Chicago-based photographer Sandro Miller was lying in bed at home, recuperating from treatment for stage IV head, neck, and throat cancer. Pain-numbing morphine might have been responsible for his slightly altered state. Probably better, he thought, not to be in the reality of the situation anyway. It was a very cold day in the winter of 2012.
Miller’s eyes wandered around the guest room of his studio and living space, adorned with photographs from his extensive collection. He thought back on his career, and on all the photographers who had inspired him. An idea started to formulate. If he did recover, and that was a very big if, he wanted to somehow repay these masters of the still image. Rays of light started to penetrate the dark clouds of that chilly afternoon.
“I was just so incredibly weak from all the treatment that I had received,” he recalls. “I had my wife, [Claudie], bring in a lot of my photography books…. I recall just lying in my bed with a notebook and closing my eyes and just thinking about the greatest portraits that I’ve ever experienced seeing, the portraits that really changed the way I thought about portraiture. I would close my eyes and I would see [Yousef] Karsh’s Winston Churchill; I would see [Alberto] Korda’s Che Guevara; I would see Irving Penn’s Truman Capote images,I would see [Richard] Avedon’s beekeeper and [Diane] Arbus’s twins. These images would just flow into my brain because they’re embedded in my memory. These were the images that really made me who I became as a portrait photographer. So I’d write these things down, and I came up with a list of about 45 images…I wanted to recreate.”
His notion was to enlist a great actor “to play” the people in dozens of classic pictures—as if the subjects of his favorite iconic photographs were characters. To portray all the leading roles in what would become his Homage to Photographic Masters series, Miller wanted to cast his longtime friend and collaborator John Malkovich. The two artists had met in 1999 when Miller was commissioned to shoot for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, at which Malkovich was one of the ensemble players. “John liked the way I shot, the way that I was prepared, and he liked my ideas. So whenever he was coming to town, he would give me a call. I’d come up with some ideas and go out and get costumes.”
By the time Miller conceived the Homage project, he and Malkovich had worked together on dozens of portraits and completed a short film. That friendship and working relationship, however, was no guarantee that Malkovich would have the time or the interest to invest in such a time-consuming personal project; Miller estimated that the commitment would entail being available for five setups a day over multiple shoot days, each of which could last up to 16 hours—including two hours, per photo, in a makeup chair.
Miller had confidence he could technically achieve the recreations after studying the highlights in the eyeballs pictured in the famous photographs, which allowed him to discover the source and type of lighting in the originals. He realized he would need to assemble a highly skilled team, including a makeup artist, stylist, set designer, and assistants. But would Malkovich go along?
By the summer of 2012, Miller had regained enough strength to fly overseas and meet Malkovich at his house in France. He proposed “casting” the actor in a series of classic photographs, recreations in which the actor would transform himself into real-life characters, ranging from Abraham Lincoln (from Alexander Gardner’s 1863 portrait) to Christy Turlington, as seen in Patrick Demarchelier’s 1992 study.
ENTER JOHN MALKOVICH
John Malkovich, who in 1976 began his career with the independent Steppenwolf troupe in the suburbs of Chicago, would venture onto the big screen in films such as The Killing Fields, in which he played a photojournalist; Empire of the Sun; Dangerous Liaisons; Of Mice and Men; In the Line of Fire; Con Air; and the eponymously titled Being John Malkovich.
In addition to taking on film, stage, and television roles, Malkovich would write and direct plays, direct and produce films, and create his own fashion brand. As Miller has said of his muse, “Malkovich could very well be the real-life version of the ‘Most Interesting Man in the World.’”
To act in a friend’s photography project was another thing altogether. But Malkovich proved game. The two ended up joining forces to produce more than 60 recreations. And next month Miller will release a limited edition book with their collaborative photographic and cinematic efforts, titled Malkovich: Then Came John (Komma No Ordinary Publisher) and created in the Netherlands by producer Duncan Meeder, owner of Leica Store Lisse; printer-publisher Steven Hond; and designer Wout de Vringer. (Miller will have a companion show in Amsterdam in 2025.) The volume comes with a signed and numbered print and contains photographs previously published in Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters (Skira, 2020), as well as images made for a David Lynch project. A flash drive showcasing four Miller-Malkovich short films also accompanies the book.
The book, which retails for 4,950 euros ($5,529), can be purchased at Leica Store Lisse and through the publisher Uitgeverij Komma.
To mark the occasion, Malkovich agreed to open up about his work with Miller—and his creative process as an actor.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
ON NOT BEING JOHN MALKOVICH
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Mark Edward Harris: What were your initial thoughts when Sandro approached you with the Homage idea?
John Malkovich: I’d worked with Sandro before, doing funny, interesting, strange things, so of course I was amenable. I considered him to be a close collaborator in a medium I hadn’t really done collaborations in, per se. I saw the challenges innate in that project. I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to get around those challenges. But in fact, a lot of them went away, I think, because of his great love for these images and his care about them, and his knowledge of them and his sense of how they could be recreated.
Photography seems to have been a part of your life since childhood.
My father published a conservation magazine and did photography as well. I’ve always liked it. Being the subject of it sometimes is more of a mixed bag, but the work with Sandro, of course, is very different, because, thankfully, to a large extent, I’m not the subject. Someone else is the subject, and I’m a means to an end.
When I looked at a photograph, I would say, “Okay, where are we here?” And, “Where is this person in their life?”—whether it was [Salvador] Dalí or [Pablo] Picasso or Marilyn Monroe. I think Bert Stern took the photographs of Marilyn a few weeks before she died. You just try and find how that person is viewing the world.
For some images you had to change sexes and/or close large age gaps.
If you look at David Bailey‘s photograph of Mick Jagger, Jagger was 20. I was 60. That’s a big span. I would start with Randy Wilder, who did the makeup [for Miller’s sessions]. “Okay, what do we take away and what do we add?” “Do we do a nose?” And those I would just make with wax quickly, sitting in the makeup chair.
When you have a whole different sort of physical appearance, like the little boy with the hand grenade in the Diane Arbus photo, you have to get inside it because you’re 50 years older, and he’s wearing shorts and making a face, and blah blah blah. You have to be very aware of how far you can go, and that’s partially up to the director, but you don’t want to go overboard. You stay within the kind of limits of the seemingly possible.
Each image had its visible challenge. Two were quite similar, although obviously very different personalities. One was Dalí, who in an odd way was very similar to Bette Davis, because they both had enormous eyes. And Bette Davis’s eyes were kind of three times too large for her face, which was already enormous. I have a huge head. I once rode on a plane with her to Europe, and her head was three times the size of mine. And just the kind of mathematics of that [were something] to look at. “What do we take away from me and what do we put onto me to do the photograph?”
This seems similar to film acting, where you are often interacting with somebody who isn’t there.
Of course. In film acting there isn’t so much acting with someone; there’s acting for the camera, which is an altogether different thing from theater, where you act with people. You sometimes do [that as well] in film, but the whole thing is for the camera. It’s not about the interplay and the kind of aura of the two or the four or the 10.
To portray Marilyn Monroe, what was the mental process to get in character? Were you trying to think like her?
Well, I think no. You do several things at once. First of all, I’m responding to Sandro in terms of what he’s seeing in the camera and what he might like to see done differently. So that’s the principal thing. I never think I’m anybody else, ever.
So you’re still John Malkovich in your brain.
I don’t think about John Malkovich, actually. Ever. I just think about what I’m doing. It’s funny, people ask me questions about John Malkovich, and it’s a subject I know nothing about. It’s just a nonsubject to me.
Do you feel detached from the name?
If I even feel anything, it’s detached. With a camera, it’s a very funny discussion I’ve often had after all my years in cinema and then also having had a long life onstage. I always kind of took exception to the idea that the camera doesn’t lie. That’s what it’s for. When you take a picture, you take a picture of a thing—a person, an object, a room, a landscape—and what you leave out is every other thing in the world. So that’s already a lie, in that you say, This is what’s important and this is the way to look at it.
And this project is very, very interesting for that because I would assume some people might find any of these photos as being revelatory in a sense of ascertaining or showing a truth. But then, this project is presenting someone who is not that person in a photo that is not that photo. I’m not Jean Paul Gaultier, because Jean Paul Gaultier is Jean Paul Gaultier.
People don’t even notice it’s not [Ernest] Hemingway, or it’s not Orson Welles, or it’s not Bette Davis, when in fact, no, it’s not. In that sort of dichotomy and in that interplay between “the camera doesn’t lie” and “that’s what it’s for,” that’s where these works live.
Is there a way to describe your approach to acting?
I’m someone who can only learn from experience. So if I’d, say, buy a crib from Ikea, I don’t read the instructions, because I know that—I don’t want to blacken the name of Ikea or Home Depot or anybody else—but I know that one important instruction will be missing and one important part. This is how the world is. So it’ll lack one screw or bolt or whatever, and one important instruction. So I can’t read them and I just have to figure it out on my own, and that’s what I’ve always had to do. For baking, I’ve followed recipes with a modicum of success, maybe, but it’s a big struggle. I don’t know why.
Yet you’re able to memorize and recite incredible amounts of difficult text seamlessly. You must have some memorization technique.
I don’t think so. I’m lucky, in that words have always appealed to me. I love reading. I love good writing and it stays in my mind. Right now I have five pieces I’m touring in. Only one isn’t memorized. It’s something I’ve never really had trouble with when the writing is correct. It’s like remembering the lyrics to a song from 1967. It’s not a problem. When it’s not written correctly, then you have trouble memorizing it. Whereas when everything is in its place, then you don’t have trouble memorizing it. The struggle comes when it’s not quite right, not quite there.
Then there’s improvisation. In Sandro’s new book, he also includes a flash drive that contains short films you have made with him. Your first film together, Butterflies, has no dialogue. Just a premise.
That’s really all you need when you’re an actor. Things occur to you. You have flashes of things you’ve seen, of things you’ve lived, of things you’ve read, of things you’ve heard, of things you witnessed, and then they just all come out.
Do you ever scare yourself, in a situation like that? I don’t know if Martin Sheen scared himself when shooting the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, but he definitely scared the director and the crew.
No, I don’t scare myself. I think people are basically capable of almost anything, really, including many terrible, regrettably awful things. And I think I’ve always had to give myself the permission to say, Well, I think this is like that. I don’t necessarily want to be that, and I don’t necessarily think it’s my fault that I think that is like this. I have to be free to use whatever experience I have and observatory powers or inclinations or inklings to be able to say, This person behaves this way in this situation. If it’s a play, you’re maybe only saying this person behaves this way in this situation tonight. Tomorrow night might be different. The matinee, maybe, was already different earlier that day. Closing night’s certainly gonna be different than opening night, because you continually learn and revisit and erase and add and subtract and refine and distill and etcetera. You know that’s what we do. I don’t consider myself a factor at all, except as a thing the observations live in.
A conduit to the story. What would be examples of that?
In the last six months, for instance, I sang an opera duet with Cecilia Bartoli, and I made some disco songs with Nile Rodgers in a studio. The craziness of those two things, the absurdity, the impossibility. The absolute ridiculousness of me getting some songs one morning, listening to them once while taking an Uber down to a recording studio in Boston, and then starting to record music written by The-Dream and produced by Nile Rodgers is insane beyond recording studio. “What do you want me to do?” Okay, record. “I don’t know that I can sing any of these. I didn’t really have enough time to do this. But let’s start recording.”
So fear doesn’t seem to get in the way too often in your life.
No, it doesn’t. At least in that aspect of my life, because, what are you fearing? You’re fearing failure. But failure is my constant companion. Failure is my best friend.
What were your thoughts as you prepared to recreate the classic Annie Leibovitz photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono? Several hours after that session, which was made on assignment for Rolling Stone, John was fatally shot in front of his apartment. I know for Sandro it was one of the most emotional pictures in your collaboration because he knew the fate that awaited John.
History is a given, and one is either capable of—or, let’s just say, susceptible to—feeling its weight or not. And I’m susceptible. So I don’t worry about it. I assume it’s there. And so I concentrate on the more technical elements or aspects of anything like that. Especially, I would say, in photography, because it’s so exact. I mean, as you said, it’s one fixed image, so you can’t fuck around with it like you can in a movie. It exists in space already. And it carries with it all kinds of weight and emotion and history and loss and intrigue and grief—and hope, maybe. So I think you’re just lucky if you’re one of those people who is susceptible to those things. Or even, you could say, appreciative, but not as a positive quality but as a fact of your being, like having brown hair or blue eyes.
It’s the way it is, not wishing it. The late photographer and portraitist Mary Ellen Mark and I were talking about one of the homeless kids in her project “Streetwise.” I said, “I hope she is doing well.” Mary Ellen responded, “Hope has nothing to do with it. So much has to do with the bed you’re born in.” She had a very unfiltered view of life. If people made decisions based on reality, rather than on wishing for specific outcomes, we might avoid problems, both personally and in politics.
I stay away from politics only because if politics was about the solving of problems, then, of course, that would be worthy of interest. But I don’t think it’s about that, and ideology scares me as much as any single word in any language. That’s really scary to me that people believe there is this way of understanding the world, because I agree with [Samuel] Beckett, “You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.” And I think that’s mordantly funny and amusing. But it’s also true. That’s a statement also bathed in pain. The idea that [pain] is avoidable is, Oh, maybe it’s avoidable for a certain period of time, but you’re on earth. There’s no cure for that. And that, to me, is the way it is.
There’s an obvious difference between portraying people in a still photo versus portraying them on the screen. What is the process you go through to make the sometimes-farfetched characters play real and not slip out of a character?
For me it’s only when the camera rolls. I just always try and keep in mind that it’s during these little spaces of time. That’s the only time that character will ever live, will ever be actual, will ever be brought to fruition, will ever appear. And whether that’s three hours onstage or two minutes into a film, that’s their only chance to be and to speak for themselves.
So you’re not going back to the dressing room and staying in character.
No. That was not uncommon when I was young. Maybe even now there are some who prefer to just stay in character.
There’s a film you did, locked in a vault, that’s not to be seen until 2115. It’s called 100 Years: The Movie You Will Never See. Your character is a highly guarded secret.
This was a project presented to me by a French family that owns Remy Martin and their representatives. They make a cognac called Louis XIII that takes 100 years to make, and that means the people who initially started this particular vintage obviously don’t live to see it, and neither do the people who replace them, and oftentimes the third people who replace them don’t live to see it. So they asked Robert Rodriguez and myself: Could we do a film that would be shown in a hundred years? And that’s what this is. It exists in a vault in Cognac. I have tickets for it that even our little granddaughter that’s two years old won’t see. It’s kind of a living letter from the dead. Before they die. Maybe it’ll be of interest. I won’t be around to see it.
So that movie will endure. Great painting, sculpture, music. We still listen to Beethoven and Brahms and Schumann. Will great photography and cinema endure?
I think in some form. In the same way, I always thought that movies were the last few generations’ paintings on cave walls. Some of those are almost 70,000 years old. A few years ago they found one in Indonesia [calculated to be 45,000 years old]. What are those paintings? The one in Indonesia shows a pig. Not much has changed. That was a culture’s way of saying, I went here. There were mountains. I saw this animal. He looked like this. He had horns. He chased after me. We’re still doing that. So I don’t have reason to assume we won’t still be doing it in 500 years or 1,000 years.
I was just doing a piece in Bremen, Germany, which I’ve done off and on for many years with classical music colleagues of mine, called The Music Critic. It’s all the worst reviews of Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Schumann, Ravel, on and on, and then they play the pieces, which are among the most beautiful pieces in the whole canon of Western music. I don’t imagine that necessarily there will be so many more beautiful pieces than, say, Schumann’s Piano Quartet, third movement.That seems unlikely to me, but it would be great, I suppose, if there were.
But I think, at least to some extent, beauty lasts and people appreciate beauty, and photography has beauty in it. Certainly music does. Certainly painting does. Certainly movies do. You know there is no real slow-cooking movement in the cinema. Everything just gets faster and faster. You know you have to edit an image every half second, or people fall asleep.
And there’s a lot of AI being used.
People keep asking me about AI and talking about all the things that it can do, including colleagues of mine, who are very, very bright. But my computer can’t even do spell-check, so it seems absolutely fucking stupid to me. I believe it’s a known fact that in the last couple of years, IQs have gone down. I think science has had a very bad few years recently. So has computer science.
If humankind needs a savior, it’s in themselves. A computer can be a nice tool, great. I met a young German guy a few years ago. He has a beer garden in Berlin. He was in his 30s. His dream was to have robots do the work. To me it’s astonishing, but, hey, I don’t know, maybe people just go on holiday to Phuket and Sardinia.
A century from now there might be a couple of robots at Remy Martin drinking that Louis XIII and toasting you.
Could be. Yeah. Might be only robots.
On assignment for Vanity Fair, photojournalist Mark Edward Harris has covered North Korea as well as the aftermath of both the 2011 Japanese tsunami and the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. He has also written VF.com stories about fellow photographers such as Nick Ut and Don McCullin.
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