Meet Marlon Brando

In an interview session with various regional TV journalists, the famed movie actor Marlon Brando shows his most charming, and most reticent, side. Instead of answering questions about his latest film, the ever-amiable Brando distracts one inexperienced reporter overcome by blind reverence after another, or discomfits them with compliments such as, “I believe I have never been interviewed by such a beautiful woman before.”

Without saying so out loud, the Maysles brothers demonstrate how the actor has been turned into a marketable product, and how he resists this. At the same time, their film calls into question the interview phenomenon, so strongly detested in the Direct Cinema genre that they helped pioneer.