Martin Landau continued...

OUTRÉ: In a way, you fit into the same kind of scenario making this movie. You were teamed with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp and other new young actors. As someone with years of experience in both stage and film, how does this new breed differ from the young turks who studied with you back in the fifties?

LANDAU: Johnny Depp is a throwback. He's amazing; he's a very serious actor. I know some of the other young kids are a little less than serious, a little more whimsical about the whole thing. But Johnny is very professional. He's prepared, he knows his stuff and has thought about it, and jumps in with a great kind of energy.

OUTRÉ: Similar to the acting style of the fifties.

LANDAU: Without question. He has a great sensitivity, an "organic" connection to what he's doing. And Tim is wonderful because he has a great enthusiasm and is willing to open the door and let you play, which all the good directors do. Like Francis Ford Coppola [Tucker] and Alfred Hitchcock [North by Northwest]. In a sense, they hire you and say, "OK, let's see what you can bring to this."

I'll tell you one of my favorite Coppola stories. During the making of Tucker, and I said to him, "You know, I've been thinking about this scene we're going to do today. I was really ruminating and going over it last night and there's so many ways I could approach it in terms of what we've done thus far and the way the picture's going. I could literally play this scene ten or twelve different ways." He said to me, "Pick the best one."

OUTRÉ: Then it's entirely up to you.

LANDAU: In a sense it is. However, you can discuss things until you're blue in the face; what it gets down to is the actual performance. If a director allows a certain degree of freedom and exploration and play for some scenes, you can take something that's very straightforward in the script and play with it until it evolves. In Ed Wood, Tim, Johnny, and I were willing to play with a suicide scene in which my character is brandishing a gun and is going to kill himself. Well, by playing with it, that scene took on a life of its own. And while we didn't change a word of the dialogue, it took on a whole different texture.

OUTRÉ: No one is alive today who can tell you exactly what occurred during that particular incident, so if you're going to dramatize it, you have to be spontaneous.

LANDAU: Yes, and the scene really does have a great spontaneity. The texture of it keeps evolving, whereas on paper it's pretty straightforward. It's quite rich and enlightening and revealing. All of this came out of a rehearsal process that was free and uninhibited. It was between Tim, Johnny and myself to play with the scene like a big chunk of clay, and we decided to make it into that specific statue instead of something else.

OUTRÉ: Does your character have a "death scene"?

LANDAU: I'd rather not tell you that...but he does die during the course of the movie. There is what would be known as a "death scene," yet it's not a death scene. It comes toward the end of the picture and is a sort of surprise.

There's an arc: I start off on a high note and end on a high note. In between there are ups and downs, a sort of roller coaster ride, because I felt he wasn't quite ready to die at the beginning of the movie. So I chose to play the opening scene almost like the Bela Lugosi "of yore,"with him meeting and accepting a ride from Ed Wood. In the course of this ride I sort of "get old" in front of your eyes. A lot of this comes from selection and choice: "What do I do here? What best illuminates this guy in this context?" There are always so many ways to interpret a role. Sometimes Tim would say, "You're too robust here." And I would say, "No, I don't want to play the third act in the first act." He would listen to me, and if it made sense, he would buy it completely. Most of the time he did, because I had given it an enormous amount of thought.

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