In His Own Words: Brando Tells It Like It Was in Listen to Me Marlon

Sometime in the 1980s, Marlon Brando had his face digitized, presumably as a way of leaving just a bit more of himself after his departure from this planet. As we see it in Stevan Riley’s documentary Listen to Me Marlon, that speaking, moving hologram looks like a cross between George Washington as engraved on the dollar bill and the solemn, glowing visage of Superman’s dad, Jor-El — whom Brando played in 1978 — just before blasting his only son into space. The image is fuzzy and staticky around the edges, like a spirit trying to separate itself from the earthly world. Even so, this memorialization of self is also a trivialization of self. Brando uses his digitized face to tell us what the future has in store: “Actors are not going to be real,” he says in voiceover. “They’re going to be inside a computer. You watch.”

We hear a lot of that voice — and see some more of that strange and beautiful digitization — in Listen to Me Marlon, a portrait of the actor assembled from film clips, stills, television interviews, dramatic re-creations and, most significantly, more than 300 hours of recordings made by Brando himself. Brando was clearly a little obsessive about these tapes: Some, labeled “self-hypnosis,” contain deeply personal observations that are unfiltered but also surprisingly cogent. Others constitute Brando’s recollections of his childhood and early years as an actor. Late in his life, Brando had hoped to collate these observations into some sort of autobiographical multimedia work, a project that was never completed. (He died in 2004, at age eighty. He published a memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me, in 1994.) Riley — whose previous documentaries include the 2012 Everything or Nothing, an examination of the James Bond phenomenon — gives us the next best thing.
The film he’s made, a world apart from your usual straight-up biographical doc, features no talking heads other than Brando’s own. Instead, it’s like a tone poem drawn from the actor’s inner and outer life, narrated by the man himself. There’s nothing quite like it in the world of Hollywood documentaries, though Riley’s presentation of this rich material is at times a little discomfiting.

Brando, one of the greatest actors of the last century — and some days it’s just easier to call him the greatest — has always been mysterious as a person. That’s a polite way of saying that, particularly in the last thirty or so years of his life, he came off as kind of crazy.
His imaginative, intuitive, bombshell performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather almost didn’t come to be: Though Francis Ford Coppola desperately wanted him for the part, Paramount executives thought Brando to be too unpredictable, too unreliable, too nuts. In Listen to Me Marlon he comes off, mostly, as more thoughtful than unhinged. He talks candidly about his childhood in Omaha as well as his studies with Stella Adler, at the Actors Studio in New York.

But the finest parts of Listen to Me Marlon are those in which he talks about the nuts, bolts and the unnamable something that goes into the making of a performance. He uses boxer Jersey Joe Walcott, and his strategy of never letting his opponent know where the next punch was coming from, as a springboard: “Never let the audience know how it’s gonna come out. Get them on your time.... Hit ’em, knock ’em over, with an attitude, with a word, with a look. Be surprising. Figure out a way to do it that has never been done before.... Damn, damn, damn, damn! When it’s right, it’s right. You can feel it in your bones. Then you feel whole. Then you feel good.”