As mentioned in the post below, I want to archive some of the pieces I've enjoyed doing over the years, and to a large degree that means interviews conducted for various film outlets. A good place to start, I think, is an unpublished interview that has lived only on my desktop since it was conducted. In September 2007 I did a semi-long 1.1 with Rosamund Pike, one of my favorite actresses, at the Toronto Film Festival. This was for the Holocaust guilt film Fugitive Pieces, and as I recall I had a hard time selling the piece because everyone lost interest after the film had trouble picking up distribution. The interview naturally covers Pieces, as well as Pike's partially self-stoked reputation as a neo-Hitchcockian blonde and her ambitions for the future.
RS: I've been running around like crazy today, seeing movies back to back to back.
RP: I bet you have! Well, let's just sit and chill out.
RS: So are you in town to see the movies too?
RP: Yeah, yeah. I went to see two last night. I saw Control and Rendition.
RS: I recommend Chrysalis. It's a French Sci-fi movie. Did you see Minority Report?
RP: Yeah.
RS: It's kind of a cross between that and The Bourne Identity. A lot of hard fist-fighting and some sci-fi ideas.
RP: Sounds good. You went to a press screening?
RS: Yep.
RP: Control is amazing, wonderful. It's like a British realist film, shot in black and white.
RS: Tomorrow morning, I'm seeing Atonement.
RP: Oh, great.
RS: I'm such a fan of Joe. Pride & Prejudice was way up on my top ten list that year. He should have paid me to do publicist work for him.
RP: [laughs] Atonement is going to blow you away then, I think. It's an even more sophisticated film. It has a different beat to it, in terms of the ideas.
RS: You guys were supposed to remake the Ingrid Bergman movie, Gaslight, right?
RP: Oh, I ended up doing it on stage, cause I thought he'd never get around to it. I just went to the Old Vic.
RS: You look forward to working with him again, I'm sure.
RP: Yeah, we definitely want to work together, but I think at the moment, but when the heat is sort of off it, really, and we can actually go and make a good, creative work without it being a kind of thing that we're doing it. It'd be nice to be like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.
RS: You couldn't really update Gaslight anyway. There are no more gaslights.
RP: Yeah. Dimmer switch.
RS: So, I saw the movie yesterday, and I came away with sort of a downbeat feeling. The message I took away was that your formative experiences are what they are, and there's no escaping them. It's the strongest memories that will prevail and shape you, positive or negative.
RP: Yeah, it's definitely about the dead and about grieving, but it's funny, you know, I was thinking about the scene where I have to read his diaries and he's just finished that book. It's like she thinks that's going to be a new beginning, and in some ways he's had some survival guilt, I think. When you've been miraculously saved in this huge act of human kindness by Athos, who has taken him out of the arms of despair and into hope ... there's a sort of guilt and confusion and he doesn't know quite how to live with it. It's a kind of Atonement, isn't it? Writing his book. Funny that there are two films about this process of writing as being therapeutic, getting out all your demons. I think Anne Michaels wanted to give some hope that, if you're allowed to put down roots in a new place ... if you're a rootless person whose been uprooted, then you are entitled to find a new homeland, or find a new place to embrace you -- to find a new family.
RS: Do you think she wanted to change him, consciously?
RP: My character? Yeah. Save him, maybe, more than change him. I think she just wanted to make him happy. I think that's why it hurts so much when he says in the book that she wanted to change him. But I think it's like anyone ... she sees a mysterious soul that's closed off, and she wants to be the person who opens it up, and make him fall in love with her and enlighten his life.
RS: Do you think people who make projects of other people like that are more often than not, doomed to failure?
RP: Yeah, absolutely. Doomed to failure. Of course, yeah. And grief is such a mammoth human problem ... it's not someone else's responsibility to alleviate it. You can't. It takes time and somebody has to do it on their own. I think she's quite naive in that respect. And also, she doesn't understand -- she's from a completely different world.
RS: You can tell she's had a relatively light, carefree existence.
RP: In the novel, her father was a kind of emigre from Europe, from England actually, and she was brought up with a political conscience, but I don't think anyone who didn't go through that can really fathom what it must have felt like to have gone through those atrocities. You can be shocked and horrified from the outside, but you must carry that burden with you your whole life, if you've seen those things and lived through that. You could never stop telling stories about it.
RS: At one point, she says 'your brain explodes' from all this stuff.
RP: Yeah, she gets frustrated with it. She's part of the voice that has to say in the film -- it's a very reverential film -- she has to say, rather politically incorrectly, 'Enough about the Holocaust. Enough. I can't live with this everyday. I can't live with this darkness. You pull me down, and I'm gonna drown with you. It's that feeling, and then of course, Michaela is a woman who can just let him be, and doesn't feel that she has to get involved. She can just be there and understand. She just is sort of there, and I think that's what he responds to, just like he did with Athos before.
RS: I think it's mentioned that Michaela is Russian and Spanish. I wonder if there's a comment there, about one culture being more like 'Eh, do your own thing,' and the other being ...
RP: I know, I know. I don't know, because Ayelet is from Israel. Did you feel that she was Jewish or not, Michaela?
RS: I didn't really peg her one way or the other, but she certainly seems aloof, and not prepared to get involved with his inner turmoil. She seems to have her own.
RP: I identify with Alex. I feel that when you see someone in pain, you want to try and understand it, but she's the kind of person who, when she falls in love she wants to jump in somebody else's body and walk around in it. [laughs] And he's not ready for that kind of intimacy. I found it really heartbreaking, really.
RS: What attracted you to a character who is so chipper?
RP: [laughs] Why do you think?
RS: I don't know!
RP: In the book, there's a chapter where she's introduced, it's called Phosphorous, and I thought, I want to play someone who is sort of elemental. I loved her wit and her brightness and her carefreeness. When I did Pride & Prejudice, living inside Jane Bennett, it was a very positive feeling. They rub off on you. I've just played these two tragic, oppressed women on stage, and I think, enough of the oppression, I want to play someone strong again. I admire her strength, even though she experiences a lot of hurt.
RS: I was wondering if it might be a conscious choice, to sort of get away from the Hitchcock Blonde image.
RP: The sort of cool image ... I don't really make conscious decisions. I just try and ... I wish I did. I'd probably be much more successful, if I was canny. I just think I can't do it. I don't know what would be good for my career or what wouldn't be good for my career. I just respond to certain stories
RS: You must be calculating to some extent, in terms of your career. Seems like it would be a chess game that you'd enjoy playing, on some level.
RP: No, I can't do it like that. I can't do it like that. I couldn't take a film because I thought it might be good and high-profile, cause then I know that I'd feel out of body and all weird making it. I wouldn't be able to relax. With a film like this, I felt so relaxed making it. I understood it, I loved the people, I loved its feel, its European feel. It was like coming home. That's how I feel when I'm on stage
RS: That's interesting, that relaxation is so important to you in the day to day work. Relaxation as opposed to intense concentration?
RP: No, it's always intense concentration, doing the work, but if you feel at home within the environment, then you're free. You can be relaxed, but still be playing a very dark character or a very dark subject, exploring a very dark subject, but you just have to feel safe and calm, and not stressed or tense, you know?
RS: Would you say you've been lucky in that regard, with most of your previous films?
RP: I have, yeah. I think, starting off with the Bond film, I think that was very nerve-wracking because I was very young. It was quite stressful for me. It's a mammoth thing.
RS: I told myself I wouldn't bring up Bond unless you did first -- I'm a big Bond fan.
RP: [laughs] Did you like the last one?
RS: Yeah, I think I liked Casino Royale more than Die Another Day. It was time for a reboot.
RP: Yeah.
RS: The only opinion I remember having about your character is that she should have won the knife fight at the end. I mean, how could she not?
RP: Yeah, being a fencer.
RS: Right, and just, what's MI6 training coming to?
RP: [laughs] Yeah, yeah, right!
RS: Anyway, to circle back to Fugitive for a second, I found it interesting that the film isn't a Holocaust film, even though it's about that. It's a film about talking about the Holocaust.
RP: Yeah, it's about the ghosts of it. It's about respecting the dead and what happened and how we move forward with that in the past. How the present is affected by history. It's like the dead, whatever he says, the dead are with you and in the dark they reach out and they grab you. It's that feeling ... it's a very exploratory piece of work. It's about how we live now. It's not about trying to go back and go over the atrocities. That's not the kind of film we wanted to make.
RS: I wonder if audiences have grown weary of films that make dramatic hay out of the extreme violence of the Holocaust.
RP: Well, this film is different because it's about human courage, as opposed to human suffering. I think the shocking bit on the Greek island, when that woman gets shot for standing up to the Nazis, what you see is a killing, a cold-blooded killing, coming out of a moment of amazing strength. I think it's about the triumph of the human spirit over the evil, rather than wallowing in how horrific everything
RS: Right. And the other kind of film has been done successfully, so it doesn't really need to be revisited.
RP: Yeah, and this is about small, human acts of kindness and support and the way people protect and look out for each other. I feel if everybody did that, to one person, the world would be a better place. I always feel that about charity. I feel that if everybody does a little bit ... I'd rather do the little bit that I do in person than give money to something I'm not involved with. I'd rather go and help an individual, mentor a child or help somebody I see on the street, help one person.
RS: Why is that way preferable, in your opinion? Maybe you could do more good the other way.
RP: Because it's little triumphs over adversity. I can change somebody's life, but I can't change the world.
RS: By the way, appropo of nothing, I've seen some actors lately retaining the American accents of their characters during press interviews. Actors who I know from research are British, or European. You'd never do anything like that, I hope.
RP: God, no. Weird.
RS: I've seen it happen, for sure. Sometimes they just keep the flat American undertone to their voice, so you can't tell where they're from.
RP: Are you Canadian?
RS: No, American. Muddled accent, from starting down South and moving up North.
RP: Ah, okay.
RS: Do you buy into the idea that it's important to keep an air of mystery about yourself as an actor?
RP: [makes the lip-zipping motion ... turns her head away from me]
RS: Oh, boy. How am I supposed to transcribe this?
RP: [still not talking]
RS: Maybe I touched a nerve.
RP: Not at all. I just agree with you.I was talking to Rade about this. I think you have to be cautious about doing too much work, because you sort of dilute. He says in his wonderful Croatian way, "You dilute your face." I know what he means. You save it for the things that really matter to you. Not that I've always done that. There have been a few things in there that I've ... experimented with that I wouldn't do again.
RS: Like what?
RP: Well, something like Doom, which was great fun and taught me a lot. It was a sort of great thing to do, but not the best use of what I can do.
RS: Some actors aspire to be ciphers, but some carry their qualities with them, and you're very English. I don't know if you're aware of it. Are you? Do you try to work within that Englishness?
RP: Did you feel I was English in Fugitive Pieces?
RS: No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying it's an extant quality. If I was a director casting for Middlemarch or something, I'd think of you over some American actresses. You don't see it?
RP: I don't object to it. It's weird because you say you come from the South and I feel a great affinity with the American South. I did a Tennessee Williams play in London and I spent much time in Mississippi. I can do quite a mean Southern. Maybe that's because there's an affiliation with Englishness.
RS: So there's a great Southern character in your future?
RP: Oh, I hope so. I really do.
Comments