“There are some people who suffer from this ‘[Auschwitz] disease’ for life, simply because of the experience they have gone through. Another group simply doesn’t talk about it. And a third group of people have learned to come to terms with these events. I’m a writer, so I don’t belong to any one of these three categories. I view my experience as being raw material and I process it in the process of writing. And as I go along, I get rid of this experience. You know, this is how I go on and on and on and on, until I reach a stage, as a writer, where I will have run out of raw material. Then it’s time to die.”
“I was teaching a martial arts class and a couple of guys showed up in my class. They were talking about my team, Mannheim, and because of the way they were dressed and because they were talking about my team, I immediately knew they were hooligans, they were in a firm. Being 15 and having this whole urban myth about hooligans, I was like, ‘You got to take me to a game. I want to stand with you guys.’ They were like ‘No, no, no. No girls allowed.’
I said: ‘You have to take me because after all I’m teaching you martial arts here, so you can’t really convince me that I can’t take care of myself.’ So, in the end, to the guys and in general, I was like the little sister. One they could accept. I wasn’t necessarily a girl’s girl. They took me and for two years it became somewhat of a family for me. Everything I portrayed in the film was really what I saw. Like I thought it was really cool and really fun. I thought it was their way of choosing an extreme sport, they were just adrenalin junkies, it was alright; they didn’t hurt anybody that wasn’t in the same game. They didn’t attack families. They basically were 30 guys running against 30 guys from another team who wanted to do the same thing. I thought, ‘What’s the big fuss? Why can’t they just let them do what they want to do? They’re just a bunch of boys wanting to get into fisticuffs.’ So at first you think it’s very cool and you see a certain attraction about it, and then you start noticing what happens when somebody does break the rule, you know? You notice that even though they have this unspoken law of don’t kick anybody when he’s down, there will always be somebody who breaks it. You just cannot rely on a bunch of guys all following these rules. Even in a boxing fight you have a referee because somebody will always go low.”
“I’ve never seen poverty on that level. A million people living in a very small space with no running water, no sanitation, no electricity, there’s a very high level of disease, HIV, and yet there’s that scene in the movie where the children come running up to you and they say, ‘How are you?’ They welcome you. I remember coming back and saying this to my sister and saying they’ve got such – I mean the kids have got nothing, they’ve got no toys, literally no toys, so they make footballs from plastic bags scrunched together and they just wrap string around it, and they kick it around, or they take a piece of string with a button on the end and they pull it as if it’s a dog. Toddlers of three or four are already carrying their siblings on their back. And yet their spirit is so welcoming and there’s a life going on. There’s little cafes and they’re barbecuing meat. There’s a life. Anyway, I came back and I said this to my sister and she was like, ‘You’re being so sentimental. You can’t say that. You’re a wealthy white person. How can you go there and say that?’ They said to me, ‘Where you come from, do children welcome strangers?’ and I said, ‘Where I come from children are told not to speak to strangers.’ We live in a different culture but you do ask a question whether with material wealth there can be spiritual poverty and vice versa. It’s a dangerous territory, though, isn’t it?”
“I had a very difficult time. I actually quit at least 4 or 5 times. I couldn’t get a job. I had done 30 plays in Los Angeles and I couldn’t get a job. I was getting little jobs here and there, but no one was really recognising what I thought I had. I thought, ‘I’ve done all this work, why isn’t it paying off?’ That really starts to hurt your self-image; and I already had a questionable self-image coming into the game. I wasn’t like the best candidate to become an actor. I was really insecure and I didn’t particularly like myself very much.”
What did your mother say to make you not give up? It’s down to her, I believe, that you carried on? She’d never told me to do anything before and she said, ‘I’ve let you do everything. I’ve tried to let you make all your own choices in your life but goddamit, Mark, I’m not going to let you do it.’ I wanted to go back to Wisconsin and work with my father doing construction painting. She said, ‘Goddamit, I won’t let you do it. If you give up, you’ll never forgive yourself.’ She called my dad and she basically said she’d never talk to him again if he let me come up there. It was a pretty powerful moment for me. I woke up.
Your career really started to take off when you did ‘This is our Youth’, with Kenneth Lonergan, in New York. Yes. That period of time was like Cinderella. It was very exciting because I had come from Los Angeles theatre, and I went to New York to do a play and nobody knew who the hell I was. After our opening night we’re standing in a restaurant, having a party, and someone comes running in around 12:15, with the New York Times, and yells, ‘It’s a hit! It’s a hit!’ That was a dream!”
Did you talk to John Woo about violence? I have interviewed him a few times and on each occasion he told me how much he hates violence. I don’t know if anyone knows this about John but his dream is to make a musical. It’s his dream. He just happens to be a fantastic choreographer and really the only way to do it if you’re not doing it with dance is to do it with action. That’s what he does, so beautifully. The way he moves the camera with the actors on Windtalkers, it’s like a huge musical production, very choreographed. He’s the most gentle, soulful, non-violent man I think I’ve ever met, yet he makes these incredibly violent films.”
Michael White: With Chuck and Buck I do think one of the biggest taboos, at least in America, is still men relating with other men in an honest, vulnerable way. It’s something you rarely see in anything, and I just find it amusing. It’s not keeping pace with the reality of life. Men, in this day and age, are expressing their more vulnerable side. I don’t live the life of an action hero, so, in terms of my own life, those movies don’t really speak to me other than as wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Stephen Applebaum: I’ve been writing about Fight Club, and that seems to me a very old way of looking at male relationships: men relating through violence. White: Fight Club is a perfect example of what the media … I think that it’s more acceptable to show two guys wailing on each other as a way of connecting, because then it has all the undercurrent of homoeroticism but, OK, in the end you’re both punching bags. But, you know, to call a spade like in Chuck and Buck, where one character says, ‘Do you remember when we were actually a partnership?’ I get all coiled up over something like Fight Club, because I think it’s feeding on the adolescent notion that as you turn into adolescence, you can’t relate in a real way to men. You have to freak out over two men relating. In Fight Club that whole sentiment is turned into a pathology. It’s interesting, but I think it’s a sad reality that a lot of guys think.”
I thought it was interesting that most sympathetic characters in the film were the women: they were the most nurturing or the most understanding. Well, it goes back to the whole Fight Club thing. I just thought it would be interesting. I thought it would be interesting to have Buck on, like, this mysoginist rant, in a way. He’s writing this play about a woman who’s a witch, and he becomes friends with this actor who’s a total, full on mysoginist, but the women in the movie totally undermine their argument. They’re the most campassionate. But it’s also interesting to write a movie in which the men are conflicted and have all these, like, tortured relationships to themselves, to each other, and to their sexuality – because they can’t really, honestly, communicate about it. And I think is more true in life, too, women, certainly here in America, have an easier time relating, so they have much more equanimity when it comes to issues of this kind. The theatre manager, she sees it all going on and she understands; she’s not freaked out. I think that plays into the whole Fight Club thing: guys just have more difficulty accepting their own vulnerabilities and needs for each other in male relationships.
“I came home one evening – I had just driven from Isleworth to Borehamwood, which is a long drive, and my mother said, ‘You’ve got to go back to the studio right away’.
“I was furious. I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘They’re testing operators for something – Technicolor or something – so you’ve got to go back to be tested and have an interview’. Those that had been in came out shaken because the questions were highly technical.
“When it came to my turn they started all this technical stuff and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m your man because I’m a dunce at a lot of these things’.
“So there was a shocked silence and they said, ‘How do you expect to get on?’ I said, ‘Well I’m very fond of painting, and I also watch the light’. I had formed a habit, oddly enough, of watching the light in a room.
“Anyway, they said, ‘Which side of the face does Rembrandt light?’ I said ‘This side,’ which was a guess, really. ‘And for etching, of course, it would be reversed’. That was another bluff. But the next day they told me I had been chosen.”
Kelly Reilly: I have to say that I am not the most ambitious person in the world.
Stephen Applebaum: So the work’s the most important thing for you? Reilly: Definitely, definitely. It must be nice to go to these parties and show your face and be bit recognised, I’m sure that must be great for a first few months or so. But I think I would just find myself in the corner, wishing all my friends were there, and going why am I here?
So where did it all start? I can’t remember where it started. When I was very young I was always grabbing all my friends from down the street and making them put on plays with me. But I never, ever, ever, in my wildest dreams, thought that I could be an actor because I come from a working-class family.”
What do your parents do? My dad’s a police officer and my mum’s a secretary. We’re a kind of two-up, two-down, very normal suburban household. I went to a normal secondary school. Other people do those jobs, you know? I forgot about it, kind of grew out of it, went to school and I had two brilliant drama teachers and that was it. They gave me plays to read and I just kind of felt that that was it for me. It wasn’t like, this is what I want to do but it was the only thing that pushed my buttons and I was good at it. That was when I was at secondary school.
Where did you go from there? We put on plays every other week, there was a bunch of us at school who felt the same and we had a student drama teacher who came to tell us about this showcase he’d been on called The Casting Couch. I decided, being the arrogant 16-year-old I was, I’d have a go. So I wrote off a letter to the artistic director saying, ‘Please, please see me. I’m 16 years old, I’m great, I think you really need to see me and it would be a loss if you don’t’. She didn’t see me, but about 6 months later I got the audition and I was actually the youngest person to get on it. I got on it and I got an agent from it.
It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I now look back on myself at 16 and go, ‘You’re a nutter’. The older I get the more I want to step away from it and not be in the spotlight and not have any attention. Then I realise I’m kind of in the wrong job. But that’s how it started. I got this agent and she gave me my first audition, which was Prime Suspect, it was a complete fluke. Before I knew it I was doing my last year of A-levels and I just had to ask my headmistress if I could take 2 months off to go up to Manchester to film. They did and I came back and that was it: the bug was there. I wanted to go to drama school, my drama teachers were very keen that you go and learn your craft, but I didn’t have the money to do it, that was one, and I was getting more work. So I thought I’m 17, let me have a go. I’ll see what happens. I got episodes on TV, that was then and I never went back.
“I think if you put people, actors for instance, under duress, something suddenly happens: you get past acting. Kubrick did that when he was making The Shining. I had dinner with Jack Nicholson and he said, ‘He did 140 takes. It took two days to do one shot. It was just exhausting.” Later I spoke to Kubrick and I said, ‘Why do that many takes?’ He said, ‘Well, I try to exhaust the actors because once they’re really tired they stop acting’. I do think there is something in putting actors into an environment like the Amazon, or putting them into heat and humidity, that they respond to. It’s all about trying to integrate the actors and the environment.
So, why do you keep returning to this theme [alienation]? You have even written that you feel alienated from your own work. When you watch your films, you said, they seem like the work of a stranger. I don’t want to psychoanalyse myself but I suppose if you look at my preface to the script of Hope and Glory, where I am talking about the lower middle-class suburbs around London, which grew up between the wars, they were completely alienating. These were people who had no past, no history, they were refugees from the Industrial Revolution who were coming into these sunny suburbs that were clean, and they threw off their past. They were strangers to themselves and they had this kind of foolish look about them of people who don’t know what to do or how to behave. I suppose that was the thing that I came out of. And I suppose that sense of not belonging to anything is what creates that sense of alienation. I also remember that when I was a kid and we lost our house – it was completely burnt, gone, everything – I felt a great sense of freedom. Since then I’ve always eschewed material possessions, I’ve never put value on them at all.
Would you say you portrayed Panama fairly and accurately in the [Tailor of Panama]? The people in the poorer areas of Panama were wonderful. But there was a ghastly rich community who were just awful, awful people. These were the people running the banks and all the corruption, and they were some of the worst people I’ve met in my life. They all have bodyguards because everyone’s afraid of kidnapping. Basically there are two types of kidnapping in Panama. There’s the serious one where the Columbians come over and grab someone and bring him over to Columbia where they’re bought and sold. There’s a whole trade in this kind of kidnapping and the ransom’s usually around $2-3m. Then there’s the local guys who just look for $10,000, but you have to produce it within two hours otherwise they kill the victim. We always kept a lot of money in our pocket as we went round the place just in case, but we were left alone.
Returning to Deliverance, I watched it recently and felt that the film was an anxiety dream about how masculinity has been made monstrous by being repressed by civilisation. What did you want to say with the film? The central idea of Deliverance was that you had this river that was a metaphor, a symbol, for life, and it’s flow had been stopped by the dam, which is probably the most aggressive act that can be levelled against nature. And what’s it for? It is to generate electricity for air-conditioners in Atlanta. So these men are responsible for that in a sense. There’s this notion that you have benevolent and malevolent sides of nature, and those… were the malevolent spirits of the forest who take revenge on these men for being responsible for the destruction of this place. It is fine when people talk about being in harmony with nature and finding a harmonious place within nature, but you have to recognise that just as there is a good and an evil side in men, so there is in nature.
What do you see resulting from the schism between man and nature? I think that it leads to neurosis. If we’re not in touch with other living things on the planet – like animals and trees, the climate and the weather – if we lose touch with all of that, then I think it leads to lots of problems and neurosis. It is easy to forget that we are all a part of nature, and to set ourselves apart is incredibly dangerous.
Stephen Applebaum died in February 2024. He was one of the UK’s foremost film interviewers, with interviews spanning from Beyonce and Al Gore to Michael Moore and George Clooney; Bill Murray and Terry Gilliam, to Vidal Sassoon and Paul Rusesabagina. He’s survived by his wife and two daughters.
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Stephen Applebaum: Would a film like The Devils be hard to make now? Ken Russell: It would be impossible. No one would finance such a film, I would imagine.
Hasn’t the British Film Industry improved? Well I’m not so mad on the British film industry. It seems to just produce one or two gems and then tons of mediocrity. I mean I saw, there was one the other day of people painting electric pylons.
Oh Among Giants? Is that what it was called? I thought it was called Men Painting Pylons. And obviously it was so bad that they were desperate. Do you know what they did? They did long shots of them painting these pylons and over it they put a male voice chorus singing spiritual as though these guys from Newcastle would be singing “Nobody has known the trouble I’ve seen”. You know? All this crap. And it was watching paint dry. That was financed all very much by the British film industry. There was no excuse for it no matter what it was.
Maybe the establishment just wants new faces, new attitudes and films about social groups. You know, I’m not interested in that ever happening, I’m interested in wider subjects, wider horizons and not obvious things. New ways at looking at things. Just pointing out new excitements if you like, and so this film will be a new way at looking at Edgar Allan Poe.
What about British cinema? I’m not interested in any of the British ones and I think that there are a lot of the American ones that are very… I don’t think enough credits given to American films these days, I think they’re very imaginative. I mean “The Thirteenth Floor” I thought was a wonderful film. I saw it on Sky. I loved it. I’ve seen it several times and it’s really quite a deep film. We all loved, at least I presume we loved the “Matrix” and we all want to see the “Matrix 2” and there is this film “Very Bad Things” which I love. And there have been a whole spate lately and they’ve come and gone very quickly but I can’t call one particular one to mind but I’ve got a sense that I’ve seen a number of very imaginative American movies that haven’t quite been exploited properly.
Stephen Applebaum died in February 2024. He was one of the UK’s foremost film interviewers, with interviews spanning from Beyonce and Al Gore to Michael Moore and George Clooney; Bill Murray and Terry Gilliam, to Vidal Sassoon and Paul Rusesabagina. He’s survived by his wife and two daughters.
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