The one and only director who “intimidated the shit” out of Jack Nicholson: “It blew my mind!”
Once he’d become one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s breakout stars, a household name, and one of the industry’s biggest personalities, directors were a lot more likely to be intimidated by Jack Nicholson than he was to be intimidated by them.
Of course, not every filmmaker cowered in the presence of that iconic shit-eating grin and thousand-yard stare, with the actor forging several professional relationships that spanned decades, but younger, less experienced, and more unproven names were known to quake in their boots when he stepped on the set.
That comes with the territory of being both performer and persona; in front of the camera, the three-time Academy Award winner is one of the all-time greats, who rarely gave a performance that was anything less than memorable. Behind it, he was an infamous womaniser, hell-raiser, and wild man, and he carried every ounce of that baggage with him wherever he went.
It wasn’t until after Easy Rider that Nicholson became the magnanimous star he would remain until he retired after James L Brooks’ 2012 flop, How Do You Know, and he was still capable of being intimidated. He was still supremely confident, though, which belied his nervousness at working with a legend.
By the time he helmed the 1970 musical dramedy, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Vincente Minnelli had won an Oscar for directing Gigi, overseen two Oscar-winning performances, and was renowned as one of his generation’s most daring visual stylists and a genre-hopper who hadn’t met a medium he wasn’t willing to tackle at least once.
“You can use me or not,” Nicholson told him when he was auditioning to play Tad Pringle. “I can tell you my credits. I can charm you. But really, I’m the best actor there is in my age group.” He wasn’t wrong, since there were few better, but his friend, Bruce Dern, knew that he was tooting his own horn to compensate for the fact that he was daunted by Minnelli’s presence.
He even told Dern that “Minnelli intimidated the shit out of me,” and things got even more fraught when he had to sing in front of the filmmaker. “They didn’t know if I could even carry a tune,” Nicholson recalled. “So I auditioned. Just me and him in the room. Me singing ‘Don’t Blame Me’ a cappella to Minnelli. It blew my mind!”
He got the part, but it didn’t fill him with professional pride. Having renegotiated his salary several times over to guarantee a $12,500 payday, Nicholson would later confess that the only reason he agreed to star in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever was for the money so he could pay alimony and child support to his ex-wife, Sandra Knight.
With the benefit of hindsight, Dern would subsequently blast Nicholson’s “uncomfortable” work in a movie he called both “pitiful” and “a total toilet job,” with Minnelli’s intimidation factor all but forgotten, replaced by a commercial endeavour that he’d come to regret from almost the second it was released.
