Marlon Brando: The Superiority of Imagination

"There can be no good work that is twinned with the puny lineaments of the actor playing a part. You must go higher."

This fucking argument about acting will go on forever, I think, because no one really knows who or what is good--or when, for that matter: We all lose our way from time to time. There is no one way to approach a part, and every part has presented to me a new set of challenges and a requirement for an upgrade in the tools I had at hand. But I do know that the foundation for anything I've ever done that is any good has found itself in my imagination, in whatever ability I had to imagine how a person, non-existent but for ink and paper and hope, would react and respond to situations created for him. My own personal history or inventory was of no value to me at all, and this is where I think we have to deal with the differences between Stella [Adler], who was my true teacher, my true guide, and [Lee] Strasberg, who had many acolytes, but who taught me absolutely nothing about acting or life or theatre.

Here were the approaches as I saw them: Lee cuddled around him some fervent students, faces uplifted, hungry birds, mouths agape, and threw to them pre-digested morsels of anecdote and history and hyperbole, and then urged them to utilize--to exploit--their personal lives and fears and struggles to become actors. There was encouragement to open wounds, scratch scabs, pour into the classics what had been done to you a year or two ago in a cold-water flat by a man with fat fingers. You know? Abuse was the gold standard of a Strasberg acolyte. Think of the crushed puppy beneath the wheels of the car. Remember your father or your brother coming into your room late at night to have his way with you. Remember the kids who picked on you at school. Cry and moan for your damaged little soul and pour it into the work. I think this worked for some of the plays that emerged from the Studio, but it is not a foundation upon which you can build a career, a life, work of any meaning. It really was a form of self-debasement and self-aggrandizement masquerading as art and truth. It is always about us watching the actor, the person, struggling toward something, and we are expected to honor the effort. The effort should be invisible, a silent scaffolding on which you build your character, but applause and awards await the actor who is seen reaching and sweating and essentially being himself. I despise this sort of acting, and it flowed from the Studio daily during the time I was working.

Stella taught me that the imagination was the gold standard. Whatever gifts might have been bestowed upon those who become good actors, one of the greatest was imagination: that childlike ability to ask 'What if?' and take it from there. Study, yes. Learn everything about Elizabethan England or the Civil War or the Depression--whatever period you find yourself searching--but what has happened to you, this single entity in the vast world--will not lead you very far. You have to imagine, and awaiting the guillotine or the electric chair will not benefit much from the humiliation you felt when you didn't win the science fair in third grade, or when that cute girl didn't return your affections.

Look, the religions of the world, the philosophies, the great theories of man, were invented when we looked around us and realized that there was a great deal of raw material--and I emphasize the rawness--but there must be more, there had to be more of which we were capable, and more that we were not able or ready to apprehend and admire because of our limitations. Our eyes can only see what our brains and hearts direct us toward, and this stems from imagination, from the innate curiosity we have about things, about other people. It is not inside of us. There is not enough within us to fulfill the great roles, the great responsibilities. Let us take our curiosity and will and make something great, and when we join our curiosity, our imagination, with those of others, you really have latched on to a super power, an incredible source of good.

There is still too much emphasis on self-identity in art, and it has lessened the work, whatever it might be. I think we know too much about artists today, and it cheapens our experience with what they produce. I mean, I read interviews, and there is the actor describing precisely how he came to understand his character, upon whom he based the gestures and the voice, and I'm suddenly cold toward what he's done, because it's small, it's puny and self-contained and fueled only by what his life could bring to it. It's not enough. There is never a knowing too much about anyone or anything, and you have to get out of the way of what you've learned. Our biology dictates how our character will look and sound to a large degree: There is only so much you can do through makeup or a dialect. The audience is stuck with you, skin and bones and eyes and digits. What you provide that alters all of this is what you've imagined a person might do or become. It's a sort of meditation on all that people might be capable of doing, and it takes a lot of study and what Stella called self-abnegation--the removal of self from the process. Provide ears and a heart and a brain. Mix. Then see what happens.

There can be no good work that is twinned with the puny lineaments of the actor playing a part. You must go higher.

Interview with Marlon Brando

Conducted by James Grissom

By Telephone

1991

©2020 James Grissom