PLUME: We’ve jumped around a bit … actually, I’d like to just throw out a couple of your film roles, and get your recollections on them. Going back to one of the first films - Midnight Cowboy…
BALABAN: Yes, that was the first time I did a movie.
PLUME: What was that like, as an experience?
BALABAN: Well, I was probably fairly terrified. I mostly used to be terrified all the time when I was working. In plays, I’d be in them for a while and I’d stop being terrified, but in movies you never have a chance. Every day is like a new play. It’s like, “Whoa, it’s a new scene, I don’t know how to do this one.” And I’m not saying that sometimes I wasn’t, and now I’ve gotten somewhat better about that as I’ve gotten older. So I was scared. I didn’t know anything about the movie, I didn’t read the book. I really like John Schlesinger - he was very patient and friendly. I loved working with Jon Voight, he was completely - both his character, and also it was his movie and he was just very gracious. Like, coming up to me after something and saying, “Bob, that was very good. I think you just need …” He would give me little helpful hints. He wasn’t pushing me a round, he wasn’t directing me, but he was just like - he knew I was a 20 year old kid who had absolutely no experience, except in theater. He was very good at just helping me. We had to do our two days of me pretending to go down on him in a movie theater - that’s enough to make anybody kind of tense. He was just very patient and funny, and grateful that we were doing this together, and that I wasn’t frightening to him, because he had to encounter, his character, all these loony people in the movie. It was just a really, really nice experience. The only thing I particularly remember was the movie - my part was shot backwards. So I had three sections. I met him on 42nd Street, then we went to the balcony of the movie theater to perform the sex act, and then we went into the bathroom of the movie theater so that I could throw up, and he could try to steal my watch and I wouldn’t let him, and once again the poor Midnight Cowboy gets taken advantage of by his victims. We filmed it backwards, meaning that he tried to steal my watch on the first day of shooting in May. Two months went by, it was July or August, and then I had the scene where we had the encounter in the balcony, and then two months went by and I met him on 42nd Street. So my introduction to filmmaking was it’s backwards. How do you do it?
PLUME: So it was the technical aspect, that was …
BALABAN: Yes, and also on the first day of shooting, when he tried to take my watch, my hand flew up in the air as I recoiled from his arm trying to take my watch and I smashed myself in the face and almost knocked myself out. I thought I had a concussion. So that was my first day of shooting, and that’s what I remember.
PLUME: That’s a nice inauguration.
BALABAN: Yeah, one remembers those things. But it’s funny. Now it’s 9,000 years later and, as you grow and you see people… I’ve now worked with Jon Voight, I did Catch-22 - the next movie I did, Jon Voight was with me. How funny that is, in this busy crowded world that I would go from being in a men’s room in 42nd Street with Jon Voight to being in Guaymas, Mexico with Jon Voight, in World War II. That’s kind of funny, if you think about it.
PLUME: One of my favorite roles that you had…
BALABAN: It was fun.
PLUME: Regarding Catch-22, I hear many different stories about how difficult the production was. What did you personally observe of that?
BALABAN: It took a long time. I loved working with Mike Nichols, and I still love his work and seeing him, and whatever he does. I’m always watching, and obviously love it. Occasionally, I try to pretend that I’m Mike Nichols when I’m being with other people, “Oh, I’ll try to be Mike right now.” I met some great people that I got to be really good friends with, during that movie. I got to watch Orson Welles work. I mean, how amazing is it that we are… you know, if and when history chooses to look back on the movie business - which I’m always concerned it won’t really be able to, because in 300 years they won’t have projectors. The film of course doesn’t last more than five minutes - all of our film preservation is not nearly enough to salvage all the great things that I wish would be salvaged, and people won’t have DVD players in the year 3010. Nor will they have computers. They’re going to lose all this stuff, and yet here we are in the beginning of movies and I have actually gotten to work with the man who made Citizen Kane. I mean, that’s unbelievably exciting to me, in one’s personal six degrees of separation game.
PLUME: How apocryphal were the stories of difficulties with Welles on the set?
BALABAN: He was pretty impossible, but not as impossible as other people that I’ve seen be impossible. He was as impossible as people get when they pop in for a week to do a part, and you know, they’re not part of the movie. It’s not an ensemble - they just flew in to try to do their part for a week, and suddenly they’re plunged into this strange world.
PLUME: Was that kind of thing more difficult for you as an actor, or was it more difficult for Mike Nichols as the director?
BALABAN: Well, I think the hardest part was for Mike, because Mike revered him so much - as do all filmmakers and most people in the movie business. So I think it was probably very hard for Mike. I was a child in a way. I guess I thought of Mike Nichols as this giant, old person - he was probably 32 or something at the time, and I was 21. That’s how we are when we’re 21, I suppose. But it was still a big experience for Mike to have Orson Welles come down and be in his movie. I ultimately thought Orson Welles was wonderful in the movie. It was just cantankerous. How difficult was he? He wasn’t any worse than a lot of other people. But he was cantankerous and had ideas and was slow, and that’s all. Everybody else was kind of in the same fraternity, and he was just in a different fraternity when he came down. That’s kind of my analysis of it. The hardest part in that movie was the time. I mean, it was a very slow movie to shoot. In the beginning of shooting, we only shot at 5:00 in the afternoon, so that there could be that fabulous light that Terrence Malick got so nicely in Days of Heaven, and yet you can’t do that in a movie of the vast scope and size, and with all the salaries that were being spent on this movie. You just couldn’t only shoot at 5 or 4:00 in the afternoon when the sun was yellow and golden and perfect, and lasted for 42 minutes. So that took a lot of time. I know that for the first number of weeks of shooting, anything outside that had a lot of extras in it, Mike started watching the dailies, and I think he started watching some of it together - I’m not really sure. But he came to the conclusion - and I think he was right about it - that stylistically, the movie didn’t really want to have extras in it, because it was really Yossarian’s wild nightmare dream, and in wild, nightmare dreams, you only remember what you remember. You know, you don’t fill in the corners. So we re-shot a lot of the scenes that had extras in them, to remove the extras.
PLUME: Making it more stark.
BALABAN: Yeah. Well, the effect was that it became stark, but the point was that when you have a dream, certain things stand out and the other things just aren’t there. So why would your dream have extras in it if you didn’t know who they were or recognize them? It’s subtle, but I think it had an effect. Also, I liked the movie very much, although it was not highly regarded at the time. M*A*S*H stole a huge amount of its thunder for coming out first, and here I am just having worked with Robert Altman in Gosford Park. So it’s just so like one huge, just overwhelming world, and then you stay around long enough, you do enough things, and eventually you sort of feel like it’s a small party that you’ve come to the table at. And it is, in a way. But, of course, it’s always changing. Just when you think you know everybody and it’s a small world, suddenly you go, “Oh whoops, a whole new bunch of people just moved in.” I suppose the trick is to keep up with everything, the way Robert Altman does. I mean, he just doesn’t age. I mean, his body ages, but creatively he doesn’t get any older. He’s completely aware of everything all the time. And it’s not because he’s one of those oldsters who’s putting on a funny hat and trying to act young - he simply is young.
PLUME: Amazingly connected…
BALABAN: I suppose that’s part of his being a renegade. He never became a part of anybody’s establishment - and resisted with every fiber of his being.
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