PAYING THEIR DUES
James Woods and Oliver Stone are no strangers to controversy.
Woods’ personal life and Stone’s history-inspired films have come
under harsh criticism. However, the two are also familiar with
praise. Woods’ roles in ‘Citizen Cohn’ and ‘Salvador,’ and Stone’s
Oscars speak for themselves. Today the two meet in Ackerman to
discuss their newest film, ‘Nixon.’
By Lael Loewenstein
Daily Bruin Staff
Don’t get James Woods started on Hillary Clinton.
"She’s a liar; she’s a perjurer. It’s an undisputed, provable
fact," Woods insists. "Take every fact of what she ever did in her
life and imagine a fat, bald, 58-year-old white guy did it, and any
feminist would want the guy lynched. If he shredded documents at a
potential murder scene against the protestations of the police, if
he lied under oath to a federal agency, you’d want him in jail.
She’s a handful of narcissism, and greed and mendacity."
Brash and irrepressible, Woods, who will speak today at
Ackerman, launches into an indictment of Clinton so forceful,
passionate and shrewd that it might be a prosecutor’s closing
statement and not a casual interview with The Bruin at his
publicist’s office in Beverly Hills.
Woods has played lawyers before, bringing memorable temerity and
verve to his incarnations of defense attorneys in "True Believer,"
the recent "Indictment: The McMartin Trial," and as infamous
prosecutor Roy Cohn in HBO’s "Citizen Cohn."
Small wonder, given Woods’ verbal dexterity, persuasive logic
and barely contained energy, that he has played so many lawyers. He
has unbuttoned that same manic energy in acclaimed performances as
intense, driven, socially transgressive characters, notably in "The
Onion Field," "Against All Odds" and "Casino."
In his latest role as H.R. Haldeman in Oliver Stone’s "Nixon,"
Woods, 48, departs from his repertoire of lawyers and sociopaths. A
carefully shaded complement to Anthony Hopkins’ power-obsessed
title character, his Haldeman is complete control, with hardly any
mania. But he admits he was not the director’s first choice.
"Oliver said, ‘You can’t play Haldeman, Jimmy. You’re too
flamboyant; you always want to be the lead. Haldeman is contained
and square,’" Woods recalls. "I said, ‘I can do it.’ So he said,
‘I’ll take your word on it, but don’t fuck me up on this.’"
It’s easy to see how Woods won Stone over. A compelling and
rapid speaker, he thinks even faster than he talks, sometimes
tripping over words as they blurt out, but always two steps ahead
of everyone else in the room.
Once he had won the role, Woods concentrated on developing
Haldeman’s original expository function into a fully rounded
personification of Nixon’s chief of staff.
"At first he was a tourguide to the plot, and then we fleshed
him out with his own agenda," he explains. "My theory about him is
that loyalty is everything with this guy; his loyalty is his
undoing."
Woods has made something of a specialty of playing historical
figures. Aside from Cohn, his fact-based characters include the
founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (in his Emmy-winning turn in "My
Name is Bill W."), the cop killer in "The Onion Field," and the
zealous lawyer Eddie Dodd in "True Believer," the part that he
cites as being closest to himself, "because it’s about a guy who’s
more passionate about ideas than he is about material objects."
But despite that impressive list, Woods has always avoided
physical mimesis in his roles. Having gone on record as an opponent
of method acting, Woods reveals that his realization of a character
is an interior journey.
"I always take the Tony Hopkins approach," he says of his
"Nixon" co-star, whose performance is more impression and
amalgamation than imitation. "I’m more interested in the heart and
soul of the character, and not the rubber noses and make up.
"A lot of times, I’ve approached characters where I didn’t know
about their physicality and I didn’t want to know. I’m content so
long as I know that the documentary truth of what we’re showing is
correct, because I find that when you get into all that mimetic
stuff, you tend to lose a lot of the soul of the character."
Ironically, in his turn as Haldeman, as with his portrayal of
Roy Cohn, Woods’ character exploration from the inside out often
leads to gestures and mannerisms that are strikingly like the
real-life figure.
Woods’ work in "Nixon" has been so well-received that he is
being touted as a likely Oscar contender for Best Supporting Actor.
An Oscar nomination this year would be his first since receiving a
Best Actor nod for "Salvador" almost a decade ago, though he has
two Emmys and a slew of other honors to his credit.
Having directed Woods in that Oscar-nominated performance and
collaborated as a producer on "Indictment" and the forthcoming
"Killer," Stone may be the director best able to plumb Woods’
creative depths.
Clearly, they understand each other. Both men like to pique and
provoke. Woods, like Stone, is fiercely intelligent, well-educated
(he scored almost a 1600 on his SATs and attended MIT as a
political science student) and well-read.
In a town where many actors are more comfortable invoking Daily
Variety gossip columnist Army Archerd than prominent intellectuals,
Woods is an anachronism, freely peppering his speech with
polysyllabic adjectives and diverse allusions to Shaw, Freud and
Aristophanes.
Woods, like Stone, has at times been misunderstood. And both
have been stung by bad press, though Stone’s controversy has been
largely professional and Woods’ strictly personal, until it was
splashed across tabloid pages.
The bulk of this notoriety came a few years ago in a legal
entanglement with actress Sean Young, in which Woods alleged that
an obsessed Young was harassing him, and subsequently came with the
breakup of his stormy marriage to second wife Sarah Owen.
"I paid all my dues for three lifetimes during my second
marriage," Woods admits candidly. From that unfortunate situation
he learned "to stay away from sociopaths – I won’t say that she was
one, but I learned to stay away from them at all costs."
Whatever else he learned from that, Woods now manifests a
mellower outlook than he has in years past. Having previously
complained that he would never make Hollywood leading man status,
he now says he accepts his unique place in the industry.
"There came a time when I had to say, I don’t care what other
people have done to me or how they have let me down. It’s my
responsibility to define what I want out of my own life."
And that goal, simply stated, is "to be a great actor. I get to
work in great scripts with great directors, like Marty Scorsese and
Oliver Stone, who cherish individual strengths. What I can’t do, it
turns out after 30 years of experience, is work in great scripts
with great directors, make millions of dollars for it, have billing
above the title and sell $100 million every time out."
His modus operandi is: "Do what you care about. If you do shit
for a lot of money, then all you’re gonna have is a lot of money
and be miserable. You can wade through this town with a machete and
knock off a thousand heads with every swing of people who have a
lot of money and are miserable."
Ever the provocateur, he adds, "If I see one more anorexic
face-lifted woman in a Mercedes with a cellular phone to her ear
fighting for a parking space on Canon Drive, I think I’ll shoot
myself."
And then, with a nod to the Academy electorate, he laughs,
"There went half of the voters right there."
EVENT: Oliver Stone and James Woods will speak in conjunction
with screening of clips from "Nixon." Today, Ackerman Grand
Ballroom, 12:00 p.m.. Admission is free.
Side Bar: Stone Often criticized for his creative interpretation
of historical facts, events
Oliver Stone (left) discusses the finer points of filmmaking
with actor James Woods.
Director Oliver Stone (right) enjoys making films about issues
of power.
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