By Chris Wade
Culled from multiple interviews with James Woods himself (along with co-stars and collaborators like Jim Belushi, Oliver Stone and Harold Becker), Chris Wade’s deep dive into the storied career of this powerhouse actor sensibly keeps its attention on the screen, and leaves the performer’s occasionally fraught private life right out of it. The Films Of James Woods is a fascinating examination of the craft of acting and the voluble collection of personalities that it takes to make a movie. In this fascinating excerpt, Woods pulls back the curtains on the making of Oliver Stone’s 1986 masterwork Salvador, in which the actor soars as photojournalist Richard Boyle…
THOUGH Salvador is [Oliver] Stone’s film and vision through and through, James Woods is in some ways the beating heart of the picture, a vital, electric presence, jittery and sparking with nervous energy. He is alive wire, as if hooked up to electrodes, a blagger and a chancer who elbows his way to the centre of the conflict and comes out the other end somehow alive and in one piece, disillusioned with the media, with politics, with the establishment itself, and so called humanity. More specifically though, given it touches him directly at the film’s end, Boyle is more ripped up about the treatment of ordinary people in the centre of this conflict. But when it came to portraying the real Boyle, Woods was not overly impressed by him, especially his lack of focus and vision (Stone said that as men the pair could not have been less alike), yet to add poignancy he chose to portray him as a man who desperately wanted to be someone extraordinary, the only man brave enough to capture the truth. The fact he is not the great man he wishes to be makes Boyle a strangely likeable character, at least asa creation in Woods’ hands. Woods put to one side his personal feelings for the man himself (as he did with others, especially Roy Cohn and the more monstrous men he’s played) in order to give him depth.
When we spoke of the movie, I brought up one of my favourite scenes, when Boyle is drunk in the centre of five or six gunmen, and he blags his way out of being killed. “I was supposed to be blind drunk but there was not a drop of alcohol,” he recalled. “I didn’t have nothing. I just played that scene – I mean, I would never play a scene drunk – but I was completely straight and sober. He’s fighting for his life in that scene. And how did that guy survive? I think it’s because I played it so crazily. I said to Oliver, ‘I think if I play it crazy enough, I have to do it in a way so that they find it amusing, like, ‘This gringo, we’ll deal with him later.’ I put a lot of work into the scene. And also the scene earlier when I scare Jim, and go ‘Rargh!’ and he laughs. Jim and I were a great couple in that I think. We quibbled on the set in a fun kind of way, but we liked the Hunter S. Thompson kind of journey into darkness, that then turns and gets really dark.”
Though Woods and Stone had a certain friction, it needs to be said that their disagreements were to do with what was best for the picture. But Stone was also very open to Woods’ ideas. One famous and very moving scene involves Boyle going to the scene of the crime where the Church workers were brutally raped and murdered. James had an idea, and he put it forward to Stone. “I had this Claddagh ring,” he told me. “I wore it all the time. And the tradition with the Claddagh ring is that you can only give it to one person in your whole life. I said to Oliver, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I slipped the ring onto Cynthia Gibb’s [who plays one of the murdered women, a character based on Jean Donovan] finger, when we find her body?’ So Oliver said, ‘Grab a camera and shoot it, I gotta go to lunch and stage another shot.’ Soon my lunch I went to Cynthia – and she was made up with all the murder make up – and I said to her, ‘Cynthia, I know it’s your lunch 130 break and I hate to disturb you, but would you just shoot this scene where you lie down and I’m bent over you crying, and I’ll put the Claddagh ring on you? It will be a great end to that scene.’ We were in the parking lot where all the crew trucks were parked, and we said, ‘Let’s just shoot it here!’ But the dirt was a different colour to the dirt in the actual scene, so I said, ‘Get some darker dirt and put it down.’ And she was like, ‘Oh so I gotta get down on this dirt?’ And I said, ‘Please Cynthia, please do it for me.’ And she did, to her credit, with all that horrible make up glued to her face. We got the dark dirt, we put it down, we shot the scene and, man, Oliver put it in the movie. It was one of my favourite, proudest little editorial things that I got to do. Oliver was very good about letting us create.”
And of course, one cannot overlook the confession scene. Encouraging him to follow his gut, Stone famously rolled the cameras and told Woods that his character needed a confession. Woods’ classic scene, made up on the spot to the priest, is a masterclass in film acting. He cannot promise to be a totally pure man, but will do his best, as long as he can still get drunk and smoke a spliff or two every now and then. He’s doing this in a bid to marry his girlfriend (played brilliantly by Elpidia Carrillo) to get her out of El Salvador, so his intentions are good. But the scene illustrates Woods’ acting genius and alone is enough to give him cinematic immortality. It’s a magic moment and a flawless performance.
James had more kind words about Oliver, specifically about his influence on popular culture as a whole: “With Oliver, people talk about his political films, his conspiracy theories and his writing, but they are forgetting that Oliver actually created a lot of modern film grammar. He really was responsible for a lot of that kind of MTV craziness, you know? It was all Oliver. And in his book he teases me a lot, but actually, fundamentally we got along great about making a great movie. I broke his balls a lot on the movie and visa versa, but we became great friends and are to this day. We both got nominated for Academy Awards for Salvador, so we did something right, I guess.”
The Films Of James Woods is available now.
