A screen legend whose career has lasted from the golden era of Hollywood to present day, Warren Beatty sat down with RTÉ's Sinead Brennan to talk about his big-screen return, "baloney" tabloid rumours and more.
Warren Beatty is one of those few remaining true Hollywood icons and after over 15 years away from the screen, he has made his return with Rules Don't Apply; a film he not only stars in, but has also written, directed and produced.
Covering all four bases is nothing new for Beatty, who, apart with Orson Welles, is the only person to have ever been nominated for Academy Awards for all four disciplines for the same film in the same year. The only difference; Beatty did it twice.
Over the course of his prolific career Beatty has clocked up an astounding 14 Oscar nominations (4 Best Actor, 4 Best Picture, 3 Original Screenplay, 1 Adapted Screenplay), winning Best Director at the 1981 ceremony for Reds.
He is also among the few that have been honoured with the Irving G. Thalberg Award, which is issued periodically by the Academy to "creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production." The honour saw him join the ranks of other screen legends like Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock.
After a lengthy hiatus from filmmaking, during which he raised his four children with wife Annette Bening, Beatty is back and it's all because of them.
"It has to do with my kids saying, 'Ok, enough of you'," Beatty laughed.
Beatty was first linked to a film about the enigmatic and eccentric Howard Hughes four decades ago and Rules Don't Apply sees him take on the part, though the film is in no way a biopic of the late billionaire. Instead, the film is based heavily on Beatty's own personal experiences with religion growing up in Virginia, and his move to Hollywood in the late 1950s.
"It's an idea, a romantic comedy about two young people who came to Hollywood when I came to Hollywood in 1958, and the moral obstacles in this whole comical American Protestant sexual repression, the whole Protestant guilt that has made us the laughing stock of Europe so often," he said of the storyline.
"I came from a state that was very bible-belt – Virginia – so I'd always had in my head that I wanted to do something like that, and the obstacle of American Puritanism to a love affair of two young kids would be very good, and I loved the idea of having an unusual crotchety old Howard Hughes, who has always struck me as quite comedic, to be a more specific obstacle to their relationship."
Beatty seems like a man that doesn't rush into anything, and is very considered in his conversation, so it came as no surprise that he kept the idea for Rules Don't Apply to himself for quite a long time – and won't share any of his new ideas prematurely with the media.
"I played around with the idea for a long time, but when I say I played around with it, it was in the back of my mind, like I have a couple of things that are in the back of my mind now," he said.
"I have learned not to say what they are, because if I say what they are, they'll say 'Oh, he's working on such and such' and then when I finally make it at the age of 112, they'll say 'Well, it couldn't have been very good or he'd have already made it'."
Beatty truly is a people person and has the power to put people at ease straight away. Despite his legacy, he is extremely down to earth and introduced himself to me as though he couldn't assume that I would know who he was. It's those little touches that can really endear you to someone and it goes to that old adage that it's the biggest stars that are the most humble.
Learning that I had flown to London from Dublin to interview him, he told of how he has familial roots in Ireland and that he has visited in the past and enjoyed himself here. He seemed more interested in getting to know something about me before we began, as though his mind is always trying to absorb information about the people he meets and the stories they have to tell, which meant I sadly didn't get much information about his adventures here.
Accepting his Oscar way back when, Beatty said that "I know I do one thing well, I get good people" and over 5 years ago he took the soon-to-be Han Solo star Alden Ehrenreich under his wing, getting to know him well before eventually offering him the role of Howard Hughes' driver Frank Forbes in the project.
Another young star he saw something special in was Lily Collins, who plays an aspiring actress in the film, and she told of how they would all get together in Beatty's home to "talk about politics, the world, pop culture" as opposed to just running lines.
"We really just got to know each other for who we were as people," Collins recalled.
When they did get down to rehearsals they would separate off into different rooms in his home, with the actress saying it felt almost like they were working on a theatre production.
"We really treated it almost like a play, so that we got so used to each other and the moments in the scenes, so when you got on the stages or you got on the sets, it felt like a continuation of what we'd already been doing, so it really was quite organic, that process," she said.
Beatty married Bening in 1992 after finding love while working together on the 1991 release Bugsy. The story goes that after seeing Bening's audition tape for the film, Beatty called director Barry Levinson and exclaimed, "She's terrific. I love her. I'm going to marry her!"
Rules Don't Apply marks Beatty's first time to direct Bening and he said of the experience, "She's a great, and I mean great actress."
Beatty then went on a short tangent about working with great actors – "I'm lucky, I get good people, well, it's not totally luck; I'm kind of good" – before redirecting himself back with a charming, "Ok have I dodged the question about Annette? She's amazingly respectful of the process..."
He then turned to his co-star Collins, "The way you nodded just now makes me think that you would want to substitute the word respectful for the word tolerant... Tolerant of me, I mean" to which she laughed.
"She's fantastic in doing her craft, and also then, when she feels that she has done what she has been there to do, she tells you, and she goes 'Ok, I think we got that, let's move on' but in a way that is so respectful," Collins smiled.
"It's a collaboration, it didn't matter if Warren and Annette were together, it was actor, actress, collaborators, we all just felt seamless in our chemistry and it just so happened that they were husband and wife, but it was never treated that way."
Beatty said that he can feel it in his own performance when he works with the best people and on the experience of working as both director and star on a project he added, "I like to say that if an actor is directing, it has a lot of problems, but one thing is a good thing – the director at least has one actor that sort of knows what he has in mind.
"So I like to feel that we're all kind of directing one another but I'm the boss."
He also likened his fellow actors to his audience as they can give a feedback similar to that of theatre-goers.
"I like to listen to what the actors feel, it's at least one thing when you're doing plays in the legitimate theatre is that you can tell the reaction, so in a sense you, as a director/actor, you're interested in what that audience is or that audience responds and then you think, 'Maybe I'm on to something here' and if an actor wants to do it again, I do it again," he said.
With fame comes rumours, and over the course of his career Beatty's life, in particular his romantic ties, have garnered as much attention as his body of work.
I asked him if he had ever heard a rumour about himself that made him laugh at its absurdity and if the rumours didn't, the question did.
"Are you kidding? Well, you don't always laugh at a laughable rumour, but it's been going on so long for me because it started in 1959, that I think it kind of comes with the territory, as Arthur Miller would've said about (Death of a Salesman character) Willy Loman," he said.
Adept at dealing with showbiz gossip at this stage – "You kind of have to laugh at it after a while, but that's almost 60 years for me of laughing at it, or trying to" – Beatty mused that new technology is affording it more space and attention, but the real problem is when it starts to affect the world outside of show business.
"What is somewhat alarming is the increase the new technology has afforded to gossip, and I'm not using the word I want to use – I'll say baloney – but there's another word, but I don't know about your channel, whether you want to hear me say it, but there is so much of it, that its worrying, but you shouldn't worry about show business, but when it applies to foreign policy or economics or the stock market or whatever, then there's some reason to worry about it," Beatty mused.
"I think one of the most worrying things is the brevity of interest in anything now, new technology wants to be paid attention to so we jump to something new, so we hear more about more different things, but I think our understanding of these things is not as deep as it used to be, because they don't hang around for long."
Rules Don't Apply is in cinemas now.
