Off Screen - THE CRYPTIC ACTOR

IT APPEARS I was rather premature last issue, when I suggested Martin Scorsese had once again been nominated for an Oscar and asked him how much it would mean to him. The column was written before the nominations, but with the world’s greatest film director hotly tipped to go ahead with the world’s most successful film director (living or dead) for the pre-eminent film award that has so long eluded them both, I thought it was a safe bet to make my question sound more prescient than it has actually turned out to be.

His answer, however, has become even more pertinent after the fact. “It’s been 21 years or so and I had a lot of chances, but if I didn’t get it for those pictures, God knows, what am I going to get it for? You know what I’m saying? What more do they wanna know? Is it something I said maybe?”

Although this year’s Oscar nominations contain few surprises, the omissions are as glaring as ever. Scorsese’s period masterpiece The Age Of Innocence was almost completely ignored (just one major nomination, for Winona Ryder) while the similar but staid and stuffy The Remains Of The Day picked up nominations for best picture, best director (James Ivory) and best actor and actress for the Anthony Hopkins/Emma Thompson double-act.

The Americans do dearly love Emma, so I suggest the British hand her over. A straight swap with, say, Jodie Foster would be nice but I’m sure British audiences would settle for any Californian starlet who is prepared to appear nude (for artistic reasons, of course) but would turn down the obligatory Emma sneezing scenes on the grounds of good taste. After starring opposite heavy-weight thespians like Hopkins, Daniel Day-Lewis and . . . er . . . Ken Branagh, it’ll be interesting to see how Britain’s premiere thespette and Dame-in-waiting will manage with real heavyweights (and we are talking kilos here) Arnold Schwarzenneger and Danny DeVito in Junior, Ivan Reitman’s forthcoming comedy about the world’s first pregnant man. This could mark the beginning of Emma’s transformation into a female Michael Caine – anything for money and a nice location.

Also criminally (but predictably) ignored by the old duffers on the Academy committee was Harvey Keitel, whose glut of movie appearances last year would have made him eligible for a possible four best actor and two best supporting actor nominations. He was never going to get it for his astonishing performance in The Bad Lieutenant, the committee generally preferring their actors to play gay (Tom Hanks in Philadelphia) or be dying slowly of some awful disease (Hanks again) or battling for a good cause (Hanks again, making him 13/8 favourite at William Hill and Liam Neeson saving Jews for Spielberg) or display some kind of disability (Daniel Day-Lewis’ accent in In The Name Of The Father, Laurence Fishburne’s sideburns in What’s Love Got To Do With It?) or, at the very least, speak nicely (Anthony Hopkins) to snorting ounces of cocaine and masturbating over teenage girls (than man Harvey). But every other film awards body at least nominated Harv for The Piano, as a way of saying sorry. Not the Academy though, who were no doubt perturbed by Harvey’s now obligatory onscreen wiggling of his own personal Oscar.

I am confident, however, that Harvey will win next year. So confident, in fact, that I am going to put money on he and Scorsese for the Oscars '95, without even knowing what films they will win for (I don’t know how my bookie will work out the odds for that, but I am sure we can come to some kind of acceptable formula). It is the nature of the Oscars to scramble backwards trying to make up for the previous year’s omissions. Thus Jeremy Irons won in ‘91 for his straightforward performance in Reversal Of Fortune, after astonishing everyone in 1990’s Dead Ringers (made Oscar-unfriendly by inclusion of unpleasant gynaecological scene). Richard Dreyfuss, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Bette Davis, (to name but a few) have all been recipients of Oscars to make up for previous omissions. Now it’s Marty and Harvey’s turn, if they can just keep the obscenities to a minimum and that pecker in its pants.

Given the number of times he has been conspicuously ignored, Steven Spielberg has to be hot favourite this year, with Schindler’s List garnering 12 nominations and Jurassic Park picking up another three in the technical categories. Steven would be wise not to count his chickens before they hatch however. In 1986, The Colour Purple (directed by a certain S. Spielberg – any relation?) garnered 11 nominations but, in a famous snub, failed to pick up even one Oscar.

Ireland, once again, has made a more than respectable showing. Liam Neeson fulfils long standing promise with his nomination for Best Actor, although William Hill puts him at only 25/1 (you may be wondering about my sudden obsession with betting odds. I have just moved into an office above a branch of William Hill. I have always thought of cinema more as an art than a sport, but my new neighbours have quickly disavowed me of that misguided notion).

After a revelatory GQ interview that focused largely on what lurks inside his fly, Liam can at least console himself with the thought that he is almost certainly the best hung nominee. After refusing to actually unveil the said organ for the (female) interviewer (it’s a good thing Harvey wasn’t being interviewed, or it would have been out on the table pronto) he furthered the legend by quoting Dana Delaney’s remark that “if she were in a room with James Woods and Willem Dafoe and Liam Neeson, there wouldn’t be room for anything else.” (Dafoe previously unveiled his member on stage to gasps of astonishment from the audience, and it is said that the only thing bigger than James Woods’ penis is his ego.)

In The Name Of The Father garnered seven nominations including Best Picture, with Jim Sheridan in the Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay categories, Peter Postlethwaite for Best Supporting Actor, Emma (again) for Best Supporting Actress (it must have been the sneezing scene that swung it) and another Best Actor nomination for honorary Irishman Daniel Day-Lewis.

I met Daniel recently, although I won’t pretend we discussed his (then forthcoming) Oscar nomination. I have learned my lesson. He was in London with Martin Scorsese promoting the release of The Age of Innocence and the two could not have been more contrasting. While Scorsese was hardly able to contain himself, shooting sentences in every direction, Day-Lewis was so reserved and self-contained that questions had to be applied as if they were crowbars in a vain attempt to prise him open. Mostly he waffled on, slowly but at great length about indefinable things, before petering out with a remark like “I don’t think that answers your question.” (He was right about that at least).

Yet there is no doubt Day-Lewis, already an Oscar winner, is an uncommonly gifted actor. Scorsese, who should know a thing or two about acting, having nurtured Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, recalled seeing him in My Left Foot and becoming so entranced by his performance that “after three or four minutes I had forgotten I was actually watching an actor at all”. After casting him in the turn of the century role of Newland Archer, the director was astonished to find his star turning up to meetings in a period suit and tie, and walking his character’s cane.

Immediately after completing filming with Scorsese, Day-Lewis leaped into a part that could not have been more different: the working class, rebellious, immature, confused and angry Belfast lad Gerry Conlon, wrongly incarcerated in a British prison for 14 years. He prepared for the role by undergoing actual physical torture, being kept sleep-deprived in a kind of solitary confinement and having buckets of freezing water thrown over him every time he nodded off. This is the kind of dedication to the craft that borders on the psychotic. As Laurence Olivier famously once said to Dustin Hoffman, “You should try acting, dear boy.”

Although quite reluctant to discuss his acting technique, Day-Lewis is nonetheless at his most eloquent avoiding this particular issue. So here, for the edification of would be thespians everywhere, is Best Actor nominee Day-Lewis not quite talking about his craft.

“Uhm . . . what tends to happen is people talk on my behalf about that part of the work and I usually resist, as far as I can, talking about it. I don’t know why I do. Bearing in mind that all the work takes place in a public situation, the actual shooting period is a very public situation, you are observed from the moment the camera starts to roll and, depending on the nature of the distractions around you, you have to fight to hold on to the feeling of intimacy or privacy. The period of time in which we work in isolation from each other, I think that’s where we either find or don’t find what we’re looking for. If we haven’t found what we need by the time filming begins then we’ve lost already. I don’t really understand the way I work particularly, which is one of the reasons I don’t talk about it. It’s a very kind of murky business, it’s not a clear thing to me, and it’s not a system of any kind, this idea of total immersion. Immersion can take many different forms. Very often it seems as if one is plunged into a mud bath looking for gems of some kind. There’s no guarantee that they’re there and when you find them there’s no guarantee that they’re going to be useful to you. It’s very much a blind process and I don’t really understand it, that’s probably why I don’t talk about it."

Does it make you difficult to be around when you’re working?

“I wouldn’t say no, because I’m sure that you could find people who would say yes, but what’s terribly important, bearing in mind that the only things that can ever succeed on film or any performance art is when people communicate in some way, genuinely, and if you isolate yourself through some way of working to the extent that other people are excluded then that is of no use at all. And of course that is a delicate thing. We all do have different ways of working and you have to find a way of not affecting people in a bad way with your own.”

Once you’ve finished, how long does it take a character to go?

“It depends. There’s nearly always a moment when you’re filming when you know that you need it to finish. It could be three months of shooting or four, five, six, but there’s a period, half way through sometimes, when you’re still compulsively involved but you know that you need it to finish. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t still, paradoxically, hold on to it when it does finish. It’s hard to push it away. You never know how things do affect you. There are parts of each piece of work that become assimilated into your life in a way that you’re entirely unconscious of.”

Do you ever consider Laurence Olivier’s advice; Just try acting?

“People seem most titillated by the idea that you live in the shadow of some terrible phantom. When they talk about the way I prepare for a part, they don’t actually talk about preparation, what they talk about is anything that might seem to be insanely uncomfortable and could have caused the maximum amount of distress. By dwelling on that it implies that the whole process is some complex act of self-flagellation. I haven’t once been able to describe it accurately myself. Often I don’t know what happens. You move very quickly from self-consciousness to a place where you are no longer aware of the decisions you are making, of the life that is taking shape. And that’s how it has to be, because self-consciousness is death in front of the camera. It might seem like an act of great arrogance to think that through playing a game, an exercise, you can understand a very profound experience that can touch someone’s life. But a lot of acting is trying to get back to how we were as kids, a process of unlearning, of retrieving innocence.”

. . . which may not leave you any the wiser, but it has to be better than Harvey Keitel’s response to the same line of questioning: “There are some good books I could recommend.”

Daniel Day-Lewis is 10/1.