In July of 1996, a script arrived from my agent entitled Bookworm, written by Mamet. As was the case on maybe five occasions in my life, I sequestered myself from everyone around me and read the screenplay the moment I opened the envelope. When I was finished, I called my agent to say that I loved it, and in a couple of weeks I was in a conference room in a Beverly Hills hotel with the presumptive director, Lee Tamahori, the producers, and other actors reading the smaller roles. Playing the other lead role was Robert De Niro. I was, obviously, beside myself with the prospect of working with Bob. However, the character was named Charles Morse, and as tycoons go, De Niro is more Stavros Niarchos. De Niro did the reading and decided he didn’t want to play the part.
I was offered the other lead role and waited for them to tell me who they would cast in De Niro’s place. That month, I went with Kim, Ireland, and Kim’s siblings and father to Figure Eight Island, just off the coast of Wilmington, North Carolina. We’d vacationed there for several years as it was a reasonable drive from Athens, Georgia, where Kim grew up and her family lived. I remember sitting on a bed in our rented beach house when my agent called to tell me that Anthony Hopkins had just been cast in the role of Morse. I literally welled up with tears of joy.
Just two years prior, the producer of the Oscars, Gil Cates, asked me to present a clip from a nominated film. I told Gil I would if that film could be The Remains of the Day, which was one of my favorites that year. I worshipped Emma Thompson and admired the director, James Ivory. The movie I shot with Hopkins would be one of the few of my films that I can watch. Its mournful treatment of the main character’s struggle to connect with people in any meaningful way requires an actor of Tony’s ability. Who plays existential angst better than Hopkins?
We began shooting that August on location all over Alberta, Canada. The cast and crew were in hotels and rental houses in Canmore, thirty-odd minutes from the gates of Banff National Park. It was decided to jettison the title Bookworm, which I preferred. The new title, The Edge, should have provided a clue as to how Tamahori, the producer Art Linson, and the studio execs at Fox wanted to shape the film into more of a conventional action-adventure-drama than the baroque thriller I thought I had signed on for. The script told the story of Morse, an awkward, introverted billionaire, who accompanies his supermodel wife, Mickey (Elle Macpherson), on a photo shoot in the Alaskan semiwilderness. Unbeknownst to Morse (or maybe not), his wife has been having an on-again, off-again affair with the attending photographer, Bob Green, played by yours truly. I loved the script because it was simple and stark, throwing two men into desperate circumstances, simultaneously mistrusting and needing each other. In several scenes, such as when a third companion, played by Harold Perrineau, is killed, the film mimics The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its moments of unbridled humanity.
In one rehearsal, Tamahori said, “This scene on page fourteen. I think we should just cut the first four speeches. David does tend to go on a bit.” I felt that the way David tends to “go on” was the very reason I was there. At one point, I telephoned Mamet, who listened politely to my concerns about the changes in the tone of the film. Then he said, “Alec, these scripts are like orphan children to me. I write them, they pay me, and they belong to someone else.” In terms of Hollywood protocol, he was right. As he was not the director, he wouldn’t waste his time worrying about how the film was being made. During the actual shooting, Tamahori revealed that he had little, if any, affinity for dramatizing the tensions between Morse and Green. Instead, he relied on Bart the Bear, our Alaskan Kodiak castmate, to execute the kind of storytelling he could comprehend.
Ultimately, the stars of the film are two incomparable icons, the Canadian Rockies and Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins treated me to my favorite acting collaboration and the best view of a truly great actor I’d had since shooting Knots Landing with Julie Harris. With his classical training, subtly expressive face and limpid eyes, and an essential sturdiness and strength, he is my favorite living actor. No matter the role, there is always both the gentleman and the thug, the man and the beast present in so much of his work. I had studied Hopkins (and I do mean studied) going back to 1974, when he starred in the television adaptation of Leon Uris’s QB VII. I’d then watched him in films like Magic, The Elephant Man, The Remains of the Day, Nixon, and, of course, The Silence of the Lambs. After we worked together, Tony, ever the pugnacious iconoclast, still delighted me in The World’s Fastest Indian.
Hopkins has numerous gifts, and it is, of course, his voice that casts his spell. Like the French horn solo from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, he simply opens his mouth to speak and his work is halfway done. While many British actors imbue their work with something a bit more polished than Americans do, with Hopkins there is an added layer. Whether it’s something sensuous or dangerous, it’s palpable. While we were on location in Banff National Park, my sister Beth came to visit me. My sister Beth flew from Syracuse to Toronto to Calgary, then drove ninety minutes to the set, arriving rather tired. I found Hopkins lying on an air mattress, recommended for a neck and back injury that he joked he picked up while channeling Nixon. I approached him and said, “Tony, I’d like you to meet my sister Beth.” Hopkins put down the newspaper, stood, and slowly looked up at my sister, his blue eyes like sapphires that he had often utilized to similar effect, no doubt. “Elizabeth,” he purred, taking her hand, “what a pleasure to meet you.” When he kissed the back of it, I thought that Beth, a married mother of six, was about to faint.