Matthew Modine: The Hollywood Interview

MATTHEW MODINE: BETTER ANGELS
By
Alex Simon

Matthew Modine has been something of an iconoclast most of his working life. After being groomed for ‘80s teen idol status in early films such as Private School and Vision Quest, Modine was also one of the first actors of his generation, along with Sean Penn, to take on riskier projects, such as Robert Altman's Streamers, Alan Parker’s Birdy, Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs. Soffel, and Alan J. Pakula’s Orphans. It was his lead role as the cynical Marine Private Joker in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam epic Full Metal Jacket that put Modine into the pantheon of young actors who were more than just pretty faces and knowing winks at the camera. This, after all, was the young man who turned down the lead in Top Gun, arguably the prototypical ‘80s blockbuster, due to its cold war politics. From the beginning, Matthew Modine carved his own path.

Born March 22, 1959 in Loma Linda, California, Matthew Avery Modine was the youngest of seven children born to Dolores and Mark Modine, who ran a string of drive-in movie theaters across the United States, prompting the Modines to pull stakes during Matthew’s formative years with great frequency. Contrary to some reports, the Modines were not “a close-knit Mormon family.” Mark Modine briefly joined the Mormon Church during a job stint in Utah, and was advised to join the flock for the betterment of his business.

After being bitten by the acting bug as a child, Modine dropped out of college and headed to New York in his late teens, studying with legendary acting coach Stella Adler, and landing his first television role in 1982 on an ABC Afterschool Special. More than sixty feature films later, including one (If…Dog…Rabbit) as a director, Matthew Modine’s latest turn is in the romantic comedy Opa!, featuring Matthew as Eric, an uptight archeologist who lands in Greece, hoping to unearth a cup that may have touched the lips of Christ. When a comely islander (Agni Scott) enters the picture and catches his eye, Eric finds his rigid value system being altered (and seduced) by the woman and the island’s charms. The Cinedigm release hits theaters in limited release October 16.



Matthew Modine, who lives with his wife on a 100-acre farm in upstate New York, spoke with The Hollywood Interview during a recent L.A. stopover. Here’s what transpired:

Opa! reminded me of an old-fashioned romantic comedy that could have been made in the late ‘50s with Jimmy Stewart playing your role, and Sophia Loren playing the Greek girl.
Matthew Modine: Yeah, we were joking during the shoot that it was a Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn movie. I like those kind of movies. I don’t like comedies that are, like, dick joke comedies. I like things that give me the opportunity to reinforce things I’m trying to figure out or believe in. One of those things was the idea of a Western man--and we think of Greece as being part of the West, but it’s really Eastern—and him arriving in Greece and these two mindsets butting heads: a conflict between materialism and spirituality. I thought my character really represented that, that kind of materialism. This cup that he’s seeking out won’t make anybody’s life different if he finds it. It’s just a thing, and the fact that he doesn’t appreciate that what’s important about it is maybe Jesus Christ drank from it. The taverna that rests over the cup’s burial spot now is sort of like the cup: a place where people have been sharing stories, dancing, gathering to share food. We live to work in the West, whereas in a place like Greece, they work to live. And I loved that, and taking a film like that gives me the opportunity to examine something that I’m struggling with in my own life, and being on an island with a couple of thousand people and seeing how they help one another to get by.

Matthew Modine and Agni Scott in Opa!

I remember reading about your being an iconoclast in terms of your values system, going back to the ‘80s. After all, you were the guy who turned down the lead in Top Gun because of its politics.

Yeah, I really do believe that people want to be good. I think we have a violent history, a violent past, and this struggle that began in Greece thousands of years ago of logical thought, of empirical truth, of moving away from the mythologies, of “don’t tell me what you think. Tell me what you know.” Where is the scientific evidence? Not to discount the strange, unknowable spirituality of space, the vastness of the cosmos, but the idea of really solving the problems that exist before us where, if you have a different way of thinking, how do we sit down across the aisle from each other and share thoughts. It’s not about conservatism and liberalism. They really go hand-in-hand. They should support each other. If we didn’t have liberal thought, we wouldn’t have had the abolition of slavery, or women’s right to vote. These are things that are progressive ideas. Our country was founded on liberal thought, but that’s not to say that there aren’t great things about conservatism. One thing that we know about life on this planet is that it evolves, and when we wake up tomorrow we’re going to be another day older, and we’ll be evolving. So I’m digressing, as always (laughs), but I like to find movies being made by like-minded people. I’ll tell you a story. I went to Turkey last year for a film festival. And they asked if I wanted to go to Tiramisus, which was the town that Alexander couldn’t capture. It’s on the top of this hill, and is really amazing. You have to climb up this mountain on this little trail, and you get to the top of this mountain and see this city that Alexander couldn’t conquer, because it was too well fortified, and he said “To hell with it. Destroy it,” which meant to cut down their olive trees and burn them, because that’s what made the town rich. 2,000 years ago they made these miles and miles of terra cotta pipes that would carry the olive oil down into the port, where it was put into drums, loaded onto ships, and sent all over the world. You wander all over this town, and you just feel it’s so alive, then you walk into this amphitheater that was carved into the side of a mountain. And that’s how important theater and art is to our culture, going back that far. As we struggle through our lives, the people who tells stories and sing songs help give us a sense of who we are. Some of us don’t have time in their lives to think these things, that’s why there are some people, like myself, who are retarded enough to become actors, writers, directors that have this strange desire to do this, and those people come together to help give context to our lives. When I was up in that ancient theater, it really humbled me to think that I was part of that lineage. I never celebrate Matthew Modine in the arts. It’s not about me. I might happen to be on the poster of the film, but it’s really about those people sitting around the fire for thousands of years, telling stories. And we’re part of that thing that helps people figure out what the fuck they’re doing here.

Modine at Pvt. Joker in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.

Absolutely, and I think that’s something you’re born with. You had some help growing up because your dad managed drive-in movie theaters. Apparently you had your epiphany while you were watching a documentary about the making of Oliver!
Yeah, that’s right. I looked at the kids, watching them learning the songs and the process, and I just knew that’s what I was supposed to do. It wasn’t because of fame, or celebrity. I just knew that I was supposed to be doing that. It wasn’t about vanity at all. In high school I thought ‘Wow, this is kind of great because you can get laid.’ (laughs) Stella Adler, who I studied with in New York, said “If you came to my class to be a movie star, you can get up and leave right now. I don’t teach that. I teach you to be a human being.” That’s the final thing I say in my play “If I’m lucky, I’ll teach you how to be a human being,” and that’s why the Top Gun thing happened the way it did. I was in East Germany. I was at the Berlin Film Festival, and they asked me if I wanted to go into the Eastern bloc. I said ‘I can’t go into East Germany. I’m an American.’ They said “No, you can. Germans can’t go there, but you can.” I went over there and met Russian soldiers who were my age who gave me pins from their uniforms and we shared cigarettes. They were no different from my brothers who went to Vietnam. I thought ‘Wow, they’re just people, and who are the people who are telling me that the Russians are the bad guys who want to destroy the world, and who are the people in Russia who are saying that the Americans are the bad guys?’ These lies are being told by somebody. I learned that if you follow the money back to the source, you usually find the people who are perpetuating the lies, and if you can get to that cause, it’s the start of the solution.

Well, that was Watergate: follow the money.

Follow the money. Follow the money.

You got to work with two of my heroes: Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman, whom you worked with several times. Let’s start with Kubrick. I read your “Full Metal Jacket Diary,” and I know that working with Kubrick was a major intellectual, sensory and emotional experience. Tell us a bit about his process.

Well, the process was a mystery, and now will remain so forever. I think that you discover when you read the diary that the search that he was on and the discovery of the film that, while premeditated and thoroughly planned was like jazz music, or like a battle, was something that had to be improvised. Things changed over the course of the filming. Discoveries are made. Weaknesses are found, and so you have some performers who don’t fulfill what you imagine the film to be or you have some extraordinary surprises, like in the case of Lee Ermey, that becomes a major chord in the symphony that you’re trying to put together of filmmaking.


The diary contains a lot of great photos, as well as very revealing anecdotes about Kubrick himself.

Yeah, in fact I started a website for the book: www.fullmetaljacketdiary.com. There’s a link where you can register your book. I was just curious to see where it ended up. All the information is confidential, if anyone’s worried about that. It’s just kind of cool to know…I mean, Oliver Stone owns the book, so that was really exciting for me to find out. Probably I should have a forum on the site where I can answer questions about the book, too. But getting back to Kubrick, I think there was this perception about Stanley that everything was so premeditated and planned out, and I don’t think that was the case. He was very improvisational and all that preparation that he did in preproduction—if you look at “The Stanley Kubrick Archives”—it has to be subject to alteration. You start to play the notes. The thing that is exciting for me—and I thought of this recently when I saw an exhibition of Picasso’s work that he did toward the end of his life—was that a man like Picasso or a man like Stanley Kubrick, up to the final moments of their lives were still trying to uncover something, were still searching for something. I worked with Arthur Miller on one of his final plays, called “Finishing the Picture,” which was aptly titled because it was about the end of his relationship with Marilyn Monroe while they were making The Misfits, and “Resurrection Blues,” which Robert Altman directed at The Old Vic in London, where Kevin Spacey is the artistic director. And up until the end of his life, he was trying to solve this bizarre marriage he had with Marilyn Monroe, and with “Resurrection Blues” he was trying to come to terms with the uncertainty of life and the mystery of life, and God. Arthur was close to 90 when he did this play. Picasso was throwing gasoline on these final paintings and watching them melt. He was still trying to bend the form and find something hidden within it, just as he’d done with Cubism. I think that those three men are great examples of people who keep searching, who keep trying to find something. For me, Eyes Wide Shut, the reason that Kubrick had wanted to make that film for so long, before Full Metal Jacket even, there was something about that story that was very personal to him. Kubrick’s father was a doctor and Tom Cruise’s character was a doctor. As Jack Nicholson’s character says in A Few Good Men “You can’t handle the truth.” I think that was a big part of what that story was about and a big part of what many of Stanley’s films are about is telling the truth. When people start to tell lies, there is deception and there is mistrust, and from mistrust comes violence. Whether it’s The Shining or A Clockwork Orange or even 2001: A Space Odyssey, there’s an underlying story about the importance of telling the truth. Once people start to lie to one another, like in Eyes Wide Shut, Nicole Kidman’s character had this fantasy of fucking some sailor and was honest with Tom Cruise about it, and he couldn’t handle the truth.

Modine and Heather Prete in Arthur Miller's "Finishing the Picture."

You raise an interesting question: what’s been the ongoing question or theme of exploration in your life, thus far?
Trying to understand that big mystery: what are we doing here? That’s what drives me with the choices I make. What are we doing here? What is the meaning of life? What I do know is that when I have my final breath on this planet, I don’t want to be gasping for another one. I want to feel that if my time came today, I could smile and exhale and say ‘Ah, that was good,’ because I didn’t harm anybody to live my life and achieve the success that I’ve had. There are a lot of people who step on people’s throats in order to be successful. There is that nature in all of us, like puppies at their mother’s tits. You don’t want to be that run shoved to the back on the back tit. You want the motherlode. (laughs) That’s instinct. But I think if we imagine ourselves to help one another when we’re suffering, that’s what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said “To summon up our better angels,” to summon up the better side of humanity.

You got to work with Robert Altman three times, twice on the screen, and once on the stage.

The thing about working with Bob was, it wasn’t just those times working with him on the set, unless you’re a schmuck, you become a part of his family. You’ll meet with him, have dinner with him, and you became a part of his life. Oftentimes you work with people on a film and then once you’ve wrapped, you never see them again. Altman chose people that he enjoyed spending time with, and fortunately I was one of those people that became a part of his extended family.

And in terms of his working process, apparently he was someone who really gave his actors a lot of latitude in terms of what they did in front of the camera.

Yeah, I’d say he gave those people latitude because he was careful about who he picked to work with, whether it was Shelley Duvall, Meryl Streep or Warren Beatty. He picked people because he was looking for people who understood the role. I had a big monologue in Streamers when we were making that in Texas and I wanted to talk to Bob about the monologue I was going to do. I was very nervous because I hadn’t had a role of that size before, and I was very nervous about the interpretation of what I was saying. He kept postponing and postponing our conversation about the monologue and finally the day came where he said “Okay, we’re going to shoot. Modine, you go first.” I said ‘Bob, I’ve never had a chance to talk to you about this.’ He said “Let’s just shoot it.” We shot it, did two takes, maybe three, and he said “Good. Let’s move on to Mitchell Lichtenstein.” And I was really upset. He sat down on the bunk with me and said “You see kid, if I was interested in my interpretation of the role, I would’ve played it. I hired you because I knew you were an actor who understood it, and could play it. My job is to be like the conductor who says ‘A little bit softer.’ ‘A little bit louder.’ Your job is to interpret the role.” And it was such an important lesson for a young actor to receive from such a masterful director that the responsibility of interpretation is mine, just like if I was a cellist or a violinist, I wouldn’t expect the composer to teach me the song. He would want me to know the song and come in, and play it. The way that a conductor looks at a musician looks at a musician when they’re playing, you can see in the conductor’s face what he wants the musician to do, and you could see the same thing with Bob. He was very much a masterful conductor.

Modine and Julianne Moore in Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

By the time you did Short Cuts in 1993, you were a veteran actor, as opposed to a neophyte actor. Did you find the experience of working with him different at that point?

Yeah, in the sense that I had enough confidence to say to him in the scene with Julianne Moore where she takes her pants off and wanders around the house. I said ‘Bob, I know it says in the script that I’m chasing her around the house, but I don’t think this is the first time they’ve had this conversation. The difference is, today is the day when he’s going to put a period on this conversation, and get to the bottom of it. He’s going to sit in his chair, have his cocktail, and chase her around the room with his words and his thoughts.’ And Bob said “Fantastic. That’s what you’ll do.” That’s how he’d start every conversation on a set: “Okay Modine, what do you want to do?” And I think that created a much more powerful scene.

Any final thoughts?

I’ve been lucky enough to reach that point in my life, at 50, where there are so many tremendous roles that open up. When you’re young you get by on charm and looks, and when you’re middle aged there are some amazing opportunities that you have. I just hope all this work I’ve done over the last 30 years has prepared me for it.


The first ten minutes of boot camp from Full Metal Jacket.