A Talk with Peter Falk
In memory of Peter Falk, the French newspaper Liberation has posted an interview with the actor by Marie Colmant that first ran there in 1996, and it’s a good one. He talks about the time when he was both playing Columbo and acting in the films of John Cassavetes, and compares it to “City Lights,” in which Charlie Chaplin “was a millionaire by day and a drunkard by night.” He speaks revealingly of working with Cassavetes:
To act under his direction, I first had to manage to forget everything I knew, all my points of reference when I got to the set. Not what I had learned, because I never really learned this craft, but all the ideas I had on how to act, to rehearse, to learn the text. With John, I had to get rid of all that. It didn’t interest him. There was a struggle under way between my instincts as an actor and what he wanted. But he never said what he wanted. Not a word. And I understood nothing of what he was saying. He did that deliberately. Because he was afraid of words, because he didn’t trust them. He created spontaneous acting, spontaneous behavior by playing on the nuances. He made me discover a whole palette of discomforts, a huge variety of shynesses, of annoyances. That’s what he was looking for, not what you usually see in movies…. It did me good to meet him, I was beginning to become a cynical actor.
He talked about his long period of gestation as an actor (“I wanted to become an actor but I didn’t want to admit it”) and his world fame as Columbo, saying that, when he was shooting a film in rural Ecuador, the bus he was riding in stopped in a mountain village and “children ran up to me shouting ‘Columbo!’ At first, it gave me great pleasure, but later I said to myself that those children should have had their own heroes instead of admiring a cop from Los Angeles.” And he admitted enjoying the fame the role brought him: “when I go see a basketball game, I’m always in the front row; I always have a table at a restaurant, I never have trouble getting a taxi” but “to be totally sincere, I’d surely be a better actor today if I hadn’t played Columbo all these years.”
It’s a good discussion with an extraordinary artist who remained a regular guy; there may be something to be said for his long gestation.
