Films Illustrated 5/73 Malcolm McDowell Interview for O Lucky Man!

Lucky Lucky Man by John Williams

    Five years ago, an unknown actor of youthful appearance made a remarkable debut in an equally remarkable film called if.... .The film was one of director Lindsay Anderson's all too rare forays into cinema. The boy, Malcolm McDowell, was received by the critics as some kind of Thespian Jesus - a new face, and with talent too. Perhaps hope was to spring eternal for the fading film industry after all. Perhaps a star was born.
    Young Malcolm, fresh from Leeds via Liverpool, and possessing a ruthlessly honest approach to people and life generally, took the capital by storm. And if...., considering its social and artistic qualities, made a not inconsiderable amount of money. That almost unheard of achievement had been realized: artistic merit and commercial success went hand in hand, and the grey-haired lefties and whiskey-soaked profiteers stood together and cheered.
    McDowell was sent script after script, but while he had been chosen to play Mick Travis in if..., he resisted the obvious financial temptations of instant popularity. His next two pictures were carefully chosen - Figures in a Landscape and The Raging Moon both provided him with parts that would absorb his interest in the individual's quest for fulfillment. Commercially, they were quiet to say the least, largely because the distributors involved were disinterested. But A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm's fourth film, became a phenomenon of its time. Watch committees banned it in Hastings and Leeds (Malcolm's home town) and the film's makers were accused of influencing the increasingly violent mood of teenagers in Britain (its right-wing critics chose to ignore the fact that these same youngsters were prohibited from viewing the film anyway). It was a truly original masterpiece, and took 25 million dollars within a year of release.
    To complete a sequence of five films which together illustrate, how sensitive and intelligent our young hero is, Malcolm persuaded Lindsay Anderson to take an interest in something he had begun to write. David Sherwin, who wrote if...., became involved, as did other members of the original team. The result is O Lucky Man!
    "It's a much more ambitious film than if.....". Malcolm thinks carefully about words. "I mean that I think if.... was a great film, but on a smaller scale - it was bound by the public school, whereas this isn't. This is a journey through life. It's an odyssey, a kind of search for success."
    In many ways, O Lucky Man! takes over where if.... ended. McDowell once again plays the character Mick Travis, now a coffee salesman put in charge of 'The North East' - a major sales territory for the Imperial Coffee Company, headed by Peter Jeffery (the headmaster in if....) At this stage of the film, it is a closely autobiographical study.
    "I was a coffee salesman", Malcolm explains. "It's a very degrading job, a really hard job. I was stuck out in Yorkshire, in digs in Leeds. I used to drive off every day flogging the stuff, wherever I could. I just thought: there's got to be something better than this, there just has to be something better. I can't go through my life working up to being a home sales manager, because I don't give a damn whether they sell the coffee or not, though it's good coffee. Commerce- forget it!" Malcolm wandered into acting after a course of elocution lessons with an old lady in Liverpool.
    "I had this girlfriend at the time who went to a Mrs. Ackley for lessons. I went with her once, and we got on. She used to just talk about her experiences. In a way, she corresponds to one of the characters in the film (Monty, played by Ralph Richardson), though it's not fully explored. She was a kind of mentor figure for me. It's very important to me to have somebody. I've always been lucky in that respect. I've always found somebody that can give to me, and I can give to them and it seems to work. This type of person has always been strong in my life, except when I was in Yorkshire, that was the only time I didn't have anybody. It's probably why I just drifted around and was so lonely." "I suppose the very first person to influence me to act was the headmaster at my school. He did a couple of productions a year, one Shakespeare, one a pantomime. I didn't particularly enjoy it at the time- I mean I enjoyed it when it was on, but I hated rehearsing. I thought it was rather sissy stuff. I preferred to be playing cricket or rugby." O Lucky Man! ends when Mick Travis finds himself auditioning for a film part, clearly the completion of the odyssey since the reference is to if.... . "This last scene obviously isn't the actual audition I went to, but the thing was that when I was writing the story, I asked Lindsay, how the hell does one end this thing. He said, 'what happened to you? you were in if...., right? Well, that's a good end, that's enough.'
    "This is the audition for life really, it's nothing to do with a film part. The idea behind it is the Zen Buddhism thing of the master and the pupil. It's interesting, because everybody has a completely different idea about the ending - the scene between Lindsay and I. A very eminent film director saw it and said: Oh, yes, that's the dominance of the director over the actor, which really amused me!" (A cough, a smile straight out of A Clockwork Orange)
    "I find it a very moving scene, I don't know why. It's nothing to do with me as such. It's the culmination of all the events that have happened to this character. At the beginning it's easy for him to smile. But he tries to get through to his fellow human beings and is rejected by them. This is what society does to us- if you're at all aware, you've got to question things all the time. Mick is, I suppose, the great naive, like Candide".
    But doesn't that mean that the real Malcolm McDowell is going to find it very difficult to find satisfaction?
    "Of course. It's true that I will never come to terms with myself. If you found what you were looking for, then that is the time to die. What's the point of going on? You've got to have something to motivate you and drag you on. That is what life is about - for me. You can't just drift on as I did when I was a salesman. I wasn't old enough or mature enough to understand what was going on. I came out of school having been taught to be a success. 'Get out there. Whatever you do, just be successful.' I really did believe that."
    It begins to be apparent why Malcolm McDowell is being hailed as a superstar. He knows exactly what he is doing; is a total realist.
    "I don't think it's true that people will automatically go and see your next film if they enjoyed your last. Reputations only mean something in the first week or so. After that, it doesn't matter what you do, it depends on word of mouth. If the word of mouth is not good on a film, you've had it - you've really had it."
    "All I can really do for the industry is to try and get people like Lindsay Anderson to work. It is difficult. He is one of the greatest directors in the world. There is no question in my mind that if he will make a film in England, then it's a bit of an event. It would be very nice to get John Schlesinger to make a film, or Jack Clayton or Karel Reisz. They are the people who can change things.
    "I don't want to have to work abroad. I certainly don't want to live abroad. I'm English, my roots are here. It would be like taking a cod and putting it in a river." "I don't think the British film industry is ideal as it is. The people who seem to be running our business- I don't really know who they are to tell the truth, one never knows really who is doing what- if they put up 100,000 pounds for a film , which is really very cheap, then they can get their money back in England. It's pure economics. So they are quite prepared to make any old piece of shit as long as it doesn't cost more than a hundred thousand. Then there's the TV sale. It's much more difficult to make a film which has a universal appeal instead of a typically English provincial kind of appeal. If O Lucky Man! did sensational box office in England, it would lose money. If you're making a film about freedom or success then it will be understood the world over. That's the kind of film I'm trying to find work in.
    "I couldn't write a script on my own, but I think I can bring some ideas to it, working with somebody like David Sherwin. That's how we started on O Lucky Man! and we seem to work well together. Ideas seem to really move. It's too lonely a job for me to do by myself. I haven't got that kind of will power.
    "A lot of the film has happened to me, or at least it's how I remember it as- the truth at the time, or an extension of the truth. It's very weird, except of course that Mick is a characterization. He's not a realistic character in any way. It's not realistic cinema." "I found the character very hard to play because it isn't a great part. Mick is a sort of essence, a catalyst if you like. But next time I write a film I'm going to make sure that I will write myself a better part! No, that's being a little ungenerous. But I do find it much more difficult than A Clockwork Orange. That was a great actor's role, you could really go to town and enjoy it. This was much more controlled."
    One of the features of Malcolm's performances, to date is his apparent willingness to get involved in bruising physical scenes, like the lengthy chase through the swamps in Figures in a Landscape.
    "I always think I'm very bad at action. That's my weakest point. When it comes to action, I think: Oh god, it's so boring." "Some of the things I have to do are really painful. I should have never gone through with the scene in A Clockwork Orange where I have my eyes pegged open. I was told later that I could have permanently damaged myself. In Lucky Man, I have to climb a steep hillside in the rain- they had to put pegs in the ground, or it would have been impossible. As it was, I could only manage one go at it.
    "The scene in Clockwork Orange where I get ducked in a horse trough - there was a bottle of oxygen in there. I had to find a mouthpiece and start breathing. We shot it without the bottle and I could only last ten seconds. It was a bloody cold day, in January, and the water was freezing. It was just horrendous. The water was colored with bovril. But the rushes didn't look up too much. A very clever man called Roy Scammell, I guess he is a stuntman, he thought of this bottle. That's the great thing about films, of course. It is a tremendous amalgam of everybody making a contribution. If it hadn't been for Roy, that scene would have gone for nothing."
    As if to prove his point, Malcolm is keeping closely in touch with the post-production work on O Lucky Man! He spends almost as much time in the cutting rooms and the preview theatres as do Anderson and producer Michael Medwin.
    "You've got to get behind a film, like Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman and I did on The Raging Moon. We went to different showings over the country to try and push it. You've got to care."
    "I hope O Lucky Man! doesn't get an 'X' certificate. I don't see why it should - there's hardly any nudity, there's no pubic hair, which is what they go on. You can't start cutting a film, because it has something which the present government would not like it. Unless you're applying political censorship. This is a problem, because we've just pulled the film out of a big festival in Washington. It was going to be shown for the first time, as part of the opening of the Kennedy Arts Center. The American Film Institute invited a Costa-Gavras film, his new one, which is about political assassination. The moral behind that is that in certain circumstances assassination is fine. Well, nobody would have complained if someone had shot Hitler, would they? So, it was all planned, the catalogue was printed, the bookings confirmed, then suddenly Nixon said: well, I'm not going there if they're going to show a film in the Kennedy Memorial Center about political assassination. So the AFI withdrew the film. So we said this is political censorship, so we won't show our film there. Ten other films came out with us, including Truffaut's and Rossellini's. Franco Zeffirelli stayed in."
    Malcolm McDowell clearly does care about a lot of things, and his experiences with Messrs. Losey, Forbes, Kubrick and Anderson will stand him in good stead later in years.
    "I do think that in the end, I'll have to direct, that's all, for good or for bad. If I can get the money to do it." But that's all in the future. For now, he will continue to look out for possible projects.
    "I don't beat around the bush. If I want to talk to a particular director, I ring him up and say, can I come round- let's meet. There's no point in sitting around like some bloody primadonna." We wander off to the local in search of beer and sandwiches. The barman comes from Liverpool.
    "Do you know the Lucky Pig in Knutsford?"
    "Acting is technique. That's what the game is about. You can't be undisciplined as an actor. You have to develop your technique from experience. You can't go on all the time every day for seven months giving this honest performance. There are some days when you don't feel like it, but if you are a pro actor, you can't just say: I'm sorry, I don't feel like it today. That's the technique. In the end, there's a terrible moment when it all goes quiet, and it's up to you."