Older, Wiser, Easier

Think of them as long-distance runners surrounded by sprinters. In a business in which most movie stars count themselves lucky if they can last 10 years at the top, Paul Newman, Al Pacino and Ellen Burstyn are going strong decades after learning their craft from the Method acting school of Lee Strasberg in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The trio’s track record speaks for itself: Collectively, they’ve made about 150 films, and have played lawyers, losers, drug addicts, cops, thugs, cowboys, rebels and most everything else while picking up 22 Oscar acting nominations (and three wins) along the way.

By a strange twist of fate, these actors will be teaming up this summer with younger directors in three of the season’s most anticipated films for adults:

* In DreamWorks’ “Road to Perdition” (July 12), directed by Oscar-winner Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”), Newman portrays a Depression-era crime boss named John Rooney and adoptive father to a conflicted hit man, played by Tom Hanks.

* Warner Bros.’ psychological thriller “Insomnia” (May 24), from “Memento” director Christopher Nolan, has Pacino as a sleep-deprived homicide detective trying to crack a case in a tiny Alaska town.

* And in Warner Bros.’ cross-generational relationship dramedy “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” (June 7), Burstyn stars under the guidance of first-time director Callie Khouri (best known for writing “Thelma & Louise”) as a flamboyant Southerner trying to make peace with her angry daughter.

The staying power of all three stars is certainly remarkable. Newman’s breakthrough performance came in 1958 with “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Pacino debuted on screen in 1969 with “Me, Natalie.” Burstyn first became known through her work in 1971’s “The Last Picture Show.” And they’re still capable of attracting A-list collaborators.

But there’s something more, according to the directors of their summer films: Newman, Pacino and Burstyn are insightful enough to leave their laurels at the door. What becomes a legend most? Not acting like one, except when the camera’s rolling.

“Paul Newman is extremely skillful in defusing any kind of hero worship, and he can do it within five minutes,” Mendes said. “When you’ve been that famous for that long, I think it’s probably a bore for him to deal with people who are in any way idolatrous.”

Indeed, Newman, 77, is as likely to carry on about global warming and the migration habits of geese in New England as he is about his place in the acting pantheon. Unprompted, he’ll take a poke at his own profession, gleefully quoting Hunter S. Thompson: “The entertainment industry is a cruel and shallow money trench,” he said during a recent phone interview, “a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side.”

Newman laughs heartily. “That’s a lovely quote, isn’t it?”

But ask the man about his legacy as an actor and Newman responds with a long silence before finally deflecting attention to Mendes. “I don’t think that’s the issue here,” he says. “The issue is whether the guy knows what he’s doing.”

What motivated Newman to pick “Perdition”? Hanks? The script? Mendes? “It was a choice invitation,” he replies. “Listen, I’ll just say one thing. Most guys know a little bit about what they’re doing. Some guys know about half. A very few guys know three-quarters of what they’re doing. But Mendes--that guy knows what he’s doing. To have a clear picture of what you want and to be able to convey that in a way that an actor can understand, that’s a real gift and he has it.”

Newman admired British stage director Mendes’ artful work on “American Beauty” and found David Self’s “Perdition” script intriguing. But before committing, he wanted to meet Mendes. “People talk about actors auditioning,” Mendes explained, “but I think sometimes directors have to audition as well. It doesn’t get much more surreal than going to see Paul Newman, because I grew up along with everyone else in the world with ‘Cool Hand Luke’ and Fast Eddie and Butch Cassidy.”

Mendes recalls ringing the bell at Newman’s apartment overlooking Central Park. “As I walked in the door, the first thing he said, with genuine horror in his voice, was ‘Jesus Christ you’re young!’” the 36-year-old Mendes says with a laugh. “He was just checking me out. I think if you’re Paul Newman, you’ve earned the right to say, ‘I’m only going to make one picture a year, kid; I don’t want you [messing] it up.’

“So you’ve got to go in there and say, ‘Look, here’s the film I want to make and do you want to be a part of it? There were a couple of times when we got into intense debates about what should or shouldn’t happen to the character, but that’s how trust develops, because he knows I’m going to speak my mind.”

After two weeks of pre-production rehearsal, Mendes began to think of Newman as a workaday collaborator. “So you’re trotting along thinking he’s just another actor and, of course, the first day he turns up on set you realize he’s ‘Paul Newman.’ I remember the frisson that spread across the set was remarkable, even for Tom [Hanks].

“At one point, Newman flashed him a look and Tom came over and said, ‘Man, he just looked at me with those eyes!’ and it all came flooding back, same for Tom as it was for me.... It just makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.”

But a director cannot afford to be awestruck, so when it came to getting performances on film, Mendes says he treated Newman just like any other actor.

“I did find myself pushing Paul very hard, take after take, telling him, ‘I think you can get it one notch up.’ Occasionally he’d tease me: ‘There’s only one other way I could do this now and that’s by standing on my head,’ that kind of thing, but he still did it.”

Newman has directed six films, including the Oscar-nominated “Rachel, Rachel” in 1968, but he wouldn’t dream of trying to mentor Mendes. “I would rather be shot dead than to do that!” he says.

Newman may downplay his star power on the set, but Mendes hopes the actor’s screen persona will add dramatic subtext to the story. “With Paul Newman, there’s a point at which the iconography of the man mixes with the iconography of the role,” he says. “In ‘Perdition,’ he appears at first as the Paul that we know: mellow, avuncular, charming, with the twinkle. And then he is gradually revealed to have immense depths of darkness beneath the surface. Mr. Rooney has lived a bad life and he knows it, and that gradually comes back to haunt him during the course of the picture.”

For “Insomnia,” Christopher Nolan needed his big-city detective Will Dormer to radiate authority from the moment he stepped off the plane to take over a murder investigation implicating an eccentric novelist (Robin Williams). The catch: Dormer has secrets of his own to hide, and there’s no one he can confide in. How to convey the character’s turmoil without dialogue? For Nolan, the solution was obvious: cast Pacino.

“When I met Al Pacino in New York to try and convince him to sign on for ‘Insomnia,’ I was very nervous, but he immediately put me at my ease and we had this conversation that went on hours longer than it was supposed to,” recalls the 31-year-old Nolan. “I can’t remember the exact phrase he used, but the question I felt I was getting was, ‘Why do you need me for this part?’ And my answer was I needed an actor who clearly projects moral intelligence and can make that visible to the audience.

“In retrospect, I don’t know how I could have done that without Pacino because he can put so much into one look, one expression. Those dilemmas the character is struggling with, that he can’t talk about, they have to come across just through the eyes.”

The “Insomnia” cast did not rehearse before the 54-day shoot in Vancouver, Canada; Nolan developed the Dormer character through lengthy conversations beforehand with his 62-year-old star (the film is a remake of a 1997 Norwegian film of the same name).

So when filming began, Nolan for the first time witnessed Pacino’s extraordinary presence as a performer.

“He has some kind of ability to focus all this intense energy straight down the barrel of a camera. I don’t use a monitor; I sit by the camera and watch the actors with my eye. You get moments with Al where it ceases to be acting and becomes completely real to you, three feet away. Pacino can do that so often, so powerfully--it’s very hard to pin down, but that is what makes Pacino not just a great actor, but also a movie star.”

He jokes, “It probably spoiled me. God help the next set of actors I work with. I’ll probably be there shouting, ‘Take 50.’”

Callie Khouri wrote the 1991 hit “Thelma & Louise,” which she desperately wanted to direct. Those honors instead went to Ridley Scott--and the film became a sensation. In 1995, she tried to film her script for “Something to Talk About,” but Lasse Hallstrom got that assignment.

So even though “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” marks her directorial debut, Khouri was more than ready to get behind the wheel. “It’s kind of like walking in to get your driver’s license when you’re 16 and they go, ‘OK, here’s your Testarossa,’” she says, referring to the film’s high-powered cast. Besides Burstyn, the ensemble includes Maggie Smith, Ashley Judd and Sandra Bullock.

Burstyn, 69, was the first actress Khouri cast once she’d completed her adaptation of the 1996 novel by Rebecca Wells. As fans of the best-seller know, Vivian Abbott Walker (Burstyn) is the larger-than-life, hard-drinking Alabama matriarch whose stormy relationship with daughter Siddalee (Bullock) is examined through a series of flashbacks.

“From the time I saw ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ and ‘A Dream of Passion,’ a film she did [in 1978] that absolutely blew my mind, I’ve always felt that Ellen’s vulnerability is so present in almost every character I’ve seen her do, and I felt like that was the absolutely ideal quality for Vivi,” says the 44-year-old Khouri.

Khouri met Burstyn at a Los Angeles coffee shop to talk about the role. “In her very gracious and diplomatic way, I think she was seeing if I was up to the task,” Khouri says. “I was not burdened with huge doubts about myself. I’ve waited a very long time [to direct], and I wasn’t going to let insecurities be a part of the equation.”

Burstyn had no hesitation about putting herself in the hands of a first-time director. “I’ve worked with many directors who were making their second film,” she said. “‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here’ was Marty Scorsese’s second film, ‘Requiem for a Dream’ was Darren Aronofsky’s second. So I’ve had a lot of experience with directors whose talents are still young and fresh, who are still finding their way, and I prefer that, actually, to someone who has already answered all of the questions successfully.” She laughs. “You know what I mean? Where they’re kind of relying on old solutions.”

When filming began on “Divine Secrets” last summer in North Carolina, Burstyn showed up “in the zone,” as Khouri describes it. “I realized, it will be my job to not knock her out of it.” Which, for a Method actor like Burstyn, required some delicacy, Khouri admits.

“There were a couple of times when I’d go up to her and say, ‘Ellen, I was thinking maybe if we could do such and such,’ and she’d say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I can’t even think about it like that, I have no idea what you’re saying,’ and I’d just be like, ‘Well OK, let’s just try it.’ And then she would do it exactly.

“Or I’d go, ‘Ellen, when you say that line, I just want you to glance back that way a little bit. And I could tell she’d just look at me, like, ‘Shut up, get away.’ But then she would do it so perfectly. And I was just like, ‘Thank you!’”

Burstyn, who grew up in Detroit, modeled her character’s Southern-style theatrics in part on women she observed in Texas, where she had once worked as a waitress. But there was a more universal component to the character as well.

“I felt Vivi was like many women that I know, whose aspiration is greater than what they’ve fulfilled in their lives,” Burstyn says. “There’s all this creative energy that never got organized, so Vivi just kind of killed it off with booze. And that’s been my experience in life: If you have creative energy and you don’t use it, you have to do something with it, so you kill it.”

For Burstyn, as with Newman and Pacino, preparation is essential to creating a believable person on screen. But the real life of a film doesn’t begin to take shape until the other actors show up on the set. For Burstyn, as with the other acting legends who last the longest, there’s simply no time like the present.

“Each project is a brand new thing,” Burstyn concludes. “You don’t want to solve the problem the way you solved it before.... It’s a brand new character, story, life on the set, all of it. But the fact that you’ve made a few movies is helpful.”

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Hugh Hart is a regular contributor to Calendar.