“You know damn well why”: the genre every actor needs to try once, according to Marlon Brando
It must be an incredible thing to work in a profession and be able to seek advice in person from quite possibly the greatest to ever do it, and that’s the position the late Val Kilmer found himself in when he befriended the legendary Marlon Brando.
After all, Brando is the actor that most will point to as the most influential, the forerunner, the man who changed movie acting forever and whose performances, especially in the 20-year period between On the Waterfront and The Godfather, still stand as some of the finest in film history, but despite that provenance, the relationship between Kilmer and Brando was anything but straightforward.
Up until they were both cast in the 1996 movie The Island of Dr Moreau, Kilmer was resolutely of the opinion that Brando was his hero, however once filming began there were several reports of the former’s difficult behaviour, possibly due to his recent divorce, and clashes with Brando, who reportedly told the younger actor: “Your problem is you confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent”.
But despite that, once a couple of decades had passed, Kilmer began to talk about how rather than a strained relationship, the two in fact got on very well, saying that Brando had been supportive of him through that difficult period and that the veteran actor had constantly made him laugh throughout filming on the ill-fated sci-fi horror, which is often regarded as one of the most chaotic productions in Hollywood history.
In his last few years before he succumbed to illness, Kilmer began to look back on his life and career, writing a biography called I’m Your Huckleberry: A Memoir, which he published in 2020, and a documentary called Val, which came out the following year, and in fact included some footage of him and Brando seemingly getting on famously behind the scenes on the movie.
In his book, Kilmer wrote about how much he looked up to Brando and the influence he had on his career. He wrote, “I’m proud of the work I did on [1989’s] Billy the Kid, a made-for-TV western written by Gore Vidal, the towering member of the literati. In thinking about the role, I may have had in mind Brando’s Kid Rio, the hero of the only movie Marlon ever directed, One Eyed Jacks.”
He added, “That film was made when I was an infant. When I was an adult and Brando’s friend, he told me that at some point every actor must make a western. When I asked him why, he answered with his famous half smile and the words, ‘You know damn well why’.”
In trying to work out why Brando might have felt that way, as Kilmer could only land on the fact that the pair were American, and that to be American meant it was necessary to show the nation’s complicated past with guns, westerns and the seizing of native land through violence. Brando, of course, was famously vocal about his feelings on that matter, sending an activist called Sacheen Littlefeather up on stage to collect, or rather turn down, his ‘Best Actor’ Oscar for The Godfather in 1973.
Kilmer died just over a year ago, but will appear in a new A24 movie this month called As Deep as the Grave with the use of generative AI. The historical action movie also stars Harry Potter’s Tom Felton and is the story of America’s first female archaeologist. Kilmer had been cast before his death but hadn’t filmed anything for the movie, so all of his scenes will be entirely digital.
