The acting legend on channeling decades of personal passions into the role of a melancholy hitman in Wild Horse Nine.
I’ll admit it – the prospect of talking to the actor John Malkovich was a daunting one when faced with a career of such magnificent scope and diversity. Toggling constantly between stage and screen, Malkovich has made a name as someone who brings a sense of literary gravitas to any role he takes on. My first encounter with the actor was being shown Gary Sinise’s 1992 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’, in which Malkovich brought tragic lunk Lennie so vividly to life. Notable early roles included the vapour-inducing cad, the Vicomte de Valmont in Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons, and as a deranged would-be political assassin in Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire. He crossed the pop Rubicon with his role as Cyrus the Virus in 1997 action spectacular Con Air, became a metatextual in-joke in Being John Malkovich and presented his comic chops in the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. Martin McDonagh provides him with one of his juiciest roles in Wild Horse Nine, working opposite Sam Rockwell as a CIA operative in his twilight years, heading to Easter Island in 1973 to contemplate his eventful life, which may have involved assisting in the assassination of JFK.
LWLies: Where were you on Friday, 22 November, 1963?
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Malkovich: I was in primary school in fourth grade. The news came during the lunch hour. I think David Miller, who I later played football with and who was in our class, broke the news that JFK had been shot. David rushed in and announced what had happened because he’d gone home for lunch and heard it on the radio. I remember it very well.
Did the news have any impact on you at that young age?
Well, it did, but it would only really manifest about 25 years later, when I read Don DeLillo’s novel ‘Libra’, which I then started adapting as a screenplay. Later I decided to abandon it, because Oliver Stone had made JFK and so there wasn’t really any kind of interest, because the book is perhaps too complex for the cinema. It’s a work of fiction about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, his mother and his marriage to Marina, etc. In ‘Libra’ DeLillo refers to the assassination as the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century, and I would say that was accurate.
And the current century also. It feels as if there’s still this fascination with JFK in America.
Well, without putting too fine a point on it, I think the figure, or the most recent figures, is something like 60 per cent of Americans don’t necessarily take as gospel the official narrative about the Kennedy assassination.
Were you at all interested in the conspiracy side of things prior to having read ‘Libra’?
No, I think a lot of people are ignorant of the fact that your government may not tell you the truth about any number of things. And that you may never ever find out what the truth actually is. But you might be wise not to take everything you’re told at face value.
Did you discuss ‘Libra’ with Martin McDonagh? Was he interested in the fact that you had done that adaptation?
I don’t know if I discussed that with him. I did send him a couple of things regarding that, but this was long after the screenplay [for Wild Horse Nine] was written. There’s quite a fascinating YouTube video in which a man named James Files – although that wasn’t his real name – confesses to being the second shooter on the grassy knoll. And that was fascinating for me in how closely it resembled DeLillo’s recounting of the events in ‘Libra’. All this established a kind of… I wouldn’t call it a narrative, more a timeline of certain things that happened on that day. So, oddly enough, I not only adapted with DeLillo, we made a play out of ‘Libra’, and he came for the entire rehearsal period and wrote some beautiful additions to the novel – very theatrical ones.
Were there any other literary inspirations for you for this role, maybe connected to Chile?
There’s a book by the great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño called ‘Nazi Literature in the Americas’, and it’s essentially 43-ish obituaries of fake Nazis who never existed and all of whom had deranged literary obsessions. One of those pieces, which is called ‘The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman’, is about a Chilean poet, Air Force cadet and sky rider who wrote his poems in the guise, to a great extent, of an adventurer and representative of the Pinochet government. I’ve been travelling with that piece as well for three years, which is a classical music collaboration. The chapters are slightly childish, but very mordant and apparently based on a lot of Bolaño’s left-wing friends. Do you know Bolaño’s work?
I know of him but have never read anything by him.
He did two quite important novels. One called ‘The Savage Detectives’, set in Mexico, which is a massive novel. The other is called ‘2666’ about the murder of women in Ciudad Juárez in northern Mexico, and it’s a brilliant and profoundly upsetting book. ‘Nazi Literature’ is minor by Bolaño’s standards, but it has its beauty because it’s essentially about wasted talent.
Are you able to recall your first encounter with Martin McDonagh’s work? Had you seen any of his plays?
Yes, I had seen ‘Hangmen’. I had never seen ‘A Behanding in Spokane’, but I had read it and was actually offered it and loved it, but couldn’t do it because I was doing a Glasgow music collaboration that was prebooked. Because that field has a tendency to book a very long time in advance.
Which role would that have been? The Christopher Walken role perhaps?
I honestly don’t remember. But I love the play and I thought it was hilarious. I like Martin’s films very much and he’s a wonderful wordsmith and really great with characters. I thought the script for this film was just beautiful.
I think that a lot of that beauty emanates from how the script is delivered, largely by you and Sam [Rockwell]. I wondered what your relationship with comedy is?
I’ve done a lot of it, but not always so much in movies. I’ve only made a very few comedies. One called The Great Buck Howard, one called Making Mr Right, a comic series called Space Force. Most of the comedy things I did were Saturday Night Live or on the stage. I do very much like comedy. Yet this is a very particular kind of comedy, based in character and in relationships, and very often with extreme melancholic overtones. There is a great line about how the character of Chris happened to be there when Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese leader, was killed, and he’s recounting how Lumumba said to him, ‘But Chris, if you kill me, you’ll be killing democracy in Africa for the next 50 years,’ and Chris says to him, ‘Well, what do you think we’re trying to do?’ Very funny but also very terrible.
Do you have any thoughts about what makes good comedy?
Good comedy, to me, is based on pain. It just has to be your pain, not mine. Martin is particularly good in this regard. You have these characters and they fight not about killing people, but more the etiquette of killing people. Can you kill somebody while eating a cheeseburger? And that is just a moral gauge that’s beyond belief, even for CIA assassins. I think Martin is terrific at that. I mean, I think he’s terrific at a lot of things, but that in particular I think is really well observed.
In critics’ parlance, one might say that you and Sam Rockwell have this tremendous chemistry in the film. Do you think this idea of chemistry – of having this special connection to another performer – actually exists?
I remember when I started doing movies, I came from the theatre and they would always say to me that the camera doesn’t lie. The more I thought about that, the contrary seemed to be true, and that’s entirely what it’s for. So that’s my experience. In general, when you are shooting a film, all you need are a few good seconds. So if you do 40 takes, you need nine seconds of one take, 13 seconds of another take. What you’re seeing is something highly manipulated in every way. Added to that, a film is then shot in a certain way, on a certain lens, with certain lighting, with certain action, with certain dialogue etc. Everything is very, very chosen. Theatre is organic, it’s ephemeral, and Martin does both, and I think that informs his work. So in this case, that might be where this idea of chemistry comes from.
In your view, what are Sam’s qualities as an actor?
I think Sam is a very special actor, someone I’ve always loved and have loved working with. He has a great method, is very well trained and very serious and very smart and both funny and very touching. I think of Sam as a kind of colleague who returns all the serves, and often does so with a considerable degree of spin on the ball. He keeps you on your toes, and that’s a great thing.
How was it being on Easter Island for so long on location? Had you been there before?
No. But I loved it. Usually I was working, but if I wasn’t I was walking. It’s a lovely place to walk around, very volcanic, verdant, quite empty, very remote, not much there except the beauty of nature. I liked it very much.
What other location shoots have you done that were similarly remote? I recently re-watched Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky and that must have been quite interesting.
Yeah, the part we shot at the Great Banks, which are at the beginning of the Great Dunes of the Sahara, in a little oasis town called Béni Abbès in Algeria. That’s fairly remote. They had a zoo that only had fennecs – the little desert fox with the huge ears. I went there a number of times. I shot a film with Volker Schlöndorff called The Ogre north of Trondheim in Norway. Because they supposedly had the biggest moose in Europe who I had a scene with. I’m in a little hunting cabin where I had to feed the moose carrots and he kept trying to poke my eyes out with his antler. But fuck him. So yes, that was pretty remote.
In the film your character has been moved to write his memoirs, and with the sheer diversity and scale of your career and your interests, has it ever occurred to you to write one?
I couldn’t face it. I find writing torturous. In the film obviously there’s a sense of finality to it, you know. It’s like a sort of existential bookmark, so maybe that would be a reason not to do it. Maybe it’s something very Midwestern, but all the experiences I’ve had I think are personal and should remain that way. I think it would be a violation of friends and colleagues. I understand why people do it and why some people like to read them, but I can’t imagine ever doing that.
