Marlon Brando and the best director he ever worked with: “We nearly killed each other”
There was no question about it: every director wanted to work with Marlon Brando. Even though Brando gained a reputation for being difficult on set, especially in his later years, he was still the iconic star of A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront. Everything that Brando touched had a certain air of authenticity to it, and there wasn’t a director alive who didn’t want to be a part of that.
Francis Ford Coppola famously thought that Brando “wasn’t difficult to work with”, even though he had to devise some unique ways to handle Brando on the sets of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Although Coppola would seem like an easy choice for Brando’s favourite director he’s worked with, the Godfather director didn’t even make Brando’s shortlist.
“Aside from Elia Kazan and Bernardo Bertolucci, the best director I worked with was Gillo Pontecorvo, even though we nearly killed each other,” Brando wrote in his 1994 autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, which the actor co-authored with Robert Lindsey. “He directed me in a 1968 (sic) film that practically no one saw. Originally called Queimada!, it was released as Burn!“
“I played an English spy, Sir. William Walker, who symbolised all the evils perpetrated by the European powers on their colonies during the nineteenth century,” Brando continues. “There were a lot of parallels to Vietnam, and the movie portrayed the universal theme of the strong exploiting the weak. I think I did the best acting I’ve ever done in that picture, but few people came to see it.”
Set in the mid-1800s, Burn! remains one of Brando’s more obscure works. As a British agent sent to overthrow a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean by stoking a slave revolt in the interests of the sugar trade, the film’s subject matter and international production made it something of a non-starter in the United States.
“Gillo had made a film I liked, The Battle of Algiers, and was one of the few great filmmakers I knew,” Brando wrote about Pontecorvo. “He is an extraordinarily talented, gifted man, but during most of our time together, we were at each other’s throats. 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.”
Check out Brando’s performance in Burn! below.
