Sutherland’s 30-plus-year career has produced 84 film performances, a rock-solid reputation for exemplary work and a presence that has moved into the culture like a whisper in the night. After I did ‘Ordinary People,’ I wasn’t offered a job for a year.” If I’m not working in America, I’m working in Europe, or Canada. “I’m on a schedule where I make 2 1/2 films a year, every year, with time off in the summer for my family. The Hollywood veteran in Hoffman probably knew he wouldn’t have to drill far before he hit the nerve especially raw among actors: insecurity. You don’t look like you’ve ever lived next door to anyone.”) This last goes along with that of the English director who once told him, “The role we’re casting is that of a guy who lives next door. (Every actor’s memory is embedded with splinters of rejection. Up for the lead in “Same Time, Next Year,” he overheard the film’s producer say, “Donald Sutherland doesn’t do comedy.” He’s fooled people who should know better. Sutherland can play crazy (“The Dirty Dozen”), he can play sane among the crazies (“The Day of the Locust”) he can play romantic (“Casanova”) brutal (“1900”) stoic (“Bethune”) and morally incensed (“A Dry, White Season”). ![]() Or the astonishing patience with which he caught the hard curves Jane Fonda threw him in “Klute.” Or the terrible perplexity of Calvin Jarrett in “Ordinary People” in realizing decency wasn’t always enough to hold your family together, or even get you through. His loopy Hawkeye in Robert Altman’s film “MASH,” for example, in which his watery eyes and vulpine grin suggest wider margins of anarchy than might be apparent to the most gimlet-eyed among Army brass. They’re fighting for their lives.”Ī great many of those lives are of course memorable. I don’t worry, but the characters go crazy. That’s why I never see the pictures I’ve made. In McClintock I hope a certain arrogant wit comes through, and a contempt for people incapable of seeing through a morass of sentimentality that oversimplifies complex issues. “ They certainly think they’re doing the right thing, by their own lights. “That’s why, when people say that Flan is such an (expletive), or that Garvin is smarmy, I’m a little taken back,” Sutherland says. “You have to see people the way they see themselves,” he says, by way of describing his work ethic and answering an old charge that he’s “complex and temperamental.” That we can’t be sure is a tribute to Sutherland’s skill at keeping us off balance. We don’t know whether to laugh at his empty bonhomie or groan over his pathetic smugness. His portrayal of Flanders Kittredge in “Six Degrees of Separation” is almost frightening in the nervous accuracy with which he captures a professionally charming, upscale New Yorker who lives through the eyes of other people. His corporate honcho Garvin in “Disclosure” greets the day with Volpone-like glee, seeing gold in sunlight with a carnivore’s pearly smile. They are a product only of the decadent West.” Fetisov, who must be careful not to wince at a powerful apparatchik’s contention that “there are no serial killers in Russia. McClintock contrasts with the political suavity of “Citizen X’s” Col. The steely contemptuousness of “Outbreak’s” Gen. ![]() The past couple of years have been interesting for Sutherland his last four roles have formed a kind of parallelogram of characters in which each refers to the other, but from different angles. Dustin and I really wanted him, and as it turns out, he came with a lot of ideas of his own we wound up using.” He has an enormous presence on the screen. “We needed someone with intelligence and credibility, and a sense of humor. ![]() “We needed someone who could play a very special, complex character, not just a bad guy,” said director Wolfgang Petersen.
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