He enjoyed working with Gallo on the script, a process that took place almost entirely during six weeks last summer in Huston’s home in Puerto Vallarta. “In this picture particularly, I wanted it to be an immediate experience, rather than telling a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with frozen climaxes. I wanted something that was happening constantly, that gives you a feeling that you are present, as though it were an actual experience, rather than a remembered experience.” He pauses, watches a whore go by. “To me, one of the great things of American writing is when you feel you are directly witnessing something. One has that feeling in O’Neill, that you are directly witnessing a happening. And are you familiar with W. R. Burnett? This is one of the least appreciated American writers, and you get that thing of direct experience in reading Burnett.”
Huston watches Tommy Shaw whip the extras into their assigned roles and smiles. “That man is the true hero of this production,” he says of the white-haired Shaw. “I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
He turns and sees Albert Finney, dressed in the soiled white suit of the Consul, smoking a cigar in the corner, mumbling to himself, as if rehearsing one final time before the cameras turn. “This fellow Finney is giving one of the finest performances I’ve ever seen. I thought he would be good; but I never dreamed that he would be as good as he is. Or that anybody would be as good as he is.”
It was one of those pictures that, even though you have arrived in the middle, grip you with the instant conviction that it is the best film you have ever seen in your life; so extraordinarily complete in its realism that what the story is all about, who the protagonist may be, seems of small account beside the explosion of the particular moment, beside the immediate threat, the identification with the one hunted, the one haunted.
— Malcolm Lowry
Under the Volcano
It is impossible, on these days at the Farolito, to imagine anyone other than Albert Finney in the part of the Consul. When he is supposed to be drunk, he is drunk; not the comic drunk, not the grotesque, exaggerated drunk of so many bad performers. Finney as the Consul plays an intelligent man, a man of language and smothered passions, who has moved past the point where the world is clear, yet remains capable of sudden explosions of clarity. It’s in the way he stands, in the looseness of his features that suddenly snap into tension. It’s in his great angers, breaking out of the emotional ice jam that the Consul has made of his life. This performance displays one possible solution to the old problem of making a movie out of a literary masterpiece: Strip away the literary style, get down to the bones of the narrative, and then fill the bony structure with performance.-
“Where the book has helped me is to fill in the internal life, the subtext, the thoughts that go through my mind above and beyond what one says,” Finney says one afternoon in his room at the Racquet Club in Cuernavaca. “Because often in life, you don’t think of those things, or about what you say; you say what you say. A phrase may come out, a line may come out; but the general feeling behind it is often, in life, a sort of nonspecific area that you’re preoccupied with, from which lines come out. So I thought the novel was important to me to fill in that sort of interior thought pattern. One does this anyway as an actor; that’s one of the things that you’re supposed to do. I mean, that’s what one does: invest the undercurrent with all kinds of thoughts that may be applicable to the situation the character is in at any time. But it helped to have the novel.”
In Mexico, when not before the cameras, Finney is living to some extent the way Geoffrey Firmin might have lived in 1938. He drinks only tequila, usually taking a taste before shooting; he makes a ritual of eating breakfast each morning with a Mexican family living near the location that has begun to make special meals for the crew. Such activities are not simply a device to find the character of the Consul.
“It’s all to me part of the total experience, of trying to live the moment — the present tense of the matter — when you work,” Finney says. “The whole Mexican experience of doing this film is not repeatable in my lifetime. I’m not saying I won’t do another film in Mexico, but this subject, this experience, these circumstances at this time are not repeatable. One wants to relish all that, as well as the work. And, of course, it all feeds the work. So in this part, I find myself having a tequila; I had never really drunk tequila before. I’d been to Mexico before, but I never drink tequila in London or Spain. So suddenly I tried one or two kinds of tequila and mescal, just for the flavor. So that one is mildly — mildly — sort of savoring what the Consul seriously put himself through. It’s not that they, or it, help; but they might help. One of the jobs is that [as an actor] you’re going somewhere that’s unfamiliar to you. You’re trying to get yourself into unfamiliar territory in your imagination. So you help prepare the ground so you might get an idea you never had before. There’s no guarantee. It’s not to be relied upon. But it might help.”
Finney was first asked about playing the Consul in 1981, while he was portraying Daddy Warbucks in Annie, also directed by Huston. He was approached by a bearded, New York-based German intellectual named Wieland Schulz-Keil, who with his partner, Moritz Borman, was determined to bring Under the Volcano to the screen (at that point, they were almost finished with the enervating task of clearing the rights).
Huston loved the way Schulz-Keil looked, and drafted him for the part of a bomb-throwing anarchist in Annie. But Lowry’s novel was the German’s primary concern. He’d read it as a boy; now he wanted to see it on the screen. Huston was the ideal director, Finney the perfect Consul. Finney hadn’t read the book before Schulz-Keil’s first approach. “He told me they had an outline for this script, and could he send it to me,” Finney remembers. “I said, ‘Of course.’ “ A friend coincidentally gave him a copy of Under the Volcano; there had been some industry talk about the possibility of the movie being made, and she thought he should read the novel. At the same time, Schulz-Keil sent over his outline.
“It was the thickest document I’d ever seen,” Finney remembers, “so I thought, Well, I might as well read the novel. Like most people, I found the novel very difficult to get into. To plug into somebody else’s stream of consciousness is always hard. But then I thought what an interesting story it was, what an interesting situation it was. The pain of it, the anguish of it kind of struck me. Then periodically I would get new outlines, and then scripts.”
Meanwhile, thirty-two-year-old Michael Fitzgerald had been brought into the production end of the movie. Huston invited him to come to The American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award dinner honoring Huston last year in Los Angeles, where a deal was worked out with Schulz-Keil and Borman. The two Germans had exhausted their bankroll in the process of clearing the rights, and had been turned down by four studios. At the Huston dinner was Alberto Isaac, a director general of the Mexican Cinematographic Institute, who expressed interest in helping with the financing. Fitzgerald sent Tommy Shaw to Mexico to work with Isaac, and three weeks later Fitzgerald arrived to make a deal.