinee, maybe, was already different earlier that day. Closing night’s certainly gonna be different than opening night, because you continually learn and revisit and erase and add and subtract and refine and distill and etcetera. You know that’s what we do. I don’t consider myself a factor at all, except as a thing the observations live in.
A conduit to the story. What would be examples of that?
In the last six months, for instance, I sang an opera duet with Cecilia Bartoli, and I made some disco songs with Nile Rodgers in a studio. The craziness of those two things, the absurdity, the impossibility. The absolute ridiculousness of me getting some songs one morning, listening to them once while taking an Uber down to a recording studio in Boston, and then starting to record music written by The-Dream and produced by Nile Rodgers is insane beyond recording studio. “What do you want me to do?” Okay, record. “I don’t know that I can sing any of these. I didn’t really have enough time to do this. But let’s start recording.”
So fear doesn’t seem to get in the way too often in your life.
No, it doesn’t. At least in that aspect of my life, because, what are you fearing? You’re fearing failure. But failure is my constant companion. Failure is my best friend.
What were your thoughts as you prepared to recreate the classic Annie Leibovitz photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono? Several hours after that session, which was made on assignment for Rolling Stone, John was fatally shot in front of his apartment. I know for Sandro it was one of the most emotional pictures in your collaboration because he knew the fate that awaited John.
