How alcohol, urine, and ‘Raging Bull’ made Anthony Hopkins realise cinema is “all bullshit”
If there’s one thing Anthony Hopkins hates about acting, it’s actors. If there’s another thing he hates about the job that’s given him a livelihood for the last six decades, it’s answering questions about his acting. Put the two together, and the results are usually combustible.
Obviously, it’s bizarre for someone largely regarded and heavily celebrated as one of the all-time great British thespians to have such a deep-seated disdain for the work he does, but that’s always been intrinsic to Hopkins’ famously, or infamously, depending on who’s on the receiving end, hot-headed personality.
Even after he went teetotal following a lengthy struggle with alcoholism, it wasn’t as if the two-time Academy Award winner suddenly calmed down. If anything, not having booze to fall back on made him seethe even more, with everything from awards season to overbearing directors and most things about modern filmmaking rubbing him the wrong way.
Hopkins made it clear that he was in the business to make money as early as the 1960s, which was admirable honesty for somebody who was a relative newcomer at the time. Three decades later, his opinion hadn’t changed, with the star bristling in a 1998 interview with US Magazine when reflecting on being quizzed on his performative choices.
“I was asked questions like, ‘What is the arc of the part?'” he recalled. “And I’d say, ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about’. And they’d say, ‘Why did you do it?’ And I’d say, ‘Because of the money.'” Hopkins has never been too precious about his art, and it turns out that Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece, Raging Bull, played a significant part in his apathy towards the industry he called home.
“When I went to see Raging Bull, I couldn’t wait,” he explained. “I went to this duplex cinema, and there was a drunk, the smell of urine, someone snoring, and scratches all over the film. I thought, ‘So much for art’. It’s all bullshit. You do it because it’s the instant thing: the instant rush.”
From that point on, Hopkins didn’t care about how, when, or why his films were seen on the big screen. He made them because he wanted to make them, and once he’d gotten the part out of his system, it was onto the next thing, with his unfortunate Raging Bull experience souring him on the so-called ‘prestige’ of cinema he no longer believed in, something he told his Meet Joe Black director, Martin Brest.
After the director became disappointed with failing to capture the perfect sunset take, Hopkins told him it didn’t matter in the slightest: “I said, ‘Marty, when this is released, it will be at a multiplex cinema in some gritty little town somewhere with scratches all over the print.'” Not what a filmmaker wants to hear, but indicative of the actor’s indifferent approach to what happens to a movie once he’s finished working on it.
Raging Bull is one of the greatest movies ever made, but for Hopkins, it had an altogether different, and much worse, effect.
