Lives Less Ordinary How do filmmakers and actors make historical figures--known, unknown, dead, or alive--breathe on screen? It's all open to interpretation. by Ty Burr This movie season, the simple questions will be on the order of How did they get Harry Potter to fly? Answer: computers and blue screens. Now for the hard stuff: How do you boil down the life of Muhammad Ali to two and a half hours? Can you truthfully dramatize the long, fraught marriage of writers Iris Murdoch and John Bayley--or any marriage--on a movie screen? Is it possible for clean-cut Benjamin Bratt to make himself over as the junkie playwright Miguel Pinero? And why does Ron Howard want to direct a film about a troubled, real-life mathematics genius in which entire characters and events are pure fiction? These days, fantasy is easy and reality is hard. So while the four films mentioned above are each based on the lives of people who have walked--or still walk--the earth, don't dare call them biopics. "This is categorically not a biopic," insists Ali director Michael Mann. "This is Will Smith and I trying to do something more extreme than that." "Ours is not a biopic," seconds Akiva Goldsman, screenwriter of A Beautiful Mind, the Howard-directed tale of Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr. (Russell Crowe). Admits Tim Williams, coproducer of Pinero, "In terms of being truthful to the actual things that he did and the people who were in his life, that was sort of secondary for us." Iris director Richard Eyre simply states, "One person's truth is another person's lie." Get past the semantic defensiveness--and, okay, the word biopic does conjure up images of made-for-Lifetime movies and Gary Oldman glowering in a Beethoven fright wig--and you find a group of screenwriters, directors, and actors all wrestling with a profound conundrum: How do you get the truth of a person on screen? Is it even possible? On one level, of course not. "Simple selection is a creative process," laughs Goldsman. "You say 'Well, this was a scrupulously accurate biopic.' Yes, but you left out 98 percent of the person's life. It's by definition not accurate, so stop striving for accuracy. Strive for something else." In the case of his film, that meant striving to see through Nash's eyes as literally as possible. "We took the architecture of John's life that God gave us," says Goldsman. "It's: mathematics genius, mental illness, Nobel Prize. And then we reimagined. We tried to replicate the experiences of those phases of his life in the minds and hearts of the audience. It's a stab at the truth, but not by way of the facts." Not that the filmmakers made everything up: When Ron Howard met with the real Nash, who at 73 still teaches in Princeton, N.J., he had an epiphany that shaped the whole film. "I realized that Alicia is as much of a hero in this story," says Howard of his subject's wife (played by Jennifer Connelly), who divorced Nash yet has continued to care for him--and recently remarried him. "You see 95 percent of the movie through John's eyes, but it's good to pull back and see 5 percent of it through Alicia." One may be allowed some creative leeway when dealing with a John Forbes Nash Jr., hardly a household name. But what about Muhammad Ali, whose every waking moment during his peak seems to have been documented? For Mann and cowriter Eric Roth (who also collaborated on The Insider) that meant choosing a key stretch of time and digging in. "What's the moment in somebody's life that's emblematic of the whole?" asks Mann. "If you can find that fractal that contains within it all the dramatic struggles, then it's powerful. What I found to be the heart of Ali's history was 1964 to 1974, Liston to Foreman." There's endless high drama within that decade--marriages, a conversion to Islam, draft resistance, a championship title won, stripped, and reclaimed--and the Ali team had free rein to present the bad with the good. "Muhammad and [fourth wife] Lonnie said that one thing they didn't want was some idealized, religious portrait of Ali," says Mann, "because to do that reduces him to a Hallmark greeting card." If no one knows John Forbes Nash Jr. and everyone knows Muhammad Ali, Miguel Pinero was known by both many and few in the New York City theater scene. "Everybody seems to have a story about him," says Pinero coproducer Tim Williams. "From Pacino and De Niro on down. And most of the time it's 'He still owes me money.'" The Puerto Rican-born writer emerged from an early stint in jail for petty theft as one of the crucial voices of the Nuyorican poetry renaissance, and his 1974 play Short Eyes--about a prison community's response to a child molester in their midst--shocked theatergoers, got a Tony nomination for best play, and was made into an acclaimed 1977 film. But Pinero was never able to reconcile success with the street: Caroming between playwriting, acting in films like Fort Apache, the Bronx, heroin addiction, and homelessness, he died of cirrhosis in 1988. "He could be jivey and talk like someone from the street," says Benjamin Bratt, "and yet he could talk about Kierkegaard and the Beat poets. He was an incredibly conflicted man." This also made him extremely hard to research, according to writer-director Leon Ichaso (Sugar Hill), who knew Pinero in the early 1980s. "He didn't live the kind of life where records were kept. Most of his friends are dead--killed, murdered, died of AIDS. So what I found that could tell the story best was his work." And in a very real sense, adds Ichaso, "his form was himself. Wherever he went, he'd lay on theater; maybe his best work was forgotten in shooting galleries and bars and streets and parties, rooftops, whatever. He was like a happening." By contrast, Iris looks to be the most conventional of the four films: a straightforward adaptation of two books by John Bayley about his relationship with the renowned British author of such prickly, intelligent novels as A Severed Head and The Green Knight. And yet it's the story of a marriage, captured both in youth (when Murdoch and Bayley are played by Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville) and at the end, when Murdoch is suffering from Alzheimer's disease (and the couple is played by Dame Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent). But who can claim to know the secret language of any long-term couple? Not director Richard Eyre, who often spoke with Bayley, got his blessing on the screenplay, but chose not to work closely with the author. "None of us can play God with authority," says Eyre, a veteran of British stage and screen. "My obligation is not to traduce the experience of the people on whom it's based, not to trivialize it, and not to misrepresent it. But we don't know what truthfully goes on between anyone in a relationship that lasts 30, 40 years." If it's an inherently absurd task for screenwriters and directors to boil a life down to a paste jewel of simulated reality, how much harder is the actor's task? A fictional character is open to endless interpretation, but a real-life human is rooted in the physical immediacies of voice, bearing, and personality. Can an actor hope to use makeup and mimicry to get at the substance of a person? Or is mere imitation a dead end? Depends on whom you ask. Many actors and directors claim to shy away from mimicry, but it's clear that it's a useful tool in building a larger performance. "I know my main goal is to inhabit and not impersonate," says Pinero's Bratt. "And yet I did want to capture some physical accuracies and vocal qualities of the man." Director Michael Mann feels more strongly: "You never mimic, because it's a self-defeating road to travel. The most you can get is a good Xerox." At the same time, some members of his Ali cast aren't averse to reaching for the actor's equivalent of the toner cartridge. "There's two things," says Mario Van Peebles, who plays spiritual adviser Malcolm X. "One is just being a really good mimic. And the other is being true to the spirit of the man." And Jon Voight freely cops to the joys of latex in helping to create his performance as famed sportscaster Howard Cosell. "I'm a little bit more related to Lon Chaney than some of the more modern fellas, you know?" says the veteran actor about his approach to a role. "I'm a pretty good mimic, and I enjoy changing myself." Looking like your character is one thing; knowing everything about him or her is another. All actors consider research a sacred duty, and some revel in it. "It's one of the reasons I got in this business," says Van Peebles. "The excuse to go ahead and learn about what you're doing." To that end, he interviewed everyone from Malcolm's daughters to Louis Farrakhan to Jesse Jackson to his own father, writer-director Melvin Van Peebles, who interviewed Malcolm during the Muslim leader's visit to Paris. "It was interesting to go to my own family tree and shake it a little bit," the actor remembers. "I was able to sit down and talk with my father about his impressions of Malcolm, and then talk with Malcolm's daughter about the meeting of our fathers. You have two second-generation firstborns talking about the meeting of their fathers! And not only that, but my two daughters played Malcolm's daughters. So this really was an unusual experience." Others approach research more casually. For Judi Dench, who has Queens Elizabeth and Victoria on her resume, books and questions work fine. "What you've got to do, I think, is read up as much as you can, to understand what motivated her," she says of capturing Iris Murdoch. "I've seen people with Alzheimer's. I never stopped talking to people about her. And it all goes into a sort of an inner computer." And then? For Dench, the actual process came down to communing with an old photo of Murdoch: "I found that, with all the things I'd stored up in this personal computer, just glancing at that picture was enough to start a chain of some kind of life of her inside me." This is where the mysteries begin, and it's where many actors start sounding mystical, inarticulate, or simply odd. After Van Peebles is done researching, for example, "I literally and figuratively sleep--and a lot of the pieces of the puzzle come to me at a semiconscious state." Says Bratt, "I once read a story that Sir Laurence Olivier couldn't capture the essence of a character until he actually wore the shoes of the man he was going to portray." Bratt's own inhabitation of Pinero grew in similarly intuitive ways, according to his director. "Ben's a jock, and all of a sudden he had to be a junkie," recalls Ichaso. "He runs six miles a day; now he was dragging himself in the streets. He was starting to eat greasy stuff, started smoking and drinking, just letting himself get a little nearer, putting the pieces of Miguel together." As time passed, Ichaso began getting nervous. "One day I said, 'Ben, we're going to shoot in a week, you haven't shown me a thing!' It was just the two of us at his apartment. He went to the bathroom for a second, I waited in the living room. Then he came back and started talking the Miguel rap, that jivey bebop, doing stuff with his arms, and...he was Pinero! There was no more Benjamin Bratt in front of me." Even somebody as seemingly confident as Russell Crowe can get edgy when jumping into this pool. Remembers A Beautiful Mind director Ron Howard, "Russell said, 'I'm not sure I can get this guy,' and I said, 'I'm not looking for a mimic. I hired you for your creativity and insights.'" Crowe chose not to meet with Nash (although the two bumped into each other on the set); instead, the actor studied photos and seized on physical elements, like his subject's haircut. "Nash has long, elegant hands," says Howard, "and Russell has big, strong hands, so he let his nails grow long. I'm not sure you see it in the movie, but it was something he used to help him." The result? According to screenwriter Goldsman, "The John Nash that Russell portrays is an entirely complete individual. It's un-be-liev-able to watch." Michael Mann, by comparison, has the transmutation of his actors down to a science. He just can't talk about it. "Whether it's Pacino or De Niro or Russell Crowe or Daniel Day-Lewis or Will Smith, it's always the same process," the director says. "The process can't be described in 25 words or less, but it requires about a year of preparation. It's everything from Will taking Islamic studies to becoming a boxer. Not learning how to box, not figuring out how to fake it, but becoming a boxer. From that to working on the regional origins of Ali's speech patterns to the point that Will would be dreaming in Ali inflections." Finally the machinery is honed, says Mann, and impulse and grace take over. "Then your thoughts have to be spontaneous and your emotions have to be spontaneous, and automatically they get expressed because you are Ali. That's why it's not mimicry. I don't know if there's a term for it, but it's kind of a reanimation of that character inside you." How spontaneous, exactly? "There were many times where Michael would say 'Okay, what does Malcolm say here?'" says Van Peebles. "And you've gotta know, and it's not a scene that's scripted. What does he say when he's talking about his eldest daughter? What was she like? What did he call her? What was he feeling about the Nation of Islam at this time? And it has to be in the time period; not just saying it in today-speak. You gotta be it. It's challenging." When does the challenge end? Given the karmic alchemy needed to wear another person's psyche, do any of these actors have a problem putting their own shoes back on? Many insist they don't; they're professionals, after all. "Oh, there's no confusion at all," says Dench. "It is, when it comes to it, a job." Of his Beautiful Mind star, Goldsman says, "Russell is absolutely committed to the moment--and then a great guy to smoke a cigarette with." Other actors admit that real-life personae can be harder to shake. Bratt is still moved by a spooky, tearful set visit by some of Pinero's relatives. "That's the ultimate compliment, to have a family member say that for a moment they felt he was alive," he says, admitting that Pinero has been "one of the few roles I've played where to date he stays with me." For Van Peebles, playing Malcolm X prompted a larger rethink. "I, um...I made out my will," he admits. "And I put my finances in order, and I decided what I would leave to my kids, and I just clarified my position. I decided that I'd be very specific about what kind of roles I wanted to do at this point. "It's a funny thing," he says, "when you play a man that feels as comfortable, if not more, than being yourself. Check that out. You take away a lot."