Lee Marvin to me represented America - big, wild and dangerous. He was a turbulent but sensitive boy from an artistic family, who went off to the Pacific War and killed people. Stationed on the island of Saipan, he became a sniper who picked off Japanese soldiers in his rubber boat at night, until his whole platoon was wiped out save for him and one other soldier. He came back from the war with survivor guilt, and whenever he acted out violence in his films it was a way of exorcising his demons.
Making a movie with Lee was combat. You went to war. He was on your side but you could get killed by friendly fire, for he was the kindest, cruellest man. If he detected anything fake or shallow in your work, he became a ruthless critic or got drunk on disappointment. He was interested in limits - emotional, physical - exploring them, breaking them. War left him fascinated and horrified by violence.
In his early movies, such as 1953's The Big Heat, it's a sort of psychotic violence, but in Point Blank, which I made starring Lee in 1967, the violence is utterly necessary. Point Blank is about processed human emotions, the coldness and aridity of 1960s Los Angeles. It's also about a man (Marvin), cheated by his wife and best friend, who returns from the brink of death on a mission to recover his stolen money, which is a metaphor for his soul.
It's in moments of cold violence that he comes to life, as if it's the only way that he can find his humanity. Lee understood that part of what we are is savage. He was a heroic figure, but he never achieved the popularity of a Wayne or an Eastwood (he was, however, the first to use on film the .44 Magnum, the handgun that Eastwood made famous in Dirty Harry).
There are a number of reasons for this: he was a very uncomfortable figure, too extreme and complex. He didn't have the cool of Clint or the ease of Wayne, so people feared him. He was probably closest to Bogart who, among his romantic leads, also played some very rough characters. Unlike Bogart, though, Lee never got the girl.
Point Blank saw Marvin invincible. There's a scene in which his co-star, Angie Dickinson, is hitting him over and over again and he's like a rock, not a human being. She was hitting him very, very hard, too, getting her revenge for the scene in Don Siegel's The Killers where Lee dangles her out the window of a 10-storey building by her feet. Lee could be scary like that, but he could play funny, buffoon-like characters as well - a bit like Jack Nicholson.
He was in hundreds of second-rate films, but he always stood out. When I met him, he'd just won an academy award for playing a buffoon very well in Cat Ballou. The initial script for Point Blank was terrible, but Lee agreed to make the picture on condition that he could throw the script out of the window. He did and we started from scratch.
I started to talk to him about his life and his experiences in the war and became interested in the relationship between these experiences and the lead character in the original script. He was called Parker, but I called him Walker because of the way he strides down a corridor in one of the film's key scenes. He exists on two planes: a realistic one, and one in which the whole film is being imagined by him in the moment of his death. He could just as easily be a ghost or a shadow.
Lee helped me enormously during and around production. He called a meeting with the heads of MGM - which was a very moribund organisation at the time - and said, "I've got cast approval, script approval - I defer all approvals to John". And then he walked out. That was very important. He knew that with a picture which was, in Hollywood terms, avant-garde, there would be tremendous resistance if I didn't have that authority.
Eventually, when I showed the picture to the studio bosses they shook their heads and started talking about rewrites, but it got through in its original state because Margaret Booth, a greatly feared executive editor famous for cutting Gone With The Wind, told them, "You cut a frame of this film over my dead body!"
Marvin was always dangerous and unpredictable to work with. He could be cruel and he could sneer, but he could be very generous and loyal. He kept me on my toes, but he never cost me time. I had to shoot him twice while he was drunk and both times it worked out fine.
One was a reaction-shot against an incredible light on the Hollywood hills where I shot him from the waist up while two guys held him steady. The other was a scene at Alcatraz. I had been up late rewriting and in the morning I was too tired to think straight. A hundred MGM technicians were waiting for me to tell them what we were going to shoot. Lee was suddenly at my shoulder: "Are you in trouble?" My denial was unconvincing. He went back to wardrobe. He started roaring and singing. I looked up as he staggered and crashed on to that harsh, concrete floor. The production manager ran over to me: "You can't shoot on him in that state." With the pressure off, it took me only 10 minutes to work out the set-ups. I gave Lee the nod and he amazed everyone by sobering up in 10 seconds flat, with the help of some black coffee. Lee had tremendous concentration and he was ready to try anything.
WE talked about many other projects in the years that I knew Lee after Point Blank (A River Runs Through It and Monte Walsh were two of them), most of which didn't come off. I visited him in Tucson frequently and he visited me in Ireland. Jean-Pierre Melville once said: "A friend is someone who you can phone at two o'clock in the morning and say `There's someone I need you to kill,' and be sure that they'd do it." It didn't happen, of course, but I know I could have made that call.
We worked together one more time, on Hell In The Pacific in 1968. He played an American pilot who bails out after a sea battle and becomes marooned on a tiny island with a Japanese naval officer. In a sense, it's two men fighting out the second World War in miniature. It was a difficult film for me and a traumatic experience for Lee, having to go back and re-fight the war on the same islands. He still hated the Japanese in many ways but he had enormous admiration for his co-star, Toshiro Mifune.
I remember one incident which occurred while we were scouting for locations for Hell In The Pacific in Maui. We went up in a light aircraft and flew down inside the crater of a mile-wide volcano - myself in the front with the pilot, Lee in the back. The engine failed, and we started to glide down with the pilot desperately trying to get the plane restarted. I turned around and looked at Lee and there was this amazing look of tranquillity on his face, tinted with an ironic smile. It was the strangest thing to see, as if he'd already been beyond the death experience and therefore he could welcome it.
His widow, Pamela, tells me that a similar sort of thing happened right at the end, in August 1987. Lee was wired up in intensive care, watching the monitor, and he could see he was having a heart attack. He couldn't speak, but he was nodding and witnessing his own demise with a clear eye.
Point Blank will be re-released here, at the IFC in Dublin, from August 7th