Listen to Me Marlon filmmakers found heart of darkness

Brando narrates his own story in new documentary

Surviving a broken home with alcoholic parents, Marlon Brando found a way to heal using a tape recorder, isolation and a professional obsession with truth that made every performance vibrate with all the beauty, and ugliness, of the human condition

By Katherine Monk

PARK CITY, UT – When Marlon Brando was still alive, his face was scanned using what was, at the time, cutting-edge digital technology. Pulses of laser light crisscrossed his famous profile, swallowing each feature into an algorithm, resulting in an animated, glowing green grid: a Marlon matrix.

The footage lingered for years. Then the producers behind Restrepo, Waiting for Sugar Man and James Marsh’s Project Nim got a call from Brando’s estate.

“They approached us to do something and we said we’d be delighted, but only if we can make it in a way that is entirely original,” says John Battsek, one of the founders of London-based Passion Pictures – perhaps the most successful documentary production outfit in the business with nine back to back visits to the Sundance Film Festival, starting with One Day in September.

“Marlon Brando is a sexy subject. And if you think Brando documentary, you think you’re going to start with Bernardo Bertolucci and interview everyone who ever worked with him, but we had no interest in making that kind of documentary. When we take on a subject, we like to think we are making the definitive version of that film – whether it’s about the Munich Olympics or the folk singer Rodriguez,” he says.

“On this project the money came quickly, so the challenge was creative. How do we tell this story in a way no one else has?”

With access to the Brando archive and over 200 hours of an audiotape journal that reveals the actor’s private fears and traumas, Battsek needed the help of a storyteller he could trust. He turned to regular collaborator Stevan Riley, the director behind other Passion projects such as Fire in Babylon and Everything or Nothing.

“Stevan was the perfect person for the job because he is thorough and he is patient. He will take the time to get into every part of it, down to the smallest detail, and then he finds the voice and the rhythm. And that’s what we needed here.”

Battsek says the central ordering principle was obvious from the moment they heard the audiotapes: Created as part of Brando’s personal quest for healing, there were hours and hours of unfiltered, unmediated material recorded on reel to reel equipment and it was all in Brando’s own voice. He spoke to himself in a bid to love himself, but as Listen to Me Marlin show us, that would prove a near-impossible task.

“Without getting too heavy or deep, Marlon was involved in self-analysis his entire life,” says Riley. “So, early on, we had this inkling of an idea: What if Marlon were trying to diagnose himself? He was a seeker of the truth, and here, he takes us on a journey to discover his own truth. Who better to reveal the truth of Brando than Brando himself?”

Everyone has an idea of who Brando was because his performances were so intense, says Battsek.

From the raging Stanley Kowalski, moving through Tennessee Williams’s language like a prize bull, to the iconic Colonel Kurtz, describing the efficacy of horror as a tool of war, Brando’s ability to connect with people was the result of injecting so much of his own blood into each role.

“Finding his own truth in each role was part of his process,” says Battsek. “It’s part of method. So what you’re hearing in the recordings is all part of that… and it made for a strange production because the very first cut I ever saw of this movie was a black screen with 90 minutes of audio. It was a backwards way of making a movie, but it worked, and I think if there’s one thing that I really feel satisfied by is the fact we let it grow organically. Every decision we made along the way felt right.”

Battsek says the whole experience became a lesson in truth telling, which turned into a watershed moment in his own life.

“As a British man, I kind of knew who Marlon Brando was – obviously, a movie star and an icon, and a predictably troubled celebrity. But over two years with the research, I really got to know him and it was revelatory. He left a huge impression, partly because I was going through a hard time in my own life. My father had just passed away and I was facing private difficulties. And watching Marlon struggle with similar things was therapeutic for me because he was facing it,” says Battsek.

“He was really working hard to understand the human condition. So the movie is as much about a life as it is a study of life itself. You know, what does it mean to be alive, what does it mean to have hopes and dreams and heartache?

“Here was a guy who may have been the most beautiful man who ever walked the planet and perhaps the best actor who ever lived, but fundamentally, he is a guy trying to have human relationships with women and his kids, and he is failing on all fronts.”

“Here was a guy who may have been the most beautiful man who ever walked the planet and perhaps the best actor who ever lived, but fundamentally, he is a guy trying to have human relationships with women and his kids, and he is failing on all fronts.”

Battsek pauses, pulls a vibrating phone from his pocket and gestures. “This business can be all-consuming… I used to be a publicist,” he says.

“I think I am still atoning… because when you are a publicist you have to bullshit. And I am the best bullshitter on the planet. The only person better than me was my father. And bullshit is a powerful weapon, and I used it when I was younger. I was a bit of a fibber. I could tell a lie to get out of a situation without batting an eyelid or breaking stride. I was good at being untruthful and now, it feels like I am being forced to realize just how valuable the truth really is. Truth is the root of everything good.”

Battsek says he doesn’t mean to slag all PR people. “Publicity is an important job and someone has to do it. But there comes a time when you can’t sell the bullshit anymore, and that happened to me. I was selling films I thought were shit and I couldn’t hide it anymore.”

But honestly can be a liability in show business, he adds, especially for actors, which is one of the reasons why Brando melted in the Hollywood crucible.

“His search for truth, and being authentic, made him accessible – and as a publicist who worked with actors – there’s a real curse in that. If you are profound and you really consider life, and you ask questions, being an actor is going to fuck you up,” says Battsek.

“It’s ridiculous: The world that orbits you and the way you are treated. It’s ridiculous, yet it’s also irresistible. Once you make a shit ton of money working for a few months, and the world says yes to you on everything, it’s hard to walk away from that. I know it’s hard to have sympathy for people who are paid millions, but if they are really feeling people, the pain is real. And it’s agonizing.”

“His search for truth, and being authentic, made him accessible – and as a publicist who worked with actors – there’s a real curse in that. If you are profound and you really consider life, and you ask questions, being an actor is going to fuck you up.”

Riley says the beauty of Brando’s story is that it’s not just about the challenges of celebrity, but about the larger human voyage. “He would go into his bedroom, lock himself inside, and go on these great mind adventures. He was such an observer of human behavior, and a real artist, even though he probably wouldn’t have called himself one, but he was trying for perfection.”

More importantly, says Riley, he was seeking personal happiness. “Brando’s favourite movie scene was from City Lights – when the blind girl goes over the tramp and says ‘I see you.’ Brando always felt no one really saw him. No one saw that little kid named Buddy from Nebraska – the kid that needed love and never got it – and I think that’s the Rosebud part of the movie,” says Riley.

“I think that’s what you hear in the tapes – a grown-up Marlon speaking to Buddy, the lost boy.”

Listen to Me Marlon is opening theatrically in markets across North America to quality for Oscar consideration before airing on Showtime later this year.

@katherinemonk