Laurence Fishburne Interviews

"Flying Fish"

Actor, writer and now director – Laurence Fishburne is in full artistic soar

Written by Paul Chutkow
Photographs by Michael O'Neill

Laurence Fishburne is growing impatient. For more than half an hour, on this gorgeous morning in Manhattan, he's been drinking coffee, eating chicken sandwiches and talking. Talking about his parents. About his boyhood in Brooklyn. About his recent work in The Matrix and about his latest creative charge: writing and directing. This is all important, fascinating ground and Fishburne is happy to go over it. But it's not enough. Fishburne, as one can tell from his work, is a man who demands precision. Sharp edges. Clarity. He wants to go deeper, he wants to cut through all the externals and go straight to the core. So now, leaning forward, eyes blazing, Fishburne reaches out and touches it, he places the tip of his finger on the exact spot where his life, his work, his entire being snapped into focus.

It was on that boat, that battered little gunboat, edging its way upriver, edging deeper and deeper into the wilds of Vietnam, edging closer and closer to that murderous rendezvous with the man named Kurtz. It was more than 20 years ago, but for Fishburne everything from that boat remains vivid and huge, painted in bold, primeval colors that will never fade or lose their magic: Brando. Martin Sheen. Robert Duvall. Dennis Hopper. Sam Bottoms. Frederic Forrest. Francis Ford Coppola. Apocalypse Now. In Fishburne's mind, they're all still there together, on the boat or on the set: his comrades and mentors, taking in hand a raw, gawky 16 year old kid and passing him the flame."

"For me, this was the moment, the artist was born," Fishburne says, his eyes glowing in their sockets. "I'm 16, I'm on that boat, and we're making Heart of Darkness."

Fishburne pauses and sips his coffee. Outside is the clamor of Manhattan; inside he's back in the Philippines, on that wild, two year, go-for-broke shoot that is now an enduring part of cinema legend. Even though he was only 16 at the time, Fishburne was by no means a newcomer to acting. At the age of 10, when he was growing up in the corner of Brooklyn known as Park Slope, Fishburne made his debut on the New York stage. A year later, he was a popular regular on the ABC soap opera One Life To Live. And at 14, when his buddies in Park Slope were starting to leer at girls and inspect their first whiskers in front of the mirror, Fishburne was landing his first big movie role. That was as Wilford Robinson, a sensitive youth who watches his basketball-playing hero get murdered, in the 1975 film Cornbread, Earl and Me.

For an emerging young talent like Fishburne, all this was exceptional experience. But none of it was adequate preparation for what Coppola would put him through. Many writers dream of writing The Great American Novel; after making The Godfather, Coppola wanted to write and make The Great American Movie. Apocalypse Now was to be it. On one level, the film was to be an excoriating statement about the madness of America's war in Vietnam. On a deeper level, this was to be Coppola's own personal rendering of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's masterful unmasking of man's hidden capacities for evil and horror.