Nick Nolte
by Brendan MacDevette – IFQ Senior Critic
IFQ magazine chats with Nick Nolte at the Newport Film Festival as he promotes his latest film The Beautiful Country. Nolte discusses his preparations and his experience while playing a blind character and America’s involvement with the Vietnam War.
IFQ: How were you introduced to this project?
Nick Nolte: Terry Malick mentioned it to me years ago; I don’t know if it was during The Thin Red Line, it probably was. You know he pops up in odd places. He taught a Harvard screenwriting class and he had a female Vietnamese student who proposed a very interesting story. He gave me maybe one line in his high-pitched voice like, “A Vietnam vet, his son was left behind.” He planted this seed because he knew that my life and my generation’s hub of morality operated around Vietnam. It is the most important event in my life in informing my morality especially politically. I had done the one part of the disillusioned Vietnam soldier in Who’ll Stop the Rain, but I had not dealt with the vet part and what was left for the vet: reconciliation. I took the role because it completed the Vietnam saga for me; it really completed the story.
I sat down with a fellow named Chuck Patterson; I have a poem from him to give you before you go. It took him twenty-eight years to write this book of poetry and it is the best book I have found on Vietnam. There are great books about Vietnam, but it’s hard to get the emotional experience out of these books, especially if you didn’t go. I didn’t go; I was a resistor on the other side. And I sat down with Chuck, Michael Graham, another writer and some other Vietnam vets and discussed The Beautiful Country and what we could achieve in a symbolic way. Several of the vets expressed that as grown men they couldn’t quite figure out how they got into killing. One vet said that it boggled his mind that as a Buddhist, he spent part of his time shooting at other people. Chuck said the issue: if the Vietnam vet could sit down with a Vietnamese national and say, hey I didn’t hate you, I didn’t set out as a kid to shoot you, this was a governmental war and I was sent here. In a way that reconciliation is achieved by the reuniting of the father and the son. Does the father remember Vietnam from the jagged perspective of mutilated bodies and everything else? No, he remembers it as a beautiful country and that’s the way it was in Vietnam, I gather. You have this terrific violence and then something of tremendous beauty.
IFQ: Does the character being from Texas inform him very much?
NN: No, not really. I think it’s Texas because Terry is from Texas. For me the back-story is being wounded and flown to one of the military hospitals, Maryland maybe. I have a sister who has a farm outside of New York and the back-story goes that she came to the hospital. I was totally blind and I went through rehab on the East Coast and learned how to function as a blind man. I became embittered and probably went through a drunken phase and then eventually worked my way to Texas. I do know one thing about the blind, they want to be independent and they want to feel like they can function. At the blind institute when I was there and watched all the blind films, I didn’t find a single blind person that would stare into space. They were much more astute in their hearing and would look you in the eye. During the cooking class, which the blind got quite a kick out of because I wasn’t a very good blind cook, I would burn myself and things like that. It’s all about learning the spatial relationships between things.
IFQ: Was it important for your character to be blind to justify the fact that he did not make a serious attempt to reconnect with the family?
NN: That and also it adds the ability for the father-son unit to go through the emotional journey that they have to go through. The son has to accept the father because he abruptly left him and his mother. If you were an American-Vietnamese at that time, you were an outcast. It wasn’t until the 80s that they made a law saying that American soldiers could go back and look for their children and bring them to America. So these boat trips were quite common, it’s an odyssey in that sense. So the blindness serves the function of how do we communicate feelings and the process if we can’t see one another. And we never call each other father and son and that’s important because it’s a brand new relationship that is being formed.
IFQ: How long did it take you to prepare?
NN: About one to two months. I started putting in the contacts that make you blind for an hour or so and I found that to be a bit boring once you got the spatial relationships. It was quite easy to navigate. What was fun and I didn’t know was that once you block the vision, your mind goes into a relaxation that is amazing. I did not know the energy that is required in a neural context that vision has and the weight it carries in our whole brain activity. Because we are reading faces and color and everything, when you take that away and you feel safe, there is a peace. So I didn’t want to take the contacts out, I’d stay in them as long as I could. But then when you get back to the hotel and I was going to go back to the tavern, it wasn’t going to work too well.
IFQ: So you couldn’t see anything on set?
NN: I never saw the face of my son; generally I knew where the camera was and I reacted from hearing. On my close-ups of telling the story about my wife, I was restrained. I held the emotions, but when we turned around I couldn’t contain them. I was in full blown tears because symbolically it tied in with the loss of two of my childhood friends who were pilots. I went to Hans (Petter Moland) and said I’m sorry man, I’m just losing it, but he said that it was what the other actor needed. It was hard to go through those stories and build up a back-story about Vietnam and then have a personal connection. Many Vietnam vets talk about going back and the allure of it because for many of them, it is the highest adrenaline point in their lives, so they had some of the highest revelations that they ever had in their lives.
It was James Jones in the book The Thin Red Line who talks about a love that he never duplicates in real life when the other fellow was standing there knowing he was going to die and he is shooting alongside him. He felt a quality of love for a fellow man that he said is far beyond the love of your own children and as far as I know about love is that you love your children, I’d give up my life for my children and that’s a much bigger love than you have for your mate or anything else and he talks about another level. So there was that and there was also great envy about those who didn’t go and a little tinge of guilt even though you were fighting against the war because you judged it to be incorrect, it was driven by #1, oh shit I don’t want to die. Anybody who says that he is going to go to war out of patriotism without fear is just ludicrous; it’s a lie. Patriotism is one thing, but you need to really be under attack before it kicks in. Oddly enough, the experience of Vietnam did stop war for a while. It did put qualifications on what the President could do and that’s all been forgotten.
IFQ: Do you think the film gains a greater relevance because of our current war?
NN: In a democracy, every individual is responsible for the actions of the government. So everyone in Iraq who is killed, I am responsible for. Now you don’t feel it, but in true fact, I am responsible for George Bush’s actions. That was pointed out during the Nuremberg trial, but America said during Vietnam that the Nuremberg trial didn’t apply to them. The United States has never been a war-like nation. We tried to stay out of World War I, World War II; it was a real pacifist nation. Only recently has it become this real hog and it is not fun to go around the world and be hated. You, the individual won’t have a problem, but America is hated. If you go to South Africa, they don’t like America because it’s the perception of a bully. The people there are curious about what the world thinks of South Africa and I said you are the only place trying to make peace because they literally have to. They have no choice.
IFQ: How does this rank on the toughest roles you’ve had to play?
NN: They are all tough.
IFQ: Even 48 HRS.?
NN: 48 HRS. is the best example of improve; we literally improv-ed that film. I thought foolishly for a while that you could do that and every time it’s gone down the toilet. It was the first time that a white and a black called each other the names we called each other. I don’t think you could do it today. It’s too highly politically incorrect. That’s how far we’ve advanced, but it was done in play, in jest and with a great love between Eddie [Murphy] and I. Before that, you had Rod Steiger and Sidney Portier chained together, but they avoided the slurs.