By Michael Stein

(This interview originally appeared in Outré #1)

"Lifting Ed Wood enormously is Landau's astounding performance as the old Hungarian, Bela Lugosi. Looking and sounding very much like the real thing, Landau brilliantly conveys the ego, pride, hurt and gratitude of a man in his twilight and, despite his character's grand theatricality, gives the film its most human moments."-Variety

 In Tim Burton's biopic of the eccentric filmmaker who gave the world Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda, Martin Landau plays faded horror icon Bela Lugosi, opposite Johnny Depp's Ed Wood. For Landau, it's another in a series of memorable and quite diverse portrayals. He's played everything from megalomaniacs to milquetoasts, texturing each role with his years of experience as an actor and teacher.

Initially a cartoonist with the New York Daily News, Landau resigned from the newspaper to study acting. He was accepted into Lee Strasberg's acclaimed Actors Studio, where he learned his craft with aspiring actors James Dean and Steve McQueen. Roles on stage and in live television followed.

Moving to the west coast, Landau was cast in numerous films, including North by Northwest, Cleopatra, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and Nevada Smith. Perhaps best known for his starring roles in the television series Mission: Impossible and Space 1999, Landau has been nominated twice for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award (for Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors). He has been a director and a teacher for more than a quarter century (Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, and Jack Nicholson have worked under his aegis), and is currently Executive Director of the Actors Studio, a post he shares with directors Mark Rydell and Sydney Pollack.

In this Outré interview, Landau reflects upon his performance in Ed Wood and, in the process, offers trenchant observations on the acting technique.

OUTRÉ: How were you cast in the Bela Lugosi role?

LANDAU: Tim Burton called me out of the blue. He said I was his first and only choice. We had a meeting, I read the script, and became very excited. It's really a pleasure to work with Tim. I had the best time...and my daughter Juliet is in the movie too. She plays [Wood stock company player] Loretta King.

OUTRÉ: You toured nationally with the stage play Dracula between 1984-85. Is there an attraction on your part to Bela Lugosi's life and career?

LANDAU: I had no more interest in him than I have in any actor. When I did Dracula I was very curious about him because the play is the same one he did in 1927 on Broadway.

For Ed Wood, I did a lot of work in terms of wanting to get the essence of Lugosi. When I first met with Tim, one of the things we talked about was the makeup. Both of us felt that if the makeup didn't work, I wouldn't want to do it nor would he want me to do it. So we got together with Rick Baker, who's wonderful, and we played with it. We were going to do a makeup test without sound; while I was in the chair I started talking, and an accent starting coming. We called Tim and asked if we shoot the test with sound. So we did our first test with sound and in color. We looked at it on the television monitor. Out of all of this came the clarity that we needed to do the movie in black and white, because you don't think of Lugosi in color. All of this evolved as we were playing with it.

OUTRÉ: How did you prepare for the role?

LANDAU: I watched 25 of his films, and six or seven of the interviews he gave on film over the years. He was always very aware of the camera when he was being interviewed, but there was a difference to him in actual life as opposed to his performance.

Once we got the makeup, I realized my face is much more expressive than Lugosi's, in terms of what it does. So I had to learn to subordinate certain things and learn his face. I actually did that muscularly, by doing certain things with my eyes and my mouth. I show a lot of teeth when I smile, he didn't. I literally had to learn how to react in different ways.OUTRÉ: You've played historical characters before, but Bela Lugosi had and still has a highly visible profile in our pop culture-both his face and voice. I'd imagine it was a different type of acting process for you.

LANDAU: Yes. Impressionists and impersonators have done Lugosi for years, and they've gone over the top with him. I'm also aware that Lugosi was very dramatic and very theatrical-very extreme, actually, but awfully good. He had a complete belief in what he was doing and a great command of the space he inhabited. My big problem, of course, was that I did not want him to be a caricature. Anyone twenty-five and older clearly knows who Lugosi is, so that's always pretty interesting ground when you're playing a character who's also a morphine addict, an alcoholic, down on his luck, and is up and down because of the substances he used; a character who ran the gamut.

OUTRÉ: His last years were tragic ones.

LANDAU: Those years were terrible. He had been forgotten by the Hollywood system and Ed Wood was basically the only one who would hire him. But even when Lugosi was sick and in pain, he gave his best until the very end, which is what I convey in the film. I wanted to bring some new insight into Lugosi--the pain, the difficulty, the lack of glamor in his life. I don't believe it's ever been done before.

I really became very fond of Lugosi; I liked him. I identified with him in a lot of ways and I felt a great empathy towards him. By the same token, I'm aware that this is, in a sense, some sort of a dark comedy and so I tried to make my choices with a double edge-comedic and tragic, which is not easy but very much in keeping with what I felt. There was something ludicrous and funny and sad and pained, yet there was something comical about the entire condition. I mean, here was this very serious actor in this group of people--the Ed Wood stock company, probably the worst group actors who were ever put together. And here you had this serious actor from the Europe tossed into this mélange.

Contents [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Next Page