58° Festival del film Locarno 2005
Interview with John Malkovich
John Malkovich
Meeting John Malkovich has something fascinating. He speaks with a rich vocabulary but leaves pauses in mid-sentences that makes you wonder if there is still coming more. But you know when you have his attention: he stops blinking.
The busy actor-producer-director sat on a terrace of a hotel in Ascona where they like to barrack the candidates for the Miss Switzerland beauty peagant when the crown is handed out to the winner in the Italian-speaking part of the country.
Malkovich once said that he liked to dress like a Swiss Banker who's been fired. If the suit he was wearing when meeting with OutNow.CH is any indication that would be a salmon-olive tie made out of wool and Swiss watch so big you could cut a pizza on the clockface.
The American came to the Locarno Filmfestival in order to receive the Locarno Excellence Award. During the morning he entertained a crowd of the public and press with a speech on the differences between stage and cinema. He also talked about some of his upcoming projects. Most interestingly Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf where he would join Anthony Hopkins and Robin Wright Penn. Beowulf will again be shot in the motion-capture animation technology that Zemeckis already used in The Polar Express. The story is based on the epic poem that recounts the tale of the scandinavian warrior who takes on a legendary monster, Grendel.
Since this was big news the first question OutNow.CH had to ask was the obvious one.
OutNow.CH (ON): What's the role you play in Beowulf?
John Malkovich (JM): It's a sort of advisor to the King. But I don't have the newest script which will be on my desk when I am back in France.
ON: Are you definitively going to be in it?
JM: It's not definitive. But it is very likely.
ON: During your speech this morning you also briefly mentioned a trash version of Hamlet.
JM: It is a script that our company will produce. Set in Texas, Hamlet is a football quarterback and his mother is a sheriff. I'm acting in it.
Being him...
ON: Are you a person that likes to take risks when chosing projects?
JM: I'd like to be free to do the thigs that appeal to me in any point in time. I've often done films - or plays for that matter - where it would have been a dubious proposition to think that this would be some kind of success. But I like to do the things that interest me with the people that interest me.
ON: Do you make a differentiation between artsy films like the ones with Raoul Ruiz and blockbusters like Con Air and In the Line of Fire?
JM: It's the same work so I don't feel any differently in particular. You know to do a great play is the same as doing a awful play. Doing a tragedy is the same as doing a farce.
ON: What's easier, being in a play oder acting on film?
JM: In a play your job is to recreate something living every night that goes on without you. Movies is not that. It doesn't have to be alive. I don't think either of them are all that easy.
ON: You are especially known for your evil characters. What makes people believe that you are evil on screen?
JM: The short answer to that would be that I do what other people would like to do but they are too affraid or they suffer from punishment.
ON: Do you have any plans to direct again?
JM: I'm scheduled to direct a film with the german producer Stefan Arndt called The Crime of Olga Arbelina from a french novel written by a russian writer Andreï Makine. A very good writer but difficult to categorize.
ON: You said you didn't like to give advice to your actors when you direct. But what do you do when they are not doing what you need to have for a good scene?
Being a Pardo
JM: Well it depends on theater or movies. There is a similarity in spite of the fact that I think they are very different metiers. As a public - and when you are directing you are a member of the public - we lose interest when we don't believe. Or in other words things fail to compel us because we don't believe what we are looking at. When you direct in a theater you have to ascertain what might be the reason for not believing. That's what I am trying to do. That's my working theory. But I haven't fired a lot of people.
ON: I noticed the sketches you have in your lap. What are you drawing at the moment?
JM: They are just fashion drawings I have to finish.
ON: You've been designing clothes for quite a while now. What does fascinate you about it and when do you find the time to do it?
JM: When you act you have a lot of time doing nothing. You have a lot of time waiting. So I draw a lot of times. It is a lot of work and it takes up a lot of time. I wouldn't say it's necessary, it's just something I like doing.
ON: Do your wear your own stuff designed by yourself?
JM: I can't afford it. I have some things of ours but not that many.
ON: Being John Malkivich seems to be the obvious choice to be screened tonight at the Piazza Grande when you will receive the excellence award. What film would you have shown if it would have been up to you? It can be any film in time or anything else with you in it.
JM: I didn't mind really what they wanted to show. They asked me and I mentioned two films that I had completed as an actor. But for one reason or the other those films were not available so they decided on Being John Malkovich.
ON: What films were you mentioning?
JM: They were new films. One I did with Raoul Ruiz about the painting artist Klimt and another film I did a year and a half ago called Colour me Kubrick. But I don't know the release plans for either one. As far as I am concerned they both are finished.
ON: Would you like to walk into the head of somebody else and and if yes which person's brain would you like to enter?
JM: No, I wouldn't. If my head is any indication I prefer not to go into any one else's.
