How do you develop an awareness of what the director or director of photography will be seeing in the camera?
Well, it does become intuitive. You don't have to break out of character every time and say "Where are you framed up?" because you learn about the different lenses, or you might hear the director say 'Let's go to a 35' in which case you know you're wide. On AHX, Tony had a fondness for shooting the actors just below the hairline but just above the chin. You obviously can't express things in that proximity that you could in a medium shot, because it would just look ridiculous blown up to 60ft by 30ft. So you have to know how to scale things down. Ultimately, in terms of connecting with the intensity of a scene, I think it's something that's not deconstructible. It's just a facility I think I have.
There were a lot of rumours about what happened during the post-production of AHX. As I understand it, New Line invited you into the editing process. Tony Kaye, who wanted his name removed from the picture, subsequently criticised you in the press for getting involved, and now he has a lawsuit against New Line and the Director's Guild. What's your version of events?
I have a background in writing and I write a lot - film scripts and other stuff. I've gotten very involved in the script development of a number of films I've been involved in, usually in close collaboration with the director or the director's behest. I got very involved in the development of 'Larry Flynt'. After we'd filmed it, Milos let me sit in on the editing and I gave him some notes. Sometimes people use what you suggest and sometimes they don't; it's just part of the collaborative dynamic. There's a moment near the end of 'Larry Flynt' that I was particularly pleased with. It's where Alan Isaacman is sitting outside the courtroom and he calls Larry on his cellphone to tell him they've won the case and Larry thanks him and Alan says 'Don't mention it' and hangs up the phone. Milos had cut away from Alan at that point, but I looked at the shot and said "Look, we have five more seconds. Why don't we use them?". And Milos looked at it and agreed to let it play. It shows you Alan where he looks up at the Supreme Court logo - which is above his head but out of the frame - and you can see that he has a moment of resolution where everything he'd worked for his entire life has been realised in the bizarrest of ways. And he sort of takes a deep breath, shakes his head and laughs a little bit. So we got that in. And that's what I love about Milos. He has complete creative control from decades of great film making, and yet he pro-actively seeks the collaboration of other people as part of his process. That is exactly how I want to work in films.
To come back to AHX, I got involved in it at a very early stage and said that my acting in it was contingent on my being able to work on the script with David McKenna, who wrote it, and my agreement about where we were going to head with it. And everybody was very thrilled about that because none of felt the script was quite where it could be. David and I went away for just over three months and tore away at the script and kept beefing up the story until we had strengthened the central arc of the tragedy. Then Tony shot the film and we all went away while he edited it for about seven months. He did some experiments with restructuring it so that it was very different from the intentions we'd had when we filmed it. He'd skipped a step that a lot of people consider normal, which is to assemble the film as per the script, however long that ends up, and his first cut had been about 90 minutes whereas we'd figured it would be about three hours. And he wasn't satisfied with it and nor was anyone else. I think NEW LINE said at that point "It's hard to know if this stuff is the best cut because we've seen the dailies and we've got some very rich stuff. We feel there's more here and we want to see it all."
They decided to bring in Jerry Greenberg, who'd edited 'The French Connection', 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Kramer vs Kramer', to help Tony with the narrative, but he wasn't available immediately, and in the meantime they asked Tony if he'd sit down with me and reassemble the film according to the script because I had worked so much on it and there wasn't a very good paper version available. There was no intention that what we ended up with at that stage would be a cut of the film because I'm not an editor. Tony and I did that in November and December of 1997 and we ended up with a version that was between two hours and thirty or forty minutes and it revealed a lot.
When Jerry Greenberg came in to start work on it, I went off to do 'Rounders', I believe he told Tony he was very glad we had done our re-assemblage because it gave him the scope of what he had to work with before he and Tony started to sculpt it down during the spring of 1998. I had a break between 'Rounders' and 'The Fight Club' and came back in to provide notes about the performance, because David and I had been vigilant about creating certain moments that were very disturbing, and certain moments that would challenge the audience with the almost logical, well-articulated points that Derek had to make. We all wanted to make sure - I know Tony certainly did - that the end was an unequivocal conclusion about the tragic consequences and self-destructive reality of racism. Then I went away again, and Tony and Jerry finished working on the film and delivered it to the studio, which was very happy with it, according to their notes. The response to the film was really terrific. At that point, I think Tony wanted more time and they gave him about two and a half more months. he came back, I believe, with essentially the same film, and then NEW LINE moved forward. It was only at that point that Tony started getting frustrated. I think he had a tough time letting go of the film and dealing with the practical realities of a studio schedule. The studio had been far more in it than they normally are, and I believe to its benefit. I think it came out well.
Isn't it unusual for an actor to be so involved in post-production?
It's not the norm, I know, but it's also not a complete aberration. Every film has a different collaborative dynamic. AHX had a first-time writer, a first-time director and a very low budget. The studio had decided to make the movie with me, and if a director didn't want me, they were going to get another director. As I said, contingent on my participation was my involvement in the development of the story, because the subject matter was too volatile to allow me to get involved with it casually. I was upfront as I could possibly be about that at the beginning, and with great respect for everyone else involved. I needed to know my goals were in sync with the people in ultimate control of the film - NEW LINE - in case it strayed very far from those goals. Because at the end of the day it was me up there on the screen manifesting this guy and everything he stands for. I felt I had a responsibility to myself to make damn sure I knew why I was going into it, because the last thing I wanted was to have some gratuitously glamorising effect on the skinhead aesthetic. I didn't feel like making a Calvin Klein ad for neo-Nazism.
For me - creatively and spiritually - one of the great things about the fervent argumentative process that emerges from making a film is wiping off your brow, and going 'Hey, look what we made'. And shaking hands with everybody involved because you have a permanent bond with those people. The only dismaying thing about AHX, which is one of the better experiences I've had, was that at a certain point, Tony's interest in the collaborative process broke down and he chose to see it as a negative instead of a positive. At the end of the day, in the long lens of history, those things are less important than the film itself. And I think, in his heart of hearts, he knows he made a stupendously dynamic film. There aren't many people who can point to a first film as good as this.
When you worked on ES, you obviously had a very different kind of experience, because although Woody Allen encourages improvisation from actors, he is not at all collaborative in the shaping of a film. Having been so involved in AHX, will you be content to stand back on other films?
Absolutely. I'm doing it right now on 'The Fight Club', which is being directed by David Fincher. You have to go into each project with a clear assessment of what your particular relationship with the director is. As an actor working on a Woody Allen film, you are a hired hand. You're working for him and, whatever happens, you're relieved of the responsibility of caring too intensely about it because it's going to be a Woody Allen film one way or another. You come in and deliver whatever it was he felt he saw in you when he cast you. On ES, he would say after a run through of a scene, 'I really like all the stuff you've thrown in there, so feel free to say whatever you want and if it's too much, I'll pull you back.' So I improvised a lot, and a lot of it he left in, and some of it he took out. That was the extent of my collaboration with him, and it was a thrill for me. I would do it again in a second.
Milos Forman is totally different. After he told me he'd like me to be in 'Larry Flynt', he invited the other actors and me to come down to the Cayman Islands for three weeks to work on the script with him. Working with Milos is an incredibly nervy, almost high-wire act, where you feel he doesn't know exactly what he wants at first. His approach is to say 'Let's go at this head on, and see what the hell we find.' He demands improvisation from his actors and the re-scripting of scenes, a constant wrestling until what he describes as unrepeatable moments emerge.
What prompted you to get involved in 'Rounders'?
As much as any film I've been involved in, it was a simple decision: I read the script, loved it, talked to John Dahl once, said I'd love to do it, rehearsed it a week later, shot it three weeks after that. For me, it was about the theme of the film and the character's role in that. I don't know what John, or Brian Koppelman and David Levin, who wrote the script, were thinking in any detail. You'd have to say that my character, Worm, fits in with the rogues' gallery of loveable losers, in which you could include Ratso Rizzo and the Artful Dodger, if you want to go way back.
Worm is an unrepentant sleaze, a bottom-feeder of the worst kind. But he neither carries the weight of the film, as Derek does in AHX, nor does he have any particular social or political significance, so did that make him less of a risk to play than someone like Derek?
A couple of people said to me when I was doing press for AHX, "Oh, you've chosen to do another anti-hero'/ And I said 'What do you mean? What anti-heroes have I done other than Worm?'. My definition of an anti-hero is a character that represents the antithesis of heroic values and doesn't change - like Ratso Rizzo (in 'Midnight Cowboy'), Travis Bickle, or Rupert Pupkn (in 'The King Of Comedy'). I see Derek as a tragic hero who goes through an enormous emotional transformation but ultimately falls, through the consequence of his actions, even after having come to an understanding of what his problem was. Worm, however, is an antihero because he represents a completely anarchic value system that he never sways from.
I totally enjoyed playing him, and I was comfortable playing him because I thought he was central to the overall theme of self-definition in the movie, something that I connected with a lot. It's about the importance of putting aside other people's notions of who you are and pursuing your passion and enduring risk to pursue your passion. Of all the people in the movie, I think Worm is the character who has the firmest grasp of that philosophy. He might be a nightmare as you get sucked into his world, as Mike (Matt Damon) discovers, but everything that happens to him happens to him because he chooses that lifestyle, not because he's desperate or out of control. As he says 'The running, the hiding, the occasional beating; these are outgrowths of my choice to pursue the hustle, which I love. And I completely accept them.'
Existentially, he's a completely pure character. Certainly he's the only person in mike's life who says to him 'You've got to get shot of other people's notions of how you ought to be living your life.' Ironically, it's only by Worm pursuing who he is so relentlessly and enthusiastically that Mike is ultimately forced to draw boundaries between himself and Worm, and himself and Joey (John Tuturro), and Jo (Gretchen Mol), so he can start pursuing who he is. Worm tells Mike that he, Mike will thank him one day for that - and I think he's right. So I like the fundamental message of all that but I also probably wanted to play Worm because I am not like that. It's thrilling to explore the idea of living free of the fear of consequence for a while and to try to move around in it, even if you're affecting a pose.
How did you decide on Worm's demeanour?
When you lay poker at that level, there are all kinds of styles that you can adopt. You can be the stone-faced killer, the chatty tourist, or you can be like Worm, a guy who relentlessly aggravates people to try to shake 'em up, and I tried to do that. I found it takes a lot of nerve to constantly step up and get in people's faces like that and sincerely not be afraid that someone's going to take you out back and beat you up.
You and Matt Damon took part in some off-limits poker games as part of your research, right?
Yes.
Is that when the acting started?
Sure, absolutely.
Generally, how will you prepare for a role?
I can't do a role with less than a couple of months to get ready for it; I'd be too panicked. If I plunged right into something without having had time to explore the particular world, I'd feel I was faking it. I don't think I can make a character distinct from myself if I don't take that time. Also I want the personally satisfying experience of the exploration and the research - that's a big part of the fun of it for me. If you're an actor, you can take the opportunity to be an experiential dilettante. You can live a certain way for a while and then get out of it without paying any of the consequences of choosing it as your natural lifestyle. I consider that a great treat.
Did you hang out with skinheads when you were preparing for AHX?
Yes, but not extensively, because they were only valuable to me to a certain degree. It was more important to me to talk to people who had gone through the sort of transformation Derek goes through, which was what I did. The most important model for Derek was a terrific book called 'Furher-Ex; Memoirs of a former neo-nazi'. It's by a brilliant guy called Ingo Hasselbach (with co-author Tom reiss), who was raised in terrible social circumstances and plugged himself into the skinhead world as an outlet for his frustration. Because he was so dynamic, he became one of the leaders, but that exposed him to a broader world and then his intelligence penetrated the holes in the whole thing, and he had to leave it.
How do you assess a character you're thinking of playing without judging him?
I think you have to have both eyes open. You not only have to look at the piece as an actor, but also as if you were the dramatist as well. I always say to myself 'What's the point of this? Why does this story need to get told? How am I hoping to affect people through this story?' First you should identify with something in the piece in general and then with the role your character plays in shaping that message or that theme. If I don't connect with a piece over-all, it won't matter to me what the dynamic of the character is. And by the same token, if I find a piece to have validity - if it's something I think I want to participate in putting out there - then I don't care if the character is an amoral character, because he's part of the structure of a drama I believe in.
When I did 'Primal Fear', for example, I wasn't in the position of having a great of choice at that point in my career; having been offered it, I was obviously going to do it. But if I was to get a film like that right now, I would read it and say "This is a thriller - a piece of entertainment. That's my external assessment of it as a piece.' In the context of that piece, of course, my character, Aaron Stampler, is a completely amoral psychopath. but in terms of a story that has the goal of thrilling people, he's the key to the whole thing. And if you can scare people, that's a completely valid and worthwhile goal and one I have no problem with, because I like thrillers too. I like to get scared and I like the idea of giving people a great date movie to go and get scared at.
But doesn't that film have a semblance of a moral purpose in that the Richard Gere character, who's a smug celebrity lawyer, needs a wake-up call - a reminder that he needs to serve justice and not simply his ego?
Yes. that is what makes it a better-than-average thriller. The element that thickens it up is Richard's character thinks he's cornered the market on using manipulating people's perceptions of the truth. I think he likes the feeling that he controls the truth at some level. And so when he's taught this lesson, it's a real body slam. I was always thrilled that Greg Hoblit (the director) was completely committed to the idea of the last shot of the picture showing Richard standing there with his shoulders sagging as if he's just been kicked in the teeth. He gets to experience the deflation that he's inflicted on others. I know if I'd judged Aaron externally, I'd never have been able to get away with the whole thing. In order to pull him off, you have to get inside him and celebrate his role in the piece. You have to adopt his perspective enthusiastically - and the sheer thrill of being him. And because he's not only the villain but a kind of actor perpetrating a deception on the audience, he's a character working on some kind of meta-level. It was interesting to step into those shoes.
That begs a question. When you were playing the meek, shaky, beaten-down Aaron, which was 99% of the role, were you laying him exactly like that, or were you laying him as someone with deception going on in his mind?
I think for the most part I played him as that innocent kid, because that's what he himself is doing, even though he's a killer. He's playing those moments with completely sincere vulnerability. But if you go back and look at the film, there are some moments when, in the context of playing innocent, he comes close to getting busted and has to back-pedal. You can see him struggling around his own lie, but he retains his composure. This, for me, is where the medium of film is thrilling because you can make things happen in your eyeballs. literally, that can read a certain way and be very spooky.
There was a moment when the psychiatrist played by Frances McDormand was interviewing me in the cell, and for her perspective on me, Greg and Michael Chapman (the cinematographer) cocked the camera just slightly higher than what would have been the normal position for it, and from that angle my eyes registered in a slightly alarming way.
Anything that involves a specific evolution of a character on film is tough because the shooting is broken up over many days. having moved from stage to film, one of the things I've had to accept is that most days on the making of a film are not big acting days. There are days when you almost have to go through the motions because if you don't all your motions would be too large. You have to trust minimalism through the bulk of the shooting process, and just pick the moments that need to be bigger. 'Primal Fear', of course, was the first large-scale film I'd worked on, and as soon as I looked at the schedule, I went 'Holy shit! I have to shoot the ending of this before I shoot the middle of it.' I think they ended up adjusting the schedule so we did more in sequence, but to make sure I built my character in the right way - and I've done this on other films - I wrote on index cards the scene number of every scene I was in and described for myself the point of the character's progression in that scene, or how much I felt he should be revealing. I tacked all these cards up in a big arc on the wall in my hotel room, leading up to the top at the end. Whenever we were shooting out of sequence, I would look at what we were doing that day and then go to the relevant card just to make sure I didn't overdo it or show too much.
The way you talk about acting implies that there's almost a triple consciousness that an actor has to have when he or she is making a film. One, you have to be in the moment; two, you have to be aware of the technical stuff that's going on; three, you have to have a sense of where you are inside the character's continuity. Is that about right?
Yes, I'd say it's double in a big sense, and then there's a little sub-challenge inside the working day. I have to say - and this is not to get snotty about it - that most actors probably don't so enough preparation. If you've done your homework properly, you'll have spent time breaking down the character on external levels and on those scene-by-scene levels. You'll have figured things out by working on bits of scenes that you're not scrambling to do on the day you start shooting. And since there are often no rehearsal periods on a film, it's usually up to you as an actor to do all the work. Sometimes you get an unexpected surprise. For example, we rehearsed 'The Fight Club' for two months. It was David Fincher, Brad Pitt and me, and sometimes Helena Bonham-Carter and Andy Walker, the writer, in a room going through the script, talking about scenes, working on them, reading them, rewriting them if we didn't like them putting things in, every single day. And since we started shooting, I literally haven't looked at the script once; we've done our work on it. We're still talking about things, but we're talking off a base of preparations. So, one half of the job is creating that external consciousness, the other being in the moment and that's the work of the day. And within that, there's a challenge, which is staying in the moment - or getting out of your head -in an extremely distracting environment.
What drew you to 'The Fight Club'?
I felt it was the first script I'd read that struck a generational chord with me. As I said, I've worked on very few things that I've personally empathised with, but this one had that element. I feel that Hollywood studios have completely failed to make films that have touched my generation's nerve yet. Certainly the baby-boomer generation's spoon-fed vision of us as this low-energy, aimless, slacker generation has not resonated with me or anybody that I know, and I think that's been evidenced by the fact that we haven't gone to see those movies. Not to get too specific right now, but my character's a true generational everyman whose experiences are depicted in a slightly heightened style. Although he's nothing like Ben in 'The Graduate', I think a lot of people will relate to him in the same way by identifying with the plight he's in and the negative choices he makes - the scramble he goes through to try to salvage a more positive option for himself.
You've been involved with the Signature Theatre Company in New York City since 1994. Tell me about that group, and to what extent stage acting fits into your plans right now?
Our focus is that we select one playwright every year and ask them to become our playwright-in-residence. We devote an entire season to a retrospective and new presentation of that writer's work and invite them to participate in workshops. We give them readings and ask them if they want to rework any old plays that they felt they never got right, and we ask them for one new one. We've had an astonishing list of writers: Romulus Linney, Lee Blessing, Edward Albee, Horton Foote, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Arthur Miller, and currently John Guare. I started out acting in the company during the Edward Albee season, although I haven't acted in a play with it since. Sometimes that's because there hasn't been a role for me to do but it's also because I've had these opportunities to work in films with people who are long-time idols of mine and on roles that were of enormous substance compared to what I could have done in theatre.
Will you act with the company again?
I would love to. I just haven't hit on the right character. There's nothing to compare with the experience of performing on stage. it's a much more 'adrenalised' intimate experience than working on film. Right now, though, I can't help feeling that although I believe in the ephemeral magic of stage acting, theatre has become a rarefied form, in that it plays to a limited audience, and in particular a very limited part of the socio-economic spectrum. It's not the people's art form for me these days - certainly not in New York - and I have some hesitancy about it. I've never been in a play that led to anyone other than a white person coming up to me on the street and saying they enjoyed my performance. The response to the work I've done in films has been completely across the board. So far, I would say the strongest emotional responses I've had to AHX have come from black people. that gives me more of a feeling as an actor who's playing to the times, and I value that aspect of it.
How do you balance your ambition with the day-to-day experience of being an actor focused on perfecting a role?
You have to avoid marginalising your work on the project you're working on, because that can happen if you're worried about the next one. the most gratifying thing to me has been to hit a place in the business where people know me enough that I have the freedom to choose to work on something for no other reason than my abiding interest in it. that kind of creative freedom is the Holy Grail for an actor, because acting is a profession which, because it's a collaborative medium, allows no other kind of creative freedom. It's particularly important to someone like me because I don't think I do particularly good work under any other circumstances.
Also, I've never really seen myself as someone with the potential to be the kind of actor who can
represent a consistent persona that will be of interest to people. I think all I really have to offer is the
kind of work I've been doing, and that's good because it's what I like doing. I need to adhere to a modus
operandi because there's a certain careerist pressure in Hollywood that puts a lot of value on commercial
choices. A lot of people that it's a good idea to put something in the mix of characters you play that might
have potential for later on, and sometimes it's hard not to let those bugs get in your brain. But I think
you've got to fight them off because those kinds of choices are just as much a roll of the dice anyway. I've
literally had some people say to me, 'Don't be a character actor', and I've said, 'Well, what else am I going to be?'
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