Spike Lee’s bizarre late-night phone call from Marlon Brando: “I didn’t believe it was him”
It’s often said there’s a very fine line between genius and madness, and rarely has that been truer in Hollywood than in the shape of Marlon Brando, even if his eccentricities regularly overshadowed his talent as the years wore on.
A legend who completely changed the face of screen acting forever, the generations to follow in his wake view Brando as an almost godlike being who exists on a pedestal all of his own. He’s without a doubt one of the all-time greats, but he was also a notoriously difficult customer.
Tales of Brando running roughshod have become the stuff of legend, whether he was pitching to voice a briefcase or a bagel in Superman, refusing to wear trousers on The Score, making life miserable for everyone on Mutiny on the Bounty, or sleepwalking his way through performance after performance with his eyes affixed solely on the paycheque.
He was also a mischievous sort, with Samuel L. Jackson telephoning the man who quoted Pulp Fiction at him during their first encounter, only to be greeted by a Chinese restaurant. It was Brando’s ingenious way of screening his calls, but the shoe was on the other foot when he decided to ring Spike Lee in the middle of the night.
The filmmaker had been a huge fan of Brando’s for a long time, with On the Waterfront one of his favourite-ever movies. That’s why it would have been reasonable for the bleary-eyed auteur to think he was dreaming when he picked up the phone at two o’clock in the morning to discover it was the guy who won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ by playing Terry Malloy on the other end.
Why on earth did Brando – who’d never contacted Lee before – make a point of troubling him in the wee hours? “He wanted me to do a film about Native Americans,” the Oscar-winning director said, per Vanity Fair. “I never heard from him after that. I found out later he would call people real late. But somehow, he got my number. I didn’t believe it was him at first.”
Essentially, despite the two never having met face-to-face at any point in their lives, Brando thought Lee was the ideal candidate to mount a feature-length production about a subject that was very close to his heart. After they shot the breeze and the project failed to come to fruition, they never crossed paths again, with Brando passing away at the age of 80 in July 2004, still never having met the trailblazer behind Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X.
That was the only interaction the two ever had, and while it was a bizarrely surreal experience for Lee, it wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary for late-career Brando.
