Pete Hamill - Piecework

“Where the book has helped me is to fill in the internal life, the subtext, the thoughts that go through my mind above and beyond what one says,” Finney says one afternoon in his room at the Racquet Club in Cuernavaca. “Because often in life, you don’t think of those things, or about what you say; you say what you say. A phrase may come out, a line may come out; but the general feeling behind it is often, in life, a sort of nonspecific area that you’re preoccupied with, from which lines come out. So I thought the novel was important to me to fill in that sort of interior thought pattern. One does this anyway as an actor; that’s one of the things that you’re supposed to do. I mean, that’s what one does: invest the undercurrent with all kinds of thoughts that may be applicable to the situation the character is in at any time. But it helped to have the novel.”

In Mexico, when not before the cameras, Finney is living to some extent the way Geoffrey Firmin might have lived in 1938. He drinks only tequila, usually taking a taste before shooting; he makes a ritual of eating breakfast each morning with a Mexican family living near the location that has begun to make special meals for the crew. Such activities are not simply a device to find the character of the Consul.

“It’s all to me part of the total experience, of trying to live the moment — the present tense of the matter — when you work,” Finney says. “The whole Mexican experience of doing this film is not repeatable in my lifetime. I’m not saying I won’t do another film in Mexico, but this subject, this experience, these circumstances at this time are not repeatable. One wants to relish all that, as well as the work. And, of course, it all feeds the work. So in this part, I find myself having a tequila; I had never really drunk tequila before. I’d been to Mexico before, but I never drink tequila in London or Spain. So suddenly I tried one or two kinds of tequila and mescal, just for the flavor. So that one is mildly — mildly — sort of savoring what the Consul seriously put himself through. It’s not that they, or it, help; but they might help. One of the jobs is that [as an actor] you’re going somewhere that’s unfamiliar to you. You’re trying to get yourself into unfamiliar territory in your imagination. So you help prepare the ground so you might get an idea you never had before. There’s no guarantee. It’s not to be relied upon. But it might help.”

Finney was first asked about playing the Consul in 1981, while he was portraying Daddy Warbucks in Annie, also directed by Huston. He was approached by a bearded, New York-based German intellectual named Wieland Schulz-Keil, who with his partner, Moritz Borman, was determined to bring Under the Volcano to the screen (at that point, they were almost finished with the enervating task of clearing the rights).

Huston loved the way Schulz-Keil looked, and drafted him for the part of a bomb-throwing anarchist in Annie. But Lowry’s novel was the German’s primary concern. He’d read it as a boy; now he wanted to see it on the screen. Huston was the ideal director, Finney the perfect Consul. Finney hadn’t read the book before Schulz-Keil’s first approach. “He told me they had an outline for this script, and could he send it to me,” Finney remembers. “I said, ‘Of course.’ “ A friend coincidentally gave him a copy of Under the Volcano; there had been some industry talk about the possibility of the movie being made, and she thought he should read the novel. At the same time, Schulz-Keil sent over his outline.

“It was the thickest document I’d ever seen,” Finney remembers, “so I thought, Well, I might as well read the novel. Like most people, I found the novel very difficult to get into. To plug into somebody else’s stream of consciousness is always hard. But then I thought what an interesting story it was, what an interesting situation it was. The pain of it, the anguish of it kind of struck me. Then periodically I would get new outlines, and then scripts.”

Meanwhile, thirty-two-year-old Michael Fitzgerald had been brought into the production end of the movie. Huston invited him to come to The American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award dinner honoring Huston last year in Los Angeles, where a deal was worked out with Schulz-Keil and Borman. The two Germans had exhausted their bankroll in the process of clearing the rights, and had been turned down by four studios. At the Huston dinner was Alberto Isaac, a director general of the Mexican Cinematographic Institute, who expressed interest in helping with the financing. Fitzgerald sent Tommy Shaw to Mexico to work with Isaac, and three weeks later Fitzgerald arrived to make a deal.

“For twenty years,” Fitzgerald says, “Mexicans have gotten screwed by virtually every outsider that has come in here. I wasn’t prepared to do that. In our picture, they are full participants, from every source of income, all over the world. They recoup in the same position, they have the same proportionate profit participation that everybody has. On top of that, they were given all profits in Mexico itself, as a gift from John.” Fitzgerald sold American rights to Universal Classics, while Twentieth Century-Fox took the rest of the world.

At the same time, casting was proceeding. Finney agreed to do the picture. Huston wanted Jacqueline Bisset for Yvonne; he’d directed her early in her career in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Fitzgerald had been impressed by Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited and showed his work to Huston, who approved him for the part of Hugh. And the work with Gallo continued at Puerto Vallarta.

“All of a sudden,” Fitzgerald says, “we were … I mean this all started at the AFI dinner in March for Chrissakes, and by mid-June we were in feverish preproduction in Mexico.” He remembers Huston’s original interest. “He said, ‘Well, Volcano is there, and it will never get done otherwise; what about taking it over and doing it in the same vein that we did Wise Blood? Which was basically: small, tight, putting every fucking dime on the screen, rather than on bullshit. And that’s what we’ve done.”

Jacqueline Bisset was approached indirectly, through John Foreman, who was Huston’s friend and had produced The Man Who Would Be King. “He told me about the project and asked me would I read it,” Bisset says. “And I thought, Well, it’s an interesting idea, an interesting combination of people.” A first-draft screenplay was sent to her. “My part was not particularly fascinating, but I felt it had to go one way or another: more enigmatic, or much more ‘directioned.’ Both of which seemed fine, if they could move it in one direction or another. John, Wieland, and Guy were all down in Puerto Vallarta working together when I got the second script. So I went to Puerto Vallarta to see them. I read the book in between. In the book Yvonne is not that clear. She’s there very much, if you go through the book looking for her. But I needed to start from some concrete point. There are a lot of abstractions in the book, a lot of symbolism, and things difficult for me to understand: just in terms of story line, from A to B to C, to the end. In the second script, a lot of my queries were answered. I was very touched by the atmosphere of the piece; it haunted me completely; it’s still with me very much. I think it’ll stay with me.”

Bisset had some apprehensions about working again with Huston, and thus found the novel a comfort; it, too, answered some of her questions. “I didn’t imagine John Huston would be someone with whom I could be having a million detailed conversations. I felt one would go to him during the course of shooting for major decisions, rather than quibbling-quabbling. I heard he liked actors to prepare — I’d worked with him before, and didn’t have a particularly close contact with him. I was in that film [she played Paul Newman’s girlfriend in Judge Roy Bean], but didn’t have the benefit of scene preparation or anything like that; I did my bit and it was fine. I think it’s important to know the style of the director and what he expects. Some people like to change everything. And on Judge Roy Bean, they were rewriting the script before every scene, and actors were left with quite large speeches to learn, fifteen minutes before. And I thought, That’s something I would not like to be in [again], because I’m a slow study.”