“This movie was introduced to me by Elisabeth Leustig — she passed away;” Del Toro says of the casting director who put him in 1994’s China Moon. “What Dorleac plays is almost like a bad girl. You could say she is a little bit shallow. But at the same time, she puts herself in it in a way that ain’t shallow. There’s a sexiness to it. She’s edgy; like, ‘You mess with me, I’ll mess with you.’ I’ve seen her in other movies — she’s been my little secret of an actress that I knew that not many people knew.”
Del Toro dumps two sugars into a double espresso and settles in to watch Daisy Granados in Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s 1968 film – -the first from post-revolutionary Cuba to be released in the United States. The film follows a well-to-do intellectual, Sergio, who has decided to stay in Cuba after his wife and family leave. Granados plays Elena, an aspiring actress who sets her sights on Sergio.
“Why do you want to be an actress?” Sergio asks Elena at one point. “Because I’m tired of always being the same,” she says. “That way I can be someone else without people thinking I’m crazy. I want to unfold my personality.” Sergio’s response: “The only thing an actress does is repeat the same movements and the same words thousands of times.”
Does Del Toro agree with Sergio or Elena? He laughs and says they’re both right. “You could say that actors are a little schizophrenic,” he says. “But all of us are. We all behave in different ways with different people.” Granados’s portrayal veers from a blushing innocent to a vamp. Instead of speaking, she sings many of her lines, borrowing phrases from “one of those bogged-down-in-despair kind of songs that you hear in some bar in the Caribbean,” says Del Toro, who admits that his own Caribbean roots make him especially fond of this film. “She’s like a femme fatale. Her character is all about right now: You have to marry me. Sergio doesn’t want a relationship, and when she smells that, she’s like, I’m going to get you. She’s calculating. She knows exactly what she’s doing. That’s a very hard part to play.”
DEL TORO’S cell phone is buzzing in his pocket. “I’m a busy bee,” he says apologetically, turning it off as Fat City, John Huston’s 1972 film about amateur boxing, appears on the screen. Del Toro has cued it to a scene in which Susan Tyrrell, who received an Oscar nomination for her bittersweet depiction of an aging alcoholic, is approached in a bar by Stacy Keach, a down-and-out fighter. “Mind if I sit down?” Keach asks. “It’s a free country,” says Tyrrell. Her hair is matted, her shoulders are slumped, her polka-dot dress is open in the back where she forgot to zip it. Del Toro says he’s rarely seen a more realistic portrait of a brokenhearted romantic.
“Sometimes when I watch this scene I get drunk. It’s that good. I feel like I’m drunk,” he says, his voice faintly cracking with admiration. He imagines Huston and Keach stepping back and letting Tyrrell take charge. “They set it up for her, and she came in and killed it,” he says, his hands clasped in reverence, an unlit Marlboro hanging from his lips. “Look at her. She’s cute, she’s sexy, she’s pathetic, she’s drunk, she’s crazy, she’s strong. There’s everything in there. And she never comes out of it. It’s raw, what she’s saying. Then, when she’s played every other card, she becomes funny She becomes” — he pauses — “beautiful.”
Zorba the Greek is next. Del Toro respects Anthony Quinn’s portrayal of Zorba enough to be able to quote lines of dialogue verbatim (“Life,” he recites, “is you undo your belt and look for trouble”). But as an actor he has learned even more from Irene Papas’s grieving widow. She barely speaks in the film, relying instead on her swift, upright gait, her expressive dark brows, the dramatic uncoiling of her long hair. He has cued up her final scene, when she is stoned and then stabbed to death by her fellow villagers. Del Toro bites his bottom lip. “Brutal,” he says.
