A covenant with death

You joined the Marines at the age of 16. How did that experience shape you?

It taught me a lot about life and about growing up. I was a fairly confused kid when I went into the Marines. I was shy and insecure, and although there’s still a lot of that in me today, I needed the discipline and the camaraderie to get me out of my shell. Being in the military also taught me to learn to concentrate and focus on myself. I think the most profound affect on me was of the time I spent reading while I was in the service. Hemingway, Stevenson, Twain, Conrad…I could never stop reading because those novels took me to worlds that I felt I would never experience in my own life. I felt I didn’t know or understand anything about life, and those books taught me a lot about the world.

Some of your greatest moments as an actor came in the early 70s when you did films like Scarecrow, The French Connection and The Conversation

From an artistic standpoint, it was a great era for me. But The Conversation and Scarecrow were both commercial failures, and that disturbed me a lot. I was depressed by the fact that those two very important films, which I invested so much of myself in, weren’t able to find an audience. I lost a lot of confidence in my ability to choose films and I started worrying that my career would go down the drain together with all the hard work I had put into it. The failure of those two films changed my attitude towards the business. I started looking at acting as a job and less as an art. I decided I would be less selective, take the money, and not worry so much about making grand artistic statements with each project. Ever since then, I understood that you’ve got to be willing to do commercial films in order to maintain your status as an actor to give yourself the freedom to do other kinds of films for pure pleasure.

Is it true that you almost played Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs?

If anything, I was going to play the FBI detective. I had bought the rights, and I was going to produce it and maybe direct it, but I finally gave it up because it was too violent. My children thought it was too violent.