Sunday, June 30, 2024
The Triumph and Tragedy of Sondra Locke
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| Sondra Locke |
The Triumph and Tragedy of Sondra Locke
Sondra Locke, the Oscar-nominated actress who starred in several movies with Clint Eastwood—a romantic partner-turned-litigious opponent—has died. She was 74. According to the Associated Press, Locke died on November 3 at her Los Angeles home of cardiac arrest stemming from bone and breast cancer.
Saturday, June 29, 2024
Q&A / Donald Sutherland
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| Donald Sutherland Fellini’s Casanova |
Q&A: Donald Sutherland
When I was less well informed.
Not being informed.
To sift through that mountain of moments and come up with one is not a useful task.
My imagination.
With my wife.
Looking at it.
Whatever parts of the oceans that were living and are no longer, be they the coral reefs or the multitude of vertebrates that have not survived our profit-pursuing onslaught.
The Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Nova Scotia.
Is a woman's orgasm giving or receiving?
I don't.
As often as I can.
Sleeping. There's so little waking time left.
Every single director I've ever been engaged by; and when I'm done with them, every woman I've ever loved and all the children and a couple of animals and one car.
My wife.
At Orly airport, 1973.
Never.
A chef.
Ones that indicate I've forgotten what I was going to say or that I can't find the name of this or that person or place.
Training dogs.
The behaviour of those dogs.
Thirty-seven years. The birth of our first son. Just when I caught him and laid him at the side of his mother.
I died in Yugoslavia in 1968 for a few seconds. In a coma: spinal meningitis, bacterial. Saw the blue tunnel. MGM flew me to London and Charing Cross hospital for six weeks, then back to the film Kelly's Heroes, with my brain a boiled cauliflower.
Generously.
Friday, June 28, 2024
Donald Sutherland / ‘He learned the name of every crew member. What a gent’
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| Donald Shuterland |
‘He learned the name of every crew member. What a gent’
Kevin Macdonald, director, The Eagle (2011)
Tall and imposing, with those distinctive hooded blue eyes and a hawkish profile, Donald was quite scary on first meeting. Ridiculously well read in history and literature, with that distinctive accent poised between patrician and farm boy, he gave off a “don’t suffer fools” vibe. But it didn’t take me long to realise that the forbidding exterior hid a kind, sensitive, sometimes insecure and endlessly curious man. An utterly distinctive life force.
‘Being a star didn’t interest him. He just loved to act’ … with Channing Tatum in The Eagle.
He was already well into his 70s when I worked with him, and his schedule was extraordinary. He was flying around the word doing cameos and supporting parts at a rate that was exhausting to behold. Being a star didn’t interest him any more. He just loved to act.
As a director, one worries that an actor like that is going to turn up and just phone it in. But that wasn’t Donald. He would be on set before anyone else and stay there all day no matter what time his call. He learned the name of every member of the shooting crew and on his final day he personally distributed a thank you card to everyone. What a gent.
He sent me endless notes fretting over upcoming scenes, written in his distinctive ink-pen scrawl. When I commented on them, he ordered me a giant box of the disposable ink pens he favoured. I still use them and think of him when I do.
For a man who on the surface felt like the ultimate pro, he was touchingly nervous and a little superstitious about his performance. His only non-negotiable demand was that we shoot his first two appearances in the film late on in the schedule, once he had found his way into the character. “You only have one chance to show the audience who this character is,” he said, “and I don’t want to fuck it up.”
We went out for dinner a few times and he never seemed to resent my endless nosy questions about his oeuvre and the array of brilliant directors he had worked with: Roeg, Fellini, Aldrich, Pakula, Sturges. I mean the list goes on and on. He even indulged my childhood passion for Kelly’s Heroes, in which he played Oddball, a crazy, proto-hippy second world war tank commander, merrily telling stories of the mayhem he caused driving around drunk in his tank in a little village in Yugoslavia.
At the last dinner we had together, before he flew home to his farm in Canada, Donald gave me a copy of John Maynard Keynes’s seminal analysis – and evisceration – of the Versailles treaty and told me it would make a great film and he wanted to play Clemenceau. It’s a great regret that I didn’t take him up on it
Donald Sutherland / ‘I remember that bear hug and its warmth’
‘I remember that bear hug and its warmth’
Ralph Fiennes, co-star in Land of the Blind (2006)
24 June 2024
I worked with Donald on a little-seen film called Land of the Blind, set in a dystopian, futuristic, slightly Orwellian world. He played a leftwing revolutionary imprisoned by a rightwing regime. I played the prison officer who helped to release him and witness him become, in turn, an autocratic and ruthless dictator.
Donald Sutherland / ‘He’d get sick with nerves before the first day’s shoot – even after making 120 films’
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| Donald Shutherland |
‘He’d get sick with nerves before the first day’s shoot – even after making 120 films’
Francis Lawrence, director of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015)
24 June 2024
I first met Donald in 2012, when I’d signed on to direct the second Hunger Games film. He wanted to meet on 4 July – a public holiday in the US, which I thought was strange. He chose a steakhouse at 9am, which I thought was stranger. I was intimidated because he had such gravitas. I remember he came into the Pacific Dining Car restaurant, sat down and instantly became conspiratorial: if I ever met his wife, he said, I was not to tell her we’d had giant New York steaks for breakfast, because he wasn’t supposed to eat them any more. That totally disarmed me and I instantly fell in love with him.
Donald Sutherland / ‘We had such a deep, sublime chemistry’
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| Donald Shutherland Fellini´s Casanova |
‘We had such a deep, sublime chemistry’
Elliott Gould, co-star, M*A*S*H (1970), Little Murders (1971) and S*P*Y*S (1974)
24 June 2024
Donald was the best partner in movies I ever had. We were brothers and we loved each other. We had such a deep, sublime chemistry. There was nothing intellectual about it, just this amazing natural harmony. I first met him in the commissary at 20th Century Fox when Robert Altman told us to have lunch together after I’d been cast in M*A*S*H. At first I thought: I don’t think this guy likes me. But it was just the opposite. The thing was: we were such opposites. I’m a Jew from Brooklyn and he was a Canadian from Nova Scotia. But it was perfection: never any conflict, just bread and butter – a relationship that felt like a miracle.
Donald Shutherland / ‘He was hurt to have never been nominated for an Oscar’
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| Donald Shutherland Price and Prejudice (2005) |
‘He was hurt to have never been nominated for an Oscar’
James Gray, director, Ad Astra (2019)
24 June 2024
It’s impossible to talk about Donald without acknowledging his perfect timing. That such a person could become a movie star is a testament to what a wonderfully fertile time the mid-60s and 70s were for the cinema. He could have only happened in that moment. Donald was a true contradiction, a rare talent. He could convey great presence and tragic awkwardness at the same time. His genius was his ability to lay bare a wounded soul at war with himself. Unlike the superheroes with whom we are now obsessed, he played heroes: tremendously complex figures whose lapses allowed for transcendence and beauty.
Donald Sutherland / ‘He stood in the middle of the party wearing a gas mask’
Keira Knightley and Donald Shutherland
Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Keira Knightley
‘He stood in the middle of the party wearing a gas mask’
Keira Knightley, co-star in Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Monday 24 June 2024
Donald was a giant. When you meet most actors, they’re surprisingly small. But Donald was huge. I remember feeling unbelievably intimidated by his size and reputation when I first met him. He had this clause in his contract that no one was allowed to smoke anywhere near him. Most of the rest of the cast were in their late teens and early 20s, all chugging away.