By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (7 page)

I had some time before I had to work, but I wasn’t really interested in hanging out; I was focused on preparing for the movie. We were all in this huge hotel that Ferdinand Marcos had built for his daughter’s wedding, in this incredibly poor province. It was beyond third world, aside from that hotel, the kind of place where people used feces—both their own and from animals—as material to build their houses. I took all this in, but again, I was just focused on how this was my shot and I had to do a good job there. While for me movie sets later became places to go on location and party, at this point I was still very much a straight arrow. While I’d smoked pot and drank a little bit, I hadn’t done any narcotics yet and what’s more, this was a very serious set. I never saw any members of the cast or crew party; I don’t think I ever even saw anyone hungover.

I liked to run every morning along the South China Sea. After one such run, very early in the day, I was sitting in the cafeteria writing in my journal. A guy walked up to me and said, “Hey, man, mind if I join you?” I looked up, but I was so exhausted and out of it that I could only really see that there was some guy standing there. I said, “Actually, I would prefer it if you didn’t. I’m just sort of focused on what I’m writing.” And he went, “Okay, man. I get that. I like that. You’re just being yourself, doing your own thing.” His voice was funny and distinctive, and I suddenly realized it was Willem Dafoe, who was coming off big roles in
Platoon, The Last Temptation of Christ,
and
Mississippi Burning.
He was huge. I went, “Oh, man—I’m so sorry. Sit down, please.” And he just sort of stood there smiling and said, “No, I get it, you’re rude. That’s your thing. I can respect someone doing their thing. You want me to go back to my room?” I kept apologizing, and he said something along the lines of “What if I wasn’t Willem Dafoe but just another schmo?” He was being facetious and giving me shit but in a funny, unique way. I said, “If you make fun of me anymore, I’m going
to throw this bowl of rice at you.” I guess Kathryn Bigelow, who had directed him in
The Loveless,
had told him to look out for me on the set and showed him my picture, so that’s why he’d come up to me. Finally he sat down and said, “No wonder Kathryn likes you; she loves rude people.” We became fast friends.

Still, I spent most of the time before I had to shoot anything working on a scene where I would be sitting on the top of a hill in a wheelchair—my character was quadriplegic—yell, “Banzai, motherfucker!” and then go flying down and smash into a bunch of wheelchairs at the bottom. I knew that Oliver wouldn’t want to have to use a stunt-man and then cut away, so I wanted to figure out a few things—like how I was going to go flying out of a wheelchair while defying my natural human instinct to protect myself by trying to break my fall with my hands. What I came up with was that I’d have to make my hands inaccessible. So I asked this other actor to tie my hands together and then to tie them to my waist with rope. The guy thought I was completely nuts, but I knew I had to get my hands in a place where I simply wouldn’t be able to move them. The other part I had to figure out was how I was going to turn my body around in midair so I’d take the blow on my shoulder while having my body remain flaccid. I knew that, as a quadriplegic, all I could move was my nose, so it was complicated as hell figuring all of this out.

The only way I could get it right, I knew, was to practice. But it was so hot there that I couldn’t do it until the sun went down. So on ten of those twelve days before shooting, I’d be up there at sunset screaming, “Banzai, motherfucker!” and flying down the hill on my wheelchair and crashing into the others. I got pretty banged up fairly quickly. Apparently Oliver was coming home from the set at one point and saw me doing this on the makeshift hill that had been built. For about ten minutes he watched me come down and smash
into chairs and push the wheelchair back up the hill and do it again. I probably did it some six times without having a clue that he was watching. But apparently, after watching for a while, he turned to his first assistant director, Joe Reidy, and asked, “Who is that?” And Joe said, “His name’s Tom Sizemore.” Oliver asked how long I did this for, and Joe said he didn’t know but could find out. So he sent one of his guys over to me to ask. So some guy came running up to me and said, “Sizemore, how long do you do that for? Joe wants to know.” I had no idea who Joe was or why he wanted to know; I just shrugged, looked at the sun, which was almost completely gone at that point, and said, “I don’t know—till it’s completely dark. About an hour and a half, I guess.” Apparently that impressed Oliver; he liked that I wasn’t afraid. I guess it also impressed Joe—we ended up becoming friends later. Joe’s an amazing guy. He’s been the first AD not only to Oliver but also to Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. The first AD really runs the show on a movie set—he’s the one who has to say to the director, “We’re done, we’re moving on,” and have the director listen. When the director’s someone like Oliver or Marty, that’s not always easy, but they always listened to Joe.

Finally it was my first day of working, and I knew I had to hit it out of the park. So I went for it. When I was done, Joe came up to me and told me that Oliver wanted to see me. I went back to see Oliver and he said, “That was good, so we don’t even have to do a safety—unless you want to. Oh, hey, you want to watch the playback?” He was very casual—as if we knew each other and hung out all the time. Of course, I didn’t have a clue what the hell “playback” or “safety” even meant; I didn’t even know what a craft service table was at that point. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. “Um, I’ll watch playback,” I said and he played back my scene on the monitor he had right there.

I had never seen myself on-screen at that point, and I hated it.
My face looked huge on the monitor and really fucked-up. My pores seemed enormous and I had scraggly hair because I’d been told to grow my hair out, but all I could focus on were these huge pores on my nose. I must have had a horrified look on my face—I probably looked like I’d just smelled shit or something—because Oliver asked me what was wrong. I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t want to tell him I was horrified, so I just mumbled something about how it was just strange because I’d never seen myself act before. And then I sort of shuffled away, saying, “So, great, I’m not going to do a safety. Thanks.”

I was still really in my head, and just because Oliver thought I did well didn’t mean I believed it. In fact, as I was walking away, I started thinking about how in the scene I actually looked like I knew what was going to happen next. It’s a scene where a guy was threatening to kill me, and I didn’t really think I sold it; in fact I thought I looked like someone who knew he
wasn’t
going to get killed. As I was dwelling on this, I turned to someone on the set and asked, “Hey, what’s a safety?” And the crew guy said, “That’s when they shoot it again. Run back if you want one, kid.” So I ran back to Stone and said, “I’ve thought about it and I do want a safety.” So we did it again, and that’s when I really thought I nailed it. Oliver ultimately agreed that the second take was better.

For the next couple of days after that we just shot innocuous stuff. Then, on my fourth day of work, we did the scene where I go careening down the hill on my wheelchair. I had gotten very good at flying through the air and taking the blow on my shoulder but giving the illusion that I was going headfirst into the ground. It went well. Then my character gets into this fight with another vet, who was played by Andrew Lauer. I had decided before we shot that I was going to spit on him even though it wasn’t in the script. Andrew ended up spitting
back, and we got into this full-on spitting war, which is how Oliver got the idea to have Tom Cruise and Willem Dafoe get into a spitting war later in the movie. Because of that, and I think because he could tell just how passionate I was, Oliver wrote me two more scenes. I ended up staying for twenty-seven days even though I was originally just supposed to be there for two weeks. And while I was there I found out that I was cast in
Lock Up,
a Sylvester Stallone movie I had screen-tested for in Los Angeles on my way to the Philippines. It felt like my whole life was changing overnight.

But first I had to get home, which actually proved difficult because I had to fly to Manila and then stay overnight in Manila before heading back to New York. The revolution had just started there, and I was staying in Manila with Willem, who was flying out to Poland the next day to do a movie called
Triumph of the Will
. Suddenly bombs started going off in the sky, and I became convinced our hotel was going to be overrun. I was terrified and kept running over to Willem’s hotel room and waking him up. But nothing happened to us, and I was able to get on a plane back to New York the next day as planned.

Almost as soon as I got back to New York I had to go to Los Angeles. I was willing to go to L.A. as much as I needed to—I didn’t care where my acting career happened as long as it happened—but Edie was dead set against leaving New York. And that’s when Edie and I began having problems. We were young and I was away a lot. And even though I ultimately fell in love with her, I was never all the way in emotionally. I just don’t think I had fully recovered from Michelle.

But suddenly the work was coming, and it was coming fast. I did a movie called
Rude Awakening
and then
Lock Up,
which introduced me to both Stallone and Mickey Rourke. Mickey’s talent just blew me away. When I had seen him in
Diner
I realized there was someone in movies who was doing things that had never been done before.
And when we met I think we bonded over the fact that neither of us was quite right. There was also something very charismatic about him; he was Marlon Brando and didn’t know it. Everything about him was interesting: the way he walked—he had that pigeon-toed walk—and the way he looked and the sweetness he had underneath it all. Mickey and I are both weird. He’s had four dogs, all named Loki, and when each one dies, he names the next one that. I think we both want to talk to each other more, but we’re both chickens. He likes to talk to whichever Loki is around, and I like to talk to books.

Anyway, I made seventy-five thousand dollars on
Lock Up,
and I took the money I was supposed to use for a hotel stay and instead moved into the Oakwood—a furnished-apartment complex between Burbank and Hollywood, which is usually filled with child actors who are trying to get their big break—because it only cost eight hundred dollars a month. That meant I pocketed another forty thousand in per diem. I was very conscious back then about how much I needed to get by—I think I was still paranoid after hearing that you could never get another apartment once you got evicted in New York. I did not want to go back to waiting tables.

Stallone really liked me. He was the first big star I ever met, and I have to say I’ve still never met anyone better adjusted to stardom. He’s a good father, has been with the same woman, his wife, Jennifer Flavin, for nearly twenty-five years, and is simply the nicest guy you could meet. He basically decided I was a good actor and took me over to Creative Artists Agency (CAA), where he introduced me to Ron Meyer, who was one of the founders. Ron then took me over to meet with Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane. At the time, they were just kids my age but they ended up becoming the “Young Turks” along with Richard Lovett, who sort of ran that group, and Jay Maloney, who,
tragically, ended up killing himself. I could tell that they were brutally ambitious—like me.

I’d always known I was ambitious, but this was around when I realized just how competitive I was. My attitude about auditioning became: If you beat me today, I’m going to come back tomorrow and beat you. The fact of the matter is that if you can imagine yourself being anything else but an actor, then you should be doing that other thing. Acting has to be your calling because regardless of how successful you are or how soon you get that success, you’re going to have times when there’s something you want that you’re not going to get, no matter who you are. And that hurts. Because you’re not selling Girl Scout cookies. You’re selling you. So if you don’t get the job—well, you can obfuscate it with all kinds of bullshit if you want to, but it’s a personal rejection. It’s the
most
personal kind of rejection. So you have to have a very thick skin and a very deep belief in yourself to get through that. I developed a system around this time, which was to let myself grieve for the twenty-four hours after I didn’t get something, then say, “Fuck it” and move on.

One of the starring roles I got early on was in a movie called
A Matter of Degrees,
written by Randy Poster, whose sister, Meryl Poster, was already a bigwig at Miramax and who had gone to Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, where we were shooting, with John F. Kennedy Jr. Now, my family was completely obsessed with the Kennedys, so when someone told me that Randy was friends with John, I didn’t believe it. I asked Randy and he said it was true, then offered to call him to prove it. So he called up John-John and handed the phone to me. That’s when I heard this voice that was unmistakably his say, “I understand you don’t actually believe I’m Randy’s friend. Well, I’ll prove it to you because I’m going to be on the set tomorrow, doing a scene where I play the guitar and have one line.”

I guess John-John did a play at Brown, and his mother, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, came to see it, but she told him afterward, “I do not approve of you doing this because it is not a serious pursuit—in the memory of your father and your uncle Bobby, I don’t want you to go through your public life as a pretender.” But he agreed to take this tiny, one-line role in the movie not only because he was friends with Randy but also because his girlfriend at the time, Christina Haag, was in it.

When John got to the set, I was standing at an elevator by myself wearing my costume, which was a pair of overalls because I played a guy who restores cars. I heard a banging noise getting closer down the hall behind me and as I turned around I said, “Who’s the cripple?” And there was John-John, hobbling up on crutches because he’d hurt his leg in a skiing accident and had just had knee surgery. He had a big smile on his face and said, “Are you referring to me? That’s not very nice, Tom.”