I came across this quote as part of an article.. I feel it sums up something dicsussed here quite often from another perspective:
Rade Serbedzija — the great Hollywood character actor and a star in his native Croatia — appears in the movie’s most explicitly comical scene, in which Dr. Harford convinces Serbedzija’s disheveled character, Mr. Milich, to open up his costume shop in the middle of the night. For a character often criticized as a cipher, this is Harford at his most actionable: He needs to get to that sex party.
It’s a small hurricane of a performance from Serbedzija. He swerves from peevishly lamenting his hair loss to suddenly imprisoning the Japanese men with whom his pubescent daughter, played by Leelee Sobieski, has been cavorting in the middle of the night — all while calmly executing his business transaction with Dr. Harford. Appropriately, it has a bitter coda: Mr. Milich ultimately willingly conspires in the pimping of his daughter.
“It was kind of torture, what [Kubrick] did to me,” Serbedzija recently recalled to Grantland over the phone from Brijuni, a remote island in the Adriatic Sea. “He wasn’t satisfied with anything I brought. He said, ‘It’s very bad.’” Serbedzija laughs heartily as he explains how Kubrick, essentially, screwed with him. Over and over, Kubrick cut Serbedzija off, bluntly explaining how execrable he was just a few sentences into each take.
“I said, ‘Well, tell me what I have to do.’ He said, ‘I don’t know, you are [the] actor.’ ‘OK, what do we [do] now?’ He said, ‘Let’s try it again.’ And then I started again. And again he said, ‘It’s awful.’ And then I thought, My god, which game is this guy playing with me?”
Eventually Kubrick, sensing the actor was on to his tactics, ordered a break in shooting and called Serbedzija and Cruise into his office.
“He was very angry with me. And he put on my tape from the audition. And he was laughing. You know? Watching this tape, he was laughing. Tom was watching [for the] first time and he was laughing too. And Stanley said, ‘This guy is excellent! He’s fantastic.’ And he turned to me and he said, ‘Can you try [the] same as this guy?’ And I said, ‘My god. What’s going on?’”
Mulling it over for the night, Serbedzija had his breakthrough. “I was thinking, He must know I’m [a] pretty good actor. Maybe he wanted to say to me, ‘I don’t want to see your acting.’ He wanted me to be really mad. To be really crazy. And I started to play games with [the] whole world.
“Some madness I tried to bring, and everybody was afraid of me on set. Everybody except him. He was watching me, laughing from his eyes. So there is something that is more than acting. Some real madness, you know?”
Serbedzija stops. “That’s it. He [was] really a magician.”
from:
https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospec ... es-career/