Woods recalls some of the more difficult moments between him and Stone: “Oliver
and I are great friends now and were then, but there was alot of tension between us
during the making of the film. At one point we were rolling in the mud, pushing and
shoving each other, and people had to pull us apart. Another time I was strapped
down to the street with all these wires [tied to explosive squibs] running up my legs
because I was suppose to get shot, and this Mexican pilot who didn’t speak any
English was about to fly this old single-engine plane real low over me, and just before
the scene starts, Oliver’s looking over the scene and I hear him say, ‘God I miss
combat.’ So I think, ‘You get down here and be wired to the damn street with this
screwy plane flying over you, then.’ But all the tension worked wonders on t he
screen.”
Bob Richardson agrees. “I think that Jimmy would raise the stake of each scene
intentionally because when he amps up to a high level, his performance is
outstanding, and when he didn’t crank himself as high, he wasn’t quite as god. At
least I think this is what he thought. As a result, he clearly made a decision to go at
Oliver, deliberately push him, whether subconsciously or consciously. He pushed
Oliver hard, and Oliver ended up pushing back. The two of them just came to that
end, ego against ego. As a result, his performance is what it is, and I believe that’s one
of the reasons it’s so fine.”
Stone acknowledges the battles between him and Woods. “With Jimmy, the thins is
he tends to direct himself.” He says, “Which is not good because he over plays alot.
I’ve seen that in alot of his performances. It’s as if the director could not control him
or criticise or challenge him - I have a feeling that Jimmy is so bright with his I.Q that
he’s intimidating. You know he has a very eccentric genius, no question about it, and
I was lucky enough to tap in to it. Bunt in order to do so I had to get in the way of his
reflection.”
Richard says it went alot farther than that. “One time we were setting up to shoot a
bar sequence and all of a sudden there was this screaming from another room. Then
we heard this sort of movement. So we opened the door and it was Oliver just beating
Jimmy’s head against the ground. They were taking swings at each other. They came
to blows a number of times. They would just pound each other.”
Stone shrugs and a malicious grin comes over his face. “Jimmy’s like the guy you
want to punch out in school. He’s a whiner. He complained so much he drove
everyone crazy. The crew, me, his fellow actors, everyone wanted to kill him because
we had no money and we really had to depend on his mercy. He was, at that time, the
biggest single star in the whole thing, so it was like we were all amateurs and he was
the professional always telling us what to do. When someone is always reminding you
of that, it becomes tiresome. I don’t believe in confronting everyone, but I think
confronting Jimmy helped. He wasn’t use to being confronted and I think he gave the
best performance I’ve seen him do. Because I drove him nuts. on certian days, I tried
to work on his insecurity a bit. To use the anguish. By the time we got to that, he was
ready to pop. But that was a little long into the shoot when we started to get under
each other’s skin.”
