"I do not wish to die."
By Nina Rehfeld
October 8, 2002
"And they laugh all the time."
Just four weeks after its opening in China last December, Big Shot's Funeral had already broken the country's box office records for a home-grown film. Feng Xiaogang isn't exactly a household name in the US, but he's an enormously popular director in China, where he's helmed several comedies, TV series and commercials as well as the award-winning drama, Sigh.
In Funeral, Donald Sutherland plays Don Tyler, a Hollywood director who plans, of all things, a mega-budget remake of Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. Once in China, though, he falls terribly ill. His last request: A full-blown "comedy funeral," Chinese-style, right in the heart of the Forbidden City. His producer, played by Paul Mazursky, knows a marketing opportunity when he sees one.
When Sutherland came through Berlin to promote the movie, and in particular, Feng Xiaogang, Nina Rehfeld snapped up the chance to pose a few questions.
How did the project come about?
To begin with, I'd seen a movie called Sigh which Feng Xiaogang directed with his wife. You wouldn't recognize it from this movie. It's a terrifying movie about love and marriage and infidelity and the loss of love and betrayal and it's so... true. And so touching and so sad. It was shocking to both my wife and myself. We couldn't speak afterwards. It stimulated so many thoughts, so much reflection.
And then I saw another movie of his called Be There or Be Square that he shot in Los Angeles, once again with his wife, and Gareth Wigan of Sony. He's been a friend of mine for forty years at least. He phoned and said, "Would you like to go to China and make a film?" And then he said, "It's for Feng Xiaogang," and I said, "Oh! Ok. Yeah."
That was the second time for you to be in China, right?
Yeah. I was in China in 1986.
How had it changed?
Radically. Certain sections of it are unrecognizable. For a lot of reasons. There was a certain uniformity in '86 and certainly a chance for people to survive. You would have starvation because of certain agricultural conditions but not this vast gulf that you have now between the rich and the poor, between the haves and the have-nots. But they will find some way to regulate that. They have to. Otherwise, there's going to be some kind of revolution. And if it's going to be a peaceful revolution, then it has to be quick and it has to be very precise.
But the country I saw both times is filled with people of such extraordinary spirit and joy and intellect and wit. They're a sublime people. I love them. I just love them. I'd love to be with them. You know, I spent my youth wishing that I were either Jewish or Irish, and now, I wish I was Chinese.
Why?
Why? I don't know, I'm a blue-eyed Scotsman, what can I say?
Why does that bug you?
It didn't bug me. It just felt kind of like maybe my creative powers were dimmed because my eyes were blue -- with all due respect to your blue eyes. [laughs]
When you were reading the screenplay, at what point did you decide you had to make the movie?
Way before I read it. Truly. It didn't make much difference to me. I knew that I would play a director, that they didn't have a copy of the script. I remember when Fellini wanted Marcello Mastroianni to do Dolce Vita. He couldn't get a script to Mastroianni and Mastroianni's agent said, [Italian accent] "Listen, you don't have a script, we don't do it."
And Fellini said, "The script is coming over this afternoon." And this guy came with this huge... I mean, it must have been maybe five feet by seven feet package. And Mastroianni says, "What's this?" and the guy says, "I think it's a script." He brings the thing in and it's a drawing. You have the water and on top of the water, nude except for a black felt fedora, is Mastroianni sitting in the lotus position. And hanging down in the water, way, way, way down deep in the water, is Mastroianni's sexual organ, and at the very bottom of it, swimming around it, are three mermaids.
Mastroianni picked up the phone and said, "Federico, I will do the film." It was kind of like that. Gareth said, "It's this man," and I had the opportunity to make a film with a director who's unknown in the west and who will be sometime in the next ten years a hugely respected director in the western world. So it was a joy. I was happy to have a part in it. When it was this part, fine. We just sat down and did it.
Your choices of films to work on seem to be based not on whether the film will be a financial success or whether you might win an Oscar, but rather, "Will I have fun? Will it be interesting?"
Yes, sure. You know, you've got a very short life to live and you want to live it as happily and as positively and with as much vigor as you possibly can, so that's how you do it. I hope that's how you do it; that's the way I'm trying to do it.
You were talking about wanting to be somebody else. Is that a motivation for going into acting?
No, no, no. I didn't want to be somebody else. I wanted to be some other nationality. I mean, the Irish are wonderful poets. And they have a huge, exquisite sense of humor. And the Jewish people had a family. My sister converted to Judaism. They had a family. There's an underlying humor that goes through them. You know, in Canada, we have a humor, too, but it's... You don't feel immediately a brother to another Canadian.
My Jewish friends feel a complicity with each other. So, too, my Irish friends. Maybe it's a complicity of embarrassment sometimes, but it's nonetheless a complicity. And they feel a part of one piece. And I never did feel a part of one piece. And certainly, to be a part of Feng Xiaogang's family -- the family of filmmaking, because it really is a family -- those people, because most of them don't have cars, when you make a film in China, they move everybody into a hotel near the location. Everybody, the crew, the actors, everybody. Into the same hotel. Then in the morning, they all get on the same bus and go to the job. They do the work there -- they work seven days a week. They don't have a day off. They work dreadful hours. They work on an incredibly low budget. And they laugh all the time. And they yell a lot. But they yell like... well, they yell like they yell in the film. It's great. It's really invigorating.
Interesting that you should mention various cultures, the Irish culture, the Jewish culture. Could you imagine acting in a language you don't know, say, Mandarin or German?
No, I don't think so. I could do an impersonation, but I don't think I could be truthful enough to satisfy myself. I did one role in French, but it was a very short role. You know, my wife is French, and we speak French at home. I speak it pretty badly and the guy I was playing spoke it pretty badly. He was supposed to speak it pretty badly, and luckily, they cast me, who spoke it pretty badly. It was ok, but there wasn't a lot of fluidity in it. I wasn't happy with it.
"I'm not a director."
When you look back on all your years in the movie business, what do you see as the major changes?
Most of the directors have gotten a lot younger. [laughs]
I don't know. A couple of things have changed. We have a lot more light. In '75, when we were shooting Don't Look Now, it was the first time we used a 200 degree Panavision camera which had 15 degrees more shutter, instead of what used to be 185. That let in a lot more light, because the year before, Stanley Kubrick had been shooting Barry Lyndon and he'd had to use candles with six wicks in them. He was shooting with an Arriflex and Zeiss lenses, and the shutter didn't let in enough light. But this new Panavision did. So that revolutionized the way people lit.
Then you were able to shoot in natural light. The Kodak film got faster. It used to be 64, I think, and now it's way up there. Then Francis Ford Coppola got Vittorio Storaro to shoot video on high definition in Venice and then transferred it from video to 35mm film. And then projected it, and there was no fluttering around the periphery, which you usually have with video. So that was a revolutionary moment.
But the big thing was the computer. Avid just changed everything. You used to have a white glove and work on editing tables like the Steenbeck with two or three reels of film running through and two or three screens so that you could match or mix and edit your film like that. Then, when you got to the Avid, you had everything. The editing got to be really quick. It took some of the life out of filmmaking because it got to be too quick. A lot of writers won't use a word processor because it's so easy. You become overly verbose and you end up writing more than you should. You don't get to the gut of it, the heart of it.
But the worst part, the part that has really wrecked a lot of stuff is the video take-off. Because now you don't have directors sitting beside the camera listening to you and looking at you. You've lost your intimate relationship. That started with Francis Ford Coppola, too, when he made One From the Heart, which wasn't from the heart, because he was sitting out in a bus looking at everybody on a video. And video was not the same, I can tell you. It's not the same as feeling what's happening between the two of us and seeing it up on film. They don't see rushes anymore. They look at it on a videotape or on a DVD.
Have you ever contemplated a career as a director?
No, no, no, no. Never.
But you're interested in all these techniques --
No, no. It's part of my life. I mean, I'm not a mechanic but I know how my car works. I know what effects me, and what effects me is when I see everybody running away. You do a scene, and you know, it's like making love or something. You're going to kiss again, and somebody says, "Wait a second. Let's talk about that kiss." And they go off and say, "Ok, let's look at that kiss again," and they come back and, bleah. You lose it. You have to keep in the rhythm of it. It's making love, it's wonderful. It gets wrecked by this thing, and worse than that, it gives producers -- not that I have anything against producers -- but it gets people who are really not part of the creative process an opportunity to sit back in some tent, isolated from everybody else, and then they get on a radio and say, "Now shoot that again." It's not really any of their business.
So why not take things in your own hands?
Oh, I'm not a director. I wouldn't know how to do it.
You mentioned Don't Look Now. Did you get the feeling you were creating a part of movie history?
Making that love scene? No, not really. It was just a love scene.
I read that somebody added my dick on a photo -- no, really. Well, actually, they didn't add my dick. Worse, they added somebody else's. I didn't like the look of it at all. Neither did my wife. Seriously, it's true. You can go on the Internet, I can't remember where the site is, but I pulled it off and printed it out and said to my wife, "Is that me?" And she said, "No!" Doesn't have my pubic hair, either. They'd added it on and said it was the first scene with frontal nudity. Which is not true, because there was no frontal nudity in that thing. You can't see anything. Because part of my contract, literally from the beginning, has been no frontal nudity. Because it's... it's different for women. A little bit. I don't think it's that much different, but it's different. But for men...
I mean, I remember watching Bobby De Niro and G閞ard Depardieu running behind a fence because it was cold and they were having this fight naked, and they were running and pulling out their dicks and trying to make them longer because they'd shrunk up because it was so cold! [laughing] And all they were thinking about was that, because a man's sexual organ... You know, people don't look at that and think, "Oh, that's the character's sexual organ." They say, "Oh, look, there's the character and that's Donald's dick there."
In that sense, it was the first time that I had been nude in front of a bunch of people I didn't know. That's a daunting experience. And it was daunting for Julie, too. It was hard. It was a hard day's shoot. And it was done with unblimped Arriflex cameras. Both Tony Richardson and Nick Roeg were there.
It was all little things, you know? There would be the noise of this camera, RRRrrrrrRRRR, and Nick yelling, "Ok, Donald, kiss Julie's breast!", RRRrrrRRRR, "Ok, Donald, move your head down across Julie's stomach!", RRRrrrrRR, "Ok, Julie, come!", RRRrrrr.... It was like that, all the time. And after about four hours or something, you just left, you know? Couldn't make love for a week. It just destroyed you.
But: When you look at the scene, you say, Nick Roeg was a brilliant filmmaker. Because you don't see people making love. What you see is a little bit of a marriage, then people getting dressed. Then, a little bit of a marriage, then people making love. But you're only there for, like, 15 seconds. And then, people getting dressed. And then, you're back there. So you have this whole montage -- and people have forgotten about montage, this wonderful thing that Nick Roeg used so that people remember that, not as seeing Donald and Julie on the screen. They look at that and they remember themselves, having made love. And it takes you back into a personal experience and it was perfect. That's why the scene is memorable. Because they remember themselves. That's what's really wonderful about good filmmaking. If good filmmaking can take you into yourself, and enrich yourself, and reembody a part of your own past experience and bring it into the present every time that film exists for you, then it's wonderful.
Would you like to have a funeral like the one in the film?
I've decided not to have a funeral.
You'll just go on living?
Exactly. I do not wish to die. I have a wonderful life.
You played a corpse in End of the Game (Der Richter and Sein Henker), based on the novel by Friedrich D黵renmatt. Do you enjoy playing corpses?
No. It was for Maximilian Schell. He said, "Listen, this is the corpse of a very important character, and I'm lost if I just put an extra in there as the corpse. It won't mean anything." And he made such a persuasive argument that I agreed to do it.
But back to not wanting to die.
I have a very happy life and a wonderful family and a very beautiful wife and we grow old nicely and we have a pretty good time. So, I won't plan on a funeral per se because I was thinking, you know, I don't have a lot of friends and a funeral is a time of celebration and I don't think a lot of people would come.
Oh, come on.
No, I don't think so. No, I think maybe it'd be better not to die.
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