The interview itself was unusual to say the least. Though we could have done the interview anywhere within the confines of the hotel in which Nolte was staying in Manhattan--in his suite, in a hallway or the lobby--we ended up doing it in a large conference room where I had been waiting for him. I was originally supposed to talk to Nolte around noon, but he was running late and then had some other things to take care of, so we didn't get to talk until around 4:00. I had collapsed onto a couch in the conference room and spent the afternoon chatting with publicists and reading through every New York newspaper in existence. Nolte padded into the room and his publicist introduced to two of us. He said it was nice to meet me and bade me to sit down with him (next to him) on the couch. I did so and immediately realized it was a mistake. There is no good way to comfortably talk to someone who is sitting directly next to you. By the end of our interview, both of us had at least one of our feet on the couch so we could face one another. Never again.
The other element of the interview that made it so unique was Nolte's near stream-of-conscience answers. I'd ask him about being peaceful or preparing for a given role and the next thing I'd know he'd be talking about babies, poetry, obscure authors or ozone therapy. Time and again during the interview, I found myself smiling and thinking to myself, "Just how the hell did we get here?" At first, I'd ask Nolte how what he was talking about connected to my questions, but as the interview continued, I stopped doing so; it was far more interesting hearing him voice his inner monologue.
To his extreme credit and my benefit, Nolte shooed away his publicist a number of times in order for the two of us to continue talking. And for that I am genuinely grateful. It would be hard to fathom this interview and my subsequent article without that extra time.
NICK NOLTE: You write about film culture, huh?
CHRIS NEUMER: Yup.
NICK NOLTE: I almost did something with her [Charlize Theron]. Wonderful story, we were going to do a piece.
CHRIS NEUMER: What is it that you’re looking for now in projects?
NICK NOLTE: I’m just wide open. I’m looking at everything. Lately Hemingway seems to be—he’s been a thing that’s been coming up.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did you do Papa yet?
NICK NOLTE: No, I haven’t. Papa came in and, out of the blue, came Across the River and Into the Trees which was a novel of Hemingway’s—the critics really tore him apart—and he turned around and wrote The Old Man and the Sea. Part of The Old Man and the Sea, the things that were greedy and trying to eat the giant fish he caught were the critics. He was really upset with them.
CHRIS NEUMER: Ah, metaphor.
NICK NOLTE: Yes. Because Across the River and Into the Trees was a love affair between a 50-year old man and a 21-year old Venetian girl and the critics didn’t quite believe it, but he really stuck his heart out on the line.
CHRIS NEUMER: They weren’t big fans of the leopard in Snows of Kilimanjaro either though.
NICK NOLTE: I don’t know.
CHRIS NEUMER: Hemingway’s actually from Oak Park, just outside Chicago, where I’m from.
NICK NOLTE: Ah, Johnny Byrum, too. He was a filmmaker and made Heartbeat.
CHRIS NEUMER: Don’t know of him. Well, we’ve got Bob Newhart and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, so there are a lot of people there.
NICK NOLTE: There’s a lot of people from Chicago. Actors.
CHRIS NEUMER: Something like this, The Beautiful Country, what specifically drew you to this project?
NICK NOLTE: Malick had mentioned it to me, through the years. I don’t know if it was on The Thin Red Line or not, but I think it might have been. He told me of a female student whom he had been teaching in a Harvard screenwriting class and that she had come up with a really good theme and told me a little bit about it and the reason he told me was that he knew I was interested in finishing off; I had done the first part of what I thought was the Vietnam saga for me. It was a moral dilemma that my generation had faced and so it had a lot to do with forming who we were and what we believed. So I had told the story in Who’ll Stop the Rain about the disillusioned soldier who doesn’t want to be there and he acts out. What I had, I hadn’t made any kind of reconciliation from then. So I said, you know what I need are my Chuck Patterson things… (roots through briefcase) It’s okay. So I sat down with some poets, one of which was Patterson, who had written a book of poetry about Vietnam, and a fellow named Mike Graham who used to work for the Detroit Free Press and was in service in Vietnam at the time, but he was in charge of spying on the students and his mind was turned and they didn’t court martial him, but they were pretty upset with him. Four poems were covered. The guys who fought in Vietnam were like you and me, they went to high school and then got drafted. I don’t think that I’ve ever had thoughts in my mind that I would have to kill someone in my lifetime.
CHRIS NEUMER: Serious thoughts that is.
NICK NOLTE: Yeah, I knew I’d never murder anybody. I’ve been angry and I’ve have thoughts, but I’d never act out.
CHRIS NEUMER: I was waiting for that.
NICK NOLTE: And that’s who these vets are. Regular people who ended up in that was and legally killed some people. The reconciliation is with Vietnamese national and the American national. In the fact—I didn’t hate you, you didn’t rape my sister, you didn’t do anything like that, it was the government that asked me to shoot at you. In that way the reconciliation is one of war, you know? And it wasn’t a personal affair. That has never happened.
CHRIS NEUMER: So it put a final bookend on the Vietnam experiences in your life?
NICK NOLTE: That bookends it. One of my friends is into alternative medicine and he’s also very spiritual and he still—to this day—can’t fathom that he got dupped into that.. He got out and his mother was dying of chemo and that was horrific and then he developed cancer and he wasn’t going to go through her chemo and he got into ozone therapy and ozanated a tumor out of his neck.
CHRIS NEUMER: Let me interrupt you and ask you this, was there something artistic, besides the final bookend, that attracted you to this?
NICK NOLTE: The fact of the blindness. The fact of getting exactly the understanding—understanding exactly who that was. What I felt was in [my character’s] heart. What matched up with my heart, the passion that I had. For instance, when I told the story about my wife on camera, I did it fairly straight ahead, but every time I did it with the actor I couldn’t contain myself.
CHRIS NEUMER: In what way?
NICK NOLTE: I broke down. I kept apologizing to Hans Petter Moland, I said, "I’m sorry, I just can’t break it." And he said, "No, no, it’s good."
CHRIS NEUMER: Happy accident?
NICK NOLTE: Happy accident, happy work situation, happy problem, happy preparation… but it was the right kind of preparation.
CHRIS NEUMER: One thing Hans had mentioned about your entrance on screen—when you brush right by Damien—was that he enjoyed the fact that the audience didn’t know you were blind. As a big, energetic 6’2" guy, as an actor did you take any special pains to create a strong yet disabled character?
NICK NOLTE: No, I just didn’t put in my contacts.
CHRIS NEUMER: That was it?
NICK NOLTE: Yeah. I knew you couldn’t see my eyes. I’m from Iowa, go ahead.
CHRIS NEUMER: In other roles that you’ve done, you’ve been a strong, gruff character—your commanding office in The Thin Red Line—was there something that you tried to turn off, or hold out of your performance to make the character of Steve work?
NICK NOLTE: In general, most people think that the characters I play are highly intense, highly angry and driven. I just finished a picture called The Peaceful Warrior, and the first thing the director asked me was, "Can you be peaceful?" (laughs)
CHRIS NEUMER: How did you go about being peaceful?
NICK NOLTE: I’ve been searching my whole life for peace. I’ve strived my entire life to be peaceful. We start out our lives as babies, perfectly content and perfectly fulfilled. Somewhere along the line—the only time we have problems is when the pin sticks us—and if you’ve ever listened to a baby they don’t really cry, it’s a series of howls and yells. It’s very different.
CHRIS NEUMER: Piercing.
NICK NOLTE: And somewhere along the line, we forget that we have the capability of being happy anytime we want. It becomes, "You will be happy if you get this," or "You will be happy if you achieve this." Also when we’re babies everything is a revelation, it’s almost a religious revelation. And there are thoughts that intoxication.is related to trying to recreate that state. There’s a whole group of scientists that think that. They think that intoxication is an attempt to do that. When you think about that, it mistake, makes sense to try to recreate that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Or even heighten the experience.
NICK NOLTE: Yeah. But this article went on to say that there’s probably no one in the world who hasn’t been intoxicated in some way or another, using some form of mind altering, caffeine or something. It’s simply a fact. Our brain interacts with the environment and then changes—substances don’t change the brain, they don’t get to the brain, but the balance does.
CHRIS NEUMER: And this taps into the peaceful character how?
NICK NOLTE: Yeah. Um. Peace comes from the heart. It’s in the heart. If you come from the heart, you come from feeling. One thing that is consistent for every human being on the planet is that they will say they want peace and contentment or, you know…
CHRIS NEUMER: Harmony.
NICK NOLTE: That’s the similarity. Now, that’s the issues of the heart. The differences are the skin and the political ideas and all that. That’s the mind. The similarities are some kind of peace and some kind of contentment.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s good, but how do you tap into that so that it shows up on camera?
NICK NOLTE: I think you just have to—first of all, you’ve got to have a thirst to want to be at peace. There is a war going on very definitely a war going on and it’s inside ourselves. And I really don’t think that war is anything more than a projection of the battle that’s inside ourselves.
CHRIS NEUMER: Like inner demons clashing, is that what you’re talking about?
NICK NOLTE: Inner argument over reality. Which function is more important, the thought mind process or the feeling process?
CHRIS NEUMER: Which have you found to be true?
NICK NOLTE: Feeling. The thought mind is forever forever thought after thought after thought.
CHRIS NEUMER: So you’re too much in your own head, is that it?
NICK NOLTE: You’re just constantly—you don’t have control of it, it just comes out, just thought after thought. You know, then you become—if you read Church Murgee, he wanted me to write in the back of his book—what do you write in the back of one of his books?
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m not familiar with his writing.
NICK NOLTE: He’d trap your ego and frustrate you and stuck you with the dialogue. He would trap your idea of consciousness and you’d have to give it up—you’d just have to give it up.
