YEREVAN, AUGUST 10, ARMENPRESS. In an astonishing set of audio recordings, compiled in a new documentary Listen To Me Marlon, the actor describes his own life story in impeccable detail: his fears, perceptions, experiences, and aspirations; what he has learned, how he has failed, and - crucially - how to work a camera. Armenpress reports the latter, referring to “Daily Mail Online”.

The 90-minute film is culled from 200 hours of personal tapes Brando recorded throughout his life. Some personal musings, others recordings of business meetings and magazine interviews, the clips document a more nuanced life than the generalized rise and fall described in most summaries. In his prime, Brando is the charmer that made him a star - flashing smiles and flirtatious comments at journalists on press junkets. The lows include his tempestuous relationship with Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now. At one point he even finds a place in a tribe on Tahiti while filming Mutiny On The Bounty in 1962, and he thinks to himself: 'I never was in a place that told me to quit running the way that this place does, or these people do. 'If I’d come close to a sense of peace, it would be there.'

A topic which regularly resurfaces as he is working on some of his greatest roles is that of his abusive father and his alcoholic mother.

'My old man was tough,' he muses. 'He was a firefighter. He was a man with not much love in him. He used to slap me around and for no good reason. And I was truly intimidated by him at that time.'

He muses over his father's violence as he develops the visceral character of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire, and again with the feared but frail Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.

Brando's legacy was marred by intensely public coverage of his weight-gain and distress in the late 1990s, and his death at 80 in 2004.