“That’s his creative problem”: the director Jack Nicholson compared to a “dictator”
He was known to be a fairly combustible presence on occasion, so it was only natural that sparks would fly when Jack Nicholson found himself working with a filmmaker who also had a reputation for being hot-headed.
Not that he was ever particularly malicious in his outbursts, but Nicholson did see his temper boil over on occasion while he also concocted some incendiary schemes of a different kind. After all, he was planning to set fire to the set of The Departed before being convinced that it maybe wasn’t the smartest idea in the world, so there was an inherent air of unpredictability to every fibre of his being.
On the plus side, those maverick tendencies tended to manifest on-screen through a tremendous performance, which saw him go down in history as the most-nominated male actor at the Academy Awards. He didn’t win an Oscar working for the director he called a dictator, though, but it did end up as one of the greatest movies ever made.
Befitting their respective reputations, Nicholson and Roman Polanski found themselves butting heads more than a few times during the production of Chinatown, with each giving as good as they got. The timeless mystery thriller may have only snagged a solitary Oscar for its original screenplay, but the film endures as proof that a bulging trophy cabinet isn’t a barometer of greatness.
Nicholson perfectly embodies J.J. Gittes in one of the finest turns in a career defined by them, digging into the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles to uncover the truth behind a trail of deception, deceit, and corruption that threatens to tear both the private investigator and the Mulwray family apart from the inside out.
Reflecting on some of the hard-headed auteurs he’d encountered throughout his days in the business, Nicholson felt obligated to mention Polanski. “Roman is another kind of dictator,” he told The Independent. “He loves arguments, he wouldn’t know what to do if he had no arguments. And by that I don’t mean fights. Arguments. But he never loses any, so there is no real argument. That’s his creative problem.”
It can be inferred from the way Nicholson phrased it that he didn’t exactly believe Polanski deserved to emerge on the winning side of every disagreement instigated on Chinatown, but it was better for his sake and the sake of the movie if he was left to operate under the impression that he did.
Tense atmospheres on set can often yield incredible results, and Chinatown is just one of many titles to embrace the old adage. Nicholson never seemed like the sort of performer who’d thrive under a directorial dictatorship, though, not that it prevented the searing noir from emerging as one of his best features.
