Meaning in the Method: A Conversation with Ellen Burstyn

Winner of an Oscar, a Tony, and two Emmys, Ellen Burstyn is widely recognized as one of the greatest living American actors. Lesser known is her importance to the history of the Method, an approach to acting rooted in lived experience that introduced a new, radically present and humane style of stage and screen performance.

Now the subject of a new collection on the Criterion Channel, the Method was codified by director and teacher Lee Strasberg during the Great Depression and cultivated at the Actors Studio, where he served as artistic director beginning in 1951. Burstyn began working with Strasberg in the 1960s and became so central to the Studio and its techniques that she took over after his sudden death from a heart attack in 1982. In between, she became both a sought-after star and a major player in the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s, working with many of the most significant up-and-coming directors in the country, including Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), William Friedkin (The Exorcist), Bob Rafelson (The King of Marvin Gardens), and Martin Scorsese (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore).

The Criterion Channel’s Method Acting lineup features two of Burstyn’s favorites among her own performances: as the protagonist in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a widow who drives across the country to California with her child in tow to pursue her dream of being a singer; and as Edna in Resurrection, a woman who, after narrowly surviving a car crash, discovers she has the power to heal people. In this conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we spoke about how the Method has been misunderstood, how Burstyn has used the techniques she learned from Strasberg in her work, and how she contributed to the development of both Alice and Resurrection.

So, how would you describe the Method to a reader who maybe doesn’t know that much about it but has been watching these movies and is excited about them?: Well, I would quote Lee Strasberg, who said it is a method to train the senses to respond to imaginary stimuli. You want to be able to make the fiction real to you. Sometimes it’s easy; sometimes you just read the script and it’s clear. But other times you have to do something to yourself in order to make it real to you. It means that you’re stimulating your senses to respond as though this circumstance you’re in is real so that it becomes real in your body. It affects your breathing and your immersion in the fiction.

When I auditioned for my first Broadway play, I had not studied acting. There was one scene where I was moving from Chicago to New York. It’s the first day in my new apartment in New York City, and I’m all excited about it. So [as an actor] I had to cook up some excitement. Now, there I’m standing, looking at the stage manager holding the script, and I’m trying to say to myself, “Okay, I remember my first apartment in New York.” I’m trying to excite that memory, and then all of a sudden a voice in my head says, “No. You’re on the stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York City, about to audition for your first Broadway play.” That gave me all the reality and excitement I needed.

If I had been in other circumstances, I would’ve had to do something to myself to simulate that kind of excitement that I was looking for, and after I had studied acting, I knew how to do that. So I might use a memory of a smell of that apartment, or it might be what I saw out the window, the garden, or it might be the sound of the particular traffic that went by. Using one of the senses and moving into it mentally so that it becomes a reality—that’s the basic technique.

How do you then use that in your work?: When I did Long Day’s Journey into Night, there was a moment where the question was, was I [the character Mary Tyrone] going to turn to drugs again? And at the end of one act, I just turned my head toward the room where I did drugs, and then, when the curtain went up for the next act, I walked onstage and I wanted the audience to know that, yes, I had done drugs. What I did was an overall sensation of walking through a snowstorm so that I felt the cold snow on my face and hitting my eyelids, and just the act of creating that sensation made my whole body behave in an entirely different way, so the audience knew.

Where were you in your career when you first started studying the Method?: Well, after I did that first audition, I got the part, so I opened up Broadway without any training at all. For maybe eight years, something like that, I did guest shots on television, and I made a couple of B movies. In 1964, I was making a movie, Goodbye Charlie, with Debbie Reynolds, Walter Matthau, and Tony Curtis. I was sitting on the stage, and I thought, well, this is it. This is the big time. I was starring in a Technicolor movie, and my next step would be playing [a role like] Debbie Reynolds’s part. And this voice in my head that speaks to me on occasion said, I don’t want it. And I was shocked, but I knew exactly what that meant: I had to pack up my kid and my dog and my furniture and leave Hollywood and go back to New York and study with Lee Strasberg, and that’s what I did. It changed everything. I got into acting on a deep level—into the art form as opposed to the career—and I studied with Lee for a few years before I auditioned for the Actors Studio. Once I started working in the Studio and working for Lee Strasberg, my work changed, and the next big change that manifested in my career was The Last Picture Show.

What was the exercise?: It’s very hard to describe. I did a movie called A Dream of Passion. In it, Melina Mercouri plays a Greek actress who’s been away from Greece, and she’s returned after becoming an international movie star. She’s going to do Medea in the big coliseum [in Athens], and she decides that it would be a good publicity stunt if she did research by interviewing this American woman who’s in jail in Athens for killing her children.

That’s the part. I had to play a woman who has killed her children. I thought: Who’s that? How do you play that? Who is she? Who could she possibly be? So I set up an exercise just to examine the impulse to kill. I first thought about bringing in a live chicken and killing it.

You’re a vegetarian, right? I can’t imagine that idea appealed to you.: Right. So I went through all the possibilities of what I could kill, and I got down to the only thing I could think of that I could kill: a cockroach. And somehow that wasn’t commensurate with killing my children. I was sitting onstage at the Studio, and there was a very old, dilapidated chair. I thought, God, that’s an awful chair. And I started to hate the chair, and I allowed that to build up so that I wanted to destroy it. Then I created, with sense memory, a child—the child of the story. And I took it by the hand, and I put the child in the chair.

And then, being a vegetarian, I brought some raw beef there, and I unwrapped it and stuck it in my mouth and chewed it, then rubbed it all over my face and picked up the knife and destroyed the chair with my imaginary child sitting on it.

The goal was not to kill the child but to kill the chair. That’s the same act as in Medea. Both Medea and the character I was playing kill their children because their husbands betrayed them.

This makes me think of the wildness and intensity of your work on-screen. I was wondering if that was something you feel like you developed a capacity for with Lee in class and at the Studio.: You go deep inside yourself. You’re not just saying lines and hoping that you cry at the right moment. You’re penetrating your own psyche and screwing things up down there. To me, that’s the art of acting: you have to be willing to really get in it. Now, again, your children aren’t in jeopardy—it’s a chair and an imaginary child. It takes on its reality to you. Actors who think they’re doing Method acting but haven’t studied it make a mistake thinking they have to really do the actual thing.

Can you talk a little bit about what drew you specifically to the story or screenplay of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and how you put the team together for it?: I was shooting The Exorcist in New York, and the dailies were going back to John Calley, [a producer] at Warner Bros. in California. They called my agent and said, “We want to do another movie with her.” And they sent me all the scripts that they already owned with leading parts for women, but they were all types. You know: the good wife, the prostitute with a heart of gold. I was a single mother, and I knew other single mothers who were earning a living and raising their child, and I said, “I want to do a movie with a recognizable woman.” My agent found a version of the script and brought it to me, then I brought it to the studio, and they said yes. They asked me who I wanted to direct it, and I said, “Somebody new and exciting.”

I called Francis Coppola and asked him, and he said, “Look at a film called Mean Streets.” Warner Bros. owned Mean Streets, and it hadn’t been released yet. I looked at it, and I asked for a meeting with Marty, and I said, “I want this film told from a woman’s point of view, and I can’t tell from your film if you know anything about women. Do you?” And he said, “No, but I’d like to learn.”

I thought that was a wonderful answer, and so we teamed up, and it was great working with Marty. He has a way of allowing the actors to contribute what they know. Every day, at the end of the day’s shooting, we would rehearse the scene for the next day, but we would always improvise, and there was somebody there who recorded it and went through the process of turning it into a script. Then we came in in the morning with a script that reflected what the improvs had revealed.

I don’t know if you’ve read the story about the ending?

Can you tell it?: Sure. All the way through, Alice wants to go to Monterey and become a singer, and she’s on her way there. But then she meets David, played by Kris Kristofferson, and they fall in love.

In the original script, she gives up her pursuit of a singing career and marries him and settles down on a farm and becomes a good wife. I didn’t like that ending, so we changed it to her going on [to California]. That got to John Calley, and he said, “No, no, no. She has to end up with the man. We’ve already made a movie where the woman didn’t end up with a man, and it didn’t work. It’s got to have a happy ending.”

And I said, “Oh, you mean that’s the only happy ending possible, one where she gives up her career and ends up with a man? Is that what you’re saying?”

He said, “What I’m saying is, if she doesn’t end up with a man, we ain’t making the movie.”

I heard that. That’s very clear. So then we had no ending. It was the day [before] we were going to shoot it, and we came on the set to improvise that scene, and we started it, and I said, “I want to go to Monterey, and I want to be a singer!” And Kris Kristofferson said, “Come on, I’ll take you to Monterey. I don’t give a damn about that ranch.”

I said, “You will?”

And that became the ending.

I’m eager to talk to you about Resurrection as well, because I feel like it’s probably lesser known than Alice but no less a passion project on your part. Can you talk a little bit about what drew you to the themes of near-death experience and healing and that character’s journey?: I had been doing a lot of reading about death and what happens. I was in Greece doing A Dream of Passion. And my agent called and said, “A script has come in for you where you play Jesus Christ coming back to earth as a woman.”

I said, “Oh, that sounds interesting. Send me that.” So she did, and I read it, and I didn’t like it at all! The producers wanted to come to Athens and talk to me. I said, “Fine,” and I lightly sketched out a possible plot of what it could be, and they said, “Well, we have a go from Universal. We like your story, but we have a go from Universal. Do you want to make our story?” And I said, “No.” And they left and they went back to the hotel, and they called me and said, “We like your story better than our story.”

As a theater history nerd, I was blown away that Eva Le Gallienne is in that movie playing your grandmother. She’s such an important figure in theater history, as a director, a producer, and a teacher. I was just wondering what it was like to work with her. Did you cast her?: I don’t remember exactly how I came to know about her, but I knew that she had the only repertory company [in New York in the 1920s]. I knew her historically, and I knew she was still alive and that she had never done a film. And so I asked to meet her, and we had tea together, and I cast her as my grandmother. It’s the only time she ever appeared on film. She was called Miss Le G.

Miss Le G!: Then she started calling me Miss Le E, and that became my nickname on set. We have this scene where we’re saying goodbye, and she says, “That’s just it. If only we could love each other the same way we say we love Him. I expect there wouldn’t be such trouble in the world.”

And every time she did it, every take, when she said “love,” it was like her voice dropped into her heart, and the word came out of her heart, and tears shot out of my eyes. I wasn’t doing anything to myself to make that happen. It was the sound of the way she said the word that just touched me deeply.

Meaning in the Method: A Conversation with Ellen Burstyn

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