Call it "My Hong Kong Shoot-Out with Andre" and mark it as the strangest moment in a long career of strange moments.
I'm sitting in the Charles, watching the last few minutes of "A Better Tomorrow III." On the screen: mayhem, blood, screams, ++ crashing cars, rapid-firing Berettas and scraps of subtitled dialogue like "Chip! I love you, you darn rascal!"
From the rear of the house, a blade of illumination suddenly penetrates the dark: a door has been opened. And there, framed in the backlight of daytime, looking only mildly perturbed at the panoply of violence on the screen, is the Andre Gregory of "My Dinner with Andre," one of the most consummately civilized men the face of the earth. Though he's 60 or 70 feet away, there's just enough light to see the odd run of emotions that play across that cosmopolitan, blade-nosed, squint-eyed face: he's amused, astonished (but not very), mildly perturbed, somewhat baffled and ultimately impervious. The spectacle doesn't hold his attention -- it can't, really -- and he departs, unmoved. So Andre! ,, So very Andre!
A few minutes later he is encountered frontally. He has come down to Baltimore, along with actress Brooke Smith, to be the host of an advance screening of "Vanya on 42nd Street." Full daylight reveals him to be a trim fellow, nattily turned out (jeans, a heathery sportscoat and tie) and a serenely handsome man who wears the perpetual expression of a cobra relaxing after a nice meal of mongoose. He always looks as if he's about to burp.
But he doesn't, of course. His kind never would. Instead, without a trace of rancor, he cheerfully dissects his own production of "Vanya," the strangely beautiful movie that consists of a filmed record (by Louis Malle, who directed "Andre" in 1981) of a casual and perpetually in rehearsal run-through of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," without props, costumes, makeup or lighting but with a cast of superb actors.
"Of course the problem with Chekhov," says Gregory affably, "is that it's so boring. And there's a very good reason why. Nobody takes the time to rehearse. You just can't get into the past in four or six weeks. We rehearsed off and on for years, until the performance is almost second nature to the actors. What you are seeing really is completely spontaneous. What you are seeing is actors who really don't know they're acting, operating in an atmosphere of complete trust. But that trust comes from years. We finally became a family ourselves, but not in Chekhov's sense, but in the more supportive sense."
"What you learn," says Smith, who plays Sonya, younger sister to Vanya and frustrated lover of Astrov, "is trust in the text. We could have rehearsed 10 more years!"
For Gregory, the exercise represented a return to his first craft, directing. After the success of "Andre" back in 1983, his gaunt but amused visage propelled him to a minor career as a character actor, where he always seemed to play slightly debauched sophisticates whose fundamental decency still shone through. (It still does.)
"Directing is my real work," he says. "And after my wife died [of cancer after a roughly 30-year marriage], I knew I had to get back to it. Possibly that explains why I chose 'Vanya' of all the works: It offered a powerful framework for questions I felt I had to ask."
For many years, the on-the-fly production of "Uncle Vanya" was a New York legend. As the project evolved and developed, it would move from space to space. It was never truly "performed" in the professional sense, and for everybody involved the simple pleasure of taking part was pleasure enough. At no time was the audience -- always personally invited -- more than 30 people. More typically it was seven or eight, and, as Gregory recalls, "they were always blown away."
Gregory is a little reluctant to discuss the process by which it ultimately became a film.
"It's very easy for the story of how the movie was made to overshadow the play. But the truth is, over the years, a number of film directors evinced an interest. But for one reason or other, it never worked out. Finally, Louis Malle, who had of course directed 'My Dinner with Andre' came aboard, although he was terrified. 'How am I going to do this?' he kept asking."
They worked out a unique collaborative process: Malle was completely in charge of filming, Gregory was completely in charge of the actors.
"We were just taking it to another stage," remembers Smith. "The main difference was that we could do the whole play, rather than just parts."
The filming was completed in two weeks in the old New Amsterdam theater, which was new to the cast. Malle and his cinematographer worked with a 16-mm camera, often times suspended from the ceiling by a bungee cord. It was their improvised version of a steadi-cam.
"I didn't realize that Malle started out as Jacques Cousteau's underwater cameraman, but it soon became obvious that the filming had a submerged, almost aquarium-like feel in its quality. Every time he wasn't sure how to film something," recounts Gregory mischievously, "I'd say, 'Think fish, Louis.' "
"We called Andre the director of Scuba Diving," recalls Smith. "But it was also the only film I've ever done where the priority was completely the actors."