2012 SBIFF Modern Master Award - Christopher Plummer

hello hi it's so great to be back here at the santa barbara international film festival i always love coming here um he is into his eighth decade of life and this year marks his 60th year in front of the camera but christopher plummer is hotter than ever [Applause] i'm telling you he's on a roll so don't think of this as a life achievement award or one of those things you know no way welcome to the santa barbara international film festival's mid-career tribute to christopher plummer and tonight later tonight he'll receive this festival's highest awards the highest award we give the modern master award uh and it's an honor that's gone in recent years to george clooney leonardo dicaprio james cameron last year christopher nolan and many others but the term modern master when applied to the remarkable career of christopher plummer is ironic as he's arguably one of our greatest living stage actors a true classic master who has played uh so many of the great roles in fact he's canada's gift to shakespeare and and all the legendary playwrights um but he's also got this film career that is enjoying this a welcome renaissance 54 years after his movie debut plumber is also thoroughly modern chris in fact in the last decade he has done some of his finest screen work and since turning 80 he's received two let me say it way way overdue academy award nominations i don't know what oscar was waiting for but incredibly they're the first in a career that boasts seven tony nominations and two tonys seven emmy nominations and two emmys and countless other honors he's had an indelible career on stage and on television but tonight is about the movies uh just consider this list of roles from cyrano de bergerac and hamlet oedipus and rudyard kipling sherlock holmes and john barrymore leo tolstoy and mike wallace iago lear macbeth captain von trapp and of course my favorite klingon general chang among many many many others in his 100 plus films so beginning with his 1958 screen debut opposite henry fonda and susan strasberg in sydney lumet's stage struck to his touching oscar-nominated performance this year as hal a 75-year-old man who learns it's never too late to start living your life here is a taste of christopher plummer's cinematic journey [Music] [Music] well the rest of the notices are fine did you have me brought all the way over here to tell me that man i didn't get a bed till 4. it's now 8 30 and i'm going back to it joe not everybody left last night when you did well they feel worse than i do i wish i felt the way you do you with a hangover i'd settle for that i got myself involved but good [Applause] i don't feel like smiling it's a shabby business what did you do you go out on the town after we all lived no i wish i had been out of the apartment since six yeah tom told me i couldn't face her and uh you want me to write you an exit speech well it's much too early in the morning for that it's too late in my life to feel the way i do she's a delight she's decent she's i don't know girls like that she's everything i don't have time for and i'm not going to make the time you know the way i live she's a fool she's she a nuisance she and she's stage struck you know that how do i know you brought her i want you to give her this what is this it's a fair back home [Music] money i don't know where she lives but there's enough there to keep her traveling away from me out of my life i've seen too much i've lived too long i can't start this here go over to the problem give her that she'll hate it she'll hate me but the sooner she finds out the way things are the better for her i know this is tough for you joe but it's tougher for me nothing's tough for you joe [Applause] joe i didn't know [Music] you've been on my mind i grow funded every day losing myself in time just thinking of your face god only loves why it's taken me so long to let my doubts go you're the only one that i want i don't know why i'm scared i've been here before every feeling every word i've imagined it all you never know if you'd never tried to forgive your past and simply be my [Music] promise i'm worthy [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] until [Music] last one oh lord i know [Music] there oh no this is for you yeah that means gay pride yeah everyone knows that no they don't yeah everyone knows about that of course not don't be silly bob pretty much everyone knows that that means gay pride should say really yeah did you know about me no i just thought you and mom weren't in love uh-huh we loved each other i mean you were gay the whole time i learned time not to be for 44 years yeah i knew i was gay though i mean at parties i'd be staring at their husbands and not my wives what about sex how much she didn't think i was the greatest lover but we may do look i like my life the museum our house that's what i wanted and mom you want a mom too right yes stop that she proposed to me you know i said i love you and we're great buddies but you know what i am and then she says that doesn't matter i'll fix that i thought oh god i'll try anything [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Music] let's go [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] christopher plummer please welcome christopher plummer [Music] food they they like you god that was it was oh thank you that was quite a trip all the way up here i thought you would have gone by now no we're here at the beautiful arlington theater one of the great great southern california classic theaters you know from madison so many wonderful uh you know theater uh yeah plays and things in so many theaters around the world this is another one for you to uh talk about absolutely thrilled thank you so much for having me that's marvelous what'd you think uh watching your uh your your life in movies i wasn't here for that i time it so that i can walk in just at the end no that was nicely put together but why was there such a concentration of beards [Laughter] only a few of the good looking shots that i thought but back then i'd fallen in love with myself [Laughter] it's been you know it's it's a remarkable career you've had obviously on stage and and television and in the golden days of tv of live tv as well and and movies um you know what was it that sparked you as an actor was your mother uh introduced you to the arts yes well she was extraordinary she took me to everything we grew up in montreal in the in the i've been in the 30s and 40s in canada and she was very artistic and although we were all good athletes i played tennis and skied all my life she insisted on my going to see everything that came to town in the way of theater opera what a ballet whatever so i would at the age of six i was brought into the theater and and i never left i loved it i thought it was great and then of course the night nightclubs in montreal in those days were prolific they were great they were there was one for every day of the year and i spent most of my time at the bar nursing a beer as a kid and watching extraordinary artists like young judy garland and frank sinatra young frank sinatra came to town and mauricio valliere and edith piaf and all those extraordinary people i grew up with and i thought this is the most exciting life of all to be able to these extraordinary talented people get up and sing in front of a bunch of drunks [Laughter] and they hold their attention how the hell do they do that and i thought that was the biggest challenge of anything in our career in our profession so i i that's what started me off yeah now you came from you know it's a very nice background privilege background you're the great great grandson of uh one of the first prime ministers of uh canada and uh you know it was a nice life and uh so actually to become an actor you almost had to move your way down rather than up right yes yes it was tough to sort of express emotions um i was taught you know as as one was in sort of semi-edwardian times uh to not not to show your emotions and that that was how you were trained in public you didn't show what you felt and what the hell is acting all about but showing your your emotions and of course so that was rather hard to i wished i'd been born poor on the streets because that was a cinch compared to the to searching for the proper anger and the and the kind of honest emotion that could break through that makes what we call artists in the theater or movies that was that was a tough choice it was like starting at the top and working one's way down but then my family lost a lot of their money so i saw a whole change that was extraordinary i grew up rather quickly seeing that how how courageous they were and how they didn't show any of their sort of self-pity if they had any to the to the public in general they they behaved with great bravery and pretended they still were living in a in the style that they were accustomed and i admired that kind of wonderful uh attention to elegance that they they they played i admired very much but it was time to go so i crossed the border and went down to new york yeah and you were in new york in the in the wow the golden age there were the 50s when you were there your first broadway play though uh was not a hit i guess well the great actress uh eva legalian i don't know how many people here know who i'm talking about but she was one of the great theater actresses of our time she also translated uh all of chekhov's works from from the russian and she also um translated many of ibsen's works from the norwegian i mean she spoke russian and norwegian fluently and and became this extraordinary actress uh and she asked me to be in a play that was it was her comeback and uh i didn't have a huge role but it was a good one and we opened with my first broadway experience oh my god how exciting this is it closed in one night and i thought well that's it i guess that's my career and i remember like going down to the shubert offices and lining up with all the other people to get paid that was so embarrassing but uh it was so glorious to be able to work with the giants of the theater and i'm like judith anderson and to i played opposite her in medea in france we took it to paris and then catherine cornell who was a great theater star was so good to me and we i did two as replays with her and i worked with all these extraordinary women and who were great great stars of the theater they they also had their own private trains uh catherine cornell special it was and the whole train we traveled right across the country there was the dining car and her private car for her bedroom and then there were our bunks in the other cars there's a lower echelon of player and we just had such fun going across the country we'd walk up and down at night and the cars listening to who was sleeping with who listening for any telltale whispers and sweet nothings but can you imagine ethel barrymore and and catherine cornell were the last people to be at the actress managers who had who could afford to travel like that was like it was like traveling with royalty it was quite extraordinary and during that period in new york um you did a lot of live television those are the golden shoes of everybody bumping into each other yeah that's got to be kind of scary though you're on tv this new meeting well yes but we didn't know anything else we didn't know there was such a thing as tape and and here we were i remember uh it was uh one of one of those one of the great stars what am i talking about the the guy who played with jane fonda you know lee marvin thank you lee marvin he was doing a western in in a brooklyn studio live of course and he rode his horse and he couldn't control his horse the horse ran through a papier-mache mountain and was so frightened it crapped oh my god nationwide television ah i mean you couldn't you couldn't get away with anything and i i remember can i tell a little story about i'm playing opposite biblical who was an absolutely beautiful swedish actress and we were doing the myelin story you know the great love affair with the crown prince of austria and maria vetchera his mistress and they were that the famous suicide pact and they both committed suicide uh as a sort of kind of farewell and the lovers triumph at the end was an extraordinary bit of history and what it's a half-hour show and it's robert montgomery presents which was quite a popular thing and it was good material and it was a good story and i'm waiting to make my entrance into the little cabin to meet my lover of mario bachera in order that we may pursue this suicidal evening i'm i'm standing in those days off camera it was pretty murky and dark rather like this theater at the moment if i look out there i couldn't find the entrance to it's a half-hour show i mean [Laughter] you got to kind of be on time and there was no we call them floor walkers they were sort of the stage managers of the time for television i couldn't see a floor walker in sight and then suddenly i spied a little light but by the way while all this was happening my four old vivica didn't know what to do she was striding up and down the living room and she saw a piano and she sat down and started to play i mean anything to fill this ghastly pause and finally i saw this little light on my head for it and here i am in all my medals and the great magyar cloak and everything and i see this thing and i there's a little opening there with a light in it and i burrowed in and i came up medals and all i'd gone right through the fireplace the director who was an absolutely paranoid fellow came up to me after and said why why did you come through the farm and i said you're lucky i came through anything [Applause] that was awful they were hysterical days oh my god things happened all the time it was just had to be fun to be there now you got into you got into movies thankfully the movies rescued you from uh from live tv there yes and uh sydney lumet was a way to start i mean we saw at the very beginning of the reel there introducing christopher plummer on that big screen in stage truck uh with henry fonda and susan strasberg yeah sydney was an extraordinary little guy i'm so sorry he just passed away recently as you know he lived to be a good bloody good age too i think he was in his 80s oh yeah so i don't have much time wait for me sydney but he was lovely to work with a great director the first director really who sort of understood the streets of new york and he really he really did a wonderful job of bringing the streets of of new york to the public and doing fantastic plays by paddy chayetsky and all the great writers television writers of the time and they were terrific in those days they really wrote and uh so it was fun working with him uh he was a darling guy and then then uh the first big budget huge spectacle movie that you were in uh came in 64 actually was the fall of the roman empire sophia loren stephen boyd a whole all-star cast yeah i know that was those are the big epics they were fashionable at the time and it was extraordinary that sam braunston who was the producer of all those films uh what was the one with charlton heston that was so great which was a wonderful picture and then uh david niven was in the uh 55 days of peaking also sam bronson was the guy who had trump who had worked and entered turning the passetta into a huge sort of money money sort of economic kind of triumph and uh with this money he produced all these extraordinary movies and he had i guess he robbed the rich to pay the poor but he he really did do a marvelous service to the the industry he was the the most prolific producer of that period of time in the 60s and then of course they the sad thing about him was that they took all his silver away and his houses and everything and he vanished out of thin air wow i guess they i guess they caught him but but i think he did i think he did as a service well you know the um the movie i mean all these things happen while you're making you wrote chariots and things and you did a scene with stephen boyd i guess where the light was going down oh jesus those days the money was extraordinary and you you you had these three-hour lunches i mean it was like i guess it was like in the silent days but the money was no object i mean outside of madrid they the the famous restaurant madrid 21 sent up all its waiters at lunchtime uh in their red coated uniforms with food from aesthetics incredible restaurant right up into the mountains they came and served lunch with wines and champagne and every day was like that it was wonderful how we got any film done i don't know because once that lunch was there he said haha thank god i'm inside it's awful cold today and i know that i'm not going to leave this dining room until six o'clock when the lights well anyway one day it's very late in the afternoon and they have one of the biggest scenes at all we were by this time we were in rome and they used the apia antica as this long beautiful long beautiful entrance into rome for stephen boyd who played olivia's to sofia lorenz lucilla and the shot was in about 3 000 extras all with their shields and swords and he had to ride down all the way and i was in my chariot i was playing the emperor and he's riding down with past this huge shot and then he's supposed to get off his horse come up to me and say lucilla has returned to rome well it was very late in the afternoon and that they were losing light and they could not this was a very expensive shot and everybody was terribly tense and the light was disappearing behind the yard arm and here comes stephen on his horse and i'm sitting and sitting in the chariot waiting for him and he comes up rides up looking great i thought there was a bit something a bit nervous about him but he was pretty pretty in control he got off his horse walked quietly after me and said sophia is back in town [Laughter] i mean the look on his face he had he thought what have i said oh my god so of course they had to do the whole thing over again the next day it must have cost thousands and thousands yeah well we're going to take a look at a scene maybe not that scene but we're going to take a look at a scene from the fall of the roman empire followed by another scene from a movie that when it was on our reel there that you made a quite a reaction to a certain musical that christopher did so we'll talk about that right after here it comes okay i promise that's all we're showing of the sound of music our s m as you refer to it in your book which um his great book in spite of myself it's called uh uh you've got to check that out for he's just fabulous stories but okay i a lot of people have stopped me knowing i was going to do this and said don't ask him about sound of music he doesn't like to talk about sound and music but that movie obviously has lived on oh yes [Laughter] did you have any idea that this would be no nobody had any idea julie didn't nobody did we knew that when when we were filming the interiors in california after leaving austria we we sort of got an inkling that it was getting hot attention from the press because we had a lot of but we certainly didn't dream that it was going to be as hugely successful as it as it was um should we move on no i i've got another question you actually almost walked off that movie i think because they asked you to record your songs early or something yeah i did the film and this is absolutely true because i wanted to do a broadway musical about cirano de bergerac and i've never sung professionally before or not even in the toilet or the bath so i thought what a great idea and they very kindly offered i'll i'll use this film as a sort of practice ground for my singing and and so we arranged that i would sing at the end of the making of the film and when i trained a little bit but they suddenly switched their idea and wanted me to sing before we started and i certainly wasn't ready and that made me furious so i i said i'm sorry i'm i'm i'm not going to do it and uh it was too late of course they would have sued suit me and i asked them i had to i had to finish it so i was a little bit there was a little bit of angst in me there uh but it turned out to be wonderful because i had such great i've made such great friends with julie oh yeah and they did work with her again actually in on golden pond adore her she's a great pro and a great lady and then and the only one that really drove us nuts was the little girl the little little uh gretel though little yeah yeah yes we had to because they had to be educated at the same time so there was always a tutor on the set to teach them and then just as you were about to do a scene suddenly say sorry the kids need their lesson now so we had to wait around for the stars like gretel and she was the most obnoxious oh god well years later i'm in a play on broadway and some and somebody comes in to introduce a friend and the friend in walks this knockout blonde she said hi you know i'm gretel i said how wonderful you were in the picture oh my god um now that same year 1965 uh you did another picture that came out and you got to work with natalie wood who i was a great star and inside daisy clover at warner brothers in the old kind of studio system there and yes it was warner brothers was great they were extraordinary the prop men they were they were there for years i mean they kept they were very loyal to their their technical stuff and i remember the first day of my shooting there that the prop man came up and gave me a fresh scar she said what do you drink sir i said scotch here's here's the scotch i said what the god i just it's only 10 o'clock in the morning and he said no no it's a tradition of ours this is your first job sir you whatever booze you want we will toast you unbelievable there was great style over at warner's i love working there and i adored natalie she was such a everybody as orson welles once said about her that everybody's a little in love with natalie and everybody was she was such a darling person so generous a real hollywood star and she made no bones about it she was generous and divine and was so afraid of the water she never never came near it even when we went on the boat together with with rj and she wouldn't go near the near the water she she she was really terrified of it and how ironic that her death uh the sea took her which was just so sad now that movie um you played raymond swann it was the studio uh head basically yes and uh robert redford a very young robert redford yeah yeah he's rather promising i yeah thought i'm much too good-looking [Laughter] with all that impudent red hair [Laughter] you know he was he was terrific about it was his first film yeah that was yeah i think so yeah well we're going to take a look at a scene from that followed by a scene from i i love this um this movie because it's a very interesting thing we're going to talk about the royal hunt of the sun which you had done on stage and then on screen but not in the same role no so um let's take a look at inside daisy clover and the royal hunt of the sun it's kind of cool the royal hunt of the sun which you'd uh you you had done on stage in new york in new york yes yeah and uh david carradine played that part that i played in the movie which is atawalpa of course the the head of the the god of peru in those days that uh pisarro had conquered so ruthlessly it was a very interesting play uh the film wasn't quite as good as the play because peter schaffer didn't write the whole script and uh but but we tried and i love playing that creature that's such an unusual thing because you had obviously done all these performances as the other character yes and i love playing the other character but very very talky role fine for the theater but not for the screen and that all of bob was very good in it but i remember i had to learn this ancient quechuan that's that strange thing i'm trying to say and we we had actually someone there who knew it was a dead language but who had remembered some of the sounds that they made and i was working very hard on it a big speech i had and i was walking up and down the hall outside the set trying to remember it and eating only sounds like jesus it was hard to remember i was walking up and down reciting this long speech and i as i was a tony powell who was the set designer was all was making and suing that wonderful cloak made of nothing but bird feathers beautiful cloak and he was working on it and he i said hi tony he said but he said what are you doing i said i'm i'm just rehearsing this quechuan for a scene i have to do later he said he said come on you you know that's not quechuan i said well of course it is it is but you know what it means don't you he said i said no what are you talking about what does it mean it means the cat sat on the mat well that went down like a great cup of sick oh my god no let's talk about something else it's great you know i'm curious you know because of all all your stage work and theater work it seems to me that that's probably your your first love uh doing that and you've always done that you've always gone back and forth you know between film roles oh yeah i think you've got to be to me it's so monotonous to just do one of the medium and then i love going back to the theater because it replenishes your technique you know it spurs you on to do things better you learn so much in the theater because the audience is your partner and you learn so much from the live audience it's so exciting for instance i didn't learn enough not to clean up that story that i just told you and you let me know and that's how it works and that's why i love the theater i really do i love it were there any regrets along the way that maybe a film role you gave up or something you gave up to do theater you know and then later saw that wow i wish i might have done yes the only role that i wish i had played was the the king in beckett oh yeah because i'd done it in london and we it was a fabulous production and we i won all the prizes it was and i was absolutely certain i was going to get the film uh peter o'toole my arch enemy and friend got it instead and i was i was thrilled for him but i hated it [Laughter] that was um interesting because you did you know in the mid 70s you did a movie i think an absolutely terrific film called the man who would be king oh yes um directed by john huston and peter o'toole's co-star beckett was richard burton and in this case you came in yes because burton was going to play it and obviously for some reason he didn't find the role interesting enough so i i played it and i loved doing kipling it was beautifully written that script it was just a marvelous movie and john houston was one of the great directors that i've ever worked with and certainly one of the great directors of all time he had such a sort of wonderful sardonic cryptic wit about everything he was he and he really understood the spirit of kipling better than any other film that's ever been made on kipling that was the truest kipling-esque style that's ever been seen on the screen as far as i'm concerned uh and it was a short story and john and gladys hill turned it into this wonderful wonderful superbly kickling-esque movie yeah and it was what was john huston like you had not really known him before you went into this well i know you of him of course we all did and everything was true he he was wildly uh you know macho and then every respect and he would leave the set and go and shoot elephants or something which uh difficult to forgive him for that but he was always going off hunting and we'd sit around for a couple of weeks doing absolutely nothing in africa waiting for him to come back and said some pretty good kills chris we had on the way but glad to be back he talked like he talked like that he put it put a camel behind me in one scene he was always playing terrible tricks on his actors and he had this count he had me stand right in front of the camel and deliver a speech which i thought was rather touching the speech and uh not so the camel kept doing that and knocking me forward and and then we john would say we better do it again chris and i start again the camel would do it again and this went on and on and finally said chris the camel stays in the scene no matter how you dislike him but you but you ought to be able to treat animals the same way you treat actors because they're they are exactly the same he was diabolical but but i loved him and he had a great heart underneath all that and there was almost like a thing during the making of the film they almost want to cut kipling out of the movie this was a movie obviously with sean connery and michael kane but yes suddenly the studio wanted to um yeah cut kipling out oh cut kipling out for god's sake he's just he he holds up the story you know now if they'd cut kipling out because kipling was the author that kept writing the thing and the characters would come back to talk to him it was a lovely idea that was the whole spirit of the movie you take that out it would just be an ordinary epic you know in the shoot out in africa so uh sean connery god bless his heart said they're sending the guys out from california i've told this story before and it was peter guber who was who was the head of the studio then who was responsible for this diabolical trick and he went he came he came all the way to marrakech and and sean was waiting for them and just as they were about to get into the elevator after this endless flight exhausted sean grabbed gubern put him against the elevator and said if you cut kipling from the film i'm going back to london tomorrow [Applause] [Laughter] well they said sean saved my life he's a wonderful guy i told this to philip to peter goober actually and goober fell on the floor laughing it's a long time afterwards and that's why we still have christopher plummer in the man who would be king to be able to see that clip and we're going to see after that a clip from a movie i insisted when i knew we were doing this that they put in this tribute because it's a movie that a lot of people may not have seen but it's a it's a gem and it's one of my favorite uh performances of yours it's called the silent partner and so we're going to take a look at those and then we'll talk about silent partner which i think okay dress to kill there for sure um that was an interesting little movie curtis hansen you know the the wonderful director yes wrote it wrote it before anybody really knew who curtis hansen was it was an earlier that's right and and it was a story of he was a frightening character i played he he always was dressing up in different clothes and trying to rob the bank and stuff and and uh this was at the end of the movie and he comes back to really get the bag but he comes back and i thought he should come back as somebody else or he's a strange kind of transvestic creature who who obviously loathed women because he wanted to be one and uh and i thought what could i and my wife elaine was sitting out there right now or maybe that's her leaving she suggested why don't you do it as as a woman put on a chanel suit and it'd be very interesting at the end to see this sort of raunchy little guy turned into this well i did and i've got the whole thing and the swing backs and i got sort of rather suspiciously comfortable well you look good thanks [Laughter] thanks pete but that was kind of cool because that's you know you did a lot of big studio movies and things like that but there was kind of a oh i love that little film and it's still it's still it was it had a kind of uh charisma of its own totally holds up a director named darrell tooke uh who you worked with yeah director yeah you also did a movie that i think and especially now since we've seen a couple of sherlock holmes movies that have turned into these blockbuster kind of things with robert downey you did one of the best i'll say basil rathbone and you are the best sherlock holmes i've seen on screen and yeah and it's uh it's a movie another great movie you gotta go out netflix it rent it wherever you find it uh murder by decree oh yes yeah with james mason is a great watson yeah so he was a wonderful watson and the truest watson i've ever seen i think to the book yeah and to conan doyle's vision of what uh because you believed he was a soldier yeah as well as a doctor and he didn't suffer fools quite as much as nigel bruce did in the basil rathbone films nigel bruce was my my my first cousin really yeah i never met him but he he always entertained me vastly in those so silly ass roles you know what what what i thought god to make a career out of that his whole career was going what would he was wonderful in in lassie come home he played the duke remember he was talking to lassie it was great it was wonderful jimmy was he he was the terrific watson he was the right the right sort you should have done another one you should have done well we were going to do it and then james died and it was so sad because james mason was in a huge hugely great shape and we were such good friends by that time and i was so sad when he died to just unexpectedly very early in his life really and we were going to do another thing together and sadly it never happened oh um now what do you think of the the new sherlock holmes i haven't i've honestly not seen robert downey's i'm a great fan of robert downing i think he's great actor uh but i have not seen that so i can't make any but i also love very much the television the bbc uh version yeah jeremy jeremy bratt whom i thought brought all the eccentricities of sherlock holmes beautifully detailed onto the screen i i thought he was smashing um well we're going to take a look at your sherlock holmes here a murder by decree and then i mentioned it in my intro uh my very very favorite klingon yes yes listen how this is not exhausting the audience is it seems are you getting exhausted by this no no no there oh i am god [Laughter] we're moving it along right let's take a look at murder by decree and star trek the undiscovered country so are are you a trekkie are back in the 60s i watched those uh early televisions they were wonderful and bill shatner is a terrific actor he for so long he played that part but he was you could tell that he he gave such variety to it that it showed how many marvelous other parts he could have played in all those years and and he did he's a wonderful actor and a very funny man we had fun you actually have people may be surprised to know this but you have a whole history with william shatner way before this movie yeah we were when i was professionally uh i mean i've been a professional actor since i was 18 years old and at 18 it was in montreal and we were on radio together both bill and i is about the same age and we played in both french and english on the air we did french soap operas and english soap operas lot of people don't know that so bill and i really had a history and they called me back a thousand years later and then he was my understudy and henry v at stratford i suddenly i suddenly came down with some awful kidney stone disease i was or maybe it was syphilis i can't remember and i i couldn't go on and and give my performance to henry the fifth so bill shatner this was in 1956 bill was my understudy and he went on and i i'm not knowing this i was full of morphine i was in great pain at the hospital they found me staggering down the hall and the nurse obviously said come on back to your room i said no i got a i got a performance that i henry the fifth yeah and uh no sir you're back in bed well i learned the next day that bill was incredible he he you know not only knew the part backwards he did things that i hadn't done he was just stood up when i sat down he sat down when i'd stood up he was extraordinary that son of a i knew he was going to be a star so so years later we he called me and wanted me to play a klingon and i thought god this is wonderful a lovely idea and it was a quite an amusing script beautifully directed and i said yeah as long as i don't have to be made up with all those funny forehead things i don't like that that doesn't look real to me can i can i decide myself what i want to look like because you've got to have another kind of klingon everybody's too used to this these guys with a big butt so they nailed that thing into my eye and they only gave me one little wisp at the back and i love my luck i look like a sort of frustrated moisha diane it was great and i like the um the the vocal the language that you you chose to use because you weren't really speaking klingon here no the best the best line in the movie was by david warner who was the head klingon who said we were doing quoting shakespeare all through the film and he said you haven't heard shakespeare until you've heard it in the original klingon that's my favorite line um you actually went and did a video game i think as as as him oh yeah yeah yeah this is very great it's a general change yeah it's a real cult item um i'm gonna jump ahead to 1999 i know but really and sitting here across with you in this i i keep thinking wow mike wallace you know um there was such a phenomenal performance that you did in the movie the insider uh with russell crowe when you played mike wallace yes i love playing i love that i i've watched mike wallace of course since i was young on television when he for all those years of watching mike i didn't have to do any research at all he was so he was so vivid in my my my mind and my memory as that hard core journalist tv journalist that he was he he really understood the medium he knew how to shock people and get them to perhaps even cry if necessary he was a cruel guy but he was a marvelous tv journalist and it was great fun playing him i didn't have much trouble with his voice because we are we have the same time yeah but uh i do i don't think any of those guys liked the film they felt that they had been betrayed not by the film necessarily but by the um lowell bergman i think that he went over to our side uh but i was terrified that he would load my performance and when i met him at a party he he said you know i i said i loved i loved you doing me he said i think you're terrific and i was so pleased and he said you know i've done some lecture tours and i always open my lecture tours by saying i am not christopher plummer so thank god he liked it yeah i mean it was that was important to you though that that he did yeah oh yeah oh god when you're playing a real live person you don't you don't want to let them down yeah it's almost a special responsibility when you're playing yeah it sure is yeah now you played a couple of real-life people in the in the two clips we're looking at one is mike wallace and then one just like mike wallace leo tostoy and your first oscar nominated performance in the last station so let's take a look at those congratulations on the last station it brought you i just find this amazing you know all the work we look at and everything that was your first academy award nomination i you know really what did it mean to you at that point to get that kind of recognition well it was it was lovely i thought how great and you know it's it doesn't it isn't something that preoccupies me yeah i'm too i'm having too much fun doing the work you know i really do and i know a lot of actors always saying oh it's the work that counts well it is yeah and uh so it doesn't i've won other prizes it's okay it's awfully nice when it comes along but it's not uh i'm not to be preoccupied by it um that's a wonderful work by the way too so after all you know charlie chaplin didn't get an award until he was something like 83 wasn't being unbelievable yeah he practically invented the cinema i mean and yet they denied him this award is so it's so i'm in a hell of a good company [Laughter] well what i think is great and what you said about the work too is and i mentioned the word renaissance at the beginning because and i saw your golden globe speech a couple of weeks ago too and you said it's wonderful to be back in the town of rentington and king kong and things and are you having fun getting such great roles uh at this point in your career yeah it's absolutely wonderful i never dreamed that i'd get them on the screen it's easier on the stage for me to go back and play lear and on all the great roles because i'm at least a distance from the audience they don't see all the telltale age lines and stuff so i can play younger than i am on in the theater but on screen that's a bit tough and so i'm absolutely thrilled that i'm working much more than i've worked for ages i mean it's just great keeps me young it does doesn't it really does yeah speaking of that you've done like a number of wonderful um animated films too and voices and that must be fun um i one probably nobody's seen that i loved called my dog tulip where when you played j.r ackerly um it was a very touching movie actually of animation i i loved it and i loved the drawings the drawings had such a sort of quirky style to them and he he was a wonderful character but i the one the only thing that i thought was wrong with my dog tulip was there was one crap too many the dog was always crapping on the street and it was fine because that's what happens with dogs but it went on and on crap again i said i know now that would have been a tough hollywood producer who said one crap too many so let's go let's get rid of that crap [Laughter] and of course speaking of dogs you played charles muntz opposite a bunch of dogs in up love dogs and i know you personally love dogs you have a lot of dogs yeah we did have a great big family of dogs and they for 18 years we had them they all lived to an extraordinary age i think it was the steak tartare we gave them they hated dog food and loved people food and that's what kept them alive and uh we're going to show a couple of clips both with the theme here of dogs up uh as charles montz and of course beginners which we're going to talk about which is one you your current academy award nomination and so many other awards um so let's take a look at up and beginners where you where you also play with a dog cosmo yeah that's how i'm going to end up playing with dogs [Laughter] let's take a look you sure were not a bother i'd hate to impose no no it's a pleasure to have guests a real treat having guests is a delight more often i get thieves come to steal what's rightfully mine no they called me a fraud those but once i bring back this creature my name will be cleared beautiful isn't it oh i've spent a lifetime tracking it sometimes years go by between sightings i've tried to smoke it out on that deathly labyrinth where it lives can't go in after it once in there's no way out lost so many dogs and here they come these bandits and think the bird is theirs to take but they soon find that this mountain is a very dangerous place what happened with michelle i don't know you know she seemed great she was great well maybe you should take out a personal land you know where you can explain your situation my situation yeah you want to be in a relationship you can't stand one that's your fatherly advice personal ads well a lot of people use them i did what if andy wasn't going to be monogamous why should i be jesus bob chooses yourself oh god i know come on [Music] hey no no no that's a gay pride day stuff just leave those right and that's a gay book club you better leave those too what about the chair is the chair gay the chair is not gay yeah obviously the cord won't go so far ah got to hell with it oh what's that now that you're out of the hospital you'll have to exercise get you back into shape that's a great idea okay let's try it i'll i'll i'll show you how yeah later on i'm going to make myself some tea okay i'll go clean it up your mother's days need some flowers you need to tell andy that you're not well pop you're just not at the hospital you should take it easy you'll tell him won't you me please you won the golden globe and the critics choice and you're nominated for the oscar the bafta the indie spirit the tomorrow the sag award um this is a wonderful role and it's and it's given to you by a santa barbara native named mike mills [Music] who wrote and directed it and uh inspired by his own relationship with his father who ran the uh santa barbara yeah is that just extraordinary how unbelievably unsentimental michael was about it and which made it so touching that he gave his character of his father such humor and such courage and it was just a glorious role to play and i'm eternally grateful to michael however i'm still waiting for the first paycheck this is an indie movie it's uh yeah that's right of course [Laughter] it's they're working on it but it's um but it's great and you know it's a movie that's going to live on you know no matter how much money it makes in its first run you know people are going to keep discovering this i think so because everybody who's seen it seems to warm to it and love it i know it's uh i loved it in playing that and knowing that it was inspired by his father did you come with any kind of special preparation for this or what did you do i mean how could i prepare for someone i never knew or never met or seen and i was slightly worried that you know that michael was going to be a fuss part about about my doing his father absolutely correctly and he'd be at me all the time i thought well no and not at all i mean he was so sophisticated about it and so free and i made me feel so relaxed in front of a camera he do he he just directed me superbly he let me go and and that's the mark of a really terrific director who trusts people he casts do you um yeah uh the themes of the film are so they're so universal and it's such an important theme i think and watching what happens to hal uh at this point in his life yes yeah because he dies happy and fulfilled yeah yeah it's extraordinary how grateful he is and how relieved he is to to be so happy at the end of his life yeah um that's a lesson i think we we should all remember yeah to to uh it's a liberation of sorts for him oh absolutely extraordinary it just extraordinary um and and i mentioned the dog obviously i mean we should give him some props here um that's cosmo who played the wonderful just a big year for jack russell terriers yes i think our our dear little cosmo was much warmer than ugly in the artist yeah yeah that was a circus dog he was so glib cosmo was a real dog well we're going to hear from mike in a couple of minutes but i want to um before we wrap this up i want to comment on a couple of other movies you're wonderful as well in another movie that came out at christmas time called the girl with the dragon tattoo by the great um the great david fincher another wonderful director fabulous director oh yeah wonderful it's a terrifically good film and very loyal to the book really and i take my hat off to rooney mara who plays with such courage and bravery you know that wild and extraordinary role almost pornographic in nature and she does it with such courage and god damn it she's brave and got an oscar nomination herself deserves it well deserved yeah i wanted to say and i have to say i was as you know in toronto at the toronto film festival where where i saw you and i was among the i think i was the first audience in the first audience to see this extraordinary filmization of your your legendary barrymore stage performance you've now turned into a movie yes and that's a real treat that we'll probably see next year i imagine yeah well i think it's tomorrow isn't it it's going to have its u.s premiere here at the santa barbara film festival tomorrow at 10 a.m uh and i think you're going to be there well i'm going to be there for a second yeah but that's a great that was a great opportunity to bring that role which won you a tony award uh to the screen yes i was so thrilled with that and i think it it i think it does work in a cinematic way even though it is largely a stage performance because he does the eric canwell who directed it so well uh does pull it out into the into other rooms and other spaces and other memories and other times and then brings it back to the stage again and uh i i think it kind of works yeah i hope i i i can guarantee you it works it's it's really well done and i've seen film stage shows before that don't work nearly like this this has got a wonderful kind of feel to it yeah and they're going to see you're going to see a little sneak preview of that a little clip from dragon tattoo and barrymore before we uh we wrap this part up so take a look at that our final clips here i hope this wasn't too painful for you i think they really loved seeing you here and seeing this thank you and yes hang on because there's more here is the executive director of the santa barbara film festival roger darling um i first of all i have to thank pete hammond for amazing moderation tonight and um i i know that mr plummer doesn't you know he doesn't like praise and i'm gonna keep it very brief but i've never wanted to honor anybody more than mr plummer i'll explain very briefly i grew up poor in panama central america and my mother wanted me to believe in art and took me the very first movie i ever saw was the sound of music and i fell in love with the arts and and movies because of the sound of music and i loved mr plummer ever since and i got a scholarship to come to united states and in 1982 just about i came to high school to new york city and i read that mr plummer yes the son of music mr plummer was on broadway on in othello with germs l jones i have never been to the theater i bought myself a ticket and i walked in and mr plummer introduced me to shakespeare and i i'm extremely grateful for all you've done for not just me a small little person lover in the dark but there's many others like me who in the dark have loved you for so many years so thank you so much [Applause] it's also a great pleasure for me to introduce santa barbara local great filmmaker mike mills who's actually coming home tonight to honor mr plummer with the mother master award so please welcome mike mills thank you uh it's a real honor to be part of your mid-career tribute christopher um and i feel like i need to warn everybody that you know he really is one of the more gentlemanly gallant men i've ever met but he's also quite a rascal you should know this uh my one of our very first rehearsals i said to christopher and ewan mcgregor i said you're gay christopher go to barney's even take him to barney's i want you to buy a scarf he wears scarves i gave him 200 um i said ewan i didn't know christopher that well i said yo you know he's 79 take care of him make sure nothing happens i'm used to taking care of my father on the way there christopher starts looking at ewan's legs kind of a lot and says you know what are those what are you wearing and humans is well there's skinny jeans and he says christopher says they're quite tight you know and you know it says well yeah they're skinny jeans they get to barney's ewing dutifully goes to the scars as i requested christopher heads off to the jeans bar uh he according to you and he flirted with everyone he he bought several hundred dollars worth of jeans that much more money than i gave him he doesn't carry money with him anyone had to pay for them i when he came back ewen was sort of you know white in the face and he said mike i'm sorry i couldn't control him you know he was unstoppable so that was my first introduction you know and um it's very true in his memoir and you guys said this at the beginning christopher describes you know most actors climb up the ladder to security to fame to a safer world and christopher climbed down the ladder you know i think to um a grittier a freer a more wild and more real life and at least that's the man i felt like i met the scene that actually you pointed out here where christopher is explaining how they got married when we were rehearsing it he pointed to that scene it was a fragment of what you see here it was a very small little piece and christopher pointed at that piece and he said i need to say more here. and i love that he was saying i that he was how that he was the character and that he had something i didn't know about my dad and the script and i said what do you need to tell your son what do you need to tell oliver and to my very great surprise he said that i loved her and you know i was really taken aback i was how did he know that how did he know that my real father really did love my mother even though he was also gay for their 44 year marriage and when i was thinking about it you know christopher has spent his whole life wandering around inside the complicated contradictory crazy human soul he spent his life thinking about and feeling about us humans so of course he could intuit the complexity of my father's loves and it was one of the many times i saw christopher's mind and heart reaching out past the script through the lens to the people to the audience that would eventually see our story of course his years on the stage were training for this but i think it's also this climbing down the ladder to people to life to a you know connection that is his great talent um another thing you should know is christopher will never love you as much as he loves other actors so just know that i i got pretty jealous of christopher and ewin because like they i'd hear them laughing all the time in christopher's dressing room and i'd hear like a snippet of some really scandalous story about tallulah bankhead or you know something really nasty that noel coward said or i'd hear john hewson's voice booming out and you went laughing you know and and i i finally got it you know actors are his chosen family and it was really beautiful to see this the way that actors the people instead it's his tribe um and i started noticing that when eowyn really did something beautiful when anyone really went somewhere and christopher wasn't you know off camera he would reach in and pat you in or he would do this little like and a thumbs up and it was such a it was such a beautiful little gesture of camaraderie and and this love for what they do for what they're doing together there was another moment actually you showed it he's getting his hair moosed it's a very incredibly important scene in the film the character that he's playing is sort of expressing all of his lust for life and yearning and the actor he's with i figured out holy crap he's never been on a set before ronaldo beautiful ronaldo and he didn't know how it worked and christopher's amazingly worldly actor you expect him to be kind of pissed or frustrated and cred and said chris was like um he says love to everyone on set and he said love come here you know the camera goes there you come here you say your line we do it again he he's silently you know effortlessly lightly taught ronaldo how to do the scene and it was again this like beautiful expression of actor camaraderie in this memoir i dragged out his it's you know 650 page memoir you know you it's a little light reading i dragged it out for this and i found something i underlined before i met him and i and i when i read it again it blew me away as much as the first time he wrote orson welles the marquis de sade augustus john dylan thomas john barrymore each in his own way took life by the throat and forced it to its knees i wish like hell i could have done that i don't pretend to own a speck of their recklessness or daring but damn it i gave it the college try first of all what a freaking crazy list of people to put together but what an inviting and i fell in love with him when i read that i mean what an honest and beautiful and opening thing to put in your memoir but i don't really agree uh in chris's last scene in our film of course his character passes away and ewen cried like a real primal raw cry that like made the set buckle and he went i said cut you and peeled away i came up to christopher and christopher said oh he's gonna hurt himself doing that you know and and i don't know why i felt like i needed to apologize for you and i said i don't think he meant to do that he just felt that for you you know and christopher said oh i'm jealous as hell is that i love that he said that there's so much life in saying that there's so much desire but the thing that made ewan have that magical transference was that on our set and i bet on all sets with his words and his body his knowledge of the soul and the audience with his chosen family and a few very dirty stories christopher does grab life by the throat or at least he embraces life by the throat and maybe that's better with all he's done on set with him you still there's this palpable life affirming hunger in him and the stories he tells his work as an actor there's this humility you can just feel and it kind of says you know a good life and good work don't come just because you want them to the humility this humility fuels his powers of curiosity that leads him beyond the traps of being a legend of having done so much work and perhaps most beautifully and simply there's just this daily dedication to working that i saw working hard will bring you all the magic that you desire as you and i would often say i want to be like that so just how weird and strange that we're here how strange and perfect that we're here in the arlington where my parents took me to see some of my first movies um on the street outside my father would walk his real jack russell terrier uh one night you know the balconies here my father got obsessed with going up in one of the balconies and i said pop you can't do that you know and he climbed up into the balcony to look in the window and the ushers came and dragged him down and he was like you know but it's me i can look in the balcony you know but here we are across the street is the trinity church right that's where my father came out to his wonderful out gay priest just down the street is the museum that him and my mother gave so much of their life to on figaro street is a house that they both passed away in and in that museum maybe some of you saw this there really was a show as in our movie where he invited everybody to bring their stuffed animals i think i met some people tonight how i knew it was at that show and really on the on the wall of that museum he did put a quote from the velveteen rabbit as in our film uh and the quote part of it says the rabbit asks what is real and the horse explains that becoming real is something that happens to you over time sometimes it hurts and generally by the time you are real most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints but these things these things don't matter at all because winter are real you can't be ugly except to people who don't understand how strange and perfect that you would express my father's desire to be real his desire to come down the ladder away from a stability that really just made him invisible you keep showing the world how to come down the ladder to life into connection you made my father real for so many people and he would have loved what you did and i wish you two could have met because you would have got along so well so christopher congratulations on everything i'm so honored to be here and i have a little something don't hurt yourself with this thank you what a lovely speech michael just made my god the ham in him will come out [Laughter] i love his generosity and and um i'm jealous that he grew up here because to receive this is just extraordinary for my first trip really to this part of this part of the world which is one of the loveliest parts of the world and i can't think of anything nicer than this prize i'm sure i don't deserve it but nobody's going to take it from me thank you mr hammond for being as usual so generous and you too michael god bless your heart i wish euan were here i don't know he was somewhat wonderful in the movie [Laughter] that's seen stealing swine he's always away when i get a prize i wonder if he does it on purpose anyway thank you so much you been so bloody generous to sit there for so long thank you and thanks for this

Channel: officialSBIFF

Views: 7,566

Keywords: SBIFF, Christopher Plummer, Mike Mills, Beginners, Modern Master, Tribute

Id: 19HbxvtUEQ0

Length: 85min 1sec (5101 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021