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Recovery Mission:
Oldman isn't worried he'll start drinking again: "I know where insanity is," he admits. "It's just at the edge of my arm."
HIGH AND DRY--The ever intense Gary Oldman has cleaned up his act and made a masterpiece: His writing and directing debut, Nil By Mouth, is a harrowing portrait of a miserable childhood and the drinking life he left behind.
Article by Holly Sorensen
Morton's--the slick Los Angeles eatery where there are as many deals cooking as plates of swordfish with mango coulis--isn't exactly the place you imagine eating with Gary Oldman. The 39-year old actor has long embodied a sharp, streetwise integrity, both in his signature performances in independent movies (Sid and Nancy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Professional) and in his splashier turns in Hollywood fare (JFK, Dracula, Air Force One). You might expect to be sharing a few belts with him at a downtown watering hole. But this is a new day.
As he walks into Morton's in his velvet blazer and T-shirt, Oldman exudes an unexpected softness. His face is like a traffic light that alternately flashes passion, wit and extraordinary sweetness, depending on the topic, and all of those come up when he discusses the big issue of the day: his powerful writing and directing debut, Nil By Mouth. The film portrays a working-class family struggling with addiction, spousal abuse and loss, and the action takes place in the South London neighborhood of Oldman's childhood. Far from being wistfully nostalgic, Nil By Mouth is devastating in its honesty and relentless in its originality. It heralds the arrival of not only an important new filmmaker, but a new Oldman as well.
Time Out New York: You were the toast of the Cannes and Toronto. Are you surprised?
Gary Oldman: Yes, it's odd to me, because this is a very colloquial film, very specific in setting. The vernacular--there are English people who can't understand it--it's like a code. We're very much surprised at the response outisde of Britain. American response has been incredible, the French. Most surprising is the Japanese. They say that will be our biggest market.
TONY: The presenting producer is Luc Besson; the first acknowledgement is to Coppola, two directors that you have worked with. What was their involvement?
GO: I worked with Luc; we've done favors for each other. I was in The Professional. I liked him, and I signed to do it before I even read the script. I did it for peanuts. I did The Fifth Element for nothing; he was doing my movie and called and asked if I'd be in his. We asked Coppola for permission to use Apocolypse Now. He sent us back a piece of paper that just said "Gary can have whatever he wants." I'm keeping it, in case we work together again; I'm going to paste his letter over every deal point. Size of trailer? "Gary can have whatever he wants!" Final cut? "Gary can have whatever he wants!"
TONY: Was directing harder than you thought?
GO: I always had an idea of how difficult it was. I've always been aware of time, of turning up, knowing the lines, being prepared. I've always tried to be director-friendly in that way. But basically, directing is like bending backwards, trying to stick your head in your own behind. I was very clear how I wanted to do this and how I wanted it to look. [Frames his face with his hands] This is our landscape. That's where the film lives. It's like that story about John Ford, out in the desert with a young executive of the day, and he said to Ford, "What are you going to shoot out here? There's nothing here." And Ford said, "I'm going to shoot the most important thing in the world: the human face.
TONY: Who is the actress who plays Janet? I read that she had never acted before, and she's just fantastic.
GO: That woman, Laila Morse, is my sister. Laila Morse is an anagram for mia sorella, or "my sister." I moved the letters around. Not a lot of people know it.
TONY: Also, a Kathleen Oldman is credited with a song at the end of the movie.
GO: That's my mom. I would've had her play the role in the movie, but that's another story. The character my sister plays is a key character. I went through a long audition process with people, and the music and dialogue and tone of the character is based on my sister. It's not her, it's not about her, but based on her. And when you've got a tune in your head of how you want the lines read...I could hear her when I was writing it, saying, "Did you have a drink? You get fucking lippy when you have a drink!" I met all these actresses, some of whom were brilliant, but I didn't want to be in there every day, spoon-feeding these lines to someone. I couldn't find anyone to sound like her, to hit those rythyms. They all came in and they acted. I mean, I can be as over-the-top as I want in the films I do. And I am. But I don't like watching it.
TONY: Were you surprised at how good she is?
GO: Yes. The other actors--when you throw a cat in amongst the pigeons like that, they will either tear it to pieces or they will go with it. And what I loved is that they embraced her, and they had to look to their game. Because what they were getting back was so fucking real.
TONY: The casting is terrific. It's so nice not to see Hollywood pretty boys and models.
GO: When these people come up on the screen--for certain, to an American audience--they won't know Kathy Burke. They'll just see the people. It's a compliment to the actors' work that people think it's improvised. Because they make that dialogue sound so real.
TONY: Then there's the music. First, Eric Clapton does the soundtrack, which is incredible. And who is this Frances who sings several songs? I've never heard of her--she's great.
GO: Frances Ashman. She was a waitress. I met her at a nightclub, and she mailed me a tape. She lived a block from the production office. She's the singer in the scene in the club. I put her in the scene for no other reason than I wanted to watch her in the dailies!
TONY: How did you get Clapton?
GO: I had a temp track; there were things that I wanted to hold onto that I liked. People wanted too much money for the rights to everything--I was pushed to the wall financially. We came back [to L.A.] knowing that I was going to have to give up the music that I had fallen in love with. I was sad. We had a screening, and Eric happened to be in town. I'm an aquaintance of his, so I said, "Come along to the screening; you'll like this film." So he came along and he said, "It's people like you who give me hope. It's right up my Strasse!" He said, "I know what to do with this." And he did, didn't he? He said, "If you don't like it, you don't have to use it."
TONY: How was it for you to see it with an audience for the first time?
GO: I was talking to David Lynch today; he's a neighbor. Very strange. He lives opposite me, and if you stand at the kitchen window, you can see him in his Mercedes going off to work. If he sees me, he'll wave and smile, and I'm transported into the lawn and picket fence of Blue Velvet--and the fireman, waving slowly. It's like life imitating art. [Adopts Lynch's American twang] "Come in fer a cup of cawfee!" So this morning I went to the studio he's built, and we were talking about movies, editing, what-have-you. And I told him the story of sitting at Cannes watching you movie with 2,000 people, with my editor, having not seen the film in five or six months. You're watching a scene, and in your head you go, "And cut." And it goes on a few seconds more! I found myself saying, "That could come out, and I could trim that." David said, "The more people there are in the audience, the slower the movie gets." That night, it was interminable! We were just saying if John Cassavetes was alive, he'd still be editing those movies. But this was representative of where my head was at the beginning of 1996. I'm sure in five years' time, I'll see the movie and say, "Did we really think that cut worked?"
TONY: If you've had a rough childhood like yours, there is a tendency to be a perfectionist. The child is always thinking, If I were only better, things would be different.
GO: Yeah, it triggers things like that. It pushes those buttons. I know my father is still an issue in my life. I was recently made aware that when a child is abandoned, as I guess I was, you invent the man. And it's a father figure, an icon, a myth--invariably it's a perfect picture. And you fall short of it--and you have to come to terms eventually with your limits.
TONY: If this movie is about any one thing, it's about fatherhood. When the dedication to your own father comes up on the screen, it's devastating.
GO: Well, it's personal, but not full-out autobiographical. Ray is not my dad. The dad Ray talks about is my father.
TONY: But Ray is in the process of becoming the father he talks about.
GO: Yeah. But most people assume my dad beat my mother up, and I'm Michelle, watching my mom and dad go through this thing. The tabloid press in England got hold of it and started running all these stories like "My dad's a thug!" and about him beating my mother up, which, of course, upset my mom and my family. We are a close family. [Oldman recently bought his mom a house in Beverly Hills; his father left his father for a younger woman and eventually died of alcoholism.]
TONY: How did you come to write the screenplay? And how much of it is written? The film has a Cassavetes-Mike Leigh quality to it.
GO: It's pretty much all in there. I write the overlapping ums and the ahhs. Obviously, it's a creative process, and if the actor said to me, "How 'bout I say it like this?" I'm not going to bully people. I started to do the script--I was sort of someone bemoaning what was out there, specifically what was coming out of England. I was in my cups, sitting at the bar, too much to drink: "I could write a fucking movie that's more fucking honest...." I was working a lot, so I couldn't. It's hard to turn around to people who make money off you and say, "I'm going to take a year off. I don't care who calls me--Scorsese, I don't care. I'm going to take two years, remove myself from the market and make a movie." YOu get to a certain point, and you can demand a certain kind of billing and money...
TONY: Was that important to you?
GO: Sitting here, I can't say that. Maybe one day it will be. I don't quite know what to make of it all. You know, I am the sole financier of Nil By Mouth.
TONY: Wow, usually actors make headlines just for taking a pay cut.
GO: If you see me in Air Force One, then you see Nil By Mouth, you get a pretty good idea of what I did with the cash. It does fit together, in a crazy way. There are two Garys that are operating. I'm out there looking for a good role, primarily. But I'm looking for a good price tag, so it would buy me freedom. But there's also the other Gary, who thinks he's wasting his time doing it. There are other things I should be doing. I shouldn't be struggling on a movie set trying to utter some unutterable piece of junk, when I could be playing Iago on the stage, or Hamlet. Nil By Mouth is representative of who I am as an artist and what I'm about. But when you play those great parts, and you say those great lines every night--you can't do Shakespeare eight shows a week for six months and not come out a better, more enriched person for it. You can't have understanding and poetry in your mouth and not have your life unfettered by it. I'm certainly going to get a lot more from it than saying, "Mr. President, get your hands up!"
TONY: So what is your career strategy going forward? How is Lost in Space?
GO: It's quite good. If it does well, you'll see me again as Dr. Smith.
TONY: Will you write and direct again?
GO: I want something to say. I've done Nil By Mouth; I've purged whatever that was. It wrote me. It was like a stream of consciousness. In five weeks, I had the first draft. Eric Clapton said, "It was like you throwing up over everyone." And now, when I sit down at the computer, there are the two Garys again. The Gary that lived in South London for 15, 16 years, and there is this Gary who went to drama school, got into theater, went to the West End, started to make movies, did more plays, came here, and really went into self-imposed exile, an a way. I wanted to come here--I loved America when I first came in '81. I moved to New York and I said, "I'm home. This is my town." I'm not one of those Brits that goes to the English pub and plays cricket under the Hollywood sign. I really immersed myself in the culture. And I work in the industry as an American. I have a fantastic ear, and I'm a great people watcher. I sit down at the computer and the two Garys battle.
TONY: Is your goal to merge the two sides into a unified whole, or simply to make peace with the fact that your body holds two people?
GO: The last one--to make peace. If, for instance, I start to write a piece that is set here, my tendancy is to say, "Who am I trying to kid?" and to keep going back to that old neighborhood.
TONY: When you have an underprivileged childhood and you transcend it somehow, there is a lot of guilt in leaving it behind.
GO: That's it. It's the guilt. You say, This is all phony. You feel phony in the new world. My therapist said, "There is no reason why you can't live where you live, go to Madison Avenue, observe it, and write something about it. What's dishonest about that?" But I have this real thing about it. And that's not helping. And writing is hard enough all by itself. If a script came to me to direct, maybe I would.
TONY: Are you afraid of a relapse?
GO: No, I'm not afraid. But I know where insanity is. It's just at the edge of my arm. It's as far away as that. There was a day--well, not a day; there was never just a day. There were three-day, four-day, one-week benders. You'd come out of a five-day run of mind-stoking consumption. Mind-stroking. And I would come out the end of it, and "Just this one time...." There were no excuses anymore. That was it. I just read this book, Drinking, A Love Story. There's not a sentence or a page I can't read without going, Yeah. Very simply, you have to live life on life's terms. There is no buffer anymore. You feel the feelings. You experience the experience. Sometimes that can be thrilling and wonderful. It's like the focus pullers--you finally see the image very sharp: "Ah, there it is." I used to--life was sort of a blur of massive color. But I'm still working on all of that, yeah.
TONY: Did you carry around the romantic ideal of the drunken artist? And were you afraid stopping would make you less good?
GO: Oh, yeah, "The edge. It gives me an edge. It gives me my spark." That's the drunk talking, not the artist. Because the drunk doesn't want to stop. He'll do anything. Like I said, there were just no more excuses. "Hey, the sun's shining! Let's have a martini! Hey, it's raining; let's have a bottle of whiskey. I'm happy; let's celebrate. I'm sad; let's drink."
TONY: You have a new baby boy. How do the issues in the film resonate for you as a new father?
GO: He's five months old, yesterday. I have another son, who's nine, and given the circumstances, I have a miraculously good relationship with him. I'm just trying to be the best dad I can be. For me, it obviously had a lot to do with recovery and putting down the drink. All of this that I have at the moment is because of that. I'm just living the day, and having a bit of grace and gratitude, really. And it's hard for me. So far, I have a terrific marriage and I have a beautiful kid, and I'm remodeling a house. I've always had terrific friends around me who loved me, even though I couldn't always see it. But we're sitting here, I've made this film--I could never have done it before. So I've broken the pattern of fatherhood just through that. And maybe that's all it needed.