Hurt was lured into reading a script about alternative states of consciousness
— “And I couldn’t stand up for 45 minutes, because it was every idea I had
been thinking about. I went back and said, ‘I can’t make movies, because I’m
too thin-skinned. I’ll wither under the assault of generalised fame. But you
have to make it.’ ” The way he tells it, the producers had already seen 500
actors and would pull the plug unless Hurt agreed to do it. So he negotiated
from a position of strength.
“I had no obligations to do PR. I had a guarantee that I was personally in
control of the character. I had director approval until 48 hours before we
started filming. And I had those protections in my contract for many, many,
many years. You couldn’t make me market a film that I didn’t approve of. You
couldn’t make me sell something where I thought I’d been lied to or cheated.
You couldn’t make me smile on something I didn’t want to smile on.”
He started as he meant to continue. For his second film, Eyewitness, he asked
the producers to give half his fee to the fringe theatres of Off Off
Broadway. They refused, so he gave it away himself. Then came Body Heat, the
first of his collaborations with Lawrence Kasdan. “I spent the first six
hours with Larry Kasdan telling him why he couldn’t direct it. He didn’t
know what he had. It was a gem, pure and simple.” Did he take kindly to
that? “Yes, he did. He listened. Because I was the only person who was
honest with him.”
By that time, was he hooked? “A person doesn’t like to admit that, but maybe.”
And so he rose, picking fights and good scripts along the way. For him, The
Big Chill was “almost a classic, but not”. Kasdan lost final cut, and out
went the flashback coda (and, famously, Kevin Costner with it). “I always
knew that what was susceptible in the screenplay was the most audacious
stroke in it. And as actors, we had to prove we were good enough to play
ourselves younger than currently. I was the only one who had done it
before.” This turns out to be a familiar refrain. Hurt on the small print of Hollywood’s
standard contract: “I’m the only actor I know who’s even read it.” Hurt on
making an effort to find out about lenses and cameras: “I don’t know anybody
else who asks the DP (director of photography), ‘What lens you got?’ ”
His carefully acquired knowledge paid off most handsomely in Broadcast News,
in which he played a newscaster who makes grace under pressure seem
vacuously easy. For three years running, he was nominated for an Oscar. He
won the first as a crossdressing convict in Spider Woman. He did the film on
spec, for no pay upfront; and, as you might guess, was “tremendously
conflicted” about receiving the statuette. “It was also the night they gave
one to the producer of 007 for selling more theatre tickets than anybody
ever sold. So I’m going, ‘Is this the same golden dildo they ram down your
throat to make sure you never work unconditionally again?’
I thought I was going to have a couple of drinks and watch the other
salivating guys in the penguin suits, like you study a character. But when
they called my name out, I really thought, ‘Oh no, no, no, no, don’t put
that target on my chest.’ I went up on stage, and Sally Field put it in my
hand and I said, ‘Sally, what the hell do I do with this?’ She looked at me
hard, because she knew me — she was a wonderful woman — and she said, ‘You
live with it.’ ”
However easy that relationship with the camera, relationships with humans have
proved less governable. He married the actress Mary Beth Hurt at 21, then
went on to have four children with three further women, including the French
actress Sandrine Bonnaire (there were no children with Matlin). It is no
surprise to learn that his own childhood was spent on the move. He was born
in 1950 in Washington DC. His father worked for the State Department, so
Hurt spent his first six years in the South Pacific: “I spoke sentences of
Guamanian before I spoke English.” Then his parents divorced and his mother
remarried the son of the founder of Time magazine. To visit his father, he
had to board planes bound for the post-imperial Third World: Lahore,
Khartoum, Mogadishu. Needless to say, Hurt now regards it all as
character-building.
“You see an immense amount when you’re young that you can’t see when you’re
past puberty, because by then you represent something. I don’t have a
problem with poor people. I don’t have a problem with black people. I was
living in, on and around them from the time I was a baby. So I didn’t see
any difference. I just didn’t see my best friends as black or white.”
Whatever the inside dope on his private life, when it comes to work, Hurt has
no patience with the idea that he became difficult. “‘I hear that you’re
obstreperous,’” he says in a poor-diddums voice. “‘You must be neurotic or
temperamental or something worse.’ ‘No. No. You’re wrong.’ ‘Oh, you told me
I’m wrong. You are obstreperous.’ You hear what I’m saying? You can’t win
that way. Really, all you can do is just do damn good work.” And if damn
good work involves pulling colleagues up by the bootstraps, so be it. Do
they welcome that? “Not initially. But if they get six weeks, and if you get
a chance to prove, rather than just say, that you believe in their work as
much as you believe in your own, I’ve never walked away from an actor who
didn’t appreciate being treated as a human being.”
Hurt, in short, would seem to be unvisited by doubt. In an industry that, the
way he would see it, requires too much subservience from its workers, this
has been a debilitating quality. It is actor-directors who, above all, have
started to see the point of him again. In the time it takes him to sink
three slow pints of bitter, I ask, in as many different ways as I can think
of, if he admits the wheels might have loosened even a little after The
Accidental Tourist.
“I’ve never been sorry about anything I chose to do,” is what he says. Another
of the things he has no doubt about is the rightness of that prediction of
his to the producers of Altered States. “Fame,” he says, “is not a happy
condition for me. Having people generalise about you with any information
about you whatsoever, contempt prior to investigation — it’s a remarkable
prejudice. ‘Aren’t you who I think you are?’ ‘No, ma’am. I don’t know
anything for sure in life except one thing: I’m sure I’m not who you think I
am. I’m positive of that. Now can I go my wandering way?’”
Endgame is on Channel 4 tomorrow at 9pm
