Some Came Running

Stark, Parker, "The Jugger," and "Made In USA"

For Bill Ryan.

One of my greatest regrets, both personal and professional, is that I didn't schedule my phone interview with Donald E. Westlake a few days earlier. The occasion was the official revival of Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 Made In USA, the North American distribution rights to which had been held by Westlake for many years after the producer Georges de Beauregard had failed to pay Westlake for the movie rights to The Jugger, a book Westlake had written under the pen name Richard Stark, the sixth novel to feature Westlake/Stark's sharklike professional crook Parker.

If you look at it one way, Made In USA is the first Parker movie; it predates by a year or so Point Blank, adapted by John Boorman from The Hunter, the first Parker novel, which features Lee Marvin (below) as the revenging, money-chasing lead criminal. Marvin, is, of course, a close-to-ideal incarnation of Parker (the actor Westlake had mentioned envisioning when contemplating film adaptations of his Stark novels was Jack Palance, but Parker as described in the books is if anything a bit bigger and rangier than Palance, something like a truck in human form really), and Robert Duvall doesn't do a bad job with the character in the later The Outfit, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. As it happens, Made In USA isn't really a Parker movie at all. The resemblance it bears to the novel The Jugger is almost entirely incidental. It's an adaptation more likely based on a plot description on the back cover of a paperback, and I sincerely doubt that Godard ever dipped into the book beyond that. And Godard himself speaks of the film in terms of homage to Hawks' The Big Sleep, to the extent of putting his heroine Paula Nelson (portrayed by his estranged wife Anna Karina) in a Bogie-like trench coat throughout (see above). In both The Jugger and Made In USA the lead character comes to a small town to investigate the mysterious death of a friend. And the resemblance ends there. The Jugger is titled for the profession of the dead man in the book; Parker's contact man, a retired safecracker. Made In USA contains no such French equivalent of criminal jargon and the mysterious circumstances of the dead man's end are kinda/sorta tied into such world-historical events as the Ben Barka case. Also, Marianne Faithfull turns up to sing "As Tears Go By," a cappella.

In short, it's a Godard film, and, by Westlake's lights, a "rotten" one, or at least that's how he characterized it in a 1990 interview with Patrick McGilligan reprinted in the fourth volume of the invaluable Backstory series of talks with screenwriters. Westlake states that in the years since he sued for the aforementioned rights, those rights had been worth "exactly nothing," but as of the time of the interview (which may well have been updated by McGilligan and Westlake for the 2006 book), "a distributor is planning a new release of a whole ton of Godard, and they want Made in USA, and they're going to pay me."

Had I interviewed Westlake, I might have asked him if he'd revised his opinion of the film, but it really doesn't worry me. As a film critic and a Godard fan, I certainly don't think Made In USA is rotten, but I'm also not stupid, and it's hardly a functional genre film, or any kind of what-you'd-call-an-"entertainment," which is why I have to say "hold your horses" on the rare occasions when anyone of my acquaintance says "Really? Godard made a Parker film?"

In any event, I did not get to interview Westlake, because the man died on December 31, 2008, about a week before my phoner had been scheduled. I gather he had been paid sufficiently to warrant participating in the publicity campaign for the arthouse re-release of the Godard film (which, to tell you the truth, one WAS able to see at the likes of N.Y.C.'s Thalia in the days of its ostensible embargo, via some kind of bootlegged print), and while I hadn't looked into Westlake's work in years, was looking forward to having the chat. Now that I'm a little over halfway through a fresh reading of Westlake/Stark's Parker novels (I had seen a few as cheap paperbacks back in my youth, and I was as impressed as a preadolescent aspiring snob was apt to be, alas; now, fantastically, they're being reissued in snazzy trade paperbacks by the University of Chicago Press, no less), I'm even sorrier that he's not alive today, if only because I'd like to kiss him full on the mouth. 

The great Lawrence Block contributed a lovely guest post to this blog earlier in the year, which opened: "Over a good many years, my friend Donald E. Westlake wrote two dozen books about a career criminal named Parker. Because his agent had the good sense to retain rights in the character, many film deals were signed over the years, and quite a few pictures actually got made. One time or another, and under one name or another, Parker was brought to varying degrees of life on the screen by Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Peter Coyote, Mel Gibson, and Anna Karina.

"Don, pondering all this, said he had to conclude that the character lacked definition."

That's a great, funny story, and exemplifies the wry humor that was so intrinsic to the caper novels Westlake wrote under his own name. What makes it funnier is that Parker is, in fact, so well-defined that it's scary, and that filmmakers have largely lacked the intestinal fortitude to bring the original conception of Parker to the screen. 

The two films that come closest are Point Blank, and John Flynn's The Outfit, which I wrote about here and here. The ways that Point Blank diverges from a Parker novel is in boiling down the plot just a little bit, and in rather self-consciously mythologizing the Parker character a bit. Interestingly enough, Westlake/Stark's The Hunter differs from the novels to come, in that the money aspect of it happens to be an afterthought; the novel begins with Parker having nothing on his mind but settling scores with the people who left him for dead after a job; recouping his share (and more) of the heist is something of an afterthought. In Point Blank it's the whole raison d'etre for Walker, whose "I want my money" is repeated by Marvin to the extent that it almost becomes a mantra. Which is pretty awesome in and of itself, admittedly. Westlake himself called The Outfit "the one movie made from a Stark book that got the feeling right [...] [i]t was done flat, just like the books." Indeed, although Robert Duvall's Parker is a little more prone to jocularity than the Parker of the books, but not that much. One thing The Outfit really gets into is the mechanics of criminality: how, when doing a job, the perps go about gathering all the necessary equipment, from weapons to souped-up cars with "clean" plates and so on. But even director John Flynn's exemplary treatment Hollywoods things up as it were; in the book, the auto-bootlegger's wife who throws an offer of sexual services to Parker is an obese bovine creature, while in the film she's, well, Sheree North. (And she throws the offer to Parker's buddy.)  Westlake said of Flynn, "early in his career, I thought he was going to be a world-beater," but that The Outfit turned out to be "about the only thing he's done that shows what he can do."

It's worth seeing, and you can do so via a DVD from the Warner Archive. But more importantly, the Parker books are worth reading. While the likes of Mel Gibson and poor Brian Helgeland's Payback have whiffed on both the Parker character AND his actions, filmmakers have been picking from the Parker novels piecemeal for YEARS with at least a certain perspicacity.  In one of the new forewords to the Parker novels, Dennis Lehane details some of the lifts Michael Mann has made, but doesn't mention that the uneasy cop/criminal acknowledgement bit in Heat that everyone swoons over is a treacly, sentimentalized mutation of a TRULY amazing Parker-and-detective confrontation (followed by cat-and-mouse pursuit) in The Seventh, the novel immediately following The Jugger. In The Rare Coin Score, Parker asks one of his men to set up an office fire and not make it detactable as arson; "Easiest thing in the world," the guy says, setting up not just a future George V. Higgins title but a future Coen brothers line. The line from Stark/Westlake to Willeford to Elmore Leonard to Tarantino gets clearer the more you read, and I admire Tarantino's cleverness in adapting situations that could have come straight out of a Parker novel to, I dunno, a World War II film, e.g., the tavern basement standoff in Inglourious Basterds, the playing out of which is predicated on the observation (ostensibly) of certain criminal rules of engagement; a staple of the sticky situations Parker often finds himself in.

Aside form their amazing entertainment value, these are great books for any, and I shudder to use the term, aspiring screenwriter. They're invariably perfectly structured, in a way that demonstrate's there's actually nothing wrong with "formula" if you've got the elements and the smarts to make you actually good at it. They're also object lessons in the truth that exposition is nothing to be afraid of, once you know the right way to put it across. They're also brilliant at mixing authentic, or seemingly authentic,. detail and jargon with imaginative flourishes, so the whole thing feels as real as if it's happening right in front of you. All done in the seemingly plainest of prose (so perfectly plain that on those rare occasions that Stark feels the temptation to get Westlake-smart-alecky, as in the first line of The Rare Coin Score, which is in every other respect perfect—you'll see what I mean—it really glares). Check 'em out.

On "Shame"

As good as Brad Pitt is in Tree of Life, and as good as he's reputed to be in Moneyball (a film I remain in zero hurry to see), I thought as far as actors are concerned, this was Michael Fassbender's year. (The New York Film Critic's Circle today awarded Pitt for the aforementioned pictures.) Not for his work in X Men: First Class (althought I dug him in that) or Jane Eyre, but for his Jung in Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method and ESPECIALLY his spectacularly well-modulated work as a wrecked sex addict in Steve McQueen's sometimes genuinely galvanic Shame, which I review for MSN Movies this week. I've said it before, but I think he's the best lead actor to emerge in English-language cinema in the past ten years, and I can't wait to see what he'll do next. 

Conversation about "Conversations With Clint"

One of the best film books of the year is also one of the most unusual. Conversations With Clint, edited by Kevin Avery, presents the "lost interviews" conducted by the writer Paul Nelson between 1979 and 1983, for a Rolling Stone cover story that Nelson, who could be stone-cutter slow in the composing process, never completed. Eastwood's a good interview, well-schooled in the art, but Nelson was an unusually sensitive and knowledgable interlocuter, which Eastwood is known to appreciate (I recall during our own single conversation, a phoner for a sidebar in Premiere, Eastwood was inclined to extend our brief discussion for a bit after I had demonstrated that I knew who henry Bumstead was), and the two men had friends in common, and they got on. So these chats go well beyond standard interview stuff and give you a lot of unfiltered Eastwood, which is pretty entertaining in and of itself, but also shows just what a deft filmmaking mind the man has, how thoroughly well-versed he is in pretty much every aspect of moviemaking. In this respect, I'd say it's as crucial a text as Lumet's Making Movies, for instance, and of course it's just as impressive a study in voice, if you will.

On Thursday, December 1, at 7 p.m., I'll have the privilege of leading a discussion with Kevin Avery, the editor of this volume and the writer/editor of the equally impressive and crucial Everything Is An Afterthought: The Life And Writings Of Paul Nelson at the 7th Avenue Barnes and Noble store in Park Slope, Brooklyn. If you can make it, please do; it ought to be a very stimulating chat.

Ken Russell, 1927-2011

Twiggy in The Boy Friend, Russell, 1971

Along with Hitchcock, Welles, Vigo, Buñuel and Godard, Russell was one of the first directors I was aware of as such, because, really if you were alive in the late '60s, how could you not be? I was too young to have been able to see the likes of Women In Love, The Music Lovers, and The Devils first time around, but good God, reading about them just made my head swim. I recall Jackson discussing her nude scenes in The Music Lovers and talking about how her early pregnancy during the shoot enhanced her breasts' photogenic qualities and I practically swooned in forbidden reverie. (I was, you know, eleven.) Russell was the supposedly mad, supposedly truculent, white-haired supposed gnome responsible for all this sex and sex and sex and sex, with classical tunes and literary pedigree. But there was more to his eccentricity than that, as I learned at the first Russell movie I could actually go see by my own self, the above-pictured The Boy Friend, a genuinely clever slice of affectionate post-modernism that toggled between delicacy and grotesquerie more purposefully than many other of his films ever would. Damn, the things he got away with, as I discovered once I was able to see, say, The Devils. (That was a very popular choice with the cinema program at William Paterson College, where I ran the projectors sometimes. Derek Jarman did the production design!) Nowadays I find myself nostalgic for the time when such excess could conceivably be studio-subsidized, and I bet a bunch of other people do, too. I'm grateful to him for quite a bit—including his standing Davy Graham up against a brick wall and shooting him playing a guitar—and I regret never having met him (far from being mad or truculent or what have you, he was reputed by many of those who did know him to be both a swell fellow and a real hoot), and it's a sure thing we won't be seeing his like again in our lifetimes. 

Lou Reed, Patti Smith

Artificial Intelligence band practice, Ultra Sound studios, Manhattan, November 26, 2011

Green, easy

I observe in my MSN Movies review of The Muppets that, indeed, nobody doesn't like the Muppets. The new Jason-Segel-starring revival of the characters is a lot of fun, but I have to admit that I, like a certain commenter on a thread over at Jeffrey Wells' site, I'm a little bemused at, and I quote the other guy, "all these jaded, bearded fatsos who usually hate most things are suddenly going all gooey and weak-kneed at the joy and wonder of the Muppets." Yes, a lot of aspiring badasses or what have you have been taking some minutes away from their efforts to prove that fat, drunk, and stupid IS a viable way to go through life the better to publicly touch their inner childs, and quite the spectacle it has been, too; even funnier than the virtual site of dozens of young Brooklyn gentrifiers distracting themselves from agonizing over which private school they want to get their moppets rejected from and instead agonizingover the news of Kim and Thurston's separation. A funny little world we live in, with our little circumscribed objects of reverence, and all. One quite enjoyable side product of Muppet-love is an extremely informative and entertaining article by Sam Adams (who is not a jaded, bearded fatso, incidentally) about the odd roots of "Mahna-Mahna," which appears, in of all places, the usually-hardly-informative-or-edifying Slate. 

Speaking of friend Wells, though, he may be the only dude in the universe who complains about a fucking four-day weekend, on account of "everybody stops creating." Jesus, my man's a FREAK. Even as a freelancer, I dig a four-day weekend the most, and I'm not EVEN gonna stop creating—I've got a lot of Blu-rays to look at if I even want to think about getting a Consumer Guide Holiday Edition posted before the YEAR ends, AND I've got band practice on Saturday; gotta whip the rhythm section in shape for a December recording date. But this blog is going to be highly inactive until Monday, so enjoy whatever you are intending to enjoy, until then.

An interview with David Cronenberg

That's not him, obviously. That's Keira Knightley, in A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg's new film, and below the fold are Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen as Jung and Freud.

The interview, which I've edited from the transcript more minimally than I might have under other circumstances, was meant to appear in the discontinued Nomad edition, Wide Screen. Its loss is your gain! My review of A Dangerous Method for MSN Movies is here. Some prior thoughts on the film based on my New York Film Festival look at it are here. The interview follows. I have deleted our greeting pleasantries.

     KENNY: I saw the film a couple of times, and I saw your press conference with Michael Fassbender at Lincoln Center.  And you said during the press conference that when you're making a film that you never or rarely if at all think about stuff you've done before, themes relative to things you've done before, but sometimes that's the critic's job to do that.  And I was thinking relative to a few things that this film reminded me—there's a scene in the film where Keira's character is receiving the treatment and she's breaking down a bit with Michael's Jung and she talks about how she's vile and she needs to be put away and never allowed to be let out.  And that and a few other things reminded me, many things that the film's theme is partially about, the threat of a woman's sexuality.  And it reminded me a little bit of Rabid.  And because her presence in is so disruptive, in a way, to the world of Jung and Freud and I was wondering if I might be on to something and if you'd elaborate on it, if so.

     CRONENBERG:  Sure.  Well, once again, I mean quite apart from Rabid or any connections it had, it was absolutely of the essence of psychoanalysis.  How sexuality in general is disruptive.  And certainly one of Freud's revolutions was to give full acknowledgement to a woman's sexuality.  Freud has been criticized by feminists at some points for his patriarchal elements and so on.  But in fact, it can't be denied that he was one of the first—especially in that era, where women were revered as goddesses but were therefore not supposed to have sexuality or intellect—one of the first to give full voice to both women's intellect and sexuality.  And that's one of the reasons why Freud was considered subversive and disruptive and dangerous.  It was not just because of sex but also because of female sex.  There's no question about it.  And here was—you have in that scene that you're talking about—and that's a real quote from Sabina.  That's accurate reporting, she did say those things in her diary.  She…the whole idea that a woman should suddenly be asked for the first time to talk about these things, that was the talking cure.  It sounds innocuous to say it's the talking cure, but nobody wanted to hear what these crazy people had to say, until Freud said, no, no, you should listen to the crazy people because they are telling you what's going on.  They're telling you how to heal them, telling you what's wrong with them.  And of course in Sabina's case, for a young woman to be talking about being sexually aroused by her father's beatings was completely unacceptable and completely, you know, just intolerable.  And suddenly for the first time she has a man who she doesn't know giving her permission to talk about those things.  And with the concomitant sort of pain and trying to say the things and then trying not to say the things.  So yeah, I mean I think whether it connects—the various things that are disruptive forces, whether it's sexuality or other things, sure, of course they're of interest to—well, to me I think they're of interest to any dramatist really.  Sex and death.  I'm not the first.  I can't claim to be the first to deal with them. 

     KENNY: Well, that's another interesting thing, because when we're talking…well, there were three things, themes that I thought about.  Another being, this is also a film in a sense that's about the creation of the language that we use when we talk about what we talk about and when we talk about the themes of your films.

     CRONENBERG:  Well, it's also…it's really in a sense; and certainly John Kerr in his book, A Most Dangerous Method, said it this way: that these three people, in a way, invented the 20th century.  They invented modernity.  Up until this point, talking about those things, in that way, was unprecedented.  You would never have men of the professional dignity and stature of Freud and Jung exchanging the letters that we have, that they did, talking about bodily fluids and orifices, erotic dreams and stuff.  The stuff that people talk about all the time now, and you can see on anybody's blog.  But it was unthinkable for people to talk about that stuff, especially, as I say, professional people.  And then you had Sabina giving voice to the woman's version of that.  And she was absolutely their intellectual equal.  And they accepted her as that as well without condescension.  Really, all of that was quite extraordinary, and was quite new.

     KENNY: And one more thing that I think relates to some of your prior work is the theme that comes in a little later after the break between Freud and Jung, and it's in the conversation between--it's most prominent in the conversation between Freud and Sabina, and then of course in the title cards that tell you the fates of the respective protagonists, is the theme of the Jew, and the Jew as other, which is very close to something you explored most explicitly recently in the short film you made for Cannes, for the “Chacun son cinema” section in celebration of the 60^th anniversary of the festival, a short called At The Suicide of The Last Jew In The World In The Last Cinema In The World.

     CRONENBERG:  That's quite true.  It was absolutely also of the essence.  I mean Freud was acutely aware of the position of Jewishness and Jews in Austria; he couldn't avoid it.  At the time Jews were accepted in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but they had limited roles to play.  They were not allowed to be in the military, they were not allowed to be in government.  And he was very aware that psychoanalysis could be dismissed as Jewish mysticism, or some kind of Jewish charade or trick, or something.  Which is why he was very straightforwardly desperate to get Jung to be the leader of psychoanalysis in the future, because Jung was a good bourgeois Protestant Swiss German.  It would take the curse of Jewishness off the movement.  And that was absolutely one of the attractions for Freud of Jung. 

     KENNY: Have you—in terms of this theme of Jew-as-other, being something you've been exploring more recently; is there a story behind that, or is this something that you may have been exploring in more implicit ways throughout your career, or--

     CRONENBERG:  No.  No.  I certainly have friends who as they get older, suddenly become Orthodox when they were not, prior to that, very interested in being Jewish.  Is that what you're talking about?

Two under-ten-years-old fans of "Hugo" can't be wrong

Above, a couple of youngsters of my acquaintance, ages four and seven, a few minutes prior to the November, 20th 2 p.m. SAG screening of Martin Scorsese's Hugo, at New York's Ziegfeld Theater.

Last month I was lucky to be able to see an unfinished version of Scorsese's picture at a work-in-progress screening at the New York Film Festival, and sheep that I am, I decided to take Richard Peña's request to not tweet about or review the film seriously. My screening companion, Farran Smith Nehme a.k.a. The Self Styled Siren, and myself were kind of appalled by the near-instant spate of social media assessments of the film that followed the screening, and Farran was particularly taken aback by the pronouncement of many such wise folks that Hugo was too slow for today's kids to get into and that, regardless of its artistic achievements, it would prove a misfire in the family-film category. She was of the opinion that her own small kids—she has three, including twins who are pushing double digits—would go for it in a big way, not least because it so effectively trades in on that extremely resonant trope of children's literature, that is, the Secret Place at the Repository of Imagination. In Hugo it's the rafters of a great Parisian train station, where the title character works on an automaton that's the last inheritance of his...well, you'll know when you see it. (Reprobate that I am, I myself was reminded by these environs of the cathedral bell-ringer's apartment in Huysmann's La bas.) Warming to Farran's disapprobation, I noted that many of those questioning Hugo's kid-friendliness had no offspring of their own, and a good thing too. I also wondered whether some of them were not in fact legally enjoined from standing within 500 feet of a schoolyard. But.

Anyway. Sunday I was invited to moderate a post-screening Q&A after the Ziegfeld showing, and I was allowed to bring some guests, so my wife and I asked our pals who shall remain nameless if they wanted to come and bring the above-depicted moppets. I admit I was a little nervous. I loved Hugo; would they? Would I be forced to utter the words that were, and remain, death to me, those being "David Poland was right?" Well, as it happens, no. Despite their pre-screening potential raucousness as documented in the above shot, once the lights went down, the kids were...absolutely rapt. Silent as church mice. Except for an occasional ooh and/or aaah at a particularly beautiful effect. There were a lot of other kids in the surrounding rows, and they were equally silent. One of the questions from the audience during the panel afterwards was posed by a pretty adorable girl of about six or so. 

My friends had to leave before the panel, and the little fella actually bumped into Sir Ben Kingsley on the way out, which was kinda trippy. I asked their mom about what they thought, and she wrote me, "They loved it. [The four-year-old] loved the train station and sequences, but admittedly the plot line was a bit advanced for him....but it held him captive the entire time which is largely owed to the way the story was crafted. [The seven-year-old] was mesmerized and talked about it all night."

I know what some of you, and probably David Poland too, are thinking: "Whatever, Kenny; you're a film-snob homo, and most of your friends likely are too, bet this family force-feeds their kids Satantango for breakfast, and that the children were just relieved to finally see something in COLOR." But this is not only not nice, and shame on you, but it's also not so. The impression possibly created by the more radical/alienated pronouncements and attitudes on this blog and my Twitter feed notwithstanding, I in fact have a fair number of friends who are actually what you might call normal people, and the parents of the above-depicted delightful children happen to be among them. Solid citizens and professionals. Not weirdos or bohemians. They may have never even heard of Bela Tarr. So there. 

Meanwhile, Farran herself writes: "The more I think about it, the more abhorrent it becomes to me that I am reading people I actually respect saying that Scorsese's late-movie paean to film history in Hugo is of interest only to film critics and film-history nerds. The entire [...] movie is an explicit rejection of that notion.

"So, to prove my point to myself, this evening I showed A Trip to the Moon to [the twins][...] And they loved it so much they asked for another one 'like that' as soon as it was done. 

"Lest we say 'Well, of course they ate it up, these are Farran's kids,' let me remind you that the[y] are [also] the two sophisticated cinephiles who worshipped Jack & Jill."

My MSN Movies review of Hugo is here.

An interview with Michael Fassbender

Another piece that originally appeared in the late Nomad Edition, Wide Screen. This one of a slightly older vintage, having been conducted and run in February of this year in conjunction with the release of Jane Eyre. But we also discuss (a little) Shame, which had just started shooting, A Dangerous Method (from which the above shot derives), and Haywire. I chopped a good deal of my "YOU were in a Soderbergh movie?!!? I was in a Soderbergh movie!!!!" blather from the transcript before putting this in for the edit. 

I think that, much-commented on genetic gifts aside, Fassbender really has got it. The whole thing. The most impressive film lead actor I've seen come along in a decade. So, enjoy. 

The role of the brooding, romantic, secretive Jane Eyre hero Edward Rochester has been essayed in the past by a veritable hall of fame of great actors and/or leading men: Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, George C. Scott and William Hurt, to name but a handful. Now, in a version of the Charlotte Brontë literary classic directed by Sin Nombre helmer Cary Fukunaga and costarring Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, The Kids Are All Right) in the title role, the very busy half-Irish, half-German thespian Michael Fassbender takes a stab at the role, and the results could very well solidify Fassbender’s status as both a great actor and a very viable leading man for American audiences.

Fassbender impressed cinephiles with his turns in the likes of Steve McQueen’s Hunger (playing real-life IRA martyr Bobby Sands) and Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and made an impact with larger audiences in the far-ranging ensemble of Quentin Tarantino’s crazed and very revisionist-history treatment of World War II, Inglourious Basterds. On the eve of the release of Jane Eyre, which opens on March 11, the 33-year-old Fassbender talked about his burgeoning filmography (one picture not discussed was his upcoming entry in the blockbuster category, X-Men: First Class, in which he portrays the villain Magneto), his approach to character, and the exciting roller-coaster ride that’s been his career over the past few years. 

WIDE SCREEN:  In the films you’ve worked on, there have frequently been some very interesting narrative and/or directorial strategies coming in to play. In Steve McQueen’s Hunger, the Bobby Sands character, who you play, really isn't introduced as the lead character until almost a third of the way into the film. When you're working with someone like McQueen, or the idiosyncratic French director François Ozon on Angel, or Andrea on Fish Tank, both of whom also take unusual choices in their films, do you feel coming in that you're more of a creative collaborator, that you're in on what they're about, as you're going through the process? I know it varies with each director, but working on Hunger, for instance, how acutely did you realize that the Sands character was going to be oozed into the film, as opposed to being introduced in a more conventional way as the subject of the film? 

FASSBENDER: I was aware, because it was it was explicitly that way in the script, you know! We didn't get to meet him till I don't know what page it was, but it was quite well into the story. And that's fine. It doesn't bother me one way or the other really. I mean, my job kind of entails getting the character and learning my lines and hitting my marks and all of that. So what sort of style a director wants to shoot it or what sort of way he or she is going to present it, it doesn't really ; I don't know that we discussed that.

I was very lucky to work with François. He was the first guy that gave me a leading role in a film when nobody knew who I was then at all. So I just I turned up with the character, did my work on the character, and tried to sort of get inside his head and figure that out. And that's the sort of conversations that I would have with him. It's like he'd be saying, “Oh, why don't you do X?”  And I'd be like, “Oh, well would we do X when we do something like…” — or, you know, “Wouldn't you do rather, Y?” or — “wouldn't you do something like this?”

But in terms of the style of the film, or what [Ozon] was trying to do, that's kind of not really my department. So it keeps everything nice and clean if I need to take care of what I need to take care of, and the director does his thing. That's what I love about film. You said it's a collaborative thing.  It's like, I’ll approach the prop guy, I’ll say, “Oh, I've got this lighter, do you think that's interesting for the character?” Or costume or hair, make-up, they create a look for you, and you're like, “Oh, I didn't see it like that myself.” There are all sorts of eyes on the piece, all sorts of input. It’s like, if you read a story and I read a story, you'll read it one way and I'll read it a different way, and we'll have different ideas of it. So then when we come together and try and work on putting it across, I might think, “Oh, wow, I didn't think of that at all,” or “I didn't see that.” And then you put it all together with lots of people; like the DP's, and the art department; the heads of all the departments. That's what's interesting. Does it come together and does it jell, or not? 

WIDE SCREEN:  With Jane Eyre, it's, like Angel, another period piece; Rochester is a character who's, of course, been played rather famously, in other films. Was that something you were particularly conscious of, or did you want to ignore the other film versions go back to the literary source? 

FASSBENDER:  Well, no, I watched pretty much I think all of them. As much as I sort of could get my hands on. I watched Orson Welles; I'm obviously a big fan of Orson Welles. But, while I thought I'd find some things for the character with what he did, what was going on in the [1943] film played in a very dated way. Very sort of over-dramatic, for the purposes of where we wanted to go with the piece.

That was the same feeling I had, when at one point I thought I was doing Wuthering Heights, and I watched Laurence Olivier's version and again, it was like wow, the particular approach here just dates big-time. And again, very dramatic, emphatic style. So I did dial it back to what I thought I could bring. I just studied the character as is in the book and the script, and what I found him to be… obviously he's like this Byronic hero, there's a little trace of that. But I also thought there's something quite bipolar about him, and I just didn't want him, I don't know, to fall into total moodiness. I didn't want to play him with large brush strokes, I wanted to find all the little fine, strange details about him. 

I think that’s what the director, Cary Fukanaga, had in mind. That's what interested me as well. Number one, of course, is that my mom and my sister love the story! So I kind of thought, well, it would be nice to see if I can give them a Rochester they like; let's see what they think of my Rochester, sort of give it a go. So that was attractive to me from the beginning.

And then once Cary got on board I thought, well, this is really interesting now. And then Mia, I was like, oh, even more impressed. I had seen her on In Treatment, and I was blown away. She's got so much maturity and makes really original choices. I don't feel like she's ever lying in her performances.  She's amazing as Jane. She comes on set and like wow, it's Jane. And then you see Mia as she herself is, and she's totally different.

WIDE SCREEN: You bring a lot of physicality to certain roles, from the emaciated hunger-striking prisoner in Hunger to the object of desire for both mother and daughter in Fish Tank; what did you try to do for that side of Rochester?

FASSBENDER:  I thought that he should have a weight to him. People of that era, I think, were used to riding horses and being in the saddle for hours and working out in the countryside. Obviously they're landowners, so they have to maintain the land. I really like the idea that he's a hands-on sort of guy around the land when he's there, when he's home. So I just wanted to give him a lot of weight. 

I wanted this feeling that he's got this weight on him, Bertha in the attic. I wanted that with him everywhere he goes, this shadow sort of hovering over him. And he had that in his physical life as well. But yeah, I didn't… it didn't require me to put on weight or go the gym or anything like that.

WIDE SCREEN:  In Fish Tank, which is just out on DVD in the States, yours is an interesting role in a lot of ways. Your character is kind of the lust object, for both the camera itself and a couple of the female characters. Also, your character seems kind of on the ball; he's got interests, intriguing musical tastes and so on. And it's almost as if the viewer can view him as a surrogate. Then it turns out he's really not that good of a guy at all.

In a sense the film sort of pulls the rug out from under the viewer. How much of this were you juggling as a performer during the making of the film? Because you do keep the character sympathetic in a certain respect, despite the fact that he's doing bad things.

FASSBENDER:  Yeah. Well I think it's more interesting, because it's just like if you have somebody sitting in the audience and they go, wow, that guy's actually kind of a normal sort of guy. And normal people do things that aren't so cool. But, you know, this was a case where I never got a script. Andrea didn't want to give us a script. But when she gave me the breakdown of the story, I knew what was coming, I knew how it was going to be, and I knew the reason she didn't give me a script was because she didn't want me to load it with anything. 

So I knew that I just had to play [Connor] like really kind of easy and free and encouraging and charming. And that's what’s kind of interesting, because when the people leave the cinema, they're like well, it makes them feel… it's an uncomfortable feeling because it's closer to them.  It's like we all have the capabilities of doing all these things, like killing somebody, or taking advantage of somebody like that. And when you make it very real in embodying a person that you can relate to and understand or say, ‘Oh, I know that guy,’ then I think it makes the whole experience more real for people and therefore they have to question things, morals and principles. It's more interesting. 

WIDE SCREEN:  Is that kind of stuff you look for when you're looking for parts?

FASSBENDER:  Um. I think ambiguity is something that I do like to try and find within characters, yeah.  

WIDE SCREEN:  In Fish Tank, you worked with Katie Jarvis, who's brand new, not an very experienced actor. And in the upcoming Haywire, you worked with Gina Carano, who's not an experienced actor but is well versed in mixed martial arts. What’s it like to work with people who aren’t as well-trained or well-versed in performing?

FASSBENDER: Well, Katie's amazing. When you see it on the screen, she's completely vivid and there. It was great working with her because we did an improvisation and she was game. No fear. She's not really interested in acting. So it gives her that sort of extra sort of something, I suppose, that she doesn't care. I think in the hands of the right director, like Andrea Arnold, who did Fish Tank, or Steven Soderbergh with Haywire, it works.

Anyway I think acting, it's 90 percent intuition.  Training is good. I think you learn most out there in the field, practically. But I do think, having had training — I went to drama school — when things go wrong and when you sort of get the fear or lose focus, I do have a structure that I can fall back on. It's like, “Where am I coming from? Where am I going? What do I want from this person? How does this person make me feel?” There's a drill that I can go back into that will get me so that I can focus. And that's a great thing to have.

But with dealing with non-actors, it's always interesting, because they're bringing something fresh. It's interesting when you bring in somebody that hasn't learned from the same rule book, so they're just bringing whatever they bring from their world into the mix.

WIDE SCREEN: You’ve been working an awful lot, and you have worked and are preparing to work with some really world-class directors, including some of the people we’ve talked about, and also Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds , David Cronenberg with the upcoming A Dangerous Method, and a Ridley Scott project coming up…

FASSBENDER: It’s been kind of crazy! It's like I'm in a dream, really. When I realized that I wanted to do acting, I was 17, and when I was 18, I put on a play of [Quentin Tarantino’s] Reservoir Dogs. So Quentin was a massive influence right at the beginning for me. But to be on set, being directed by him and working, and to be in a new scene that was a classic Tarantino Mexican stand-off, in one of his film… it was really just sort of a dream. I couldn't believe it. And he is everything that you would imagine him to be. Full of energy, full of enthusiasm, full of information and just — he just lives, sleeps, breathes film. 

And then Cronenberg is like an engineer. He's like a scientist. He's just so precise, so gentle and so easy. His films can be quite different, but the energy on set is very pleasant and bright. He's just so super bright. And very non-taxing on his actors. And similar to Steven Soderbergh in that precision and intelligence and pleasantness; you can see it in both of them, the way they size everything up the minute they walk on to the set. It’s fantastic to work with people who are so creative and have such a grasp of the situation on a film set.

Jamming with Edward, or, The Confessions of a "Twilight" Virgin

See here. Boy, this Lautner fella, he's a real barrel of laughs, huh?