On being Stanley Kubrick

In the early '90s, a British man named Alan Conway provided the show business world with one of its great mysteries: How could a heavily accented, clean-shaven gay man with no working knowledge of the film business or the people in it convince actors, critics, and other well-educated artisans that he was the director Stanley Kubrick, a famously unshaven straight man and filmic genius from the Bronx? It was a deception so nimble that Conway even once tricked the New York Times columnist (and former theater critic) Frank Rich, who invited the man he thought was one of the great directors of our time to join him and friends for dinner.

Is there any aspect of Alan Conway that you relate to?
"Yes. He's a fraud"Once the real Kubrick got wind of the imposter, he was fascinated, leading the famed auteur to have his longtime personal assistant Anthony Frewin gather up information on Conway. That information would eventually lead to Frewin writing the screenplay for Color Me Kubrick, which has its U.S. theatrical release this weekend. We caught up with the film's star, two-time Oscar nominee John Malkovich, to talk about his portrayal of Alan Conway, as well as life's ultimate con—the importance of being an actor.

RADAR: You seem to revel in playing charlatans and con men. What draws you to these roles?
John Malkovich: Nothing particularly, but people don't seem to write many things about people who are very nice and had a pleasant day.

It must be hard to play a character you don't feel at least some sympathy for. What did you find sympathetic about Conway?
Manoel de Oliveira, a Portuguese director I worked with many times, did a beautiful film called Vale Abraão, and the last line was, "No one is so good as I in pretending life is beautiful." That could be Alan Conway's epitaph. His life is incredibly pathetic. He rips off tons of people when he's trying to make his life meaningful and lovely and amorous and memorable and important, and it just isn't. It's like most of our lives. They're important to us.

Is there any aspect of Alan Conway that you relate to?

Yes. He's a fraud, and that's the actor's job. I should hope that some people see through the idea that someone like me is more interesting than anybody else. I'm not.

How do you think Conway pulled off this scam?
How could people believe that Conway was what he said he was? Here's how: When they look at Alan Conway, they see their reflection in his eyes, and in that reflection is their greatness, their discovery. When he talks, they hear their own acceptance speech at the comedy awards or the Oscars or the Grammys or the Booker Prize. That's what they hear. They don't really hear him at all. And if they have to give him the occasional packet of cigarettes or vodka or oral sex or whatever it is to get where they believe they should be, then that's okay.

Do you think that for a lot of people, then, happiness is more important than whether their life is truth or fabrication?
I think that, as they say, ignorance is bliss. I can't imagine anybody who doesn't live some portion of their life in conflict with the truth about themselves or the truth about their life.

Conway was able to get away with so much partially because Kubrick didn't share any of himself with the public. How much of yourself do you share with the public?

Not very much. There's a person allegedly called John Malkovich. Who is that? What does that mean? Right now, I'm making potatoes. So I know who I am and what I'm doing. But John Malkovich is who you want him to be. It's certainly not up to me. You meet people who hate your guts, who are utterly indifferent to you, who are obsessed with you, who love you, who respect you for your work, but they don't know you. They may respect what they perceive to be your talent, which other people perceive to be nonsense. And that's your part. That's public life in the public consciousness. But it's not me. It has nothing to do with me.

"I should hope that some people see through the idea that someone like me is more interesting than anybody else. I'm not"Did you agree to do Being John Malkovich partially to tweak that?
No. I agreed to do it because I thought it was a terrific script, which I had read years and years before. It never occurred to me that anybody would ever be silly enough to do it. I thought it was extremely funny, clever, prescient, and accurate about this idea that people want to be in your head, like there's something there any different from what's in their head, like there's some answer that one can distill from that life experience that can explain the purpose of life. It's absurd.

Since Conway was a man who fudged the truth, did it matter to you how close you were to the truth of his story?
No. What responsibility do you have to someone who's utterly incapable of telling the truth, or even understanding what the truth was? But I always feel a responsibility to a character who has something to say in a story worth watching. Generally in the movies, it's your chance to tell, as Faulkner says, "about the sequence of natural events and their causes which shadows every man's brow." That's your shot. It's the only one you get. In a play it's not the same, because you get that shot every night. People come in, the husband's there, he's unhappy to be there, they paid the baby sitter, to park the car costs $70, they'd rather be somewhere else. Every night it's a different crowd, and you have to attempt to compel them to become interested in the life of someone else. They may have heard the play's terrible, but they may come and love it. They may have heard it's wonderful, brilliant, and earth shattering, and they may come and sleep all the way through it and snore. But that's your job, and your privilege, too.

Have you had roles where you actually had people snoring in the audience?
Sure. I assume every role I've ever had. I don't obsess over it, or go around counting, "How many are snoring tonight? Do you think that's a rapid eye movement snore, or they just dozed off from a black Monday?" I don't analyze it, but sure.

If you're in the middle of a really emotional scene and you hear that, does that throw you? How do you get around that?

You hear it, but does it throw you? No. You get used to it. Theater is a pretty collective form, weirdly enough. It's not just you. It's also them, and what they bring to it. And there are nights I've gone to see plays and I don't think it mattered what the actors did or didn't do, because I was too tired, or had too much on my mind. I was doing a play in Chicago a few years ago and a friend said, "I'm sorry I haven't seen the play, I just can't go to the theater because I find my mind wanders." And I said, "What does that have to do with it? My mind wanders the whole time." And not just when I'm sitting there. When I'm acting, my mind wanders. That's what theater's for. To reflect. To contemplate.

Anything you watch, for certain moments you won't wander if it's very very good, but many times, even if it's very good, you will wander, and the reason you wander is because the play touches on some elements of your life—something you've lived, something you've forgotten, something you've buried, something you've shared, something you don't wanna think about. It somehow, often in a very circuitous or oblique way, hits upon something, and of course you think about that and you miss the next ten minutes of the play. But that's also what a play is for. It's not just a bunch of people going, "Oh, I completely believe everything you wonderful actors are doing on stage." It doesn't really work like that.

It took me a very long time to realize, and to allow myself, that sort of, what I perceived as flightiness or Attention Deficit Disorder.
Absolutely, and I understand why, but to me it's not at all abnormal, and you're absolutely right. It's something you have to allow yourself. Because you don't go to a play and say, "I came here to sleep and not listen to a single word the actors say." As Tom Waits said, "You're innocent when you dream," and that's a form of dream, a form of reverie. You watch this thing unfold and you start to respond, and of course you may respond emotionally. Chances are, you're going to reflect on it.

I've never heard anyone address the fact that that's alright. I think also, you've paid your $70, $90, $110 for tickets, and money for parking, so you almost feel there's an obligation to yourself to catch every second of it.
I was doing a play with a great friend of mine in London a few years ago, and a guy shouted out—in the only decent part of the play—"I hate this play!" For the next three weeks, when we got to within two minutes of that part, we were just shaking, we were laughing so hard. Because we knew exactly what he meant, and why he said it. Unfortunately, I wish he would have said it at a part of the play—which means, almost the entire rest of it—which wasn't very good. But maybe he did that because he thought, see? This play could have been good.