Listen To Me Marlon

Culled from hundreds of hours of recordings Marlon Brando made in private, recordings that have never been heard before now, Steven Riley’s documentary is an intimate affair and a must-see for any film fan.

Wanting his documentary to constantly surprise, Riley opens with the startling image of a computerised Brando’s head and continues to astonish thereafter; like the ghost of Jor-El lost in a machine, Brando’s neon face quotes Macbeth and predicts a future of animated actors. As striking as this image is, Riley uses it sparingly and also dispenses with the expected talking head approach, letting Brando’s recordings narrate over a series of behind-the-scenes footage, home movies, rare photos, and forgotten TV interviews. The whole thing is a Brando treasure trove.

He’s candid about his upbringing - his close relationship with his mother despite her being "the town drunk" and the animosity between him and his tough father (a TV interview with them post On The Waterfront is an awkward viewing) - and laments that he had little education and felt insecure and "dumb" all his life as a result. It might jump back and forth from his fame and his longing for this anonymity of youth but generally Riley instills a forward year-by-year momentum. His experiences under Stella Adler’s guidance and Method are dealt with in detail, setting out to be the opposite of the Gables and Bogarts of this world who are "the same every role" and so admitted himself to a paraplegic war veteran hospital for The Men, his debut. He debunks the theories of 'becoming' his characters, admitting that he never identified with Stanley Kowalski and thought his performance in On The Waterfront wasn’t up to snuff (despite the Oscar). There are women too - whether they know they are being recorded or not is unclear but his intentions during the flirty interviews with pretty presenters are very obvious.

There’s an air of melancholy that hangs over the film. Bookended not only by those haunting computerised images, there is the tragedy surrounding his children and this sadness spills over into his falling out of love with film. After the trouble on set of Mutiny on the Bounty, Brando went into semi-retirement, only working once a year to perpetuate his dalliance on Tahiti. He then embraced first the Civil Rights movement and the cause of Native Americans. Convinced by Coppola to screen test for Don Corleone, which Brando thought was humiliating, his early seventies rediscovery isn’t embraced with any kind of joy. Brando isn’t shy here about his feelings for Coppola either after the director was vocal about the actor’s behaviour on set of Apocalypse Now, a film Brando feels he saved.

It might skip over his reported difficult on-set behaviour but there isn’t a second here that isn’t fascinating.