Why Paul Newman refused to watch every movie he made before 1985: “It just drives me nuts”
Some actors hate watching themselves onscreen, and others can’t get enough of it, but Paul Newman was largely ambivalent to the idea of revisiting his past work, so long as it came before his cut-off point.
From the outside looking in, you’d have to say he was missing out. After all, and with the greatest of respect to one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever actors and a ‘New Hollywood’ icon, the majority of Newman’s finest performances were all given before 1985, but he never wanted to see them again.
The Silver Chalice, you can understand, because it was hardly a secret that he loathed his feature-length debut with an intense and burning passion, but by applying the self-mandated point of no return, if he were ever in the mood to take a trip down memory lane, he’d be cutting off his nose to spite his face.
Pre-’85, Newman delivered Academy Award-nominated turns in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, Hud, Absence of Malice, and The Verdict, and that’s without mentioning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Towering Inferno, Harper, Hombre, or Slap Shot.
He considered several of those pictures among the best he’d ever made, and the latter gave him the most fun he’d ever had on a movie set, but according to the man himself, they existed in the no-go area. Post-’85, though, while the odd flashes of brilliance remained, the classics became fewer and further between.
The Color of Money holds up against his best work, Nobody’s Fool was a gem, he was excellent in Road to Perdition, and he was excellent value in The Hudsucker Proxy, but those are really the only performances from the last two decades of his career that can hold a candle to the succession of masterful outings audiences grew accustomed to in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
The easiest way to look at it is this: if you were holding a Paul Newman retrospective, and the criteria were based exclusively on the best acting he’d ever committed to celluloid, then eliminating everything that came before he reprised the role of Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese’s sequel would leave slim pickings. Still, he had his reasons.
“I cannot bear to look at a film that I made before 1990,” he explained. “Maybe 1985. There’s no sense even trying to explain it. I really just can’t watch myself. I see all the machinery at work, and it just drives me nuts, so I don’t look at anything.” A simple reason, but also a defeatist one.
Rewatching his earlier work, Newman could see himself acting, and he hated that he was able to see the gears turning in his head to inform certain character or performative choices. That’s fair enough, but he was also robbing himself of the chance to see a true master in full flow.
