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I worked with him on Road to Perdition in 2001. Conrad Hall was the cinematographer
— he was about Paul’s age. He’d also shot Harper, Cool Hand
Luke, and Butch Cassidy, so he had seen Paul from the age of 40. At one point he was shooting a close-up of Paul looking into a fire, and I turned round and Conrad was crying. I said, “What’s the matter?” And he just said, “He was so beautiful.” And I said, “Well, he’s beautiful now!” And he said, “Yeah, but he was so beautiful.” I think he was crying for both of them. But whereas Conrad was not at peace with the idea of death and growing older, Paul said several times, Yeah, I’ve had some great innings, it’s about time I give this up, it’s all a bit silly. There was a real sense of grace and dignity. He had nothing left to prove. He knew what a fortunate life he’d led. That lent him an aura of a minor deity, to me. He had sort of ascended already. It was not about him, and I suspect it hadn’t been for some time.
-- Sam Mendes
There was a pivotal scene in the film Nobody’s Fool [which Russo wrote] when Paul’s character, Sully, and his son Peter are sitting in a car. Sully’s trying to explain why he bailed out so early in the boy’s life, about what an abusive father his own father was. In the screenplay, Sully went on for about a page. Paul said, “We don’t need all that.” I said, “How’s the viewer supposed to react to the past if it’s not explicated?” He said, “I’ll know what to do.” So I cut it at about half. I thought I’d done my job, until I saw it afterwards. He’d cut it down to “He was a big man. Your mother was just a little bit of a woman. And, boy, could he make her fly.” That was all that was left, but with the camera pushing in on his face, all that history was in that haunted look. Paul told me, “Don’t rob me of my memory. That’s all I have. If you share my memory with the viewer, you’re stealing it from me, and I’ve got to have that.”
All the time, actors want more lines, juicier lines. Paul understood that less was more. For him, the words were often so much less important than the physicality, the gestures. He was a dream of a physical actor. Even as he was just eating up the camera, he never showed the slightest interest in eating the camera.
-- Richard Russo
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