I've got to ask: what's your perspective on method acting? My approach tends to be whatever works works but I find myself being so much more impressed by an actor who can give a perfect take and then ask 'what's for lunch?' as soon as somebody yells cut.
I find the method approach potentially irritating, but the proof is in the pudding. When it works--Marlon Brando, Daniel Day Lewis, James Dean, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Montgomery Cliff, Harvey Keitel, Dennis Hopper--it can lead to some breathtaking performances. So I guess with actors in general, for me it is not so much how they get there, it's the end result. Certainly DDL is famous for staying in character until a shoot is over--must have been a hoot to be around during
Lincoln. Anthony Quinn was another one who had to vegetate into a role to the point of not washing for days. Brando, though, not so much, especially later in his career.
I remember an interview, must have been in the early '70s, when a kid reporter from
Rolling Stone magazine keeps pressing an increasingly irritated Brando on how he, the kid reporter, can't accept that Brando could give the performance that he did in
Last Tango in Paris without damaging his psyche, baring his soul, and maybe having to go into therapy permanently. Brando keeps demurring, but the kid keeps going on about how he won't believe an actor can just turn it on and off like that, saying "I just don't see how that is humanly possible?" At which point, Brando, not the most patient interviewee at the best of times, has had enough and then some. He totally loses it. He rants at the reporter, he screams, he looks like he is going to grab the kid around the throat and strangle him, and the reporter begins to seriously fear actual violence from Brando. And at the height of this fury, Brando stops on a dime, brushes off the kid's lapels, smiles and says "That's how."
