by Carole Zucker.
From the book: Figures of light; Actors and directors illuminate the art of film acting.
Published 1995.

    Brad Dourif has made a career out of investigating the shadowy, unhealthy side of the human psyche. As an actor, he has a singular presence: high-strung, darkly passionate, and unabashedly eccentric, with an underlying quality of suppressed rage. He has parlayed these attributes into an astonishing gallery of over-the-edge characters, beginning with his first film role as the stuttering mental patient Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). For his first foray into film, Dourif garnered an Academy Award nomination, a British Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award, all for Best Supporting Actor.

Dourif was born in Huntington, West Virginia, in 1950 and attended Marshall University. A small inheritance from his art-collector grandfather enabled Dourif to go to New York, where he joined the Circle Repertory Theater. Dourif built sets and studied acting with the company’s director, Marshall Mason, and took professional classes with Sanford Meisner. In 1973, Dourif performed the title role in When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?, where he was discovered by the director of Cuckoo’s Nest, Milos Forman. He has continued to work in film, appearing in The Eyes Of Laura Mars (1978), Wise Blood (1979), Heaven’s Gate (1980), Ragtime (1981, reuniting him with director Forman), Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Fatal Beauty (1987), Child’s Play (1987), Mississippi Burning (1988), Grim Prairie Tales, The Exorcist III (1990), Common Bonds (for which he was nominated for a Canadian Genie Award as Best Actor), Graveyard Shift (1990), Scream of Stone, Jungle Fever (1991), Amos and Andrew (1993), The Color of Night (1994), and Murder in the First (1994).

Dourif has extensive credits in television as well. One of his first featured roles was the lead in Sergeant Matlovich vs. The U.S Air Force, in 1978, a TV movie about a homosexual serviceman’s struggle to stay in uniform. Dourif’s other TV movies are Studs Lonigan (1979), Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980), Rage of Angels (1986), Vengeance: The Story of Tony Cimo (1986), Terror on Highway 91 (1989), Wild Palms (1993), and Class of ’61 1994). Dourif has appeared on episodic television in Tales of the Unexpected, The Hitchhiker, Moonlighting and The X Files. In a world much given over to exploring the underbelly of life, Dourif finds himself a busy actor.

I interviewed Brad Dourif in his Beverly Hills apartment, which he shares with his wife and manager, Joni, and their two children, Fiona and Kristina. We spoke in January 1992.

CZ: How did you first get involved in acting?

BD: Well, my mother was an actress. She married my father and moved to West Virginia where my grandfather had built a factory, and that was the end of her career. When I was young she used to read to us all - she read Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and King Arthur, and a bunch of really good books. She would always become all the characters; I just remember everything was very alive. I really felt I was wherever she said I was; she was very talented. She was in a play, and I went to a rehearsal and I watched her rehearse - she was doing Anastasia. She was incredible, and it just made me want to learn how to act.

CZ: How old were you then?

BD: Thirteen, when I really caught the bug. I think I still wanted to draw and paint; I did a lot of that. I did a lot of different things when I was a teenager, and the arts were just my way of surviving that horrible period that everybody somehow has to get through, and that’s how I did it.

CZ: Did you pursue acting at Marshall University?

BD: Yes, but I was never much of a student. I got a lucky draft number, there was no way I was going to be drafted, so I left school and went to New York.

CZ: And you went to New York with the idea of becoming an actor?

BD: Oh, yeah, there was no doubt at that point that I was going to become an actor. I just walked right into the Circle Repertory Theater [in 1969]; I knew how to do technical work because I’d done a lot of summer stock up to that point. So I just worked and worked and worked, and slowly I watched, and studied, and started acting.

CZ: At what point did you go to The Neighborhood Playhouse?

BD: I was never at the Neighborhood Playhouse per se, I studied with Sandy Meisner in what he called his professional classes, which were for working actors. But he would not allow me to work. Lanford Wilson wrote a part for me in Hot L Baltimore, and Sandy would not let me do it.

CZ: Because he didn’t want you to act and learn to act at the same time?

BD: He felt that I had bad habits, and he wanted to break them first. But by the end of the year I was so hot to act, I did the first production of When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? [1973], when I wasn’t supposed to be acting, I got rave reviews, and he read them. I thought he was going to throw me out of class, because he had said he was going to, but he just said, “So….you’re in a play.” I said “Yeah.” He said, “Who told you you could be in a play?” I said “Me.” He said “OK.”

CZ: Did he ever come to see you in Red Ryder?

BD: No, he never saw me.

CZ: Can we talk about him as a teacher?

BD: Very clear, very simple in what he was out to do. He was a teacher who really understood that you had to get it, and that he really didn’t have much to do with that. He was not afraid to allow things to be boring for a long time. He allowed people to struggle, and, more than any teacher I’ve ever seen, he really, really was not trying to make the class interesting. I think that was his great power.
If you failed, or if it wasn’t working, or it wasn’t going to work for a long time, he let you just sit there and struggle. That’s the way people learn, by their own mistakes. He just allowed people to fight their way through things.
All the other acting coaches that I worked with rescued their students. If something wasn’t going well, they’d stop it. And so the only things that would happen were things that went well. They would fix things, but that’s really directing, or workshopping; that’s where people learn by fixing things. That’s not what acting class is.
What acting class is - particularly with Sandy’s technique - is to teach you a fundamental skill of survival. What do you do when you have egg all over your face and it’s really not working? And understanding that you have to be willing to have egg on your face. And that a lot of times, it isn’t working, and it doesn’t always feel right, and it’s not always exciting, and it’s not always fun, and sometimes it’s a struggle. Yet you go in and you look at rushes, and when you had egg on your face and you were struggling and it seemed like a crock, it’s really good work. That’s because I was trained by someone who made me go through that. So no matter what I did, if it wasn’t working, I always fought well. That’s what an acting class teach you to do. And that’s why he was such a strong teacher and why his people tend to work well.
CZ: You taught directing in the film program as Columbia University from 1981 to 1986. What were some of the main things you taught your students?

BD: First of all, a director needs to watch where people’s energy is. Wherever anybody’s energy is is where their life is, and it’s probably going to be the opposite of what they would like you to think it is. So always: Don’t listen, don’t be deceived, it’s not what people say, it’s what they do. What you’re working on is your power of observation, your ability to see what’s really going on in a person, in their behavior. So we talked about behavior, which was something Sandy Meisner didn’t teach, and something I had to add.
I got directors involved in the process of acting themselves, getting them to understand on a gut level what acting is. It is pointless to teach a director to remove himself before he’s been there - this is the big mistake that people always make. Because no one ever wants to go into the world where they have to self-disclose, and feel pain, and be uncomfortable, and be humiliated, and feel embarrassed. No director can really go into that world until they’ve done it, and I’ve noticed that every single director that I’ve worked with has done some acting.
Also a director needs to know if an actor’s being phony or not. Are you doing it, or are you pretending to do it? What’s the difference between showing somebody something - which is indicating - and really doing it? That’s what really bad acting is, just indicating. There’s no unconscious involvement at that point.
CZ: How did you teach your class - in a practical way- to recognize indicating?

BD: You know how I did it? I encouraged my students to watch soap opera. I said, “I want you to watch your favorite performance on film, and then watch a soap opera, and try to come to terms with what the differences are.” Because soap operas are readings. They’re doing it really well, they’re good at it, but they’re indicating. Because they don’t even know what they’re going to say, you know? It’s not that there aren’t some wonderful actors that are doing soaps…

CZ: Did you feel there was any difference between dealing with students who were interested in going into filmmaking and students who wanted to be theater directors?

BD: Well, in general, theater directors tend to be more interested in the process. They can have terrible egos because they’re really not that important in the minds of the audience, unless they become like Peter Brook, where they’re writing plays, and that’s a whole different kettle of fish. What a theater director really does is disappear. The play is the thing in the theater. But a film director is the storyteller, he’s the poet. The camera is the narrator in a film. Film scripts are not literature, plays are.

CZ: You moved from theater to film when Milos Forman saw you in Red Ryder and cast you in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest [1975]. How did you prepare for that part, and how did Forman work with the actors? There’s a strong sense of ensemble in that film.

BD: Ensemble is part work and about 75 percent magic. If you have a great cast, as long as they don’t have enormous egos - the concern isn’t who has the biggest trailer, or something like that- you’re really going to have a great ensemble. You could have an ensemble with a style; Circle Rep had a style, and that was based on a particular way of working. There was an artistic director there who had strong opinions about what kind of acting he liked, and that’s what kind of acting everybody did. But that’s not what an ensemble is. An ensemble is a group of people who really somehow, in some kind of a magical way, meld together and really work off each other well. It’s the most positive kind of competition there is: the better he gets, the better I get, the better I get, the better he gets, and so forth and so on. When people really pay attention to each other, the stakes somehow are raised.

CZ: Did you have that sense when you were working on Cuckoo’s Nest?

BD: Oh, absolutely. You walked on the set the first day, and after we got our haircuts and so forth, and it was very clear that everybody was dead on the money; it was there.

CZ: How did Forman rehearse people for that?

BD: We rehearsed for two weeks, in a standard way. We sat around where we were supposed to sit and said our lines.

CZ: Did he talk with the group about their characters and their relationships, or did he talk with people individually?

BD: He talked individually with people. He really believed in people exploring.

CZ: What was the transition like for you, from theater to film, in terms of dealing with the camera?

BD: Oh, [Jack] Nicholson was the biggest help there. Here’s somebody who had directed before, and edited before, and who liked the camera, and was very interested in the whole process, and was very willing to teach it. Nicholson does not defend himself at all from the camera, as an actor; he really uses the camera. He talked about why James Dean was such a good film actor - he called him “The Great Peeper” - because he was always angular, and coming toward the camera. Playing with the camera made him visually very exiting to watch.

CZ: Do you ever work on a backstory for your character? In Wise Blood [1979] - your first leading role in a film - there doesn’t seem to be much information in the script about your character, Hazel Motes. How did you develop your characterization?

BD: Actually, there’s quite a bit about Hazel Motes. I saw that as very rich in terms of suggestions. It isn’t what you know that’s important, it’s how turned on you are about what you don’t know that’s important. If you’re going to make a backstory, if you make a solid, good-sounding, investigative-reporting type of story, it’s a useless piece of garbage. I mean, I don’t know what my backstory means in my life; it’s a total mystery to me. All the power that exists in things that are basically pretty unresolved and things I can’t resolve. That’s what you look for in a backstory; you try to make inferences, you pick what it is that’s important, what your job is, what you need to bring to the scene, and so forth. You say, “I need something here,” and so you write that down, you make a note, “I need something for….,” then you find something. You find something real or you make something up, but it’s got to turn you on. That’s the way I do it, but I don’t have to have a backstory. I talked a lot about that when I was teaching directing, that to get into the circumstances, the best thing to do is to stir the actor up - not to give him definite and clear ideas about it.

CZ: In Wise Blood, I thought that the character was unusual because he starts out very tightly wound. It’s not a dramatic arc like you might have in a more classical narrative, where the beginning is slower; there’s a lot of exposition, and you build to a crescendo. He starts out very angry, and he gets angrier; he’s always on that level of real intensity throughout the film.

BD: Well, the story does not work unless he is, because that’s the kind of person he is: too much. That’s why we believe that he really is going for something bigger than life - which God is, he’s the only thing that’s bigger than life. So, structurally, you can’t do the story without it; it doesn’t make sense. It’s supposed to be a comedy, and the humor is supposed to come out of that, that’s the idea.

CZ: Did you find that it worked?

BD: No, I don’t think that part worked. I think it’s an interesting film to look at, because John [Huston] shot it in such an interesting way, but I don’t think it worked.

CZ: Some of the scenes you have in that film I assume were done with real local people, rather than actors. What was that experience like?

BD: People who’ve never worked before often do quite well. You need to pay attention to what you’re doing. You need to move the scene, you’re responsible for the rhythm of the scene - because they don’t know anything about that, and they don’t have a feeling for it. So you need to take responsibility, and then do what you’re doing. And they get it, or they don’t. You try to be there for them, talk to them, get people to relax; you’re doing a lot more taking care.

CZ: And how was it to work with Huston?

BD: It was very good, John is not real interested….he doesn’t appear to be interested.

CZ: In the actor?

BD: Mm-hmm

CZ: You’ve done quite a bit of work that would be described as non-naturalistic. Wise Blood is an example, and Exorcist III [1990] would certainly be an example. Since you don’t have the life experience of being one of the devil’s minions or entering the body of a dead person, how do you work yourself into that emotional state?

BD: Yeah, but I do have an incredibly violent heart, and in that sense, I certainly am one of the devil’s minions aren’t I? You know, the great thing about being a villain, particularly in this culture, is that we love our villains, we’re really fascinated by evil. So, I mean, if you find all the evil inside you and you’re willing to express it, you can survive quite well in this business.

CZ: In Exorcist III, you’ve got very long speeches, with language that isn’t particularly naturalistic. Do you have some special way of dealing with that?

BD: Oh, you have to become very used to the language. If you know the dialogue really well, you can forget about it. And then when it comes up, it comes up in its own way, full of all your stuff. You conjure images and feelings while you’re working on it, and things from your life. So, if you’re lucky, when you’re shooting, it’s alive.

CZ: They slowed down your voice, right?

BD: Well, yes, they doctored it. And my voice sounded very different than my voice normally sounds anyway, because when I was doing it, I screamed. So part of it is [the doctoring], and part of it isn’t. My high registers were shot, and I had, suddenly, these low sounds. Have you ever screamed? Your voice really sounds strange. So it was kind of neat, I liked the way it sounded.

CZ: You’ve done “A” movies, and you’ve also worked on a lot of independent features. What are the major differences?

BD: Well, when I’m working well, there’s no difference at all, because I don’t care. Except, you know, the place you go to after and in between is nicer, a lot of times. Independents can be the best experience of them all, because you know the crew better, you know the cinematographer better, everybody’s a lot less pretentious.

CZ: Do you have more time for rehearsal or less?

BD: You have less time, because independents don’t have any money, so they shoot very fast. It used to be different, independents used to have nice, long shooting schedules. It was very common; 13 or 14 weeks was a very common shooting schedule. Now 6 weeks is pretty average, and that’s very fast to make a movie.

CZ: You’ve been working recently with a lot of European directors like Werner Herzog [Scream of Stone, 1990] and Hanif Kureishi [London Kills Me, 1992]. Do you feel there’s any difference working in Europe and working in the States?

BD: There is a fundamental thing that we do differently than Europeans do. We do melodrama, and we do it better than anyone in the world does it. No one has ever been able to do melodrama like Americans do it. We can make you forget you’re watching a film. Europeans never do that, they’re not applauded for it, they don’t even believe in it. The European director really sits besides you in the theater, and he touches you, and talks to you, and shows you what he’s doing. The great European actors all have this wonderful, natural style, but they don’t bring power to their work, they don’t raise stakes to this life-and-death extent that American actors do. When an American actor cuts loose, there’s a gut there, and real passion. European actors dance; they don’t have that passion. None of them do, really.

CZ: You’ve been in several of David Lynch’s films [Dune, 1985; Blue Velvet, 1986]; do you consider his work melodrama?

BD: No. David Lynch laughs at melodrama. David Lynch laughs at everything. This man has the sickest sense of humor of anyone walking the face of this earth.

CZ: You once called him the purest, most original director that you had ever worked with. Can you talk about that?

BD: Well, who ever made a TV series like Twin Peaks? No one had ever seen anything like that on television before. He took this small town, which is what we’re all trying to preserve, this whole small-town morality, and so forth, and showed it, and did a TV series about a cesspool lying underneath that. It’s sick, and everybody’s dirty inside, really. And he made a comedy out of it. His world is so subjective. It’s really not American; we’re extroverted, and we don’t spend very much time in the inner realms. But he’s one of the few real, pure American directors who really found himself.

CZ: Would you have a lot of input about your characters in Lynch’s films?

BD: Yeah, we got together, but David knows what he likes and what he doesn’t, and you don’t want to get in his way either. So I had my input, but I was more than delighted to hear his.

CZ: What would you consider the most favorable circumstances for making a film? What would that mean for you?

BD: I guess working on a small film with a group of people who really liked what they were doing. Playing something that I could do really well. Going to someplace where I’ve never gone before.

CZ: You’ve done a lot of television work, from series TV, to movies-of-the-week, to mini-series. I’d like you to talk about the differences you’ve found in working in film and working in TV.

BD: There’s a lot of differences. First of all, the expectations. Television is, by definition, safe. Now, it’s becoming not safe, so film is becoming much safer. We’re in a strange period.

When you’re doing television, it’s much more of a corporation, even, than film, which is badly overcorporatized. What that means is that when you’re working in a TV show, people act like they’re not really the people who are making the decisions: “It’s not up to me.” The director really doesn’t have power, and you can feel it. He’s just kind of doing a job, and everybody’s just kind of doing a job; the people who really seem to care the most on television are the actors. They’re the only people who seem to be fighting.

CZ: Is there a difference in the time frames?

BD: Well, television’s fast. But, like I say, a lot of independent films are very fast.

CZ: So that doesn’t bother you?

BD: Sometimes it’s a blessing. You don’t think about what you’re doing. There’s not enough time to spend on the shot, so you take care of it, you shoot it, and it’s over with. You get a nice rhythm sometimes, working that way. A lot of pressure, but you get a nice rhythm.

CZ: What do you feel is your best work in TV?

BD: I don’t know. I don’t think anything I’ve ever done is good in TV, really.

CZ: You have a very high level of dissatisfaction, don’t you?

BD: Have you ever heard yourself on tape?

CZ: Yeah.

BD: How does that sound to you?