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Interview - William Hurt'Acting is a challenge' From Maclean's February 11, 2002
Maclean's: This is a very different role for you. It's quite deadpan. Very contained and interior. What was like being working on a small Canadian film? William Hurt: It was great to work with Andy Jones and Molly Parker. Also, the authenticity of the Newfoundland people. I love Canada. I've done many things up here. Also I had the seminal summer of my life up canoeing in the Temagami region. I went to Camp Wabun. Maclean's: Really? I went to Camp Temagami. Hurt: Camp Temagami was our foe! Our rival! We lived for the mid-season canoe fights. Crier. That was our group. I still know the cheer: "Ram-packa-boomer-acka/Ola-bola-firecracker/Sis-boom-bah/We ain't got a cheer/We ain't got a yell/But when we yell/We yell like a baby in a high chair/Who put it there?/Ma, Pa, sis-boom-bah/Crier, Crier! Rah, rah, rah!" We would come in from our 10-day trip, and we would have that as our call to all the other groups. I was only there for one summer, but it made an absolutely indelible impression. I was 15. I remember every day of it. I remember every portage, every lake. It was one of the favourite moments of my life. I'm dying to take my children up there. In fact, I took the children across country a few weeks ago in a VW van--our two little boys and our dog. I took us over the top of Lake Superior. You get to Sault St. Marie and you have to make the decision, "Can I handle the extra miles with the kids and the dog?" We made the decision and it was beautiful. Maclean's: Andy Jones is a revelation in this movie. Hurt:He's incredible. He's a rare bird. He doesn't work like a classically trained actor, but he works like an artist. Right from the second day I said, "I'll be your straight man." Andy has made an incredibly brave choice with his life, his entire life. He has been an honest man all his life. He has made social commentary. He has stood up to the status quo. And he's done it every day with a bunch of people that he loved, in a community that let him do it and supported him. He stood up against Goliath, and he did it for a long time and that gives you strength. You walk in the room and you have to be aware of that--or at least I was. And I honour that. I respect that. I respect that immensely. Maclean's: How was Molly Parker like to work with? I asked [director] Sturla [Gunnarsson] about the chemistry between you, and he said, "Molly has chemistry with everybody." Hurt: Thanks Sturla! [Laughs] Molly did a wonderfully mature thing as an actor. She showed amazing restraint. You have very little time so you have to use it well. You could sort of see her marking something as the rehearsal went on, and as we got closer to filming, you started to see where she had made her choices. And she always chose these anchor points. And she would always hit them, never in the same way, but they would always be there. And that gave remarkable clarity to what she was doing and gave me a tremendous amount in that. Because what she was doing with the role was being a mature actress, which helped a lot with this other problem, this age difference. Maclean's: Which is never mentioned in the film. Hurt: But it's believable, mostly because of her. As an actress, she chose a very intelligent understanding of the scene, which made it possible for the character Dave to not know what's going on. She's not taking advantage of a guy in a mid-life crisis. Dave doesn't know anything at this point. Dave is really looking at this wall that may be a mist, that may be a veil, that may be oblivion. None of his bets have paid off. What's more carefully explained in the book than in the film is the life he chose to leave. He left a life of complacency, of a civil service job that had fed off the rape of the cod and other things that were destroying the character of life up there [in the community]. And he leaves that. He leaves it to try and execute this dream of his and it doesn't work. You see that in the book--and I'm sorry it wasn't more in the film--this lurch away from the status quo that was gobbling up his character. This effort has cost him so much that he has no more faith in himself. And then she sees the strength in him. Maclean's: When you bring so much craft and reputation on to a set, how does that affect the other actors? Hurt: Sometimes they get a little intimidated, but you just have to reduce that. You have to stop that. Your job is not to intimidate people, it's to prove your trustworthiness, and you do that by doing the best work you know how to do and by respecting them. You don't expect them to come to you. You go the opposite direction from reputation. You go to the work. You go to their value, the value you see, and you let them know what you see by what you do. Not by lip-service. By actually revelling in it. The joy is their talent. So if someone isn't as experienced as you are, that doesn't matter. They could have a braver heart. You're not better than they are. Sometimes the reputation is the problem. It may help get the film made, and you're glad about that. But the fact that you have to carry this goddamn reputation around with you to help get the film made may be what costs you the freedom of movement that you would love to have to express yourself in a more creative way where you don't have the preconceptions that reputations are made of. Maclean's: Some people call you difficult. Hurt: I've been called difficult. I'm glad that Meryl Streep once told someone that it's because I was good. I don't think you come in order to be complacent, you come to be challenged. And not just by the administrative difficulty of making a movie but by the material itself. I cannot come to a film set and let myself be overwhelmed by the complexity of a film set. I have to remember that I am there to be overwhelmed by the challenge of solving this scene today and what it means about life, not what it means about whether or not we're making a movie. If, with a certain amount of experience, you see people are becoming preoccupied with movie-making--that's not the point. That's like jumping on a small motorbike. It'll run out of gas very soon. There is another thing to work on today on this film set, and that is the truth of this scene. I can be very short when I perceive the mentality of shot-administration is dominating the heart of scene-solution. I can be very, very intolerant of that. Maclean's: Looking back on your career, was there a major turning point which changed your attitude toward it? Hurt: When I stopped drinking was a big issue for me. Fifteen years ago. It was a big deal. There's an interconnectedness to things. When you make a big choice in your life it reverberates on all the other choices you've made. I stepped back. It took me a while to extricate myself from the interconnectedness of dependencies. I had begun to lose a certain range of my faculties and getting that back became a big priority in my life. As you begin to gain the control back, you start wanting to go farther again, to step up to a line without an inebriant or some other painkiller. Because those lines do cause pain. When you go and challenge the dragon, it's not comfortable. Maclean's: Does it feel different working on a Canadian film as opposed to an American one? Hurt: I personally enjoy working up here much more. There's more of a shape from the past that protects a cultural reference point, where people have guides for behaviour and cultural questioning that are socially protected here and engendered. This is one of four or five film projects I've done that are my favourites as experiences. Maclean's: What are the others? Hurt: Body Heat was one. Kiss of the Spider Woman another. I really enjoyed making Second Best with Chris Menges. There's less of a sense of pretense and money, this bath of rich formaldehyde you have to swim around in. I like them highly skilled, smaller and passionate. Not obsessive. A lot of people really are obsessive about trying to get on the map. I like to work with people who aren't so nervous about whether or not they get on the map. And they enjoy being on the planet enough that they have something they can freely share. For me one of the ideal experiences on this film was working all night long in the cold rain with everybody walking up and down this 45-degree incline using a rope because the winds had shifted to come down this chute of a bay where we where going to do the scene, making the surf too high. So we had to shift bays. Everybody just made the shift. There were no trailers to move. Steven Spielberg can turn a battleship on a dime, and that's a great feat. But my preference is a well-rowed dinghy. Maclean's: Speaking of Hollywood, there's that other Newfoundland film, The Shipping News. Hurt: They came in after us. Maclean's: Were you considered for it? Hurt: No, they got a bigger guy. Maclean's: How did you manage the Newfoundland accent? Hurt: It's okay. The guys from Newfoundland say it was okay. It was subtle because I didn't have enough time to go all the way with it. I'm an out-of-towner, there's no way you can get around it. We didn't have six weeks of rehearsal. If you knew how to use the six weeks that you ought to have to prepare any role, those 42 days would be used to saturate your entire being with the structure and to create the physical building blocks of the character that you would then begin to indoctrinate into your physical, your clay--your body's your clay--so it would become second nature. [George] Balanchine would say to dancers toward the end of his life: "Don't dance. Don't get in the way of the music." The technique is there to help you listen to the music, not tell the music what to be. You're not supposed to be seen dancing. There should be another level of experience where the audience and you are released from the technique. That's why you got technique in the first place, so you can forget it. When you're not given ample rehearsal, when the world is insisting on a product and designing its developmental process to accommodate that agenda, the artist is being essentially emasculated from himself. Maclean's: How did Newfoundland affect the filmmaking? Hurt: If anything's good about the film it comes from there, the relationship of that magnificent people to that magnificent place. It comes from paying attention to that. That's the real authority. People can say those words I just said, and people can actually do it. Some people are going to say it's nice to have nice quaint streets and have the world be your filmic backdrop, your little postcard you put behind your narcissistic movie stars. And you can take that back, and get a lot of people to come to your movie, and have masses of people looking for images against which to measure some authentic notions of themselves from individuals who have a pathological need for attention. You can do that. People who do play their reputation more than they play their character, that's the crisis. |
