Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez: Their Journey
Recently Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez stopped by the SiriusXM studios to talk with Ron Bennington about their new book, “Along The Way: The Journey of a Father and Son.” You know them both from a long series of great film and television projects. Emilio started his career as an 80s teen movie icon in films like “The Breakfast Club”, “St. Elmo’s Fire”, and then later in “The Mighty Ducks”, and “Bobby”. And Martin Sheen’s distinguished career includes the iconic “Badlands”, “Apocalypse Now”, “The American President”, the television series “The West Wing” and so many more great roles. Excerpts from that interview appear below.
***
Ron Bennington: It’s good to see you guys. Martin, I just had Sissy Spacek in here. And she’s a written a new book about her career and talked about the first time that you guys did a scene together. Electricity.
Martin Sheen: I adore her. The two of us were united for “Badlands”, Terrence Malick’s first film and we met. I was doing an audition for the film. She had already been hired. And she was so kind and helpful to me and I adore her. And I’ve loved her from the moment I saw her.
Ron Bennington: Well they didn’t let you know, but after that audition, they were going crazy, they were so happy. But I’m sure they kept it from you.
Martin Sheen: They didn’t say a word, man. It was weeks and weeks.
Ron Bennington: Emilio, you’re a director and you go back and watch that film and it’s phenomenal.
Emilio Estevez: It’s inspiring. It’s inspiring. It’s a gentle film as violent as it is, it’s still a very gentle film. The exploration of humanity throughout it and the juxtaposition of man and nature. It’s what Terry’s become really famous for, but to see it in that film, I think it’s still his best film to date.
Ron Bennington: Every time I watch that film, it’s almost like I’m watching it for the first time. Every single time.
Martin Sheen: Our friend Matt Clark who’s in “The Way”, he plays the Rabbi / Priest that gives me the rosary on the way, he saw “Badlands” and called Terrence Malick “a cinema poet”.
Ron Bennington: Wow, that’s perfect.
Martin Sheen: That’s the best description.
Ron Bennington: Why do you choose to make your own kind of films and do it that way? Why don’t you say to yourself, I’ve been around Hollywood long enough, let me find the film that we know the studio wants to get behind and throw money behind? Why not hire yourself out like that?
Emilio Estevez: Well as you know, most Hollywood films are made by committee. And that is because you’re answering to the stockholders, you’re answering to forces bigger than just the actual making of the film. You gotta deliver on so many different levels that you don’t really have any autonomy as a director. You’re not really a storyteller, you’re basically a babysitter. And when I want to get beat up like that, I go off and do episodic TV. (Martin Sheen laughs) Which is a 3 week commitment, you’re in and you’re out. The writers and the producers and the network are there telling you what to do and “You should do another take” and that’s the agreement you agree to when you sign up for those. But when you’re a filmmaker, less and less we’re seeing in theaters these days, uncompromised visions by directors, by filmmakers, by storytellers. They’re compromised to a certain degree to the point where we’re now, we’re not seeing great stories being told by great filmmakers anymore. If they want to get in that, a lot of these guys they want to get into that game, they want to make these films that cost 100, 200 million dollars. And again, they forfeit a lot of times their vision.
Ron Bennington: Martin, did you want your kids to follow into this business, did you say…
Martin Sheen: Frankly no. (laughs) I didn’t discourage them. As you learn from the book, we dragged them everywhere. We wanted them to experience the world as we were experiencing it. And we disrupted their lives on a lot of levels, but we always felt we were giving them opportunities that they might only appreciate later. And I hope that was the case. It wasn’t always, they were torn apart.
Emilio Estevez: Well my parents always insisted that and believed that for the family to stay together, we physically had to stay together. And so, my father insisted or his agents did, that there were always 6 plane tickets, there was always provisions…
Martin Sheen: Or bus tickets.
Emilio Estevez: Or bus tickets. (Martin Sheen laughs) Or wherever the location was, we were tasked of packing up and going. And the advantage of that, we didn’t take vacations, we had full immersion courses in whatever country we were traveling to. So it was 3 weeks in Italy and, I’m sorry, 3 months in Italy and 5 months in the Philippines and a month and a half in India. It was full immersion.
Ron Bennington: Yeah. But there’s your memories of your whole childhood.
Emilio Estevez: That’s right.
Ron Bennington: There’s a confidence that you guys have with each other where you’ll say my dad let me down at this point or I couldn’t believe that Emilio didn’t come through for me in this. (Martin and Emilio laugh) You have to have a feeling of safety before you can make those kind of statements.
Martin Sheen: Yeah, well…
Emilio Estevez: Or just not read the book. (laughs)
Ron Bennington: That might be the better idea.
Martin Sheen: Well you know, I learned a lot about how I was perceived particularly in his adolescence. I had no idea. We learned a lot of stuff. Some of it, not pleasant, but some of it very gratifying. And we talked about this earlier, about how, there was no point in not writing an honest book. If you’re not going to be honest about it, there’s no point in it. I guess one of the most gratifying things is I read his memory of me in certain instances and not always pleasant. At least I know that who I was, that’s not who I am. That I did grow to a certain extent and it was very clear that he was far more mature than I was during his adolescence unfortunately because of my immaturity and my drinking and my disappointment in myself and my rage.
Ron Bennington: There’s a part of the book where he’s 5 years old and you guys live on the Upper West Side and you let him go out into the streets of New York.
Martin Sheen: And he got mugged. (laughs)
Emilio Estevez: But that was daily. Not getting mugged daily. (Martin Sheen laughs) But no, they didn’t…it was a different time.
Ron Bennington: Yeah, do you realize you would lock someone up for letting a 5-year-old walk around New York today?
Martin Sheen: Yeah. But how long ago was that? It was 45 years ago. You know it was different city and a different time.
Ron Bennington: But it is amazing to look back over those type of things and go well I don’t get the chance to do it, but most of us, I think, what happens in father and son’s relationship, is we tend to whitewash it, whatever happened. Particularly where alcoholism is involved and I’ve lived through it on a couple different levels so I wish I would have made changes earlier as well. But if you’re up front about that, then you get to pass that knowledge along.
Martin Sheen: It’s true. And recently I was telling my wife if could get some or most of the pain, the hurt, the damage that I did to my children before I die, if I could just get all that expunged with some miraculous event. And she said “Well, even if you could do that, there would be other things equally damaging that you would have done. That nobody gets out of here with a clean slate. It’s called life and sometimes it’s very messy and clumsy and that’s what it is and you can’t live it any differently than you did. You can’t change the past. You can only hope that what you did was in some way a positive thing because you changed.
Ron Bennington: You’ve lived a political life as well and your kids have grown up around that too. So is that another thing Martin for you that you feel you need to give back? Is this all part of the work for you?
Martin Sheen: Well I don’t think of it as political per say and I say that knowing you can’t breathe the air without it being a political act that somebody’s polluted the air. But I think of my involvement in issues as being social justice. That we’re called to stand with the marginalized and to speak for the voiceless, if we have a position to do that. And that it’s incumbent upon us to do that. And that’s how we grow. We can only really grow by serving others and it’s just a natural inclination.
Emilio Estevez: I think he should have his own SiriusXM show. I mean I’d tune into that. Right?
Ron Bennington: Everyday there would be something new to talk about too.
Martin Sheen: I don’t know about that. (laughs)
Ron Bennington: I’ll march you right down the hall and I’ll make the deal happen. Now you won’t get paid as much as a teamster, but I’ll make the deal happen. (Martin and Emilio laugh) But I was just thinking too that even that when you’re talking about a life of service that can still be controversial where you’ll still end up losing some of the people who’ll be doing the other stuff.
Emilio Estevez: That’s right.
Ron Bennington: It’s amazing to me to see that it could happen that way.
Emilio Estevez: And we would watch him on TV get arrested. I’d call my mom. My mom would say “Yeah, there he is again getting dragged off” and he’d be in the middle of reciting a Tagore poem. And he would look like this raving lunatic because given just the sound bite and the photograph or whatever clip they had out of context, he did look mad. But to finally to really understand where he was coming from has given me a great sense of pride.
Ron Bennington: And you didn’t get that in your kind of party down teen years. You’re like what is he doing?
Emilio Estevez: Not really. I was like what’s he doing?
Ron Bennington: We live in Malibu. Why can’t we enjoy? At what age do think before you start to figure out this is who dad is and it’s not such a bad thing? When do you get that?
Emilio Estevez: When he became the honorary mayor of Malibu and he declared Malibu a nuclear free zone and a haven for the homeless. And he got the attention of Rush Limbaugh who started organizing busloads of homeless people to drive to Malibu to show up at my mother and father’s house. When that happened and I realized that he had the attention of this idiot, I realized he was on to something pretty important and he was a pretty righteous cat.
Ron Bennington: And that’s when you’re like I’m ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with this guy. You know the other thing that happened to you in the 80’s is when your career starts to shoot up like that and you’re in the same business as your dad, it’s the first time that those competitive feelings start to pop up.
Emilio Estevez: That’s right.
Ron Bennington: Was that comfortable for you or was that somewhat nerve-racking to see that happen?
Emilio Estevez: For me, I was probably less conscious about it than he was because I was sort of doing my thing and working and I wasn’t really giving it a whole lot of thought because I didn’t feel competitive with him. Now it may have been the other way around. Did you feel competitive a bit maybe? You talk about it in the book. I mean I know his career is 20 years before mine.
Martin Sheen: No, I never really felt competitive, just plain jealous. (laughs)
Ron Bennington: But you know what’s weird too is like, you’re growing up… your friends were all like that, Rob Lowe’s career is blowing up, Sean Penn, these are guys you more or less grew up with.
Emilio Estevez: That’s right.
Ron Bennington: And it must have been somewhat of a bubble I guess at that time of not really getting reality because guys from the same neighborhood all shouldn’t be becoming film stars at the same time. It shouldn’t happen that way.
Emilio Estevez: Yeah. What are the odds? Right? Probably a billion to one. If not more. So it was anomalous for sure, but we, not to us for some reason. Not to us. It was as if we were all, we all knew what we wanted to do and we were in fact making it happen.
Ron Bennington: And your house was kind of the clubhouse for those kids, right?
Emilio Estevez: A bit. Yeah.
Ron Bennington: But it is amazing and all those guys growing up and knowing Martin Sheen when they were kids, that they’re all, so many of them doing good work. Rob Lowe is doing good work. Sean Penn is still Sean Penn, I mean he’s amazing. This is like almost having your entire little league team go on…
Martin Sheen: To the majors. You’re right.
Ron Bennington: All this is written about in the book, by the way, you have to see “The Way” and that’s available now, you can check that on DVD and Blu-Ray. Thank you so much guys.
=======================================
You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio. Not yet a subscriber? Click here for a free trial subscription.
.
You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.
Follow Emilio on twitter at @emiliotheway and check out the new book, Along The Way: The Journey of a Father and Son on Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com and in bookstores everywhere. You can also get their film “The Way” on DVD .
***
