Martin Landau continued...

OUTRÉ: Do you find that a director who has had acting experience has more respect for the craft?

LANDAU: Without question. Directors with that sort of experience are very, very conscious of how to talk to an actor. Talking in results doesn't help an actor to get to it, you know. Little words can sometimes turn a key. Some directors just don't know how to talk to actors. Those who come out of the cutting rooms, the directors who started as editors, have a whole different orientation.

But just talking in results doesn't help an actor. No one gets up in the morning and says, "I'm going to fall in love today." To fall in love is a very active thing to play, but it certainly is not a conscious thing. It's very visceral, you know. "What do I do? How do I make an audience feel that that is happening to me?" And the more you live as a person, the more experience you go through, the more you've got an enormous inventory of background to draw upon. A young actor with limited experience may have a problem.

Something that really helped me years ago was when I replaced Franchot Tone in "Uncle Vanya." I was in my twenties here I was playing a fifty-year-old man who was suffering from all kinds of problems-none of which were my problems at that time. This made the character very foreign to me. But I began to examine him from a different vantage. I said, "Okay, in order for me to play this guy, it's not just a question of looking old, but how does this guy think? Why is he doing this?" So I came up with insights which enabled me to play him. And I could play him much better today, without as much work.

OUTRÉ: I suppose acting is a form of mental projection, where you project out of your own personality...you have to get into somebody's else's persona.

LANDAU: I believe we all have so much of everything inside us, that it's a question of ending certain parts and subordinating other parts. If you're a sensitive instrument and have lived a full life-filled with all kinds of pain and joy--it isn't so much a question of how does your character express his emotions, but rather, how does he repress his emotions? It's how a character hides his emotions that tells us what he is.

OUTRÉ: The drama of what is left unsaid.

LANDAU: Exactly. No one walks into room full of people at a party and says, "Hello, everybody, I'm embarrassed." Normally, a person is doing everything he can to make himself appear comfortable, when in fact he is not.

But it's not only being observant about repression; you have to be aware that the kinds of things go on inside of us. You can meet someone and have ten people describe that person in ten different ways, all of which may be right. You may meet someone on a given evening when you happen to be ebullient and witty. That person's image of you would be different from someone who met you the following night, when something happened that made you much more introspective. These people would have a diametrically different point of view about you, yet they'd both be right.

OUTRÉ: So are you leery of people who seem happy all of the time?

LANDAU: Absolutely. How can you be happy all the time? Mood swings and changes, I think that's just part of being. No one can be constant. No one. Ronald Reagan was so constant, it worried me! I knew him a little bit out here, and he was quite different. He was moody. I would see him out walking around the lot years ago, and he was quiet and reflective. But once he became President, he was always that "wind-up toy." As a result, he was always a little less than real. I thought it was his best performance ever.

OUTRÉ: A public image can do things to you.

LANDAU: Yes. There are times when you can do what you do, and other times you just can't. I value my privacy-I mean I love it. Especially when you paint or you write; those moments are wonderful moments. I also love people, I also hate people! It depends on who I'm with, what's going on. People can be a bloody pain in the neck, and they can be wonderful and fulfilling.

OUTRÉ: That's why we keep getting up in the morning-wondering what will happen.

LANDAU: Oh, absolutely. You don't know what's around the corner-and you shouldn't.

OUTRÉ: Back in the early days of live television, why were stage actors chosen over over film actors?

LANDAU: Well, first of all, most actors in New York were stage actors, principally. And live television in those days was centered in New York. There were radio actors and there were theatre actors. The radio actors were really very mechanical-mechanical in that their behavior was minimalized just by the nature of the medium.

What live television did was combine the elements of film and theatre, because it was going on as you did it, being broadcast live, This was before videotape, although they used kinescopes to send to the west coast because it was before coaxial cable was available. The kinescope was a very primitive process; you made a 16mm print off of the tube image, and a lot of distortion usually accompanied that.

OUTRÉ: So stage actors were more adaptable to this new medium.

LANDAU: Yes. Those were hectic yet exciting times. You rehearsed all week: you did a tech, then you did a dress [rehearsal], and then you did air. That countdown [to airtime] was like being blasted into space! Years later when I heard Cape Canaveral, I said to myself, "Boy, that takes me back to those live days when the director would say, 'Okay, ten seconds... nine... eight... seven... good luck everybody... five... four... three... two... one...'" and then the theme would come up. You couldn't even go to the bathroom. You were stuck. It was an hour of running, lighting cigarettes, changing clothes on the run, coming up in the scene. You have just been in a scene and they move in on the actor you're doing it with; once they have the cameras on him, you slip out of that chair, you change jackets and ties on the move, you slip into another chair, already talking when you get there, pulling back to include you in a two-shot, and you've got to look as if you've been sitting there for forty-five minutes when you've only just got there after having run across an entire studio. Those were the days with the element of immediacy plus awareness of three cameras going out live.

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