Transcript
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. When you think of the acting technique known as the Method, you may think of "Raging Bull" and how Robert De Niro gained 60 pounds to play boxer Jake LaMotta in his retirement. You may think of actors who stay in character even while they're not performing. Or, as my guest Isaac Butler puts it, we tend to think of the Method as some goofy hocus pocus that actors, particularly the more self-important ones, get up to in order to do their job. Or as someone he met once put it, it's remembering the most traumatic thing that ever happened to you in order to make yourself cry. But the Method is much, much more, Butler says.
In his new book "The Method: How The 20th Century Learned To Act," he describes the history of the Method, from the series of techniques created in the early 1900s by the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, through the American adaptation created by the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio, and the actors who brought those techniques to their work on stage and screen. It's also the story of how acting was influenced by war, social change and personal and aesthetic battles. Isaac Butler also co-wrote the book "The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent Of Angels In America." He's also a theater director, teaches theater history and performance at The New School, co-hosts the Slate podcast "Working" about the creative process and is a cultural critic whose writing frequently appears in Slate.
Isaac Butler, welcome to FRESH AIR. As someone who frequently interviews actors, I really enjoyed and appreciated reading your book. Let's start with an example that you think - an example of a performance that you think embodies the Method.
ISAAC BUTLER: Thank you so much for having me, Terry. You know, when I think about the Method, I think of a performance like Al Pacino's in the first "Godfather" film in that, you know, a lot of that role is communicated non-verbally through you watching the character think. The character's often feeling emotions in a very intense way but not letting them out, but also allowing you to see that they are feeling them. You know, there's a certain amount of mystery to the character and idiosyncrasy. It feels like a real person in all of their complexity, not, like, a type or a stock role or anything like that. And, you know, Al Pacino just seems really alive in the moment and really present in that role at all times. So, to me, that's an example of the kind of performances that the Method helped usher to the fore over the course of the 20th century.
GROSS: I forget who it was, but one of the, you know, Method directors or a teacher said, you know, let someone else take the part with a lot of dialogue. You take the part where you're just, like, thinking and reacting.
BUTLER: Yeah, absolutely. That was Kazan. You know, when he was - when Elia Kazan briefly was trying to be a film actor, you know, he really learned from the other actors on set that part of what you do is you let everyone else say all the lines, that the camera is - can really read your mind, and it can really see your thoughts on your face. So part of the thing that you do is you just think, and the camera will see what you're thinking.
GROSS: There's different approaches to the Method, but one of them really emphasizes digging into your own emotional history, your emotional memories, to use those to get into your character. And you were practicing that when you were in college and you had a role, and you had been a professional child actor. And you write in the introduction to your book that through this process of mining your own emotional memories, you retreated too far into your personal darkness. Can you describe how that happened, because I'd really like to understand how, like, psychologically upsetting it can be to take this approach to plumbing your own emotional depths?
BUTLER: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's funny. It was over two decades ago, but I still remember it really vividly. The play was "Talk Radio," which is by Eric Bogosian, and he wrote it for himself to play the lead character who's this kind of, like, shock jock, right? And over the course of the 90-minute play, the actor playing that part - you are chain-smoking and you're talking to people who are calling in to the radio. And then at the end of 90 minutes on stage, you have a nervous breakdown, you know, live on the air. That's the arc of the play. And this was a college production. It was student directors who, you know, of course, didn't really know what they were doing, and neither did any of the rest of us. And we probably had two or three weeks of rehearsal.
And, you know, the character I was playing was older than me, had a lot more life experience, and they're having their nervous breakdown based on whatever is the matter with them. And I - the only way I knew how to find a connection to them was to go deep into the things that I thought were wrong with me and - you know, my own depression at being, you know, newly in college, my own loneliness and my own feelings of inadequacy and guilt and all sorts of other things. And so I really spent a lot of time thinking through those things and finding them and finding images or sensory ideas associated with them so I could kind of trigger them. And so I was doing that on stage and, at the same time, chain-smoking real cigarettes for 90 minutes. And so, you know, I would end every performance feeling completely wrung out emotionally and physically ill, simultaneously.
And so what I would have to do at the end of the show is I would go back to my dorm room and I would just stare at a blank wall until I kind of - like, my stomach settled down and I felt my humanity return. And, you know, that show only performed three or four times. And I just remember at the end of it saying to myself, I am not tough enough to keep doing this again and again and again, for part after part. I can't do this. And that was the last moment in my life that I really considered pursuing a career as an actor. I very quickly switched to focusing on directing and then eventually to writing, which led to the book that we're talking about today.
GROSS: So is this one of the fundamental aesthetic battles in acting, whether you have to kind of damage yourself in order to play a role?
BUTLER: Certainly one of the fundamental aesthetic battles in acting is whether the actors should be, on some level, really experiencing what the character is experiencing while they're on stage or on screen. And, you know, for hundreds of years, the consensus was, no, they absolutely shouldn't do - should not do that. That is in poor taste. You know, they can't really play the part if they're doing that. They can't control themselves, et cetera and so forth. But, you know, starting with Konstantin Stanislavski and then with the people who followed in his footsteps, we, as a culture, changed our mind about that, and we began to prize things like vulnerability and risk and - on the actor's part and the sense that they are really, on some level, really doing what the character is doing, not to such an extent that they lose all sense of themselves, because that truly would be madness, but that something real is at stake in those performances.
GROSS: So let's talk about the roots of the Method. The Method is an American version of the acting techniques that were codified by Konstantin Stanislavski, the Russian director who co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre in the 1890s. He started codifying his approach in 1906. He called it the system. Can you describe some of the basic tenets of the system?
BUTLER: Sure. The system flows from a couple of really simple core ideas. One of them has to do with the necessity of the actor - experiencing is the word that they use. Experiencing is a rough translation of a Russian word, perezhivanie. And it means just that moment where the actor is so into the imagined reality of the character that, to some extent, they're really feeling and experiencing what the character is going through.
And some of its other sort of core ideas are that the actor is their own material - they're kind of both the painter and the paint - that a role should be divided up into its component parts, which he called bits, that - he was very into physical relaxation and the actor using the powers of concentration and attention to forget the audience was there, and to try to kind of live again within the imagined reality of the play and of the character. One of the things that he was also very interested in, which would become particularly notorious in the United States, was this idea of affective memory. And affective memory is essentially triggering a strong emotional state that you might need to play the character through using your own memories of when you have experienced that emotion.
GROSS: He also had a principle that acting should be guided by actions, by things that you wanted or needed, demands that you had. You give the example of if you're thirsty, then you want a glass of water.
BUTLER: Yes. Yeah, hopefully in most plays, it's more high-stakes than just being thirsty, right? But yes, actually one of his ideas that goes on to be really the cornerstone of a lot of American acting and directing and script analysis is that characters are always wanting something, and they're always doing something in pursuit of the thing that they want. And those wants and the things they're doing - there's a whole lot of different names for them - the task, the problem, the objective, the action. But whatever you call it, the core idea is that I as a character have something that I need, something that I want and that I'm going to do things - which is often language is the thing that I'm doing - but I'm going to do something to accomplish that end.
GROSS: Stanislavsky also emphasized the importance of rehearsals, and he was really, really strict about them, and he'd have people rehearse, like, over and over and over and over again until they'd get angry with him.
BUTLER: Yeah, absolutely. That predates the system, really. That comes from the very start of his career. You know, he was rebelling against a status quo in Russia, where plays weren't really rehearsed that much. They were rehearsed, like, nine times, maybe. The dress rehearsal was a relatively new idea. And so he was rebelling against that by saying, no, the whole point of rehearsal is that we're going to do this over and over again. The actors and the director are going to have a unified vision of what the play is trying to do, and they're all going to kind of sublimate themselves to that unified vision. And we're going to do it over and over and over again until we get it right. That becomes particularly extreme once he starts using his rehearsal periods to experiment with developing the system. And probably the - you know, his production of "Hamlet" rehearses for something like three years, you know, so eventually it gets really, really out of control. And there are times where he rehearses things for 14 months, and the play is no better off than it was at the beginning. So those two ideas, one that predates the system and one that comes from the system, kind of intersect in ways that eventually cause him a huge number of problems.
GROSS: Well, let's take a break, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method" about the history of that acting technique, the people who created and fought over it, the actors who practiced it and how it fell out of favor. So in the early 1920s, Stanislavsky brings his Moscow Art Theatre to the States, and it really is an amazing experience for some up-and-coming actors and directors. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of the Moscow Art Theatre on acting in New York - acting and directing in New York?
BUTLER: Yeah, I mean, it's sort of difficult to oversell how important their Broadway run on their U.S. tour was. People had really never seen acting like what they saw from the Moscow Art Theatre. You know, John Barrymore wrote a letter to the producer that was published in The New York Times, saying it was the best acting ensemble he'd ever seen. You know, people would come back night after night, wrapped with attention to what they were seeing. And these plays, it should be said, were performed in Russian, and most of the audience members did not speak Russian. So it's even coming across this language barrier.
And what they were particularly swept away by was that every actor in the Moscow Art Theatre would sort of fully dedicate themselves to their characters, even if those characters were supernumeraries. Even if those characters were, you know, a spear carrier, that spear carrier would feel like a real human being. And that had always been the Moscow Art Theatre's approach. Stanislavsky is the guy who came up with the phrase, there are no small parts, only small actors, and he really lived it in his company. And so you would just see this ensemble who were all on the same page, working towards the same ends and giving it their all. And people were completely blown away by it. And, you know, many of those people - Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, among them - would go on to become some of the foremost thinkers about acting and theater in the United States for the rest of the 20th century.
GROSS: And some of the people who you just mentioned studied with Maria Ouspenskaya, who was from the Moscow Art Theatre but stayed in America and started teaching.
BUTLER: Yes. Yes, Ouspenskaya and this guy Richard Boleslavsky were two members of the Moscow Art Theatre who wound up staying in New York. Boleslavsky was actually already there because of his political beliefs, and Ouspenskaya also was informed while on tour that she couldn't return to Moscow. And so she remained in New York, and Boleslavsky hired her to teach at this new acting school he founded called the American Lab Theatre, the goal of which was really to teach Stanislavsky's ideas in the United States and to create a kind of mini Moscow Art Theatre in the U.S. And Ouspenskaya was the person who really taught the system to her American pupils. And she was, like Stanislavsky before her, famous for how harsh her critique could be. In her case, it had a really explicit pedagogical purpose, which was that acting is very frightening. You have to do a lot of scary things. And so if you could kind of survive her - you know, you had a bulletproof vest for the rest of your career, if you could really survive her, you know, flensing of your ego (laughter) in her class. And she was the one who really taught these techniques that were the core of the system to people like Strasberg, Clurman, Stella Adler.
GROSS: And if you could survive her, you could survive the rejections you'd be getting when you audition for a show or the bad reviews you'd be getting.
BUTLER: Yes, absolutely. I mean, being an actor is tough. It's never been the case that being an actor is an easy job. You have to deal with a lot of rejection. You have to deal with a lot of bad reviews. You have to deal with people not treating you well. I mean, it's a tough life. And so she thought of herself as toughening up her young charges for this difficult life they were going to have to lead.
GROSS: Stanislavski's theater group, The Moscow Art Theatre - when they perform in New York, that leads in various ways to the creation of the Group Theatre, which was, you know, an early laboratory for the American version of Stanislavski, which is what became known as The Method. Among the co-founders were Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg. What was the Group Theatre, and what are some of the ways that it was trying to innovate what theater was in America?
BUTLER: So the Group Theatre was an ensemble theater producing new works on Broadway with a fixed acting company. It was co-founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg. And the idea was to create and discover a uniquely American voice, a uniquely American way of doing theater, and whose acting techniques would draw on Stanislavski to create sort of the most sort of present, vital, living, alive-feeling acting possible. The idea was, you know, that we were in the midst of the Great Depression. The theater starts performing in 1931. We're in the midst of the Great Depression. We're still recovering from the wreckage of World War I - that America was filled with a new people and that out of this wreckage could grow a kind of utopia. And the group was - in some ways, they were utopian dreamers, and their theater company was a utopian dream. And, of course, didn't work out that way.
The company lasted 10 years before going bankrupt. But along the way, it launched the careers of, you know, Harold Clurman, prominent critic and director, Lee Strasberg, who became the most important and famous acting teacher in America of the 20th century, Stella Adler, his rival, Sanford Meisner, who's also an incredibly important acting teacher, Clifford Odets, the most important playwright of the 1930s and, of course, Elia Kazan, who for a while was the most important theater director and the most important film director simultaneously. And several of those people then went on after the group died to found The Actors Studio, which became the kind of high temple of The Method from then on.
GROSS: The Group Theatre also launched the battle - the aesthetic battle - between Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler about how to interpret Stanislavski. So what was that battle about?
BUTLER: Well, part of what that battle was about was that they despised each other on a personal level and had for years. So, you know, part of it had to do with their own personal animus. I think it could have been a respectable difference of opinion otherwise (laughter). But Stella Adler was an actor in the group, and Lee was the director and the kind of acting guru. And from the get-go, Adler really disliked Lee Strasburg's emphasis on psychology and on emotion and on the actors' personal experiences and using their personal experiences to realize the part. She had trouble doing it. She also didn't like doing it. She thought that it was - sick was the word that she would use many times. And she was also often the lead in these plays. So she's fighting with Lee Strasberg all the time about acting technique.
And then finally, on a trip to Europe, she goes to Moscow and then to Paris with Harold Clurman, who was her on-again, off-again lover and eventually her husband. In Paris she actually meets Stanislavski. And she is trying to be kind of polite. But finally, she can't hold it back any longer. And she says, you know, Mr. Stanislavski, I loved acting before I studied your system. And it's ruined me, and I hate it now. And Stanislavski says to her, well, perhaps you're not doing it right. But either way, why don't you come to my apartment tomorrow, and we'll start working together, and maybe I can help you? And so they worked together in French. And she translates a scene she was having trouble with in French. And they work really hard at it and - for a few weeks.
And then she comes back to the United States, and she tells the Group Theatre, Lee has gotten Stanislavski all wrong. Stanislavski is not about personal experience. And he's not about these affective memories. And he's not about using your emotions. The core of the system is actually imagination. The core of the system is action - all those other things you and I were talking about earlier, Terry - action, the problem, the objective, what the character wants. The system is about behavior. And the system is about the circumstances in which the characters find themselves and the context in which they live. And so from then on, there's really this battle about, you know, who is really representing the truth of what Stanislavski taught. Is it about psychology and emotion? Is it about imagination and behavior? And I think the truth of the matter is it's kind of about both. And it depends on what the specific actor needs. But that fight is really fascinating. And it lasts for the rest of their lives. And even posthumously, people are still arguing about it.
GROSS: Let's take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method." We'll talk more after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF LEONARD BERNSTEIN'S "ON THE WATERFRONT MAIN TITLE")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method," about the history of that acting technique, the people who created and fought over it, the actors who practiced it and how it fell out of favor. Butler also co-wrote the book "The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent Of Angels In America." He's a theater director, teaches theater history and performance at The New School, co-hosts The Slate podcast "Working" about the creative process and is a cultural critic whose writing frequently appears in Slate.
We were talking about the Group Theatre and the directors and actors that came out of it. It started as a theater group in the 1930s and as, you know, film expanded and, you know, sound on film became really popular, some of the actors from there and the directors, too, migrated to Hollywood. So give us an example of an actor who learned the Method through the Group Theatre and went on to Hollywood afterwards and how they had to tune up what they learned for the screen, which reveals really different things than the stage does because the audience is seated at such a far distance in the theater whereas close-ups enable you to see details you'd miss on stage.
BUTLER: That's a great question, and it's really important because film and television actually becomes, in many ways, sort of the largest vehicle for the Method throughout the rest of the century. And, you know, in some ways, the most important actor to come out of the group, who I maintain is actually the first Method film star, is a man named John Garfield. And John Garfield quits the group over a dispute over a role in a play. And he goes out west to - because his wife is pregnant and they need money. And, you know, this is what he knows how to do, and he's going to make money. And he lands a role in 1938 in this film called "Four Daughters," which is directed by Michael Curtiz and stars Claude Rains and is written by the guys who go on to write "Casablanca." And he gives this unbelievable performance in this kind of nothing movie. It's a very silly, slight film. But the performance he gives - you know, as soon as he walks on camera, you can just tell that something is happening, that acting is changing, that the norms around what a character is, that they're never going to be the same on some level because he's so vital and in the moment and he feels much more like a real person than everyone else.
But it wasn't easy for him to learn how to do that. He couldn't just do a stage performance on camera. If you've ever seen someone just give sort of a stage-size performance on camera, it's really too much because the camera picks up so much that an audience in the theater will not see. It can really see you think or people talk about it reading your mind. Or I think John Garfield calls the camera, like, the great monstrous eye, you know? And so he really had to learn how to do much less and much less and much less and to strip away and to learn how to perform with a new kind of ease and spontaneity that the camera would kind of pick up and enjoy. That was really what he had to learn to do to be a great film actor, which he really was.
GROSS: So what would you say was different about him and about other people who came out of the Method compared to their predecessors in - on screen?
BUTLER: Yeah, on screen, absolutely. So part of what's going on is in the '30s and '40s is, you know, the height of the Hollywood studio system. So the Hollywood studios own the movie theaters their work is going to be presented in. They have the actors on these incredibly detailed contracts. So the actors are full-time employees of the studios, but the studios also kind of own them and control their lives in all these ways. And the movies that they're making at this time revolve, in terms of acting, around type. So what they would do with a new actor and new star is they would create this persona for that actor - with that actor's cooperation often but not always. And then on camera, they are playing some variation of that type in every part. So when you go to see - to pick a brilliant actor from that time period, when you go to see Cary Grant in a movie from the '40s, you are not going to be convinced that Cary Grant is playing a real person. The joy of it is watching Cary Grant play this kind of variation on what a Cary Grant part is. So, you know - I mean, you've seen "Bringing Up Baby," right?
GROSS: Yes.
BUTLER: You know, an amazing film. You're not saying, oh, Cary Grant's really an archaeologist, right? You're like, isn't it hilarious to watch...
GROSS: Absolutely, yes.
BUTLER: ...Cary Grant hike up his pants and go, oh, oh, I'm so flustered all the time, you know? And so that's - I mean, that stuff is amazing. It just has different values, starting with John Garfield and then especially once people like Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando come along. Instead, what we start to value is versatility, the actor's ability to disappear into a role, the actor's ability to seem like they are really in the moment and that they are giving a truthful performance, that the actor is letting us in to some private, vulnerable part of them that we wouldn't normally access and that that's kind of their great gift to us as an audience. And we start to value that more and more and more - did they disappear into the part, did we really believe it was them, things like that.
GROSS: I think maybe also acting becomes more American. You know, in a lot of, like, early - in a lot of early films - a lot of early films are set in more, like, upper-class homes and the American sound almost British in them. Everything is so formal.
BUTLER: Well, in the early days of the talkies, there was this assumption that audiences wanted to hear English spoke well or spoke correctly and that there was almost an edifying purpose behind it, that, you know, we were going to have proper speech. It was called proper speech, which really translated into the Mid-Atlantic accent (imitating Mid-Atlantic accent) which is sort of where the person kind of talks like this. You know, you think of those old-time movies and they're always talking like this, right? It's sort of English, and it's sort of American, and the enunciation is very clear.
The Method, of course, arises out of a working-class theater company, most of whose members either were immigrants themselves or were the children of immigrants. And so part of what they were trying to do in the group and then the actors who follow after it is talk the way real people spoke, you know, is to put real life on stage. You know, a lot of them were Jews whose parents were from a shtetl and, you know, they had New York accents, and they were going to talk like that. And so in the early days of the Method's emergence into film, they're often getting dinged by their peers and their predecessors for not correctly speaking English. And sometimes it is true that it's legitimately difficult to understand what they're saying. But there's also a class component and a policing of what whiteness is that is part of this debate that are we really going to let, you know, this immigrant rabble, these Italians and Jews and stuff like that, come in and talk the way they talk?
GROSS: Let's look at Marlon Brando because his breakthrough roles are in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "On The Waterfront." And, you know, in both of them, he's working class. He's not speaking with that almost British, formal, proper way of speaking. Did he consider himself a method actor because he's always held up as an example of the method?
BUTLER: I'm so glad you asked me that because Marlon Brando absolutely did not consider himself a method actor - most importantly because by the time he's emerging in the '50s, the method is really Lee Strasberg. They're synonymous, you know? And Marlon Brando was a discovery and protege and close friend of Stella Adler's. It's actually Stella Adler who taught him how to act. And he would say in interviews, you know, Lee Strasberg never taught me anything. It was all Stella Adler and Elia Kazan. And so, you know, he was very offended by what he saw as the inappropriate claiming of his work for the method. At the same time, his performances in those two movies are so unbelievably influential for the generations of male American actors who came afterwards that - you know, they establish - if you want to think of the method as a style, that style would absolutely not exist without Marlon Brando.
GROSS: How would you define that style?
BUTLER: That's the $64,000 question, right? So part of that style has to do with - speaking colloquially is a big part of that style. A lot of it has to do with an emphasis on subtext and emphasis on what the character is not saying, not allowing to be voiced, on the restraint of emotion, and then contrasting that kind of with huge, emotional displays when necessary. There's - that colloquialism of speech also extends to the body and to movement. It feels very much like an everyday person. It often involves throwing away lines instead of making sure you can clearly understand all of them. And often, it is marked by - and this is particularly because Elia Kazan was really into this - it's often marked by an extensive use of props on set and the use of the actor's hands and the objects they fiddle with to reveal kind of what's going on with the character.
GROSS: Doesn't that eventually come to be seen as bits of busyness that you should be cutting out?
BUTLER: Oh, absolutely. In fact, there are reviews of Kazan's later stage work on Broadway where sometimes the reviewers are kind of rolling their eyes at him, and it's like, of course, here comes Kazan with all his stage business again, you know? It's absolutely true that as with any number of other movements in art, that the ideas that seem fresh because they flow out of the, I guess, authentic point of view of an individual - they become codified, and then they become stylistic tricks, and then they become cliches. And that happens all over the place, whether we're talking about paint dripping on canvas or, you know, the way Marlon Brando does stage business. Or it becomes Brad Pitt eating sunflower seeds in every movie or whatever.
GROSS: (Laughter).
BUTLER: You know? So there is a way in which these become diluted, and then they can become a kind of cliche.
GROSS: Let's take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALEX NORTH'S "STAN MEETS BLANCHE")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method" about the history of that acting technique, the people who created and fought over it, the actors who practiced it, and how it fell out of favor.
I want to ask you something else about Brando. You write about how on stage in "Streetcar Named Desire," he would give, like, a different performance every night. I mean, he'd say the right lines, but his way of delivering them would be different and really threw off his co-star, Jessica Tandy, and she just really was furious with him. So do you see both sides of that?
BUTLER: I absolutely see both sides of that debate, and she was not the only one, although she was the one who called him a psychopathic bastard.
GROSS: (Laughter).
BUTLER: So she definitely was the most colorful about it. Karl Malden, who worked with Brando many times - and I don't think they were friends, but it's not like Malden hated Brando. You know, there was one point in rehearsals for "Streetcar" when he got into a screaming match with Brando because he said, you know, your pauses are so unpredictable. I can't ever get my teeth into this scene and figure out what the rhythm is. It is absolutely a professional actor's job to do their role on stage in such a way that enables the best of your colleagues, you know? That's absolutely part of the job.
And traditionally - and this is still true today - one of the ways you do that is to set your performance, is to freeze the performance. You know, part of what the method and the system are trying to help you do is create the illusion of spontaneity within a fixed performance. And Brando did not do that. Brando was a kind of mercurial trickster and sometimes could be very, very selfish, it seems to me. And so he would just do whatever he was going to do. He would change the timing of lines. Sometimes, he would actually change the lines or throw the lines away, or you couldn't hear your cue 'cause he had mumbled it or whatever.
And Jessica Tandy, as a classically trained British actor, was really ticked at him about it with some justification. And she didn't have a lot of allies in that fight because Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams just couldn't get past what a brilliant job Brando was doing. And it wasn't only them. Hume Cronyn, her husband, who advocated for her to get the part - he's really the reason why she was cast as Blanche in the first place. Hume Cronyn could see that Brando was sort of overpowering her all the time, and so it was a really, really difficult struggle for her.
And eventually, Brando tried to apologize to her, and it didn't go very well. And it led to this really extraordinary exchange of letters - which I discuss in my book - where he tries to apologize for how difficult he was to work with. And she kind of gives him what for and says, look, if you want to be a good actor who's taken seriously and a leader of your profession for the rest of your life - 'cause you are good enough that you could do that - you need to shape up, and you need to be reliable, and you need to act in the author's style, not yours.
GROSS: Let's talk about "The Godfather" because in terms of acting techniques, it's such a fascinating film. It's a wonderful film in every way. But let's look at the - how the method figures into "The Godfather." So you've got De Niro, who studied with Stella Adler. You've got Pacino, who studied with her rival, Lee Strasberg. And then in "Godfather II," you've got Lee Strasberg himself (laughter) playing Hyman Roth.
BUTLER: Yes. Yeah.
GROSS: So what do you - when you look at that film, what do you see in terms of conflicting styles and, you know, background rivalries? And what were you able to learn about that from researching the book?
BUTLER: Well, you know, another thing I should say is that you've also got Sanford Meisner, who's sort of the third rival in there as well, because Diane Keaton and Robert Duvall and James Caan all studied with him. And so part of what I see in that, actually, is that because, in some ways, the end goal of Meisner, Adler and Strasberg is the same. And it's that shared end goal with Stanislavski of experiencing, you know, of that kind of absolute truth. You can see how all these different paths can lead to a fairly similar or compatible place. The acting in those movies is magnificent. It is really incredible what they do as an ensemble.
And you also see little moments that kind of highlight what each of those teachers are best at. So I think, for example, the sequence where Al Pacino is at the restaurant considering whether or not to commit murder for the first time - this is about halfway through the first "Godfather" film. And he gets - you know, he gets the gun from the tank behind the toilet. And he's going through this whole sort of tortured consideration of whether he's actually going to go through with this act. And how is he going to do it? But he never says that. There's no lines where he says it, you know? It's all in his body. And it's all in his face. And it's almost like you can read his thoughts in the subtext of the character. That is Lee Strasberg's techniques at its best.
Then later in the film, when Diane Keaton is confronting Al Pacino - when Kay is confronting Michael about whether or not he had his brother-in-law killed, and he's saying over and over and over again, don't ask me about my business, Kay - don't ask me about my business, Kay. And they're sort of provoking each other back and forth, repeating these same lines over and over and over again. That, to me, is the amazing messiness and spontaneity that Sanford Meisner really taught his students. And he often taught them that through an exercise that involved repeating lines back and forth to one another.
And then, when you get to the second film, and you have De Niro as the young Vito Corleone - De Niro also studied with Stella Adler. And you get this sort of heavily research-driven process where he's really trying to feel not only like this character, but like an Italian immigrant of the early 20th century. And what would that person look like? How would they inhabit the space? What would their accent be like? How would they talk, you know? He has that really weird, scratchy voice in that movie. And all of that comes from this kind of in-depth research that he would do. So you really see these pupils bring the best of what those various teachers have to offer in a way that I find just totally thrilling.
GROSS: I love Lee Strasberg's performance as Hyman Roth, who is based on Meyer Lansky. I love when he offers everybody tuna fish sandwiches (laughter). But...
BUTLER: (Laughter) Yes.
GROSS: ...Anyways, I wonder what it was like to have him as a working actor since he was, like, the leading acting teacher of the 20th century?
BUTLER: Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny because at that point, he was incredibly famous as an acting teacher. And he was making a lot of money as an acting teacher. He did not need to go act in this movie. Really, he didn't. And he hadn't acted in decades. And he had never acted on screen. He was a stage actor briefly. But Al Pacino really wanted him for that part. But by the time Strasberg agreed to do the movie, the movie was already being shot. I mean, he left - he flew out to be on set almost immediately after signing his contract. So he did not have a lot of preparation time. And one of the reasons why he wanted to do the role was that he wanted to see what it was like to apply his techniques to film and to see, you know, what he could learn about it. In the end result, what you see is this really fascinatingly strange performance, in part because Strasberg was, in real life, a fascinatingly strange person. And what you also see is how much he and Al Pacino love each other in real life.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method." We'll talk more after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of the new book The Method, about the history of that acting technique, the people who created and fought over it, the actors who practiced it and how it fell out of favor.
So getting to another De Niro role - in "Raging Bull," De Niro plays the boxer Jake LaMotta. And, you know, later in LaMotta's life, after he's retired, he puts on a lot of weight. And De Niro gained, like, 60 pounds for the role. And you write about all the really bad health effects gaining 60 pounds in a rapid amount of time affected De Niro. I don't remember exactly what health problems he developed.
BUTLER: I mean, you know, when you hear, oh, well, you know, for this part, you're going to have to eat anything you can get your hands on in Italy and France for three months, it sounds - that sounds like a good gig, right? I mean, who wouldn't want that job? I get to eat my way through Italy and France? Awesome. But the end result was, you know, rashes on the inside of his thighs. He had trouble sitting up and getting from sitting to standing. He had trouble tying his shoes. He had high blood pressure. He started snoring. He got - would get fatigued more easily so that the shooting days had to be shorter. I mean, it had a real serious effect on him and his metabolism.
GROSS: So that role had a really big effect. I think a lot of actors - like, more and more actors started, like, gaining weight or losing weight or, you know, doing something to their body to better understand or better portray or better look like the character that they were playing. And De Niro isn't the only person who had some kind of physical problem as a result. What impact do you think that's had? I mean, in the past, actors didn't do that earlier in acting history.
BUTLER: I think acting had been building towards that in a while. But also, you cannot overstate the influence of "Raging Bull." It is probably the most influential male American acting performance on film after "Streetcar" and "On The Waterfront," right? You know, but part of the problem that actors steeped in the method were having on set is, how do I turn it on on command, right? Because, you know, like, they've got to set the lighting. They got to do this. They got to stand you on your mark. And then suddenly, someone calls action, and you have to really be in character.
Well, one way to solve that problem is to never break character, right? One way to solve that problem is to really live as the character as much as possible. That is not what Strasberg taught. Strasberg was actually very opposed to that. But particularly after "Raging Bull" - because De Niro wins the best actor Oscar for it. And from that point on, De Niro is sort of enshrined as our greatest living American film actor. It just exerts an enormous influence not only on actors but on the PR and awards campaigns for acting.
GROSS: Oh, yes.
BUTLER: And so that exerts its own influence, right? And so there becomes a kind of material or industrial reason why actors are doing this because then they can talk about the fact that they did it. And that leads to the kind of - there's a self-parody kind of version of this. You know, we've all watched the press junkets where someone's like, oh, yes, then I didn't bathe for six months, and I got so drunk every night I vomited on myself, and so, you know, that's what I did to get into character. And it just seems ridiculous. That, to me, is a kind of perversion of what De Niro was trying to do.
GROSS: I want to end with a quote from Lee Strasberg that you use in the book. He said, "The profession of acting, the basic art of acting, is a monstrous thing because it does (ph) with the same flesh-and-blood muscles with which you perform ordinary deeds, real deeds. The body with which you make real love is the same body with which you make fictitious love with someone you don't like. In no other art do you have this monstrous thing." That really reminds me of what a lot of actors have been telling me on our show, which is that your body doesn't know the difference between acting and real life, so when you put yourself through something horrible for a role, your body doesn't know that you're just acting.
BUTLER: Yes, absolutely. You know, the body keeps the score, right? That's the thing we're saying more and more these days. Yeah, your body does not know that you're acting, and your body is not as separate from your psyche as we like to model it. You know, they're not really that separated. Actually, part of why Stanislavski had such a pioneering idea of acting is that he didn't view those two things as separate; he viewed them as one interrelated mechanism. And they are. And as I learned in my own life experience, you know, the body chain-smoking during talk radio was the body who felt like he was going to throw up for hours afterwards, that acting is a difficult and physical art form because the actor is their own material. And figuring out how you protect yourself within that, figuring out how you both do the job and remain a whole, healthy human being is one of the particular challenges of being an actor.
I was not up for it as a human being. I just knew I couldn't take it. And because of that, perhaps, I am always admiring of anyone who can do it. I just think it's remarkable. And, you know, the things that actors do so that we can be entertained or see some inner truth about our own lives, I'm very moved by that.
GROSS: Well, Isaac Butler, thank you so much for talking with us. It was really, really interesting. I really appreciate it.
BUTLER: This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Terry.
GROSS: Isaac Butler is the author of the new book "The Method."
Tomorrow, we'll talk about what the House January 6 committee has learned so far, including about plans to submit false slates of electors and Trump's role in proposals to seize voting machines to search for evidence of fraud that could overturn the results of the election. My guest will be New York Times reporter Luke Broadwater. I hope you'll join us.
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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Kayla Lattimore. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. I'm Terry Gross.
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