Being The Real John Malkovich

In the film "Being John Malkovich," an office worker discovers a secret tunnel that takes him behind the eyes and into the mind of the actor John Malkovich.

For 15 minutes, you get to see the world through the eyes of Malkovich. After that, you're spit out into a ditch on the New Jersey Turnpike.

"I never really got it. I mean, I never got it. I'm sort of not in on the joke," says Malkovich, who stars in the movie.

Malkovich lives in the south of France with his girlfriend, his two children, his satellite dish and his basketball court.

This game, he understands. His cult following, however, is another matter. Correspondent Charlie Rose reports.

"My partners proposed to me the other day writing a book," says Malkovich. "I said, 'Are you insane? About what?'"

"You know, I couldn't tell you the first thing about the audience's sense of me. I have no idea."

"Being John Malkovich" was directed by Spike Jonze, one of the best young directors in Hollywood, and received three Academy Award nominations.

British television has also made a documentary about Malkovich. They went to his hometown, Benton, Ill., a coal-mining town, where they learned about Malkovich's late father –- a conservationist –- and his raucous, out-of-control children.

"Dinner was so bad that I think I could say my father, before he died, so hated sitting at the table with us," remembers Malkovich. "He simply couldn't bear it. We'd just take the place apart."

Art imitated life after Malkovich joined a now legendary theater troupe out of Chicago called Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Their style was guerrilla, in-your-face theater -- madness as method.

"I always picture him as the Marquis de Malkovich, you know," says actor and director Gary Sinise, laughing. "Over there in France, enjoying his wine, holding court with his many kids and many, many French people."

Sinise, a co-founder of Steppenwolf, recruited Malkovich after seeing him give one of "the stupidest performances I had ever seen. And it was right up our alley. He was just so odd. And the choices he would make were unusual. You couldn't take your eyes off him because it was shocking, and you just wanted to know what he was going to do next."

The tough New York critics agreed, and when Sinise and Malkovich showed up there with Sam Shepard's play, "True West," it made Steppenwolf a major force in American theater. It also made Malkovich a star. Two brothers, one a bookworm, the other a thug, each believing he can write a screenplay. Critics compared Malkovich to the young Marlon Brando.

"They called me a lot of things," says Malkovich. "That was one of the more pleasant ones."

Sinise compares him to an old Mike Tyson: "He got into this thing for a while where he'd stick his fingers into my mouth. And yank my head around. And it didn't taste very good, because I knew at the beginning of the play he had his hands down his pants. And the next thing, you know, they're in my mouth. So eventually, I started saying, 'John, why don't we save the abuse, and maybe we'll cut that.'"

What Malkovich found was an explosion of top-drawer film and stage roles. Within weeks of his "True West" triumph, Malkovich was playing a war photographer in Rolan Joffe's film, "The Killing Fields."

He earned his first Oscar nomination as the blind boarder in Robert Benton's film, "Places in the Heart." And he also starred in both the Broadway and television versions of Arthur Miller's play, "Death of a Salesman," with the meticulous, ultra-method actor Dustin Hoffman.

While starring in "Dangerous Liaisons" as the lecherous Viscount de Valmont, who seduces and abandons young women for the sheer sport of it, Malkovich had an off-screen affair with co-star Michelle Pfeiffer, and found himself abandoned.

"That's something I never talk about. It's a personal thing," says Malkovich, who was married at the time. "I got separated. I got divorced. That would have happened anyway."

He spent the next seven years undergoing analysis. "I would say that when you again have all the luck that I've had in my life, when you've had all the chances and every possible piece of good luck, to find yourself in a place where you think life is not good is, again, it's a disgrace," says Malkovich. "And that's why I went into analysis. It was a fantastic experience."

Malkovich insists this didn't affect his acting. But he admits it was probably too much time spent with Freud that made him put Clint Eastwood's gun in his mouth in an unscripted moment from "In the Line of Fire."

"I couldn't pass up the opportunity of Clint, you know, with his big gun, and the legend of Dirty Harry, without sort of going all the way."

The movie, "In The Line of Fire," earned him his second Oscar nomination, and became Malkovich's biggest box office hit. He plays a would-be presidential assassin opposite Eastwood's Secret Service agent.

"I think there's something about me people look at and they say, 'Okay, well, it's him against the Secret Service. Uh oh.'"

What he does these days is design a new line of chic men's clothing called, inexplicably, "Mrs. Mudd." He will also make his directing debut with "The Dancer Upstairs," which opens in the U.S. this spring. He's come a long way from little Benton, Ill. –- to the surprise of no one.

"He always brought something to the table that was a different perspective," says Sinise "You always want to watch him. There's something behind the eyes, and inside the mind, that you just can't figure out.

"I think he's been working on trying to figure that out for 20 years now."

At the end of "Being John Malkovich," Malkovich finds the portal himself and enters his own mind. It's a new state of being, of being John Malkovich.

"I'm almost like a hanger that people like to put something on," says Malkovich. "And that thing can be negative or very negative or positive or very positive. But the hanger doesn't know why these things are on him.

"I'm just the way I am. I really am like Popeye. I am what I am and that's all I am."