Malkovich reflects on wide-ranging career

People who know

of

John Malkovich think he's a little odd.

People who actually know him and work with him think that too, but quickly add that he's a genius.

Mary-Louise Parker ("Weeds") his co-star in "RED," opening today, couldn't stop gushing about Malkovich at a recent Manhattan press event for the film, citing him as the co-star with whom she'd most like to share a long road trip.

"We have so many friends in common," she said. "He's so strange and weird and wonderful. He has his own clothing line. And he directs plays in languages I'm not even sure he understands."

(Parker may know genius. Her 6-year-old son thought "Hello, Dolly" was about Salvador Dali, begging the question as to why a 6-year-old knows of either. "It's pretentious," she said, "but I live in New York.")

But back to Malkovich. He's made more than 70 films in a three-decade movie career and while some see him as an art-house snob, his work is all over the map. At the moment he can be seen not only in "RED," as a somewhat-addled former CIA agent, but in "Secretariat," as trainer Lucien Laurin. He's finishing filming of the next "Transformers" movie and he's currently executive producing the just-started-shooting Jason Reitman-Diablo Cody movie "Young Adult."

Malkovich was a producer on their massively successful "Juno," but said he hasn't seen much money from it even though it cost $6 million to make and grossed $300 million.

"Such is life," he said wearily, at New York's Four Seasons Hotel, "such is Hollywood, such is the business."

Malkovich said he was drawn to a popcorn movie like "RED" for a variety of reasons. "I actually knew [director] Robert Shwentke, whom I'd met before in L.A., and I liked him and thought he was very bright," he said. "I liked the script very much. And of course the cast was a huge inducement.

"Occasionally I've worked with people whom I'd consider to be great actors or actresses but I wouldn't rush back to work with them. I like to have fun at work and most people who work a lot like to have fun at work. Life's too short. You're going to be spending 10, 12, 14, 16, hours a day with this group for weeks or months on end so I think it's quite important that they're people you like. It isn't a requirement but it's an inducement."

Malkovich added that it's not only fun he looks for, but as he's worked longer in the business he said he tries to find projects with "the least drama possible."

That's workplace drama. Not drama drama.

Regardless of the project, however, Malkovich said his process is the same.

"Because I work in Europe so much and for some bizarre reason which is inexplicable to me I've always been considered some type of an intellect, I approach everything the same. I don't care if it's 'Peter Pan' or 'RED' or a Portuguese art film. It's just work to me. You have a responsibility.

You've agreed to become a figure in someone else's dream and I try to keep in mind always that it's their dream. And rather than trying to help them achieve what I'd like to achieve, I'd rather help them achieve what they want to achieve. I believe other actors see it differently, but I believe in my job definition.

"It doesn't really matter how I feel about it, if it reflects my sensibility or my aesthetic, it matters how the boss feels about it."

And when Malkovich is directing or producing, does he expect actors to behave the same way? "More or less I do," he said.

As a triple threat (actor, director, producer), Malkovich said he looks for different things in scripts depending on which hat he plans to wear.

"As a producer you're in it for the long haul - 'Dancer Upstairs,' which I also directed, took eight years - directing a little less long, but a very, very long haul. But if somebody asks you to do five weeks [as an actor] on an already very good script with a lot of great actors, that's not even a decision.

"As a producer you pick the story, then you hire the writer, then you work with that writer for a long, long, often painfully long, period of time. You're not paid for that. You have to like it. And you have to like working with writers and thankfully, I enjoy that enormously.

"When you produce," he added, "that is a story that you want to tell. When you act, that's a story you're hired for that someone else wants to tell. And as a director, it's slightly different. As a producer, we work on a lot of different things, but as a director, you're going to devote yourself entirely to that [one film] for two or three years and that's very complicated for me. My life is a little too busy."

That "busy" includes the previously mentioned clothing line. Asked if he was wearing his own clothes, Malkovich responded, "No, these are not," then after a long pause drily added, "well, I mean these are my clothes. I didn't shoplift them."