Acting Out                                                                                                  :: back to main page ::

By Margy Rochlin

American Film

November 1987

 

Mickey Rourke’s office, located in a Spanish-style apartment complex in Beverly Hills, has the forest-green walls and brown-stained wooden furniture of a gentleman’s private den. The antiseptically tidy rooms are not what you’d expect from an actor whose personal taste runs to gamy-looking clothes and a slippery pompadour.

 

Rourke was born sometime between 1950 and 1956 (the date mysteriously fluctuates in various profiles) in Schenectady, New York, and was raised in the tough, black Miami neighborhood of Liberty City. His appeal is built on America’s attraction to troubled hard guys with detached-but-sweet smiles. The characters he’s portrayed in Body Heat, Diner, Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village, 9 ½ Weeks, Year of the Dragon and Angel Heart display a psychology textbook’s worth of dysfunctional conditions.

 

In Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly, he approximates poet Charles Bukowski as alter ego Henry Chinaski, with an adenoidal wheeze, a rolling “Alley Oop” walk, and an unwashed appearance so authentic you can almost catch the eye-watering down breeze. But today, when Rourke roars up on a vintage Harley Davidson, he looks almost pink scrubbed, wearing- on an oppressively hot day - a black Hugo Boss sweatshirt and leather vest.

 

The minute he crosses his motorcycle booted feet on his desk, it’s time for business. He’s willing to respond to any question and even his most embittered views are delivered in the same quaking, hesitant tone of voice.

 

This vulnerability many have been connected to his work on Mike Hodges’s A Prayer for the Dying. Rourke claims his four months of meticulous research and dialogue study for the film were sabotaged because of the studio’s quest to “make a commercialized version of a thriller.” (Since then Hodges’s has requested that his own name be removed from the film.)

 

“They’ve put it in the papers that they paid me a million dollars, which I was happy enough to get, says Rourke of the latest installment in the ongoing public dispute. “Well, I’ve turned down movies for two and three million dollars. Everyone in this town knows I cannot be bought.”

 

Question: How did you get involved with Barfly?

Mickey Rourke: I’m not a Bukowski devotee, though there’s a lot of people that live and die by what the guy says. I respect him enough to hang his picture in my office, but it isn’t like somebody mentions Bukowski and I flip out. So it was through Barbet Schroeder. He came to England while I was working -unfortunately-on A Prayer for the Dying, and close to a nervous breakdown.

 

Question: Why?

Mickey Rourke: I had worked for four months with Brendan Gunn, a dialogue teacher, on a Northern Ireland accent. Which was really hard to do. I wanted, in this particular film, to maintain a certain concentration with the dialect. The first day of shooting, I had a line “If you’re dead, does it matter?” And with a Northern Ireland accent, it come out more (in a thick , Irish brogues), “If yer daed, does it motter?” And this guy come over to me, this little shitface, and he goes (accusingly), “What did you say?” And I say to someone “Who’s he?” And they say “That’s Larry Jackson from (Samuel) Goldwyn’s company.” And he’s sitting there telling me “Do you have to say it like that?” And I say, “You guys are the ones who wanted me to do this movie; you wanted an actor who could do the accent.” And he says, “Yeah, but not that way. Could you lighten up a little?” That’s were it started. And it went like that from the first day of the shoot all the way to the last.

 

What (my breakdown) was really all about was a hatred for them, for hustling me to pimp, to make money for them by making their kind of movie. A doctor had to come and give me sedatives almost every day. I couldn’t speak, get words out of my mouth. My hands would start going like this (makes a trembling, spastic motion), and I had no control over it. I had to talk long distance to a head doctor here in California, because when I get angry and have to keep it inside I get sick.

 

Question: What kind of advice did the psychiatrist give you?

Mickey Rourke: I didn’t go to a shrink. I’d go to a priest before I’d go to a shrink. (Long pause. Laughs.) I did go to a shrink, I have to admit. But I felt like I needed a priest. We talked about the fact that I was in a very serious place, and I was fighting a losing battle. The shrink said, “You’re on a ledge and you can go either way.” He told me, “Look, you got two weeks left. If you had six weeks left, I would seriously tell you that you could not continue to finish the movie in this state of mind.”

I told the shrink that I didn’t want to take the pills the doctor gave me. He sent me a (relaxation) tape to listen to so I could try to sleep at night, so I was at the point where I could get myself just enough together to go to work.

But, I couldn’t even leave my hotel room to talk to Barbet (when he came to England). Between you, me, and the birds, I had no intention of going back to work for a long, long time. But Barbet kept coming around. The more he kept coming around, the more I kept running away from him. To be quite honest, I was terrified of losing my mind, terrified of going to work again. And I didn’t know Barbet; it wasn’t like Cimino, or Coppola, or Nic Roeg, or Alan Parker - directors that I trust.

 

When I was back in L.A., Barbet and Bukowski came here one night and everything was real calm. Barbet didn’t yet know what had happened in England, you know, and I was ashamed to tell him. Buckowski seemed like a nice guy, and interesting. Under normal circumstances, I would have met with the director every day, talked the character out. But I was still fragile. So we met again in two weeks, then again a week after that. Then, because it was Cannon Films and you know how they are.

 

Question: How are they?

Rourke: Very difficult for a lot of film makers to deal with. Barbet was fighting to maintain a certain dream of his, and make that dream clear to Menahem (Golan, Cannon’s chairman of the board). At one point, Barbet threatened to cut his (own) finger off. I guess he finally got what he wanted. Anyway, I was hearing all these stories, and it wasn’t doing me any good.

 

Question: What kind of research did you do for the part?

Rourke: I had no time to do any research, nor did I care to do any. Mentally, I wasn’t about to. Psychologically, I really didn’t give a fuck. Artistically, I didn’t want to make the character clichéd. I wanted to give him sort of a life of his own.

 

I was drawing off the fact that I really didn’t care if I stunk or not. That gave me a certain freedom to go all the way with the character. To me, that was growth in itself: It maybe has been a little self-destructive, but it gave me the sense that I really didn’t have anything to prove.

 

You know, my father died very young from drink. I have always been a little wary of drunks. I don’t have much use for people who turn to drink under pressure. I don’t like what alcohol or stimulants do to you - being out of control. I don’t see drinking as romantically as people who haven’t experienced it think it is. And I think Bukowski knew I felt that way.

 

When Year of the Dragon came out and the critic slaughtered it to pieces and ripped Cimino a new asshole, I was taking a drive with him and he says “Let me tell you a story: I know a director who made a movie once, and as soon as the reviews came out, he got a bottle of whiskey and went to bed and didn’t get out of bed for the rest of his life.” Michael says “That’s what they want you to do.” And to me, Barfly is about people who’ve given up. (Drinking) is Bukowski’s choice, but I don’t have to respect him for it.  But I can still play that kind of a character, go through the motions.

 

Question: Where did that voice come from?

Rourke: That was as close to Bukowski as I could come. Whiny. It was a choice I made moments before we went out to do the first scene.

 

Question: You’ve spoken in the past year about you disillusionment with acting. Did Barfly revitalize you feelings?

Rourke: Nope.

 

Question: So what will you do?

Rourke: I’ll continue to go my own way with directors who appreciate good acting. There’s a lot of European directors who like my work. A lot of American ones are so brainwashed by the level of garbage they make that they can’t see beyond their noses. Also, I continue to do this because there’s not really any other profession I can do that’ll pay me what making movies will. So I can’t complain, can I?

 

Question: Film critic John Powers has said that of all the young stars, you’re the one who always tries to make a good movie that adults want to see.

Rourke: I don’t give a fuck about what any of the critics in this country say. I don’t recognize them. 

Question: OK, but consider the point.

Rourke: I’d rather wash dishes than do the shit (actors) do here. I don’t make the Rat Pack- whaddyacallit - Brat Pack movies, and the mediocre, safe movies that a lot of American actors are in. Somebody said about me “Well, none of his movies make any money.” Well, look at the movies that do make money. When I was at the Actors Studio, I was naive enough to think that acting was what mattered - not all the politics and hype. The way I defended Cimino after Year of the Dragon, I didn’t realize that would keep me out of work for a year and a half.