t’s been sixteen years since Gene Hackman was last seen on screen. The Hollywood legend – who appeared in everything from Superman The Movie, to The French Connection, to The Conversation and The Royal Tenenbaums – retired from acting back in the early 00s. But in 2009, Empire was granted a rare interview with the screen icon, talking his glorious career and the novel-writing he turned to after leaving the silver screen behind. Here, to mark his 92th birthday, is the original feature in full.
Donald Petrie’s 2004 comedy, Welcome To Mooseport, in which a former US president faces off against a small town loudmouth for the role of Mayor, is the sort of amiable, low-rent affair that features a couple of laughs, decent performances and which you manage to forget even as you’re watching it. It tanked in the States, taking in just $16 million. You’d be hard pushed to find anyone who owns, or will admit to owning, a copy. Yet, in its own way, it’s a piece of movie history.
Former US President and newly-elected Mooseport mayor, Monroe Cole (that would be Hackman) is in love with his executive secretary, Grace (Marcia Gay Harden), except, dammit, he’s not man enough to tell her. So she’s off, forever, on a plane. Except the plane won’t take off – and then, lo and behold, here comes President Cole, getting down on his knees, making beseeching exhortations of commitment (“no salt”), and then winning her over with the sort of smacker that suggests he hasn’t eaten in many days.
Grace bats her eyelids. “How do you know my plane wouldn’t take off?” she says. Hackman smiles, that familiar old wily grin that lights up his eyes. “Turns out that I have a little bit of pull here at this airport now.” The crowd cheer and congratulate the happy couple – he leans in and pulls Harden close and…
Then Petrie, the journeyman clod, cuts away from the two-time Oscar-winning bona fide legend to the star of deeply average and erroneously-titled shitcom, Everyone Loves Raymond, and that’s that. Soon after that, Hackman retired from acting, with the quiet grace and dignity that had epitomised his astonishing 40-year career. There was no announcement. There was no press release. He just slipped away into the anonymity of life with his wife, Betsy Arakawa.
“The doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.”
It’s tempting to speculate on the reasons for Hackman’s retirement – afterall, Sean Connery retired from acting around the same age (both men are 79) and time (2003 for the former 007) as Hackman, because of a blow-out with director Stephen Norrington on the set of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. A mischievous person might suggest that Hackman had perhaps watched Welcome To Mooseport and concluded, ‘what’s the point?’
But there were no shenanigans involved in Hackman’s decision. Instead, the truth is more prosaic and sobering than that. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was actually a stress test that I took in New York,” says Hackman, talking exclusively to Empire from his home in Santa Fe. “The doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.”
But some men aren’t built to sit around at home doing jigsaw puzzles, or watching whatever the American equivalent of Come Dine With Me is. Admittedly, Hackman has his little home comforts – watching “DVDs that my wife rents; we like simple stories that some of the little low-budget films manage to produce”, while every Friday night is set aside for a Comedy Channel marathon, with particular attention paid to Eddie Izzard (“The speed of thought is amazing”). He likes to fish, and paint, something he’s done for countless years (and with a great deal of proficiency, too).
But all that extra time on his hands had to be filled, so Hackman threw himself headlong into a secondary career as an author. Well, co-author, to be exact, teaming up with his neighbour and friend, Daniel Lenihan, on a series of historical adventure novels. And, in a way, to say that it’s a brand-new career is somewhat disingenuous. After all, the first, Wake Of The Perdido Star, came out in 1999, when Hackman was still making flicks like Under Suspicion and The Replacements, while the second, the courtroom drama Justice For None, was released in 2004, just after Hackman had hung up his acting spurs.
But Hackman’s retirement gave the pair licence to really dedicate themselves to the cause, and their third, and most recent, collaboration – Escape From Andersonville: A Novel Of The Civil War – is just about to come out in the UK. A robustly-written, rousing tale of a Confederate officer attempting to rescue his men from the Andersonville prison camp, a hideous morass of human decay that claimed the lives of 12,000 men in just under a year, it won’t win any Booker Prizes, but it’s a fun read, with some nicely-drawn characters, a sense of genuine pace and place, and a contender for weird-out of the
year: a sex scene co-written by Popeye Doyle, containing the immortal line: “His sex hung between his legs like a sack of hot lead…” It’s the written equivalent of walking in on your parents doing it.
“It’s very relaxing for me,” says Hackman of the writing process. “I don’t picture myself as a great writer, but I really enjoy the process, especially on this book. We had to do a great deal of research on it to get some of the facts right, and it is stressful to some degree, but it’s a different kind of stress. It’s one you can kind of manage, because you’re sitting there by yourself, as opposed to having ninety people sitting around waiting for you to entertain them!”
In a way, Hackman grew into words. His father was a printer on the local newspaper, the Commercial-News in Danville, Illinois, while both his grandfather and uncle were reporters. So becoming a writer would seem like a natural development. Yet, a cursory glance at his voluminous CV reveals that, over the course of a career that spanned some 44 years and 80 films, not once does Hackman’s name appear as a writer. Not for the lack of trying, mind you. After all, if there’s one thing that a pre-PlayStation generation actor can do while noodling around in his trailer, waiting for his close-up, then it’s sit down at his desk and put some thoughts down on paper.
“I wrote a lot of little short pieces, almost like audition pieces, for actors,” he recalls. “My son thought he wanted to be an actor at one time and was in New York and I wrote him a couple of little monologues. I guess that’s where I started. I really enjoyed it. Ideas would just pop into my head and I would write them down.”
There’s a tremendous difference between writing for fun, or writing something that you know only a handful of people will hear or read, and writing something that could be experienced by millions. That was Hackman’s next step – in the late ‘80s, he bought the rights to a best-selling crime novel, and set about the tricky task of adapting it himself, with a view to possibly directing and playing the standout role of a psychopathic killer who specialises in playing mindgames with the Feds from inside his prison cell. “I was so respectful of the book that I was into it 100 pages, and had about 300 pages of the script!” says Hackman, his laugh sounding exactly like it does on film; a warm and cheeky chuckle from the back of the throat. “So I could see that I didn’t have the experience to do that kind of thing at that point, so I let the project go, kinda regretfully.”
Small wonder, for the project was The Silence Of The Lambs which, in case you didn’t know, went on to gross $273 million worldwide, become an enduring classic and win Oscars for Jonathan Demme, Ted Tally and Anthony Hopkins in the categories that Hackman had earmarked for himself – directing, writing and the role of Hannibal Lecter. “At least I had a good eye for the material,” laughs Hackman who, with two Oscars on his mantelpiece already, can afford to be sanguine about the experience. “I really wasn’t very inventive about the process. I was more concerned about the description of the scene process, and it just got to be overlong. I didn’t think within the time I had on the option I had bought on the thing, that I could develop it properly.”
Bowed, but not broken by his incompatibility with the strictures of a screenplay, Hackman gave it another go, adapting a book called Ada Blackjack: A True Story Of Survival In The Arctic. “It was the true story of an Inuit woman who had gone on an expedition in the Arctic, and everybody on the expedition had died,” he explains. “She was on her own for six months up there – it was kind of a fascinating story in some ways, but I couldn’t quite lick it. I couldn’t quite get it to come alive. I didn’t have any confidence in it.”
That lack of confidence in his writing might explain why, when Hackman finally decided to pick up a pen (he writes longhand, and his wife gets it all typed up) again, he didn’t go it alone. When he was preparing to star alongside Tom Cruise in The Firm, and needed to learn how to scuba dive, he was put in touch with Lenihan, a local marine biologist and accomplished diver. “In Santa Fe, there’s not a lot of scuba diving,” chuckles Hackman. “But Daniel took me to this public swimming pool – it had a depth of nine feet or something like that – and I got my first introduction to scuba through him.”
From there, the two got chatting about authors they liked – Melville, Hemingway, “all the traditional adventure type writers” – and tentatively decided to try writing together. “I said to him, ‘Hey, I’ve never written anything…’” says Hackman. “So I went home and I made up a scene about a young man up in the sheets in a forerigged sailing ship in a storm, and that was the start of it.”
That became the basis for The Wake Of The Perdido Star, and the formation of an unusual writing process, whereby they would each write separate chapters, focusing o
ow and again, something will shine through, like a recollection of research made with Al Pacino on the little-seen 1973 movie, Scarecrow – “Al and I got to do spent about a week in San Francisco, just hanging out in the Tenderloin area and we got to know some of the life of guys who were similar to the characters we played in the movie, kinda bums. That was kinda fun.” Otherwise, for the most part, Hackman would seem to be suffering from a case of the proverbial past-is-prologues. At one point, Empire asks him if it’s a coincidence whether Escape From Andersonville features a ‘leave no man behind’ plot that has featured in at least three of Hackman’s movies – the unloved, but actually pretty damn enjoyable trilogy of Bat 21, Behind Enemy Lines and Uncommon Valour. There’s a pause while he accesses his internal RAM. “You know, if you were to ask me what those three movies were, I would be surprised!”
So, instead, allow us to recall his career; one so remarkable and filled with great work that it can easily be ranked up there with that of his great hero, Marlon Brando. Run your eye over his CV, and the great films and performances come tumbling out. The brittle, walled-in Harry Caul in Coppola’s The Conversation. The swaggering Lex Luthor in Superman The Movie and Superman II. The twinkling, roguish Royal Tenenbaum in, well, The Royal Tenenbaums. The loathsome Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven, the role that would give him his second Oscar in 1992. The first, of course, came for The French Connection and his unforgettable bottling of the human lightning, Popeye Doyle, fiery, irascible, totally committed.
PROC. BY MOVIES
