Along the Way by Martin Sheen

Author:Martin Sheen [Sheen, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781849836968
Amazon: 1849836965
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
Published: 2012-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

MARTIN

1977–1979

I left the Philippines in June of 1977 a very different man from the one who had flown there from Rome in April of 1976. Apocalypse Now taught me the limits of my endurance as an actor and a man. Looking back, I wonder if the heart attack wasn’t a subconscious attempt to remove myself from the craziness of the situation.

It wasn’t just the grueling physical toll the film took on me, though that was surely part of it. The oppressive heat, anxiety, and sickness—fourteen months of that could have forced anyone to his limit. But the movie also extracted a psychological toll. The role of Willard had mystified me and I couldn’t get a handle on who he was. I’d never been a soldier, didn’t know anything about the physical or mental aspects of war, and despite Joe Lowry’s assurances to the contrary, I don’t believe I would have survived combat. I couldn’t imagine killing anyone, for any reason, though I also couldn’t deny that under extreme circumstances, such acts are possible for anyone.

“You’re Willard,” Francis had told me, which was both intriguing and frightening and, ultimately, impossible to accept. It seemed that to truly embody Willard I had to accept as fact that all human beings are innately hostile and aggressive, especially men. On the set Francis advocated this Freudian philosophy as a motivation, but at home Janet advocated the opposite. She believed that we are all born loving and compassionate, and that we learn how to be hostile and aggressive through fear. I agreed with her wholeheartedly, but that philosophy was hard to hold on to when the character I needed to inhabit was in the Vietnam jungle on an assassin’s mission to kill.

Years later, when I read Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, I found a writer who articulated my beliefs about human nature. Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived three years in Nazi concentration camps, believed humans are innately compassionate beings and community builders. He wrote that, if Freud had seen prisoners taking care of one another at Auschwitz, he might have revised his whole philosophy. Even in Auschwitz Frankl saw repeated proof of man’s fundamental goodness. If anyone had reason or motivation to be hostile or aggressive toward his fellow men surely it would have been those inmates. And yet they weren’t. Many of the men in Frankl’s barracks were loving and compassionate despite their circumstances and did whatever was within their limited power to help one another survive.

So there I was in the Philippines, on the set for eight to twelve hours a day with Francis urging me to be more aggressive, and then bringing that back to the cabana at night, where Janet would say, “What the hell’s the matter with you?” I had to learn how to come home and get mellow, then go back to the set and get crazy, then return home and get mellow, then return to the set and get crazy again. It was

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