Atlas (20 page)

 

H
ALFWAY DOWN THE BLOCK, ALL PHYSICAL SENSATION LEFT
me. The cold. The noise. The ringing in my ears. The rushing of my blood. It all left me, and there was nothing. Hollowness. Detachment. Like I was dead and the world had ceased to exist. All my reservations were gone; I was going to do what I had come there to do.

I got to the gate. I opened it. And then I could hear Elaine again, crying the way she'd been crying on Christmas Day, saying, “You might not be able to do this with us no more.”

I wanted to kill him so badly. So badly. And the faces of my kids kept flashing in front of me.

I turned to Tony.

He looked at me expectantly.

I shook my head and started walking away.

“Teddy, what? That's it?” he said.

“That's it.”

I wish I could say the rage went away. But it wasn't that easy. I had to keep reminding myself of my responsibilities, thinking of the people who loved me and counted on me. I had to keep thinking about what would happen to them. Otherwise I was lost.

W
I
LLEM
D
AFOE CAME TO ME IN THE FALL OF
1987 because he needed a boxing trainer to help him get prepared to play the role of a Jewish boxer in a movie called
Triumph of the Spirit.
The film's producer, Arnold Kopelson (who's big film before that was the Academy Award–winning
Platoon
), had contacted Mickey Duff, and Mickey had recommended me. After meeting and talking to Willem, I wound up being hired for a thousand dollars a week.

The movie was based on the true story of Salamo Arouch, a Greek Jew from the Balkans who got sent to Auschwitz during World War II and literally had to fight for his life in boxing matches with other concentration camp inmates. Though I wasn't aware of it, among the many atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war was the practice of taking camp inmates and pitting them against one another in Friday-night fights while SS officers sat around with their girlfriends and drank cognac and gambled on the outcomes. The winner of the bout might get an extra piece of bread so that he could live a bit longer, while the unfortunate loser got sent to the ovens.

The challenge I faced in the job was to bring an actor, in a period of a few months, to a point of proficiency where a movie audience would believe that he was a real fighter. Dafoe was a tremendous actor, very
thorough and committed, and his primary concern was that he be authentic. He had never done any boxing before, so we started with the basics. I taught him how to hold his hands, how to throw the various punches, and how to move. It was important that he be believable as a fighter from that era, so I looked at old fight films to prepare myself. I didn't want him to be too slick or fancy or use his feet too much. A fighter from the Balkans in that era wouldn't fight like fighters of today.

Willem worked very hard, and he absorbed things quickly. Even though he had no background as a fighter, he was a real professional. You can recognize that quality in anybody if they have it. I had already seen it with Twyla. It was interesting—I never would have guessed that I'd see a parallel between the kind of toughness and discipline that my world required and what was needed to be a professional actor or dancer. But Willem and Twyla both opened up my eyes in that way.

Willem was a guy who believed in the spiritual side of life; he was intelligent, thoughtful, and took pride in his profession. He was a purist, who did all this stuff outside of Hollywood for the Wooster Group, which was an avant-garde theater company. His work with them reminded me of my work in the gym with the amateurs, where it was just a matter of being committed and not with hopes of money or glory. Willem was almost embarrassed about his big Hollywood movies. “I just do them so I can afford to do the stuff I really love,” he told me.

He was constantly on a quest for knowledge, going off on retreats to meditate. He was trying to find a higher place, and he thought I knew some things. During the time I was training him, we had dinner frequently and talked about big questions. One time he said, “I'm having trouble with the truth.”

“The truth is just an exercise,” I said.

He loved that. He loved the sound of it. “Tell me exactly.”

“Like how much truth can you stand?” I said. “How much can you lift? How many reps can you do?”

“Yeah. I've never thought about it that way before,” he said. “But that makes a lot of sense to me.”

Though Willem was not actually going to fight in the movie (the boxing scenes would be choreographed), I felt it was important that he get in the ring and experience what it felt like to hit and be hit. He agreed.

I put a mask on him so he wouldn't get marked up (it was a mask I
had gotten custom-made for Chris Reid because Chris used to get cut a lot), and we did some sparring. There's no doubt that it gave him a feel for what it was really like to be in a ring with another fighter in actual combat.

We were training three hours a day in the middle of the day, and by the time Willem arrived each afternoon at Gleason's, he had already been up since four in the morning, because he was also rehearsing a play that he was doing with the Wooster Group at the Performing Garage. I guess he started to get a bit run-down from it all. I noticed at a certain point that he was looking a little ragged.

He was such a pro that he never said anything. Willem didn't know if what he was feeling was sickness or mental fatigue, and because he wasn't sure, he refused to capitulate. That pretty much defines a pro, for me: someone who will not allow himself the
out
of thinking that there is something wrong, because then there is a tendency to give in or formulate an excuse. It was up to me, as a professional trainer and teacher, to recognize if something was really wrong.

At a certain point, I decided that something was wrong, and I took him to the best doctor I knew: my father. It turned out that Willem had pneumonia. He had been training for days with it. My father put him on penicillin; he also gave him vials of liquid penicillin to inject as additional treatment while he was off in the Philippines shooting the movie
Born on the Fourth of July
with Tom Cruise. If Willem hadn't been such a pro, he would have been stopped by a lot less.

When he finished the Cruise movie, Willem got ready to go to Poland to begin working on
Triumph of the Spirit.
He told me he wanted me to go with him. I hadn't been expecting to go, and we had never discussed it, but he had decided it was important to him that I continue training him. He also thought that I should choreograph the fight scenes in the movie. At that point the producers hadn't hired anyone.

I had no idea what I should ask for, in terms of money. I had been getting a thousand a week to train him in New York, but this was going to be full-time and much more responsibility; I was going to have to be away from my family for more than a month. Willem and I discussed it. He'd asked around, and we came up with four thousand a week as a fair number, albeit on the high end. He said, “Call Arnold and work it out with him.”

“You don't think it'll be a problem?”

“No. You're going to get that because I'm going to back you up. To be honest, you could ask for whatever you want and you would get it.” Willem, who had just made a breakthrough in his career with
Platoon
, was getting a million dollars to star in this one (which was good money at the time), so he had real clout.

I went to Kopelson. I didn't have an agent or a lawyer. I told him what I wanted. He said, “Why would you ask for that much? I guess you figure, ‘Why not?'” Kopelson had worked in the garment industry before Hollywood, and he had that rag-trade mentality that everybody was a hustler.

It hit me the wrong way, him saying that. It offended me. I said, “I don't fuckin' do that. I don't make a price just to make a price. I gotta be away from my family and my work for a month, and that's a fair price for what the job is, and if you don't think so you can go get someone else.” He got very quiet at that point, and that was pretty much the end of the conversation.

Willem, meanwhile, had already gone over to Poland. When I talked to him, I told him what had happened. He went to see Kopelson, who told him that he had decided to use the stunt coordinator to choreograph the fight scenes instead of me.

“Teddy's asking for too much money,” Kopelson explained.

Willem got very upset with him. He threatened to go home if Arnold didn't change his mind. I think it even got to the point of him making plane reservations.

Kopelson got in touch with me at that point. He said, “Teddy, I think that we had some kind of misunderstanding.” He told me that he had always wanted me to work on the movie, and of course he'd pay me what I was asking for.

When I arrived in Poland, everyone there seemed to know that there had been some drama involved. I was a little bit naive and didn't realize stuff like this took place on movie sets all the time.

Poland was still an Iron Curtain country at that point. It was a bleak place, very poor. You had people working on conveyor belts in factories for thirty dollars a month. There was a lot of drinking, a lot of vodka, and people passed out on the sidewalks. They didn't use much oil heat,
so people made coal fires to stay warm and the sky was dark with smoke and soot.

The production was giving us these Polish
złoty
for our per diems, handing it out like it was Monopoly money, which in a way it was, because they had gotten a black-market rate of exchange of something like three thousand
złoty
to a dollar. The waiters in the hotel where we were staying were making nothing, and I was giving them huge tips. Edward James Olmos, one of the actors in the movie, gave me a hard time about it. He said I was throwing off the whole economy. He was serious, too, he wasn't kidding around. I said, “What the heck are you talking about, Eddie? There is no economy here.”

“You're tipping them three months' salary in a day,” he said.

“Yeah? So? What's your point?”

“When we leave there's gonna be a big crash.”

“A crash? They crashed here a long time ago. This country is in ruins.”

“But it'll make them feel bad when we leave.”

“Hey, at least while we're here they'll feel good.”

Anyway, we disagreed about it, and that was that. I kept leaving big tips. It was the funniest thing, though. One day, we were in the hotel restaurant, me, Willem, and Costas Mandylor, and where were all the waiters? At our table. Meanwhile, Eddie was at another table, looking for a waiter, going, “Waiter!
Waiter!
”

Even at the best hotel in the city, some amenities were hard to get. Like toilet paper. So when the maid came by my room, I gave her a twenty-dollar bill, American, which was unheard of. Well, forget it. You remember that old Frank Sinatra commercial with the towels? That's how it was with me and toilet paper. It was like a freaking toilet paper store in my room. Nobody else in the whole hotel had toilet paper. I had it all. People were coming up to me saying, “Teddy, I hear you have toilet paper. I was wondering if I could get a roll?,” and I was saying, “No, I'm sorry, I can't help you.” “Teddy, come on, just a few sheets….”

 

W
ILLEM AND
I
TRAINED VERY HARD DURING THE MONTH
I was over there. My job was twofold. One, to make Willem look, feel, and respond like a fighter; two, to choreograph all the fight scenes in the movie.

As far as getting Willem to where he needed to be, we hit a spot where he wasn't responding very well. He was getting a little funny with me. We were close and he was always respectful of me, but he started to get a bit nervous, and that made him resistant to some of the things I was telling him. It was like a fighter looking for an excuse not to fight. He wanted to look like a fighter, but wasn't sure he was looking like one.

Frequently, when you're doing a thing, you're only aware of the way you feel. You connect the way you feel with the way you must look. If you feel inhibited, which people often do when they're performing difficult and demanding tasks, especially physical ones, then you feel that must be the way you look. You don't realize that you look
fine.

Willem was starting to fall into a bad way of thinking in that regard. It was making him trust me a bit less, because he was worried I wasn't telling him the truth. One day, when his mood was particularly negative, I grabbed hold of him. I looked him in the face. I could smell something coming out of his pores.

Smoke. He had been smoking cigarettes. He was so nervous and stressed that he didn't realize what that meant, that he was actually undermining himself, contributing to his worries about his credibility. Would his character smoke cigarettes, knowing that he was going into the ring and if he lost he would die? He would put a shotgun into his mouth before he would do that. He would eat razor blades. Yet here was Dafoe, doing something his character would never do.

“You've been smoking,” I said.

“How did you know that?”

“Never mind how I know. I know.” I looked him right in the eyes. I didn't care that he was a movie star and that you're not supposed to act in certain ways with movie stars if you want to stay employed. “Now starting right fucking now, you ain't gonna smoke no more. You're gonna act like Salamo would act, and you're gonna act like a pro.”

You know what he did? He looked at me and said, “Okay,” and he never smoked another cigarette. From that moment on, we never had another day that came close to not being a great day.

The choreography was a different sort of challenge for me. I had never done anything like that before. I had to sort of make it up as I went along.

There was a scene where Willem gets into a fight with one of the Jewish
trustees, who were in their own way almost worse than the German guards. The fight takes place while the inmates are laying train rail up on this elevated mound. In the script there was no description of the fight whatsoever. It was just left blank. So before shooting this scene, we went to the location to see how to do it. I was there with Willem and Robert Young, the director, and the director of photography and the other actors. It was clear that the fight couldn't take place up by the tracks, because there wasn't enough room. I decided that they could roll down the embankment and fight on the flatter ground. That was how we would solve the problem.

After we had gone over the actual physical specifics of the fight, I realized I had to have a way of making sure that it would be consistent, that it would be the same every time we shot it. All of a sudden it hit me. I had to write out every step of it, every punch, every move. I wound up staying up all night to do it. I showed Willem what I had done. He said, “This is great. Now I know exactly what I'm going to do and I'll be able to prepare for it.”