Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez in The Way
“As I’m sure you saw from the looks of the ladies and gentlemen who just departed my company, I have a tendency to be a windbag...”
Martin Sheen, it must be said, can talk. As in really talk. While he might refer to himself, self-deprecatingly, as a “windbag”, the truth is he’s anything but. A 20-minute interview slot to discuss his new film, The Way, turns into a highly entertaining 35-minute chat about the nature of faith, the purpose of pilgrimage, the Iranian hostage crisis and the quality of British TV shows, with a number of Apocalypse Now anecdotes – and a very good Marlon Brando impression – for good measure.
“You may not get any question in,” warns Martin with a smile as we sit down, “so I’m going to be silent for a few moments so you can at least say you asked me something...”
Perhaps the best place to start is with The Way, a moving drama written and directed by Martin’s eldest son Emilio Estevez. The films sees Martin play Tom, the estranged father of Daniel (also played by Emilio - pictured above with Martin). When Daniel dies mid-pilgrimage on “El Camino de Santiago”, Tom flies out to collect the body.
“[Tom is] a guy who’s lived a very isolated, very conservative existence,” explains Martin. “He’s not in the Third World, he’s not giving anything to anybody. He’s a widower, he lives by himself. He goes overseas to collect the lad for burial, and learns that the boy was on this pilgrimage, and he decides he will complete the journey. In the process, his son leads him across the Camino and Tom becomes himself. He’s freed and becomes a citizen of the world.”
The nature of pilgrimage is an interesting one in the modern world, and one Martin has clearly given a lot of thought to.
“Long before I came to the Camino, the idea of pilgrimage, because of my Catholic background, is something I’d been familiar with since I was a child. But it is an effort, it seems to me, to touch the sacred and by doing it in a public demonstration – walking out – it’s like you’re given a safe place to explore the journey.
“All pilgrimage is a metaphor for our lives, which are... an effort to unite the will of the spirit to the work of the flesh and that’s how we’re made whole. We’re human. Through no fault of our own, we’re broken. I think we all, for our own health, need to explore our inner selves, and need to ask those questions: Who am I? Why am I here? And that’s why we go on pilgrimage, I think. We all need food, clothing and shelter, but there are deeper meanings that are even more necessary. We need to be loved. We need to know that we’re loved. When we accept that, a fire is lit and it begins to show. People can see it and you can see it in others. It’s a reflection of that divine presence.
“People who take drugs and alcohol and abuse them... How often do you meet someone like that who says 'I saw God'? I don’t doubt it for a moment that they did, but it doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to the substance. When they come to the program, which is a spiritual program – and I know that because I’m an old drunk and I was in it myself - people stick with it because they realise they can have that transcendence on their own, and own that experience.”
While the religious aspect was clearly important to Martin, it was also a chance to work with Emilio.
“The Way was a family thing, and deeply personal. Do you know how the whole thing started? I was with my grandson Taylor in 2003, on the Camino, we stopped in a town and Taylor met his future wife there. He’s been in Spain ever since, happy as Larry, so I was filled with enthusiasm to do something about the Camino, so I bothered Emilio. He kind of lost his son to the Camino. That was the concept and we finally settled on this scenario, a man who’d lost his faith and lost his son, who accepts the responsibility of pilgrimage.
“The truth of it is, if it had been a Hollywood film, I wouldn’t have got that part! Can you imagine how many guys would have loved to have played that part?! I’ve heard it said that some actors my age do small parts in big pictures to make a living, and big parts in small films to stay alive...”
On the subject of small parts and big films, Martin is currently filming superhero reboot The Amazing Spider-Man, playing Uncle Ben to Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker. How does a film like that differ to something lower key and personal such as The Way?
“I’m not in any of the films where he’s Spider-Man, he’s a teenager, so all of our scenes are just like you and I are talking now. All of my scenes are just normal acting. So there’s no special effects with me, it’s just relationships, so the biggest difference is that Spider-Man’s budget for food and beverage would have made The Way!”
The Way is out now.