Q&A / Donald Sutherland

Donald Sutherland
Fellini’s Casanova

Q&A: Donald Sutherland

'Sleeping is my guilty pleasure. There's so little waking time left'

• Rosanna Greenstreet
• The Guardian, Friday 16 March 2012 22.59 GMT

Donald Sutherland: 'My most treasured possession? My imagination.' Photograph: Jay L Clendenin/Getty Images

Donald Sutherland, 76, was born in Canada. One of his first roles was in the 1965 film Dr Terror's House Of Horrors. He was then cast in 1967'sThe Dirty Dozen, which was an instant hit, and starred in the 1970 comedy M*A*S*H. Sutherland has appeared in more than 130 films, including Kelly's Heroes, Klute, Don't Look Now, Cold Mountain and Pride & Prejudice. The Hunger Games, his latest film, is out on 23 March. He is married for the third time and has five children, one of whom is the actor Kiefer Sutherland.

When were you happiest? 
When I was less well informed.

What is your greatest fear? 
Not being informed.

What was your most embarrassing moment? 
To sift through that mountain of moments and come up with one is not a useful task.

What is your most treasured possession? 
My imagination.

Where would you like to live? 
With my wife.

What do you most dislike about your appearance? 
Looking at it.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose? 
Whatever parts of the oceans that were living and are no longer, be they the coral reefs or the multitude of vertebrates that have not survived our profit-pursuing onslaught.

What is your favourite smell? 
The Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Nova Scotia.

Is it better to give or to receive? 
Is a woman's orgasm giving or receiving?

How do you relax? 
I don't.

How often do you have sex? 
As often as I can.

What is your guiltiest pleasure? 
Sleeping. There's so little waking time left.

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why? 
Every single director I've ever been engaged by; and when I'm done with them, every woman I've ever loved and all the children and a couple of animals and one car.

What or who is the greatest love of your life? 
My wife.

What was the best kiss of your life?
At Orly airport, 1973.

Have you ever said I love you and not meant it? 
Never.

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party? 
A chef.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse? 
Ones that indicate I've forgotten what I was going to say or that I can't find the name of this or that person or place.

What is the worst job you've done? 
Training dogs.

What has been your biggest disappointment? 
The behaviour of those dogs.

If you could go back in time, where would you go? 
Thirty-seven years. The birth of our first son. Just when I caught him and laid him at the side of his mother.

What is the closest you've come to death? 
I died in Yugoslavia in 1968 for a few seconds. In a coma: spinal meningitis, bacterial. Saw the blue tunnel. MGM flew me to London and Charing Cross hospital for six weeks, then back to the film Kelly's Heroes, with my brain a boiled cauliflower.

How would you like to be remembered? 
Generously.

THE GUARDIAN

Donald Sutherland / ‘He learned the name of every crew member. What a gent’

 

Donald Shuterland

‘He learned the name of every crew member. What a gent’

Kevin Macdonald, director, The Eagle (2011)

Tall and imposing, with those distinctive hooded blue eyes and a hawkish profile, Donald was quite scary on first meeting. Ridiculously well read in history and literature, with that distinctive accent poised between patrician and farm boy, he gave off a “don’t suffer fools” vibe. But it didn’t take me long to realise that the forbidding exterior hid a kind, sensitive, sometimes insecure and endlessly curious man. An utterly distinctive life force.

 

‘Being a star didn’t interest him. He just loved to act’ … with Channing Tatum in The Eagle. 

He was already well into his 70s when I worked with him, and his schedule was extraordinary. He was flying around the word doing cameos and supporting parts at a rate that was exhausting to behold. Being a star didn’t interest him any more. He just loved to act.

As a director, one worries that an actor like that is going to turn up and just phone it in. But that wasn’t Donald. He would be on set before anyone else and stay there all day no matter what time his call. He learned the name of every member of the shooting crew and on his final day he personally distributed a thank you card to everyone. What a gent.

He sent me endless notes fretting over upcoming scenes, written in his distinctive ink-pen scrawl. When I commented on them, he ordered me a giant box of the disposable ink pens he favoured. I still use them and think of him when I do.

Mayhem in Yugoslavia … with Clint Eastwood in Kelly’s Heroes. Photograph: MGM/Allstar

For a man who on the surface felt like the ultimate pro, he was touchingly nervous and a little superstitious about his performance. His only non-negotiable demand was that we shoot his first two appearances in the film late on in the schedule, once he had found his way into the character. “You only have one chance to show the audience who this character is,” he said, “and I don’t want to fuck it up.”

We went out for dinner a few times and he never seemed to resent my endless nosy questions about his oeuvre and the array of brilliant directors he had worked with: Roeg, Fellini, Aldrich, Pakula, Sturges. I mean the list goes on and on. He even indulged my childhood passion for Kelly’s Heroes, in which he played Oddball, a crazy, proto-hippy second world war tank commander, merrily telling stories of the mayhem he caused driving around drunk in his tank in a little village in Yugoslavia.

At the last dinner we had together, before he flew home to his farm in Canada, Donald gave me a copy of John Maynard Keynes’s seminal analysis – and evisceration – of the Versailles treaty and told me it would make a great film and he wanted to play Clemenceau. It’s a great regret that I didn’t take him up on it

EL GUARDIAN

Donald Sutherland / ‘I remember that bear hug and its warmth’

 

‘Mischievous twinkle’ … Land of the Blind.

‘I remember that bear hug and its warmth’

Ralph Fiennes, co-star in Land of the Blind (2006)

24 June 2024

I worked with Donald on a little-seen film called Land of the Blind, set in a dystopian, futuristic, slightly Orwellian world. He played a leftwing revolutionary imprisoned by a rightwing regime. I played the prison officer who helped to release him and witness him become, in turn, an autocratic and ruthless dictator.

Donald Sutherland / ‘He’d get sick with nerves before the first day’s shoot – even after making 120 films’

 

Donald Shutherland

‘He’d get sick with nerves before the first day’s shoot – even after making 120 films’

Francis Lawrence, director of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015)

24 June 2024

I first met Donald in 2012, when I’d signed on to direct the second Hunger Games film. He wanted to meet on 4 July – a public holiday in the US, which I thought was strange. He chose a steakhouse at 9am, which I thought was stranger. I was intimidated because he had such gravitas. I remember he came into the Pacific Dining Car restaurant, sat down and instantly became conspiratorial: if I ever met his wife, he said, I was not to tell her we’d had giant New York steaks for breakfast, because he wasn’t supposed to eat them any more. That totally disarmed me and I instantly fell in love with him.

Donald Sutherland / ‘We had such a deep, sublime chemistry’

 

Donald Shutherland
Fellini´s Casanova

‘We had such a deep, sublime chemistry’

Elliott Gould, co-star, M*A*S*H (1970), Little Murders (1971) and S*P*Y*S (1974)

24 June 2024

Donald was the best partner in movies I ever had. We were brothers and we loved each other. We had such a deep, sublime chemistry. There was nothing intellectual about it, just this amazing natural harmony. I first met him in the commissary at 20th Century Fox when Robert Altman told us to have lunch together after I’d been cast in M*A*S*H. At first I thought: I don’t think this guy likes me. But it was just the opposite. The thing was: we were such opposites. I’m a Jew from Brooklyn and he was a Canadian from Nova Scotia. But it was perfection: never any conflict, just bread and butter – a relationship that felt like a miracle.

Donald Sutherland / ‘He stood in the middle of the party wearing a gas mask’

Keira Knightley and Donald Shutherland
Pride and Prejudice (2005)

Keira Knightley

‘He stood in the middle of the party wearing a gas mask’

Keira Knightley, co-star in Pride and Prejudice (2005)

Monday 24 June 2024

Donald was a giant. When you meet most actors, they’re surprisingly small. But Donald was huge. I remember feeling unbelievably intimidated by his size and reputation when I first met him. He had this clause in his contract that no one was allowed to smoke anywhere near him. Most of the rest of the cast were in their late teens and early 20s, all chugging away.

The Sex Gourmet / Don’t Look Now

The Sex Gourmet 

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Claire Fagan
Updated on October 21, 2019

There is nothing more satisfying and enjoyable than seeing sex translate well on screen. After watching many actors lock crotches and dance the dance, finding that one scene that stands out above the others is actually quite a hard task! How many times have we seen the classic throw down and mechanical navel fucking that happens so often in modern cinema?

Sex is our reason for living. We are entitled as humans to watch and enjoy the most base driving force of our reptilian brains. So seeing sex realistically portrayed in a film tickles my pink and gives reason for breathing.

The 25 best horror films of all time / Don't Look Now / No 3

The 25 best  

horror films 

of all time 

No 3

Don't Look Now

Nicolas Roeg, 1973

Anne Billson
Friday 22 October 2010 11.52 BST

N

icolas Roeg's trademark non-linear approach to narrative is put to unnerving use in Don't Look Now, a haunting adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's short story about a couple, John and Laura Baxter (played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), who relocate to Venice in an attempt to come to terms with the accidental death of their young daughter. And that's just the start of a film that establishes such a mood of doomy anticipation that no one who watches it can ever again negotiate the narrow, labyrinthine streets of La Serenissima without wondering if they'll catch a glimpse of a small figure in a red raincoat flitting over a shadowy bridge.

Right from the opening sequence it's established that John, an art restorer, possesses the gift of clairvoyance – but, as shown time and again, he fails to act on or even recognise it – with tragic consequences. Images of water, the colour red and broken glass repeatedly intersect in a kaleidoscope of ominous foreshadowing. The presence of a serial killer at work in Venice doesn't so much turn the film into a psycho-thriller as contribute to the backdrop of watery gloom.

Don't Look Now was well received by critics and achieved a certain amount of notoriety thanks to rumours that the (for then) unusually explicit scene of lovemaking between John and Laura wasn't faked. Typically, Roeg intercut the act itself with footage of the couple getting dressed for dinner.

Pino Donaggio, who would go on to score some of Brian De Palma's most successful movies, made his film debut with the poignant soundtrack, and the movie's final shocking reveal is one of the most famous since that of Psycho.

THE GUARDIAN