Alfred Molina recently sat down for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, where he talked about his portrayal of Robert Aldrich in FX's Feud. Here's what he had to say (some light spoilers if you haven't seen episode two yet):
Were you familiar with Robert Aldrich’s work before the series?
"I was a little familiar, I’ve seen a few of his movies over the years obviously. Oddly enough I was quite a fan of a movie he’d made quite late in his career. In England, it came out under the title Mean Machine, but over here it was called The Longest Yard, with Burt Reynolds and Bernadette Peters. I remember loving that movie. And I’d seen Dirty Dozen and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and a few of his movies. But I’d never studied him as a filmmaker until I got cast as him in Feud. Then I went crazy. I read two books that were published on his films and a collection of all the interviews that he’d given over the years of his movies. It was interesting to read, as the years progressed, how he changed his mind about certain films and what he thought of them. I realized very quickly that this was a director that covered every genre. He made horror movies, westerns, situation comedies, dramas, actions films. He covered every genre and is very much regarded as one of those directors that could turn his hand to almost anything. That has its plus and minuses; it was a big testament to him as a technician but it also meant that as far as the industry was concerned, he was never taken quite as seriously as an artist as many of his contemporaries were. That must have affected him somewhat."
How did you prepare physically for a role like this, given that he wasn’t as prevalent on screen as someone like Joan Crawford of Bette Davis would have been in real life?
"I looked at a lot of photographs of Robert and it was clear from the way he stood and held himself he was a big guy, but he belonged to an era when big guys didn’t apologize for being big guys. Men who were large didn’t spend all their time thinking they had to go on a diet, that was just what they were. So there’s a kind of confidence in the way he held himself so I tried to get a sense of that. I couldn’t find any footage of him working, but I did find an interview much later on a chat show on the days where people smoked and drank and didn’t care, and he was very much a man of his time. Being a director, he expected people to jump when he said jump, but that was very typical at the time of men then, certainly men in show business. So I tried to embody that as much as I could."
What do you historically know about his relationship with Jack Warner that resonated in episode two?
"The relationship was certainly tense. There was mutual disrespect. But at the same time, both of them were smart and canny enough to know there was something worthwhile in each other. Jack knew that given the right material, Robert could make a great movie and make money. And Robert was smart enough to understand that, however much he disliked Jack’s methods or personality, as head of the studio given the system that existed at the time he was the gatekeeper. In that respect their relationship was probably very honest. They didn’t pretend to like each other, they didn’t pretend to be friends, but they were smart enough to understand that this was a symbiotic relationship. This was before the modern trend of everyone being all loving and sweet and caring about other people’s feelings. Now we’re careful not to say the wrong thing about each other when it comes to fellow professionals. But in those days things weren’t so circumspect, hence all these rivalries and feuds that went on. People weren’t as discreet, and they were able to be because they weren’t working under this microscope that we all are now with social media and so on. It was a different era. But that relationship was one of mutual need and understanding."
Read the full interview at The Hollywood Reporter.
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