“One of the few great filmmakers I knew”: the director Marlon Brando called “extraordinarily gifted”
Depending on what kind of mood he was in when he turned up to set, Marlon Brando could either be a director’s greatest dream or their ultimate nightmare, and there was no way of predicting ahead of time which one any given filmmaker was going to get.
With two Academy Award wins from eight nominations to his name, even when Brando couldn’t be bothered, he still had more than enough in his locker to knock a performance out of the park. There weren’t many who could wrangle the notoriously difficult star, but earning his respect was about as sure a way as any of doing it.
Brando may have turned up to the Apocalypse Now set drastically overweight to the point he had to be cloaked in shadow, but Francis Ford Coppola had successfully navigated his idiosyncrasies before on The Godfather, so he knew how to make it work. It wasn’t easy, but in what’s essentially a glorified cameo, the actor was nothing short of haunting.
Anyone who can’t contain the genius and madness of Brando tends to struggle desperately, as John Frankenheimer and Frank Oz found out to their detriment on The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Score, respectively. Once somebody gets in his good books, it’s hard to get out, though, with one of the star’s lesser-heralded films putting him into the orbit of somebody he called both “one of the few great filmmakers I knew” and “the best director I ever worked with”.
Period-set war drama Burn! finds Brando as a British secret agent dispatched to the fictional Caribbean island of Queimada to disrupt the stranglehold the Portuguese have established over the sugar trade. To do so, he incites a slave revolt, only to have his disruption come back to haunt him a decade later when he returns to discover his former pupil is now orchestrating the overthrow of the British regime.
In his autobiography Songs My Mother Never Told Me, Brando referred to Burn! as “a film that practically no one saw,” but it made a mark on him nonetheless. More specifically, it was director Gillo Pontecorvo who left a major impression on the awards-laden and acclaimed thespian, even if he acknowledged there was the requisite tension between them.
“He is an extraordinarily talented, gifted man, but during most of our time together, we were at each other’s throats,” Brando wrote. “We spent six months in Colombia, mostly in Cartagena, a humid, tropical city about 11 degrees from the equator and not far, I thought, from the gateway to Hades. Most days, the temperature was over 103 degrees, and the humidity made the set a Turkish bath.”
Despite the friction present on set, Burn! allowed Brando to do what he called “the best acting I’ve ever done,” even if the film itself didn’t earn a spot in the upper echelons of the legend’s filmography.
