Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

and I was ready to give it a chance.

Morris turned out to be a skinny guy in his late thirties, with shaggy blond hair and penetrating eyes. His full motto was “Don’t act. Only be real.” He was always talking with great enthusiasm about the discoveries he’d made and what was missing from other theories of acting. I didn’t know any other theories of acting. But I did know that the world he opened up to me was mind blowing.

It was the first time I’d heard anybody articulate ideas about the emotions: intimidation, inferiority, superiority, embarrassment, encouragement, comfort, discomfort. A whole new world of language appeared.

It was like going into the plumbing business and suddenly hearing about parts and tools that you need, and you say to yourself, “I don’t even know how to spell the things we are talking about here.” It was like a whole new sea of words that you’re hearing over and over until you finally ask, “What does that mean?”

It was broadening my horizons to things that I’d ignored. In competition, I’d always walled off emotions. You have to keep your feelings under control or you can be knocked offtrack. Women always talked about emotions, but I considered it silly talk. It did not fit into my plan. Not that I usually admitted this to them, because it did not make them happy—instead I’d half listen and just say, “Yeah, I understand.” Acting was just the opposite. You had to let things affect you and keep your defenses down because that was how you became a better actor.

If you had to enact an emotion in a scene, Morris would get you to go back and connect to some sense memory. Let’s say that you associated the smell of coffee brewing with a time when you were six years old and your mother was making coffee, probably not for you but maybe for your dad. You visualized being in the kitchen, the way it looked with your father and mother there, and that got you into a certain emotional state. It was the smell of coffee that took you there. Or the smell of a rose: maybe the first time you got flowers for some girlfriend. You could see her in front of you, how she smiled, how she kissed, and that got you into a certain mood also. Or if you heard sixties rock ’n’ roll, that took you back to a time when somebody was playing the radio in the gym while you lifted. Morris was trying to help me identify the triggers for specific emotions I might need in Stay Hungry. He’d say, “When you were competing and winning, were you exhilarated, over-the-top excited? Maybe we can use that in a scene.”

I had to explain that actually I was not especially exhilarated when I won, because to me, winning was a given. It was part of the job. I had an obligation to win. So I did not feel “Yeah! I won!” Instead I’d say to myself, “Okay, did that. Let’s move on to the next competition.”

I said that I always found surprises much more exhilarating. If I passed all my classes at UCLA, I would walk out ecstatic because even though I expected to pass, it was still a pleasant surprise. Or going to a Christmas party and getting an unexpected gift. I explained that to him. Then Morris would simply say, “Okay, let’s go back to those moments.”

He probed and probed. When did I feel in love? When did I feel excluded? How did I feel when I left home? How did I feel when my parents told me it was time to start paying them Kostgeld—food money—if I wanted to keep living in their house? Americans don’t usually do that, so how did it feel? He would latch onto different things until he found the emotion.

I hated it at first. I told him, “I have not dealt with any of this stuff that you are talking about until now. It’s not the way I live.” He didn’t believe a word of it. “You sell yourself as being the kind of guy who doesn’t experience emotion, but don’t delude yourself. Not paying attention to it or dismissing it doesn’t mean that it is not part of you. You actually have the emotion because I see it in your eyes when you say certain things. You can’t fool a fooler.”

He was teaching me to access all the emotions that were stored in my mind. “Everyone has them,” he said. “The trick in acting is to summon them up in the quickest way. Why do you think certain actors can cry when they want? Not just mechanical crying, but real crying, where your whole face contracts and your lip quivers. It means that the actor can recall something very, very upsetting very quickly. And it’s very important for the director to capture that in the first two takes, because the actor can’t do it again and again without it becoming mechanical. You can’t mess with the mind that often,” he said. “But I’m not worried about that with Bob Rafelson because he is definitely the right director. He’s very much aware of all this.”

There is a scene in Five Easy Pieces where Jack Nicholson cries. Eric told me how Rafelson stopped filming and talked to Nicholson for two hours until he saw him getting choked up. They were talking about something in his life, too quietly for the other people on the set to hear. Then Bob announced, “Great, Jack, stay with that,” the other actors moved in, they shot the scene, and he cried. “Bob got him into that,” Eric said. “Sometimes it’s difficult, sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it doesn’t happen and then you have to try another day.

“What I’m trying to do is give you the tools,” he continued. “Maybe you didn’t cry when your brother died, you didn’t cry when your dad died. But is it upsetting to you that here you are, they died, and now you and your mother are left alone?” He was trying every angle. But we hit a wall there. I couldn’t figure it out. Nothing worked. We decided that crying on cue had to wait.

Besides the private lessons, I also took his group classes three nights a week from seven to eleven. It was twenty people, and you all worked on scenes or did exercises, and some of it was fun. He would pick a topic like, say, anger and frustration. “I want everyone to talk about it. What makes you frustrated?” For the first hour, we’d all tell stories of when we were angry and frustrated. Next he’d say, “Good. Let’s save that emotion. Now somebody give me some lines, make up some lines that show that frustration.” We would ad-lib frustration. The next class might revolve around reading from a script cold, or auditioning, and on and on.

Those nights were a lot less fun when Morris would take stuff I’d told him in private lessons and trot it out in front of the whole acting class. It was his way of going for the raw nerve. He didn’t hesitate to push me or embarrass me. I might be reading lines we’d rehearsed from the Stay Hungry script, and he’d interrupt me and say, “What the fuck was that? Really, that’s all you have in you? This afternoon when you and I did it, I felt goose bumps. Now I feel no goose bumps. Now I feel like you’re trying to do a show or you’re trying to do the Arnold shtick here. This is not Arnold shtick. This is something totally different. Do it over.”

The private lessons all focused in one way or another on the script. Morris told me, “We’re going to go through it line by line and analyze even the scenes that have nothing to do with you, because you’ll see, in fact, that they do. We’ve got to figure out why you are in the South; what it means when you meet the country club people who are throwing around their inherited money and having their cocktails at night. We’ve got to understand the weather, and the bodybuilding gym, and the crooks who are ripping off everyone.” So we worked through the script page by page, line by line. We would talk about each scene, and I’d start learning the dialogue, and then we’d analyze it again. I’d do the dialogue for him and then again in the class at night in front of the twenty people—he’d assign one of the girls to read the lines of Mary Tate.

Then he’d bring me to read for Bob Rafelson. I got to see the parade of actors, men and women, passing through Bob’s office auditioning for the other parts. In case I was wondering, that reminded me how big a deal this movie was. Rafelson made a point of showing me the ropes and teaching me lessons that went beyond just acting. He was always explaining why he did things. “I picked this guy because he looked like a country club boy,” and “We’re shooting in Alabama because in California we’d never get lush green landscape and oyster bars and the backdrop we need to make the story authentic.”

When he picked Sally Field to play Mary Tate, he wanted to make that a big teaching point. “You see?” he said. “I’ve been auditioning all these girls, and the one who is actually the best is the Flying Nun!”

“What is the flying nun?” I asked.

He had to back up and explain he meant Sally Field, and that everybody knew her as the flying nun because she’d played the part of Sister Bertrille for years on a TV sitcom. After we got that straight, he had a bigger point to make. “Everybody thinks they know what a girl has to do to get the part,” he said. “The perception is that you get the job by banging the director. And there were girls with big tits and great hair and great bodies who came in and offered that to me. But in the end the Flying Nun got the job. She doesn’t have big tits, she doesn’t have a curvaceous body, she didn’t offer to fuck me, but she has what I needed most in this part, which is talent. She was a serious actor, and when she came in and performed, I was blown away.”

Because this was my first big movie and I wasn’t an actor by profession, Bob also felt it would be good for me to hang out and see movies actually being made. So he called a few sets to arrange for me to come by to watch for an hour. It was good to experience how silent it gets on the set when they say, “We’re rolling.” It was good to learn that “action” doesn’t necessarily mean action—the actors still might be adjusting and asking, “What’s my first line?”