Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. Hey, I got to talk to Sir Anthony Hopkins recently. He has a new film out right now in a few cities called SLIPSTREAM that he stars in and directs. But more importantly, when I first met him and called him Anthony, he said, “Call me Tony.” You're damned right I'm going to call him Tony. With a big dumb grin on my face, I'm going to call him Tony. This man has been nominated for an Oscar four times, winning once for a little film called THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Maybe you've heard of it. But he also starred in two of the best films Merchant-Ivory every made (HOWARD'S END and THE REMAINS OF THE DAY); he creeped me out year's before LAMBS with a film called MAGIC; and has worked with some of the greatest living directors, including David Lynch (THE ELEPHANT MAN), Oliver Stone (NIXON; ALEXANDER), Steven Spielberg (AMISTAD), and Francis Ford Coppola (DRACULA). In recent years, he has been a bit more risky, taking roles in smaller films that provided him with greater acting challenges (PROOF; THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN; BOBBY; and the surprise hit from earlier this year, FRACTURE). Not all of these films were great, but he was always great in them.
In the next year or two, Hopkins returns in a few high-profile projects, including BEOWULF, which we talked about; a new film with James Ivory (CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION); and most interestingly playing the father of Benicio Del Toro's Lawrence Talbot in THE WOLF MAN. He lets a little plot point about that film slips as well. I loved talking to Hopkins because the man simply loves to talk, and SLIPSTREAM is not an easy film to talk about. He broke into impressions for me. I would never have dreamed of asking him to do any of his famed impersonations, but that didn't stop him from doing so. I have no idea how this is going to read; Hopkins' train of thought is as sharp and quick as a man a third his age (he turns 70 in December), and his Welsh accent is thicker than I'd have ever imagined. Bow down to Sir Tony.
Capone: SLIPSTREAM is definitely and experience that does not allow you to watch it passively.
Anthony Hopkins: Yeah.
C: If you take your eyes off of it, you'll miss all sorts of connections.
AH: I'm hoping people will go back and see it.
C: Exactly. I'm sure it would be a different experience with each viewing too. And I'll shake the hand of any man who casts Kevin McCarthy in his film. He's a hero of mine. Do you actually have a particular fondness for INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS? Or was that just something you referenced for the movie?
AH: Yeah, it's one of my favorite movies. I loved all those science fiction things from the '50s, THE BLOB and all that. It was kind of dark and film noir, but BODY SNATCHERS--that was Don Siegel, wasn't it?
C: Yes.
AH: --that was one of the most intelligent of them all. Also I loved the fact--I just realized this--a few films made an impression on me when I was a very young lad, a kid. They were the film noir types. I loved movies that started at the end--Bill Holden lying in the pool [SUNSET BOULEVARD]--and then the picture goes [indicates a wavy flashback moment] “Now here we are in Los Angeles.” It's like “Dragnet.” I love all that Hollywood drama stuff, dark films, DOUBLE INDEMNITY with Fred MacMurray. BODY AND SOUL with John Garfield. THE KILLERS, which was fairly linear but excellent still. Another with Burt Lancaster, another odd one, is THE SWIMMER. But BODY SNATCHERS also starts at the end, when Kevin says, “They're coming to get you! You're next!” And they calm him down and he says, “It started last week.” Oh God! That's the greatest. And I wanted to start like that, with an impact of this face.
C: Did the political undercurrents of those films make any difference to you when you first saw them?
AH: I don't think any of it was conscious. They didn't have a message in this film at all. For example, when I started, my wife suggested, “Why don't you write a film?” “Yeah, maybe.” So I started on the computer and I had Final Draft software, and I started Scene 1, and I always wanted to use something with a big impact, like a fist coming out of the screen. Boom boom. So I wrote that opening, a moment of horror. [Hopkins' face immediately transforms into that of Marlon Brando in APOCALYPSE NOW] “The horror…the horror.” [There's a weird pause, during which I can tell Hopkins is reading my reaction to this impersonation, deciding if he should continue answering the question or have some fun.] “Saigon.” [laughs]
C: If you just want to do Brando all day, go right ahead.
AH: “The horror, the horror. I'm just an errand boy.” [laughs] I'm not a writer, I'm not a screenplay writer or a novelist or a poet. I can write a letter. Because I don't have the skill of writing, I don't have the intellectual grasp of writing a political statement. That's not my feeling. I'm not that. I'm just an actor. I'm not trying to say anything profound about anything. This is just the way it's going to come out, and we'll see how it goes. I wanted to write something so bizarre--I didn't start out to write something bizarre--but I started with a face on the television, and there's a woman watching the races and she's on the phone. And that always interests me, picking up on something so inconsequential, someone's face in the crowd on the television shouting at a camera that should be focused on the horses. And so it evolved, and when I got the diner scene, these two guys hijack the place. I've always been interested in those desert films, the film noir of the desert, like BLOOD SIMPLE, the emptiness, the horror, the terror, the kind of spiritual voodoo-ness. [laughs] And those desolate diners in the middle of nowhere. Those huge trucks go to these diners; I love those. We were driving through El Paso, Texas, and you've got those big steakhouses and those big drivers there. My God. And the drives, the endless drives; it does something to your soul. And I wanted to put all of that in there.
And once they were in the diner, I asked, “Well, why would they hijack the diner?” They don't explain why. In the editing, I thought, at that moment when the car nearly hits Christian Slater, he recognizes the woman driving as the same woman who was in the parking lot when he kidnapped Michael Clarke Duncan. And I sneak in on a gangster movie soundtrack, “Come on Charlie, with your hands up.” “Come and get me coppers!” The whole thing is a fantasy, and Christian and Jeffrey Tambor are dressed in film noir clothes, looking like Richard Widmark or Fred MacMurray. So they hijack the diner, and it's all free flowing, it's all coming very easily to me. And when they hijackers get them to lock up the place, and they say, “Here we are like five little peas in a pod.” And I thought “Peas in a pod? Hey, talking about pods, I haven't seen BODY SNATCHERS in a while.” That's interesting. That's what I got from BODY SNATCHERS, I was thinking of television. It's got us, it takes us over. It absorbs us. What's happening to the latest movie star going to jail or whatever? I think we've lost ourselves; the whole world has lost itself in the media.
Even then, I didn't set out to make any political statement or any sociological statement. But thinking about the BODY SNATCHERS made me think “Now where do we go?” This guy's rambling on about how they're coming to get you. So I thought, what do I say next? So I decided that Slater was going to be an actor, and he was cracking up. Really, it's a light-hearted poke at actors who take themselves so seriously, so Christian's character really dies from over-acting. Then we have the inept director--who is Gavin Grazer, whose big brother is Brian Grazer--and I'm saying, “That's you Gavin, that's you.” He'd never acted before; he does a great job in it.
C: So you acknowledge a stream-of-consciousness approach to the writing?
AH: All of it is. But it was also prompted by…there's a scene where I'm in an ambulance. We filmed that late and night, and Dante Spinotti, our great cinematographer, he was the guy who would give me the go ahead. He'd say, “You have to do it this way.” And I'd say, “Yeah, but we don't have the money.” “Don't worry. I'll do it. It'll be fantastic.” I remember he had this crane jib, this big thing that comes into the ambulance. So we did that scene. And I said, “Can we use that scene where we're all sitting by the pool and Bonhoeffer's dying?” “Yeah.” “But I want to see all the cables. We go back behind the cables, like Darth Vader or ALIEN, but it's death or God or destiny. “Are we in a movie?” “Everything's a movie, dearie.” There's nothing nice about Hollywood. That's my little tongue-in-cheek jab at all of it. But underneath it all is the skull of death.
C: It definitely enters into David Lynch territory, blurring the lines between dreams and reality, movie making and the real world. He's been doing films like that for a while.
AH: I haven't seen his latest one, INLAND EMPIRE. I've got to see that.
C: That's another one dealing with a film being made. I even had in my notes that you might come across as hostile toward the movie-making process.
AH: Yeah, but in a light way, because I've had a great life in it. But some people are so grim about it. I'll see a chap on television being so serious, and I'll say, “Come on. It's a movie. What's the big deal?” “Oh, it's my art!” I like Clint Eastwood's saying, “It's a movie. Is it in focus? Okay, print. Let's movie on please.” You could spend hours doing take after take. I know you can make it look pretty. I was talking to Sean Penn about Eastwood when they were doing MYSTIC RIVER, and he said, “I began to wonder if he even had it in focus; he didn't seem to care.” When you think of it, I know it's good to be caring and perfectionistic, to a point. I know there are some directors who thrive at that. But I remember Brett Ratner [Hopkins' director on HANNIBAL] used to hang around people like Polanski and say, “That scene in ROSEMARY'S BABY, why is the camera there?” “There's nowhere else to put the camera.” “What.” “There's a chair there, and a table there.” “But it looks so perfect.” When you think of all that work that goes into, I notice that when a film comes out--I live up in Malibu and I pass a little duplex there and the next big blockbuster comes out, it's on there an then that will go. So it's a treadmill, a kind of churning-out factory, and I have an ambivalence toward it. Not a cynicism; it's given me a helluva life, like I said. It's that wonderful feeling of someone saying, “Tony, it's really not all that important. Your life is more important. Living is more important.”
C: There's a soundscape to this film that is incredible. Noises and voices are coming from every direction at times.
AH: Our sound engineer was Wylie Stateman, just extraordinary. Those are the guys you never hear of; they appear on credits. Our editor Michael Miller. I sat with Michael on this for four months, and I said, “You have to inform me and challenge me, because I'm going to do something so wacko. And he said, “Let's do it.” But I said, I want to mess with people's brains, mess with people's perception. If it annoys them, tough. I love when people say, “What did I just see? What was that? Did I see that?” Like a ghost just passed through the room.
But Wylie Stateman was the man who came in at the end of the editing and said, “I'd like to take over the film now.” We spent a few weeks together, and he came up with some stuff. And he said, “You want to make an impact?” “Yeah yeah.” I'm glad you recognized the sound work.
C: Well, you're talking about visual moments when people might say, “What did I just see?”, but I found myself saying, “What did I just hear?” There are little bits of dialog from other parts of the film scattered throughout, sound bites from other movies.
AH: When Gina's in the house before she leaves, you hear, “Darling, dinner's ready.” That's from my childhood. So I wanted to put those pieces in. Then you hear the kid playing a bit of music. That's some poor kid being made the practice the tuba, and it turns out to be the little fat guy in Harvey's restaurant. That's also something from my childhood; I remember somebody practicing on a tuba at my grandmother's house. These are little bits of memories my character has in the ambulance as he's dying.
C: I did want to talk about some things you have coming up, including one we're just starting to get information on, THE WOLF MAN.
AH: Right, Benicio Del Toro plays the Wolf Man; I play his father, who's also a wolf man. They haven't got the final draft of the script yet. And I've got BEOWULF coming out next month. I haven't seen it yet, I hear it's pretty good.
C: Tell me about what it was like shooting that. How did you like that type of unconventional movie making?
AH: It's a room. There's a big rig of cameras. Don't ask me how the hell they do it, but you have these jumpsuits on with this little pearl-colored dots all over, even your eyelashes, all the musculature. And sometimes the dots came off, so you have a bunch of makeup woman and people putting these things on. They have maps of where they are supposed to go on your body. Then we went to this studio to be photographed head to toe in a costume and beard, and you never see them again after that. Then you go to the studio, and before each take, each new set up, you have to do things like…[he stands up and poses in several ridiculous poses while contorting his face].
C: Just to get every single angle of your body and face.
AH: And you feel like an idiot, but you all do it. Everyone has a laugh, but then they're ready. “Alright. Stand by.” [Director Robert] Zemeckis is a genius.
C: Did you actually act opposite other actors?
AH: Oh yeah. Ray Winstone, John Malkovich, Robin Wright Penn. I didn't work with Angelina Jolie. She came in later. But I finished after about two or three weeks. It was on interesting process. You don't have a set. If you have prop or something, it's made of steel or some metal, like a cage, hollowed out, nothing in it. I wear a crown, some thing. And they film all that, and then they have the monitors but all you can see are dots moving around. And Bob Zemeckis would say, “That's where you're throne is, that's where they're bringing you in.” And then he'd say, “Come over here, I'll show you this. When you jump off, that's what will be behind you,” this huge artist's horizon and fire in ancient Europe. But I haven't seen the movie yet, not even the trailer.
C: I also wanted to say that I'm very pleased to see that you've made another film with James Ivory [CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION], after a long time and a great cast.
AH: It's a really fine script, and I like James Ivory, he's a wonderful. We went down to Argentina, and I really like him; he's good. I hear it's a good movie, and it's a very interesting book [by Peter Cameron], with the script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. I enjoyed that, but I was only there for about two weeks.
C: You were talking earlier about how much you liked horror films, and as one of the slightly older members of our staff, I kind of discovered horror in the late 1970s. One of the films that truly creeped me out as a youngster was MAGIC. I think people forget that it was directed by Richard Attenborough, written by William Goldman.
AH: Yeah, yeah. One of my earliest attempts at horror, psychological horror. The critics knocked it to pieces back when it came out in 1978. It caught on later as a cult movie. It's caught on in the DVD age, done good sales and so on. The film in that vein that I enjoyed doing most recently was FRACTURE. One of those films that I haven't seen since the '70s. You get a script, my agent said, “I want you to read this FRACTURE script, with Ryan Gosling attached.” And I think, Oh yeah. He's a good actor. “You play a villain.” “Oh yeah?” I soon realized, oh yeah. I phoned him up and said “I'd love to do this.” This is the sort of film you don't see anymore. Kind of smart, glossy. It's a good popcorn movie, but it's good, it's entertaining, sharp, clever.
C: Well thank you so much for spending time with us. It's been a real honor.
AH: Anytime I can talk about BODY SNATCHERS, I'm happy. [laughs]
Capone
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