 |
| 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
No comments:
Post a Comment