magazine advertisement, 1981
Ken Russell on working with William Hurt on Altered States (1980): "I hired William Hurt for Altered States and found I was his analyst for six months. It wasn't the part he talked about, never that, but how it was such a terrible thing being a billionaire after being born in abject poverty. I was quite deferential to him, but my wife listened to the crap he was talking and said, 'Okay, preppy, let's cut the shit.' He was stunned and amazed but he was quite human after that."
Hurt says that he knew just a little about Russell prior working with him, and just because he had seen his movies. About his first meeting with Russell, Hurt said in an interview, "We were in this little room and there was this radiator and a little desk and a chair and we didn't sit for a half an hour, neither one of us. Finally he sat on a radiator and I sat on the floor. When he sat on the radiator his pants pulled up and I saw he had Betty Boop socks on. It was then I thought, 'I'll do it,'"
Russell on working with screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky on the film: "I don't think Paddy had ever been involved with a director who wasn't malleable. He would make suggestions and I would listen courteously, and then disagree."
Russell hated Chayefsky's script, calling it ponderous, pretentious and labored. However, he was in a situation where, if he changed so much as one word of the script, he would have been sued. He resolved this by having the actors mumble their lines, or give speeches in between mouthfuls of food or wine.
Chayefsky disowned this movie. Even though the dialogue in the screenplay was almost verbatim from his novel, he reportedly objected to the general tone of the film and the shouting of his precious words by the actors, this conflicting with Russell's typical style of wanting heightened performances.
Chayefsky had not seen the film before he took his name off the credits, the script being credited to "Sidney Aaron," a pseudonym for Chayefsky, the two names being Chayefsky's real first and middle names. Russell and Chayefsky fought constantly during production, Russell maintaining that almost nothing was changed from Chayefsky's script and stating that he was "impossible to please."
In a 1981 interview with The New York Times, Blair Brown said many of the actors and crew tried out the isolation tank. Hurt reportedly actually hallucinated, while Brown found it very peaceful. (IMDb)
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