The greatest thing about news segments, and interviews in particular, is that you really never know what’s going to happen. Whether it’s the reporter or the witness, odds are that somebody is going to say or do something at some point that’s worth recording and uploading to YouTube — and that’s exactly why we’re here today.
Posts Tagged ‘Interviews’
The politics of climate change
July 28th, 2009 |
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This week’s guest is writer and eco-warrior Jonathon Porritt.
As the founding director of the sustainable development NGO, Forum for the Future, and, until this month, chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, when Porritt speaks about global warming people listen. The former director of Friends of the Earth and trustee of WWF came into the pod to fill in the British government’s scorecard on tackling climate change.
The astronomer Carl Sagan was a prolific scientist, pioneering the study of exobiology and astrochemistry and promoting the search for extraterrestrial life. One of his biggest achievements was Cosmos, a 13-part science documentary series first aired in the US in 1980. In it, he took viewers on a journey around the universe describing everything from atoms to galaxies and set a gold standard for science on television.
Alok Jha speaks to Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan, who was also one of the writers on Cosmos.
You can win a DVD box set of the classic documentary series by entering our competition.
Pursuing the cosmic theme, we visit a new exhibition at London’s Science Museum that shows how astronomy has influenced culture, and how it has changed our behaviour and been popularised. Exhibits include Astronomy Monopoly and a telescope built from baked-bean cans, spare car parts and coat hangers.
As ever, there’s the Newsjam which this week has details of a sharp rise in the number of animal experiments in the UK, the discovery that humans glow in the dark, and fatherhood beckons for our favourite tortoise, Loneseome George.
Stick your neck out. We’d love to hear your views on the show and the week’s science news …
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Almodóvar’s Lanzarote
July 25th, 2009 |
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Broken Embraces, which premieres in Britain this week, draws heavily on the dramatic landscapes of Lanzarote. Annie Bennett meets director Pedro Almodóvar and follows in his footsteps around the island
A decade ago, film-maker Pedro Almodóvar took a photograph of El Golfo beach in Lanzarote. When he got the pictures developed, he could just make out two tiny figures standing on the sand. Intrigued, he had the shot enlarged, and revealed a couple locked in a tight embrace, lost in the landscape.
The image, which he called The Secret of El Golfo, niggled away at him for years, eventually inspiring the story that would become Broken Embraces, his latest film, on general release here from 28 August. Although most of the action takes place in Madrid, the scenes shot in Lanzarote are crucial to the plot and set the tone for the whole film.
In Broken Embraces, the two main characters, Lena and Mateo, played by Penélope Cruz and Lluís Homar, stand on the same spot. He takes a photograph and Lena embraces him from behind, sheltering from the wind. I went to Lanzarote and stood there too.
Striated cliffs in shades of burgundy, russet and ochre frame a beach where wild waves crash on to the shore, with what looks like a slick of green paint splashed across the charcoal sand. It is the most extraordinary sight, and it is hardly surprising that Almodóvar didn’t notice the couple.
“It was like in Antonioni’s movie Blow Up, when David Hemmings takes the picture in the park and doesn’t see the body by the bushes until he develops the film in his darkroom,” said the director when I met him later in Madrid. “The camera lens sees more than the naked eye.”
The beach is actually a volcanic crater eroded by the sea, and the green stain is a lagoon, linked to the ocean by lava tubes hidden under the sand. The colour comes from the algae that flourish in a peculiar ecosystem created by the high salt content of the water and the composition of the rock. If you sift through the stones glinting in the sunlight on the beach, you might find crystals of olivine, the green mineral used as a gemstone. But you have to be patient and look very carefully: like the embracing couple, they are not visible at first glance.
“I’d gone to Lanzarote shortly after my mother died,” said Almodóvar, “and the colours of the island seemed to reflect how I was feeling. I found it somehow soothing – not just the blackness, more the soft tones of red, green and brown.”
I drove away from El Golfo along a road flanked by huge volcanic boulders, and turned north into La Geria, the wine-producing valley that Almodóvar filmed from the air as the main characters drove across it in their red hatchback.
The slate-grey, gently undulating terrain is scored with thousands of shallow circular hollows, each housing a single green vine protected by a semicircle of basalt rocks. I got out of the car and gazed at the perfect pattern, which looked like an immense art installation. I half expected to see the land artist Richard Long trudging towards me.
“I was knocked out by La Geria when I first saw it and knew that I would use it in a film one day,” Almodóvar told me. That was in 1985, when he went to Lanzarote to have a rest before shooting The Law of Desire. Back then, he stayed in a bungalow on Famara beach in the north-west of the island, which is where I headed next, as it is also a location in Broken Embraces
Since my arrival on the island, I had noticed that the very mention of Famara seemed to make people come over all dreamy and misty-eyed. I got the impression that it was the sort of place where people come for a week and never get around to leaving. The long, curving bay, backed by dusky pink cliffs, provides perfect conditions for surfing, windsurfing or kitesurfing, depending on the vagaries of the wind on the day. There is high-quality tuition on offer and professionals, including kitesurfing world champion Kirsty Jones, can often be seen training there.
In the film, Lena and Mateo stay, as Almodóvar did, in a bungalow in holiday village Bungalows Playa Famara. There are scenes in the reception area. When I walked in, I was a bit surprised to see that the receptionist was the person who appears in the film. “Pedro asked me to play myself,” said Lyng Dyrup, originally from Denmark, who turned out to be the manager of the complex. “It was hardly a stretch, particularly as I’ve been here for more than 20 years.”
Lyng told me that they had filmed in bungalow number two, in the row nearest the beach. I let myself into the semicircular building and found myself in the living room where one of the most poignant scenes takes place, with the couple on the sofa, watching television.
“This is where the title, Broken Embraces, comes from,” Almodóvar told me. “They are watching Rossellini’s film Voyage to Italy, in which archaeologists find the entwined skeletons of a couple buried by lava, together for ever. Lena cuddles up to Mateo, and he sets the camera and takes a photo of them, unaware that their bliss will soon be shattered – and the photo torn to shreds.”
Back in reception, I asked Lyng what she thought of the film. “You need to see it more than once, because it has so many layers,” she replied. “It’s really more like a book than a film – a book you can’t put down, because you are totally absorbed by the story and the characters.”
I wandered down to the beach and watched surfers riding the waves, children flying kites and dogs dementedly chasing balls. The scene is remarkably similar to one near the end of the film, when all this carefree activity signifies an optimistic new beginning for one of the characters.
Earlier in the film, Lena and Mateo sit on the sand, framed by black rocks that shield them, like the vines, from the wind and the outside world. “Famara is a place of refuge, which is a key concept in the film,” said Almodóvar.
César Manrique, the visionary artist, architect and environmentalist whose influence is seen all over the island, spent his childhood holidays in Famara and always said it was his favourite place. Born in Arrecife, the capital of Lanzarote, in 1919, he lived in Madrid and New York before returning to the island in 1966. Passionate about his homeland, he campaigned for the introduction of regulations that saved Lanzarote from the ravages of rampant development. Highrise buildings are prohibited and there are no roadside advertising hoardings.
He also designed a series of extraordinary buildings which accentuate the unique geology of Lanzarote and are now its main tourist attractions, as well as making funky wind sculptures to adorn roundabouts across the island.
“Lanzarote is like an unframed, unmounted work of art,” he famously said, insisting that anything manmade had to be integrated into the landscape.
“Broken Embraces is a total homage to Manrique,” Almodóvar told me. “I met him on that first trip back in the 80s, and he took me all over the island and showed me his Lanzarote.”
Manrique’s home at the time, Taro de Tahiche, is built into the boulders in a lava field. He was so amazed to spot a fig tree growing up from the blackness that he decided to build a house around it. Now a foundation dedicated to his life and work, its ground floor is an exhibition space with works by his renowned contemporaries, including Tàpies, Millares, Picasso and Saura, but it is the view framed by the huge windows that draws the eye. Basalt steps lead down to a turquoise pool and five lava bubbles linked by passages in the volcanic rock. It looks more like a groovy nightclub than a home. “Oh yes, I went to some pretty wild parties there,” remembered Almodóvar, laughing.
Manrique died in 1992, at 73, in a car accident at the roundabout next to Taro de Tahiche, which features one of his wind sculptures. Almodóvar used the same roundabout for a crash in Broken Embraces, but was unaware of its sinister connotations. “I chose it because I loved the sculpture on it, and it was only afterwards that I read in the local newspaper that Manrique had died there.”
Almodóvar said that it was one of many strange coincidences that happened while they were filming. “There was a special atmosphere on the shoot. Everyone involved said they felt a really positive energy – and believe me, that is not always the case. And the whole crew said they had never slept so well, including me.” I agreed with him on that. The day after I arrived, I woke to the distant sounds of a donkey braying and a cockerel crowing, feeling totally refreshed. I hadn’t slept so well for years.
I was staying at the Finca de Arrieta, an eco-retreat on the north-east coast, between the mountains and the sea. The small complex, built in the local basalt stone, is so low-rise it is barely visible from the coast road, its existence given away only by the palm trees blowing in the breeze. As well as a cottage and a villa, there are three yurts, all with a sort of Moroccan/Indonesian feel. My yurt was a sumptuous structure lined in pink silk with a marble floor, and a wetroom and kitchen just outside. I made a pot of coffee and an omelette with organic eggs from the finca’s chickens and huge spring onions from the garden, before having a swim in the solar-heated pool.
This mini paradise was created by Britons Tila and Michelle Braddock, who live here with their four children. “We have 30 solar panels and two wind turbines, which provide energy for the whole finca,” said Tila. “Lanzarote has plenty of sun and wind, and there’s no reason why the whole island shouldn’t use renewable energy sources.”
Manrique would be proud, but at the moment Finca de Arrieta is the largest sustainable energy project on the island. We were having dinner right by the sea on the terrace of the Amanecer restaurant in Arrieta, the village just down the road. As we devoured sizzling prawns, Tila pointed out a romantic-looking little cottage a couple of doors away, which they also rent out. “Being so close to the sea, you can fish out of the window if you want. We put a solar panel on the roof there too,” said Tila, dipping fried goats’ cheese into the mojo dips which are traditional throughout the Canaries. “The green one is made with coriander, and the red one with paprika,” said Michelle, topping up our glasses with Bermejo, a delicious local white wine.
The next morning, Tila whisked me off on a tour of the north of the island. We drove high into the hills, through lava fields covered in lichen in soft shades of gold, green and cream. On our left was the Monte Corona volcano, and standing alone on the hillside below it was La Torrecilla, the large house that is used as a clinic in Broken Embraces
A lava tube runs from the volcano to the sea, billowing out to form caves along the way. In one of these, Manrique created Los Jameos del Agua, a massive grotto that contains a recently restored auditorium, where Broken Embraces had its first screening. “The acoustics there are amazing,” Almodóvar later told me.
At the northern tip of the island, Manrique turned an old gun battery on the edge of a cliff into a restaurant and observation point, the Mirador del Río, where the bar has a curving panoramic window with views across to the island of La Graciosa. Almodóvar did shoot a scene in this dramatic setting, but it didn’t make the final cut.
“We organise an annual charity event, the Tres Islas,” said Tila, “when teams swim from La Graciosa over to Lanzarote, climb the cliff near here, then cycle the 60km across the island before sailing across to Fuerteventura.”
The road wound to the south and we drove towards Haría, where Manrique lived for the last few years of his life. Hidden in a lush valley and surrounded by palm trees, it is one of the prettiest villages on the island. We stopped for lunch at La Frontera, a popular family-friendly restaurant with views down the valley, and ate chunks of aubergine with palm honey, and tender lamb chops.
Later on, Tila dropped me off at El Aljibe in the remote village of Los Valles, where I was going to spend my last night. From the outside, it looked like a traditional Canarian farmhouse, albeit a rather chic one. Inside, however, a staircase led down through an archway into an enormous stone space with a vaulted ceiling and mezzanine sleeping area. Originally the underground water cistern for the farm, El Aljibe is now stylishly decorated with paintings and sculptures by renowned local artists, all friends of the owner, who was also close to Manrique and worked with him on some of his projects back in the 70s.
Sinking into the outdoor Jacuzzi in this incongruously glamorous setting, my mind wandered to the amazing parties you could throw there – but you would need both Manrique and Almodóvar on the guest list to really make it swing.
Essentials
Iberia (0870 6090500; iberiaairlines.co.uk) flies to Lanzarote from Heathrow via Madrid from £166 return. Thomas Cook (flythomascook.com) flies from six UK airports to Lanzarote, from £96 return. Cachet Travel (020 8847 8700; cachet-travel.co.uk) features boutique hotels on the island; a week at La Casona de Yaiza costs £585pp in September, including flights and car hire.
Cesar Manrique’s home, Taro de Tahiche (00 34 928 843138; fcmanrique.org) is open daily; entrance €8, under-12s free. Los Jameos del Agua (00 34 928 848020; centrosturisticos.com) is open daily and from 7.30pm to 2am on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday; €8, children €4. Mirador del Río (00 34 928 526 548; centrosturisticos.com) is open daily; adults €4.50, children €2.25.
El Amanecer is on La Garita beach in Arrieta (three-course meal with wine about €20). Mesón La Frontera is on the edge of Haría (Casas de Atrás 4; 00 34 928 835310).
Further information from the Spanish Tourist Office on 0870 8506599; spain.info.
Five fabulous places to stay
Finca de Arrieta
The estate of Finca de Arrieta comprises an eco-villa sleeping eight and large yurts sleeping up to four. The yurts have marble flooring, original hardwood Mongolian furniture and an ensuite bathroom. Arrieta is an eco-retreat, where the yurts and other properties are run on solar and wind energy, and holistic therapies, spa treatment and art courses are on offer.
• Yurts from €575 a week; 00 34 928 826720; lanzaroteretreats.com
Finca de las Salinas
This eccentric-looking rose-coloured finca in the picturesque town of Yaiza has 19 comfortable rooms. Although it’s just a short (10km) drive from the beaches, the inland location gives the hotel a peaceful feel, and there are bicycles to hire. The hotel has two restaurants – a bodega with an impressive selection of Spanish wines, and a more formal restaurant. A full-service spa is opening this summer.
• Doubles from €104; 00 34 928 830325; fincasalinas.com
Finca Malvasia
There are just four small apartments at Finca Malvasia, which lies in the heart of La Geria, Lanzarote’s spectacular wine region. Built from volcanic stone, the rooms are stylishly furnished with well-equipped kitchens, and private terraces with stunning views. The apartments are set in gardens full of fig and avocado trees, and there is a good-sized pool, yoga room and mini-gym, with massages available on site.
• From €110 per night for two people; 00 34 928 173460; fincamalvasia.com
Famara bungalows
Located between the stunning beach at Famara and the high cliff, these bungalows have private terraces. Sleeping two, four or six, they sit in a large garden with a communal pool. The village of Caleta Famara is a short walk away.
• From €60 a night for a two-person bungalow; 00 34 928 845132; bungalowsplayafamara.com
El Aljibe
This converted water tower is a spectacular bolthole for two; the exposed brick walls and vaulted ceiling create a dramatic backdrop to sleek modern furniture and a mezzanine sleeping space. The apartment has a surround-sound stereo system that makes the most of the property’s incredible acoustics, satellite TV, outdoor Jacuzzi and pool.
• From €160; 00 34 902 363318; rural-villas.com
• Broken Embraces has its UK Premiere on Thursday at London’s Somerset House
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‘Now I’ve experienced every age’
July 24th, 2009 |
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‘In old age you can close your eyes and summon your youth at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage’
‘The idea that memory is linear,” says Penelope Lively, crisply, “is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself – can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.”
It’s the concept that has provided the backcloth to which Lively has stitched the plots of her novels for the past 40 years, and which has driven her to scale the heights of both children’s and adults’ fiction (she remains the only author to have won both the Carnegie medal and the Booker prize). It’s the disjunction between time and memory that intrigues her; the irreconcilability of the calendar’s steady forward march with the extempore jumble of shards and fragments that we carry around in our memories, encapsulated in the heroine of her 1987 novel Moon Tiger, who declares from her deathbed: “There is no chronology inside my head.” Now 76, Lively finds that her own experience of ageing has deepened rather than resolved the paradox. “In old age, you realise that while you’re divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will,” she says. “As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage. When writing Moon Tiger from the point of view of an old woman, I kept worrying: would she really think like this? Now I’ve experienced every age, and can fish back.”
It’s an advantage she exploits to the full in her 16th novel for adults, Family Album. Published next month, it is a sophisticated investigation into the effects of time’s passage and the reliability of memory presented in the guise of a minor-key domestic drama. Half a century of sprawling family life is dished out via the kaleidoscopic, atemporal accounts of the nine inhabitants of a gently disintegrating Victorian villa. The central mystery, which is scarcely a mystery at all, is revealed piecemeal, with no recognised moment of denouement: the novel’s real revelation is that our individual histories bear only a passing relationship to those of the people who have lived alongside us.
When considering Lively’s own life, however, it’s a struggle to tease it apart from her generation’s collective narrative. “I see myself,” she concedes, “as someone manipulated by history.” She was born Penelope Low in 1933 in Cairo, where her father was employed by the National Bank of Egypt. Her earliest memories are a snapshot of interwar expatriate family life, from the well-staffed house on the city’s outskirts to the nanny-turned-governess and the elegant, distant parents. An only child, she spent hours playing by herself, existing in what she describes in her memoir Oleander, Jacaranda as “a condition of frenzied internal narrative”. The outbreak of the second world war kept the family in Cairo until 1942, when she, her mother and her governess fled to Palestine to wait out the fighting. After peace was declared in 1945, Lively discovered abruptly that the global turmoil had its articulation in her own life: her parents’ marriage disintegrated, and she was dispatched to boarding school in Sussex.
About school, she is emphatic. “It was ghastly. I’d never been to any kind of school, and I was hopeless at it. Schoolgirls can be very malevolent: nowadays it would probably be defined as bullying, but then the concept didn’t exist – and this wasn’t somewhere it would have been bothered about, anyway.” The trouble wasn’t confined to her fellow pupils: Lively remembers the school itself as “extraordinarily unimaginative. One punishment was to read for an hour in the library, which pretty much summed up the attitude towards literature. I was reprimanded by the headmistress for having a copy of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in my locker.” Holidays – spent in the family house in Somerset with her grandmother and her aunt, the artist Rachel Reckitt (whose woodcuts now hang on Lively’s walls) – provided a respite. The household’s familiar objects (an intricately worked sampler, the napkin rings in the silver cupboard) would eventually resurface as touchstones in her 1995 memoir-cum-social history, A House Unlocked, in which her love for the place and its occupants is palpable.
Still, Lively excelled in the school certificate at 16, prompting her father to pay a visit to her headmistress. “He said to her: ‘I understand that quite a few girls go to university nowadays. I was wondering if Penelope should think of it.’ She looked at him in horror and replied ‘Oh no, no – our girls don’t do that.’ The implication was that you got your school certificate and married – or at worst tried a domestic science course.” Luckily, her father took a more enlightened view. Lively was moved to a crammer, and applied to Oxford to read modern history. “I wasn’t an assiduous student, and I didn’t get a good degree, but it certainly formed my mindset,” she says. “I’d gone to Oxford with the idea that there was an account of the past, and the study of history involved learning it. But in my very first tutorial I was set an essay entitled ‘Who were the Jutes?’ I went to the Bodleian, read everything I could find on them, and realised there was no simple answer: people were still arguing about it. The experience of learning about history and the ways in which it’s discussed kindled my interest in memory. It didn’t make me a novelist, but it very much conditioned the kind of novels I’ve written.”
It was at Oxford, too, that Lively met her husband. Their meeting marked another moment in which her life-story bumped up against that of the century. Jack was a working-class boy from Newcastle, Penelope “a girl from the southern gentry”: it was only thanks to the war (which saw Jack evacuated to the house of a retired schoolteacher who recognised and cultivated his intelligence) and the social upheaval that followed that their paths crossed at all. Newly graduated, Lively was working as a research assistant when Jack arrived. “I’d heard some of the other fellows talking about this very clever chap coming over from Cambridge called Jack Lively. I remember thinking the name sounded like a character in an 18th-century play,” she smiles. Their friendship, fostered “over coffee in smoke-filled rooms”, quickly blossomed, and in less than a year the pair were married. It was a relationship that sustained them both until Jack’s death from cancer in 1998, 41 years later, although Lively is at pains not to romanticise it retrospectively, pointing out that “like any marriage, it had its periods of white water”. “In many ways Jack was very different from me: much cleverer, very combative. His chief intellectual pleasure was a good argument, and he had a shorter fuse than I have.” But he was, she says, always quick to apologise – and when it came to her writing, he acted as both ally and advocate. “He thoroughly enjoyed the fact that I wrote, and was always my first reader. I never asked him directly ‘what do you think?’, because of course what you want to hear is that the whole thing’s superb, and he would never have said that. But he commented on the specifics. I don’t have that any longer, and I miss it hugely.”
The couple married in 1957 and moved to Swansea, where Jack took up an academic post. Their daughter, Josephine, was born within a year of their wedding; their son, Adam, three years after that. At a stroke, Lively found herself removed from the intellectual atmosphere of Oxford and launched on to motherhood’s merry-go-round. “It was difficult,” she admits. “I was just 24 when Josephine was born – doing all the nappy stuff in extreme youth, really – and there were the usual constraints of not being able to afford a babysitter and so forth. Academics were just as poorly paid then as now, and we didn’t have a penny to spare. I survived by making friends with other young mothers who were interested in the same sort of things; we used to get together with our children on the beach and talk. That was a life raft. And I read passionately: if I was feeding the baby I always had a book in one hand. Though when they reached three or four, I was able to read with them, which was a joy.”
It was this immersion in children’s literature that first prompted Lively to put pen to paper, although she held off from doing so until her mid-30s, when her son was in school. “Reading with the children made me think: I wonder if I could do this?” she recalls. Her first novel for children, Astercote, was published in 1970; she followed it with two or three others which she dismisses now as “crap, quite honestly”. It wasn’t until the publication of The Ghost of Thomas Kempe in 1973 that she found her register. “I tried to write out of my own adult preoccupations with the operation of memory and the nature of evidence,” she says, “but in a way that meant children would come away from it thinking ‘I’ve read a ghost story,’ rather than ‘my gosh, I’ve just read a book about the operation of memory.’” She succeeded: the tale of 12-year-old James’s struggle with the shade of an ornery 17th-century alchemist won the Carnegie medal, became a staple of school reading lists and led the critic David Rees to praise it as “unique … neither history nor fantasy, but something of both.”
Although The Road to Lichfield, Lively’s first adult novel, wasn’t published until 1977, she had begun writing for an older audience long before. “At the same time as the children’s books, I was writing short stories for adults and putting them away in a drawer,” she says. “I wasn’t convinced I had anything to say to people of my own age.” In the end, however, the move into adult fiction – a discipline Lively views as “not different, but done differently; I’ve always seen the shift between the two as a gear change” – became “necessary. I remember thinking after several children’s books, there were things I couldn’t do there; ways in which I wanted to write, things I wanted to say. A lot of fiction is to do with the discussion of emotional responses, and there are limits to the emotional responses a child can have – they’ve experienced love, for example, but not sexual love. There’s a whole landscape you can’t explore.”
After The Road to Lichfield, Lively’s publishers persuaded her to turn out her drawer, and a prize-winning collection of short stories, Nothing Missing but the Samovar, followed. In 1979, Kingsley Amis awarded her the Arts Council National Book Award for Treasures of Time, the story of an archaeologist which draws explicitly on what Lively’s former editor, the poet Anthony Thwaite, calls “her authority and fluency on the subject of the persistence of the past”. She notched up her second Booker-shortlisting in 1984 for According to Mark, and when Moon Tiger was published in 1987, Lively found herself on the shortlist once again, this time facing a line-up that included Iris Murdoch, Peter Ackroyd and Chinua Achebe. “I wasn’t a favourite,” she recalls candidly. “I wasn’t expected to win, so I wasn’t expecting to win. But Jack said to me that lunchtime ‘You just might, so you’d better have something to say’. I gave it about three minutes’ thought, and then had to stand up and speak on national television.”
Moon Tiger is the story of Claudia Hampton, a brittle, self-reliant historian who excavates her own memories as she lies dying and finds her affair with a British army officer during her time as a war reporter in Egypt at her life’s core. Lively draws on her own childhood to furnish the novel, but there the similarities between her and Claudia end. “I never felt very close to her, although I admire her,” she says. “I like women like that, upfront and aggressive. Male readers’ reactions were very interesting: I used to get letters from men saying either ‘that’s just the sort of woman I’ve been looking for all my life’ or ‘I couldn’t stand her’ – which always seemed to say more about the men who were writing.”
Ah, those male readers. Throughout her career in adult fiction, the perception that Lively is a “women’s writer” – with all the vaguely negative connotations of that label – has persisted. Reduce her novels to plot-points and it’s possible to see why: she is fascinated by families, gives precedence to relationships and is comfortable writing within the domestic sphere. But Lively rejects the classification. “I don’t think it’s true,” she says. “My last novel [Consequences] was romantic, but everyone’s entitled to one of those, surely? And Family Album is indeed a family book; but after all, men live family lives too. I find the notion that a book could be ‘for’ women or men puzzling.” Thwaite puts it more succinctly: “The idea of her being a woman’s writer comes from people who haven’t read her.”
Over the past decade, in fact, Lively has been edging away from fiction into memoir: in Oleander, Jacaranda (subtitled “A Childhood Perceived”), she considers the relationship between childhood memory and adult hindsight; in A House Unlocked, she examines the connections between her family’s history and that of the wider world. And in Making It Up, her latest and most ambitious effort, she approaches her personal history rather as one of the archaeologists who populate her work might approach unearthed artefacts: turning her life’s chief junctures over in her hands, and exploring the possibilities they represent. “I don’t know quite what prompted it, except that it’s an old-age book,” she says. “You have to have reached a point where you can look back over your life and see the moments when you went in one direction or another.”
Despite having health scares over the past few years, Lively continues to write. “It’s always just gone on,” she says. “I remember reading an interview with Iris Murdoch in which she was asked how soon after finishing one book she started the next: she said ‘half an hour’. I’m not quite like her – there’s usually a gap, and there was a long one after Family Album: I didn’t start a new book for nine or 10 months, and thought maybe that was the last one. But then an idea came into my head. So off I go again.”
Lively on Lively
“Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once. The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don’t work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provides these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours … The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life. I, me. Claudia H.”
Reading this passage, I feel as though someone else wrote it. Someone else did, of course; I am not the same person I was then – I have read more, thought more, forgotten plenty. It is in the voice of Claudia Hampton, the narrator of the novel – a historian and journalist – and, while she is not me, I did give her some of my thoughts about the operation of memory and the nature of evidence. I never entirely liked Claudia, but I had great respect for her, and envied her ability to crash through life in a way that I cannot. And note that – in 1987 – she is not yet computerised but sees a nice analogy between “the new technology” and her own thought processes.
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Summer in a song
July 23rd, 2009 |
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Throw open the windows, kick off your shoes and mix yourself an ice-cold cocktail . . . producers, pundits and pop stars reveal the secret to a great holiday single
What makes a song perfect for the summer? Britain’s first No 1 holiday hit was Jerry Keller’s Here Comes Summer. Topping the charts in 1959, it celebrated teenage innocence and escape: “School is out, oh happy day/ Here comes summer/ I’m going to grab my girl and run away.” Strangely, the American’s song reached the top spot in the UK in the rather unseasonal month of October, but perhaps this shows us that some summer singles are more about dreams than sweaty, sunburnt reality. This year, the big hit is expected to be Dizzee Rascal and Calvin Harris’s imminent Holiday, a dancefloor-stormer about the typical British experience abroad, featuring the lines: “Don’t judge my passport photo/ I know I look a bit loco.”
From the Beach Boys going surfin’ USA, to the Kinks lazing on a sunny afternoon, from Grease’s summer lovers to the Isley Brothers’ summer breeze, summer pop has always been about escape – and, for buttoned-up Brits, mainly about having a party, a singalong and buckets of booze. Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime, the first No 1 summer song from a British artist, directed us in 1970 to “have a drink, have a drive”, before sensibly suggesting that we should “signal a cab” and bring our “bottle waggin’ back”.
And then a decade later came the daddy of them all, Wham!’s Club Tropicana, which took us to a sunshine wonderland where the drinks were free. George Michael tipping his cherry-red cocktail into a sky-blue pool became the ultimate expression of that decade’s cheesy decadence.
There’s also the summer novelty song. Evidence that we all go a little daft in the sunshine, the phenomenon was kick-started by Barbados in 1975, a song by a band called Typically Tropical about the delights of Coconut Airways (can you see a theme here?). It was reworked by the Vengaboys for their 1999 hit, We’re Going to Ibiza.
How do you cook up a summer hit – and is it easy as it sounds? We asked a producer, a pundit, a radio boss and musicians from pop’s past and present to tell us what gets them in the holiday mood . . .
The chart-topper
Elly Jackson, singer in La Roux
Our song Bulletproof has sort of become a summer song. I don’t really know why. We did write it in the summer, though. I think sunny weather drives you towards certain tempos and melodies that work well booming out of open windows. It’s a fairly aggressive song in terms of its mood and character, though, whereas lots of summer songs tend to be light and flippant, like Club Tropicana.
We demanded that our next single, I’m Not Your Toy, came out in summer for that reason. It has a brightness that wouldn’t work in winter. I always remember Toploader’s Dancing in the Moonlight coming out early in the year when it was cold and raining. How stupid.
Favourite summer song: Eddy Grant’s Electric Avenue. It reminds me of summers growing up in Brixton. Reggae always works at this time of year. But then again, any music made somewhere sunnier than Britain usually does.
The music mogul
Pete Waterman, producer, songwriter and Pop Idol judge
Summer songs became big in the 1950s and 60s, when people started to holiday abroad and hear the music there. Spain is much sexier than Clacton! That’s why Sylvia Vrethammar’s Y Viva Espana became a big hit in the autumn of 1974. Everyone came back from their package holidays and got misty-eyed.
Summer hits are as much about image and the way people perceive pop stars as anything else. Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan helped [my production company] Stock, Aitken and Waterman have hits with The Loco-Motion and Sealed With a Kiss because they were from Australia, a country everyone thought of as permanently sunny.
It’s also a time when the fewest records are bought, so we took full advantage of that: it was easier to get a No 1 in those months. It’s a shame there are fewer novelty singles these days. Record companies are obsessed with sophistication and coolness, which is bloody rubbish. It’s not as if novelty singles don’t work. Tom Hark by the Piranhas [a cover of a South African kwela song] was a summer hit in 1980. It’s still played in at football matches. Summer should be about having a laugh.
Favourite summer song: Carole King’s It Might As Well Rain Until September. It reminds me of when I was a 15-year-old lad, fancying a girl and dreaming his holidays away. The best summer songs play on that, especially if they focus on unrequited love. Everyone’s favourite summer songs come from that time in their lives.
The radio boss
George Ergatoudis, Radio 1′s head of music
Songs that get people dancing are held back for the summer by record labels. I don’t blame them. Listeners respond to dance music when it’s warm. We’re loving Dizzee Rascal’s Holiday and Mini Viva’s Left My Heart in Tokyo now. They have that poppy-trance sound that works at the moment, perhaps because it echoes early-90s rave culture, which people associate with being outside and having a good time.
We like to play mood-changers on Radio 1 in the summer, to promote euphoria and good sensations, and take you away from your desk or your car. There’s no rules as to how that works. In radio, you just learn to feel it: a raw, primitive, irresistible connection of music to the emotions.
Favourite summer song: Madonna’s Into the Groove or Snap!’s Rhythm Is a Dancer. Brilliant pop that sounds great coming out of car speakers.
The pundit
Peter Robinson, editor of Popjustice.com
People relax. Knobbly knees and love handles appear. And musical tastes relax, too. I don’t mean standards slip. I mean people stop trying to cover up the fact that they like simple pop music. Pretending you don’t like music with a very catchy tune is tiring, so people take the summer off.
Songs aiming for big summer status appear in our office every year., It’s like press release bingo. Claims of “sun-kissed vocals” and “lilting Beach Boys harmonies” usually mean they sound a bit bouncy and there’s a reference to sunshine in the second verse. Then again, being able to launch someone like Lily Allen off the back of a summer single is a good marketing strategy. That’s what happened with Smile in 2006. Lily’s label is trying it again this year with MPHO’s Box N Locks. To ram the point home, it features a very beachy Martha and the Muffins sample.
Favourite summer song: La Isla Bonita by Madonna, even though it was released in April. It must have been a warm spring. At the moment, though, nothing beats Dizzee Rascal’s Holiday. It’s a Club Tropicana for 2009. And like the best summer holidays, it ends with a massive rave-up.
The 80s star
Sara Dallin, singer and songwriter in Bananarama
The best summer songs remind you of your youth: what you did in your holidays, how it felt when you first kissed a boy, going away without your parents. For me, our hit, Cruel Summer, played on the darker side: it looked at the oppressive heat, the misery of wanting to be with someone as the summer ticked by. We’ve all been there!
It was a huge hit in the US. I’ll always remember coming out of our hotel in LA when we first became famous and seeing Mike Tyson sitting there. He burst into Cruel Summer when he saw us. It was unbelievable. Summer songs do that to people. When the sun’s out, anything goes.
Favourite summer song: Anything by Blondie or Roxy Music because of their sound. They were glamorous, and they take me back to those teenage summers when anything was possible.
Five ingredients for a guaranteed summer smash
• Any instrument that comes from outside the British Isles. Bonus points for Spanish guitars (the Spice Girls’ Viva Forever, Madonna’s La Isla Bonita), marimbas (Bananarama’s Cruel Summer), calypso rhythms and Brazilian samba beats. Note: bagpipes and Welsh harps do not get the pavements sizzling.
• A video that clearly costs a great deal of money and has to be watched through sunglasses. Ideally, it will feature a beach, an ocean lit up like a thousand sparkling sapphires, a snazzy form of transport (yacht on sea, Jeep on beach), a few attractive foreigners, and a scantily clad woman. See Duran Duran’s Rio.
• Any mention of sunshine or summeriness. Even when the sky is the colour of sludge, torrential rain is filling your shoes and the wind has blown your barbecue into the neighbours’ garden, the mere mention of hot weather will get the skin tanning.
• Promotional CDs distributed around clubs in Ibiza, east London and Doncaster, DJs kissed and petted, and the song pouring out of car windows strategically left open outside sweaty offices and schools. Hey presto – guaranteed summer lovin’!
• Any mention of youth and freedom that takes listeners back to the hazy days of their school holidays. Longer narratives about nostalgia work, too. This explains why Bryan Adams’s Summer of ’69 gets hyperactive kids dancing with drunk grannies at weddings.
Blue sky thinking: post your favourite summer song below
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Jon Stewart Talks Cap And Trade, Interviews Energy Secretary Chu
July 22nd, 2009 |
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On Tuesday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart dedicated the program to talking about climate change, and The Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill. He immediately got so bored that he fell asleep into a cream pie:
WATCH:
The Daily Show With Jon StewartMo…
Glen David Gold on Sunnyside
July 22nd, 2009 |
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‘I want to give pleasure’
July 22nd, 2009 |
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Great drama is all about constructing an argument and giving maximum pleasure, says the actor, currently juggling Chekhov and Shakespeare at the Old Vic
When did you first know you wanted to act?
That’s quite a difficult question to answer because I’ve acted all my life, really – well, from the age of eight. I did a huge amount at school and a bit at university. But I went to the Guildhall as a singer, and I also toyed with various other options. The acting sort of crept up on me. It was simultaneous; it was both the only thing I’d ever really wanted to do, and also something I’d never even considered.
Breakthrough production?
Professionally, it was when we went to the Royal Court with Women Beware Women, my first serious play in London. In terms of my perception of myself, it was The Seagull, which I did at the RSC in 1991. That was my first ever really very serious role. Up until then I’d been doing lots of comic parts.
Favourite venue?
I have loads, actually. When I was at the RSC, I loved the Swan, but you can’t complain about the Other Place. And I’m rather fond of the Olivier. I suppose those are the obvious ones.
Least favourite?
I think the Barbican – not the theatre, but the centre – because you have to spend so many hours a day there, and all the dressing rooms are underground. The theatre itself is rather beautiful, but the actual backstage area … Actors need air!
Most challenging experience?
I’ve done lots of performances I’ve not been happy with. I don’t think I was a very good Edgar [in King Lear]. In terms of challenges, the two Pinter plays I did last year [A Slight Ache and Landscape] were a departure for me. Whenever there’s a shift in repertoire, it can be challenging – Spamalot as much as the Pinters. One of the most demanding was Hamlet, for obvious reasons. But I’ve not had many unhappy experiences. Touch wood.
Favourite part of the job?
I love the construction of an argument. I love studying a great play with unquestionably great writing, like a Shakespeare play, and trying to make my mind respond in an interesting way to this extraordinary piece. So I suppose the process of rehearsal is what I most enjoy. Of course, we all love to be praised, but actually the least exciting thing is the curtain call.
How do people react at parties when you say what you do?
They’re embarrassed, usually, because if they haven’t seen you on stage, they assume you’re out of work. You always want to say, “I’m an actor, but don’t worry about it – I’m fine, honestly!”
What would most surprise an outsider about your day-to-day work?
I think people would be surprised by how much care goes into decisions, that we discuss things as thoroughly as we can, try and take arguments right down to the end of the line before we make decisions. And I think people are always surprised by the amount of time that we need in order to get anywhere near what we think the playwright means.
What advice would you give someone wanting to do what you do?
I used to be quite careful about what I said to people who asked – all that shit about “It’s very difficult, 90% of actors are out of work” – and then someone said, “Yes, but 10% are in work!” And that’s the way to look at it, really. There’s no advice I can give, except just to do it, and don’t feel ashamed if it’s what you want to do. I think to hedge your ambitions with lots of caveats about how difficult it is is unnecessary. It’s a passion. It’s a calling.
Can you put what you do into five words?
I want to give pleasure.
Is it glamorous?
No. It’s very exciting, and you meet the most extraordinary people, but it’s not really glamorous.
• Simon Russell Beale is currently appearing in The Winter’s Tale and The Cherry Orchard at the Old Vic.
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The room that roared
July 22nd, 2009 |
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Opened in 1969, the Royal Court’s tiny second stage gave many of our best dramatists their big break. We look back on its history of innovation, and playwrights recall how the Jerwood Upstairs shaped their careers
Strange to think that a small room, 30ft by 40ft, has transformed British theatre. But the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court in London, as it’s now officially known, has had an impact wildly disproportionate to its size. It has kick-started the careers of dramatists such as Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Polly Stenham, launched directors like Danny Boyle and Roger Michell, and produced a musical mega-hit, The Rocky Horror Show.
Its beginnings were far from promising. The theatre was set up in 1969, at the instigation of Bill Gaskill, in a club-cum-rehearsal room at the top of the theatre. Gaskill wanted the Court to acknowledge the explosion of studio spaces in the late 1960s and provide an outlet for radical, experimental work. But Nicholas Wright, the theatre’s first director, admitted the opening season was “a critical disaster”. And, within the Court, there were hostile voices. Lindsay Anderson scathingly referred to the Theatre Upstairs as “the Gaskill” and dismissed the whole fringe culture as “a self-glorifying ghetto”. Even Gaskill later said that, once you have two theatres, you tend to “siphon off” the really dangerous work.
Yet I would argue that the Upstairs has done infinitely more good than harm. It has provided a shop window for legions of new writers. It has allowed directors and designers to experiment with space. Above all, it has made risk possible, with its “right to fail” philosophy; this can provoke embarrassment in a big space, but seems perfectly acceptable in a small one.
Right from the start, the Upstairs felt – and smelled – different. From those early years, I recall a weird array of experiences. Howard Brenton’s Christie in Love with its murderous hero in a chicken-wire pen full of tattered newspapers; Heathcote Williams’s AC/DC, with its simulated trepanning of the skull of the late Victor Henry; the multi-authored Lay By, which graphically explored the details of a motorway rape. Not least there was Caryl Churchill’s 1972 play, Owners, which dealt with landlord-tenant relationships and announced the arrival of a major talent I signally failed to recognise.
What made the Upstairs special was not merely the eclectic programming. It was the visceral nature of the experience: audience members had nowhere to hide from the sex and violence that inevitably loomed large. Over the years, this sense of direct involvement has proved one of the venue’s greatest assets, as well as the source of periodic problems. It was one of the reasons for the instant success of Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show in 1973. I still recall the opening night, when we sat on rickety old cinema seats to be pulverised by a seductive mix of spoof horror, rock’n'roll and transvestite camp. Long before the term was coined, this was “in-yer-face” theatre. The madcap gaiety of Jim Sharman’s production seemed at odds with the Court’s sober, puritanical image.
Physicality has always been one aspect of the space’s appeal. So, too, have focus and concentration. Athol Fugard insisted in 1973 that Sizwe Banzi Is Dead be premiered Upstairs rather than Downstairs: partly because he was “plain scared”, partly because he loved the idea of playing to 70 or so people. His was one of countless shows that, over 40 years, eventually transferred to the Court’s larger house. One of the most significant was Jim Cartwright’s Road, a 1980s play about the crucifying effect of unemployment that only premiered Upstairs because of a lack of managerial faith. Meanwhile, despite being commissioned for the Upstairs, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse found its way to the main stage because its lead actor, Janet McTeer, in a case of sheer heightism, was considered too tall for the studio space.
For all the diversity of the Upstairs, one period has defined its historic importance: the 1994-95 season of new writing masterminded by Stephen Daldry and literary manager Graham Whybrow. In six months, we were bombarded with work including Joe Penhall’s Some Voices, Nick Grosso’s Peaches and Judy Upton’s Ashes and Sand.
But if any play from that period has acquired legendary status, it is Sarah Kane’s Blasted. I remember still the shock of its first night: the confrontation with what seemed a catalogue of horror as Kane transferred the brutality of Serbian civil war to a British setting. If we critics got it wrong, it wasn’t just because of our collective myopia. It was also because the violence proved overpowering in such a tiny space. I don’t think it’s just the wisdom of hindsight to say that Blasted seemed a better play when revived Downstairs.
Since that heady era, the Upstairs has become more international, and more physically exploratory – sometimes both at once, as in Dominic Cooke’s promenade production of Vassily Sigarev’s Plasticine, where moving scenery let us explore every nook and cranny of an industrial town in the Urals. The space still acts as a showcase for new writers, of whom Polly Stenham, with That Face and Tusk Tusk, is the most famous current example.
And Harold Pinter’s 2006 performance in Krapp’s Last Tape reminded us that the Upstairs, because of its close-up nature, can be a venue for great acting. Like many recent events at the Upstairs, including the highly political My Name Is Rachel Corrie, Pinter’s performance reverberated around the globe. It also proved that you can, if you’re lucky, find infinite riches in a little room. MB
Joe Penhall
If you could make a living out of doing everything in the Upstairs, I’d do it. It’s the most honest space: theatre is essentially watching people doing things in a room, and it’s a really good room in which to see their actions in all their gory detail. In my play Some Voices, someone pours petrol over themselves and tries to set it alight. That’s pulverising when you’re 5ft away.
Theatre in the early 1990s was still stuck in the 1980s: the Royal Court was the only place that realised a new generation of writers was doing something different. Other theatres thought our plays were a bit rough, a bit weird, a bit dark – but that’s exactly what Stephen Daldry and Ian Rickson, the artistic and associate directors, were looking for. What really set the Upstairs apart was its much-vaunted right to fail. It embraced the possibility that a play could be a disaster and strapped itself in for the ride.
Plays staged Upstairs often aren’t slick, or elegant, or in the least bit traditional – but they are meticulous in their breaking of forms. That brutal aesthetic can be a straitjacket: plays would be rejected if they weren’t sufficiently provocative or out of control.
Mike Leigh
I worked in the Upstairs before it was even a theatre. In the mid-1960s, the space was used as a rehearsal room, with a bar at one end. Squaddies from the nearby Chelsea barracks would come to drink after hours. The English Stage Club put on experimental work on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Conditions were crummy: people performing at one end, people drinking at the other end, with the audience in between, struggling to concentrate.
I returned in 1973 with a play called Wholesome Glory, about a couple of po-faced vegetarians, Keith and Candice Marie. They were such great characters, I said we must make a film about them – and that became Nuts in May.
Stephen Poliakoff
The Royal Court was a glamorous, forbidding place for a young playwright in the early 1970s. The people running it were frightening: Bill Gaskill was a stern critic of everything, Lindsay Anderson was ferocious and John Dexter would flit around, saying things like: “All young playwrights’ plays are absolute rubbish, and yours are no exception.” You were supposed to argue – and I did, often. Things were much more relaxing at the Bush.
Even so, I tried hard to get a play staged Upstairs. It meant you had arrived. You never knew what might come out of that tiny room. My most vivid memory is of the first director of the Upstairs, Nicholas Wright, standing in the bar saying: “Does anybody want to see The Rocky Horror Show?” The preview was empty and he was trying to create an audience. And that show ran for year after year after year.
Polly Stenham
The Upstairs has a transformative magic you don’t much get anywhere else. It’s always an intense experience. It takes ages to get into the room: you have to climb all these stairs to this rough-and-ready attic, and once you’re inside, it’s so voyeuristic. As a writer, you can really take advantage of the audience’s closeness. My second play, Tusk Tusk, was written for the Upstairs, and I deliberately went for a realistic set so that people would feel they were perving on the characters. The room is the perfect size to make powerful material even more scary.
I’ve been going to the Theatre Upstairs since I was about eight: my father was a big fan of fringe theatre. What always astounded me was that, every time you went in, it looked like a different room: it could be in the round, it could be promenade. When I saw the Russian play Ladybird there, walking in was like entering a block of flats – it even smelled horrible.
Sam Shepard
I was living in London and working with the Hampstead Theatre Club when some actors I knew – including Stephen Rea and Tony Richardson – convinced me to try something at the Royal Court. In New York, I had been working in converted churches and basements, so the black-box atmosphere of the Upstairs was familiar.
After my play The Unseen Hand was staged there, I was asked if I’d like to try directing something. They said they’d get me some good actors – Rea, Bob Hoskins and Kenneth Cranham. They made the directing job easy, and gave me the courage to do it again.
The Upstairs was a great little laboratory where you could really experiment. It gives a writer a different perspective. You can see right away what’s working: it’s hard to fake anything in a small space.
David Hare
The real reason the Upstairs caught on was because the Royal Court was offered more good plays than it knew what to do with. When I was literary manager in 1970, I remember one admittedly exceptional week when we rejected plays by Peter Nichols, Simon Gray and Alan Bennett.
Early on, the Upstairs even attempted a kind of living newspaper called The Enoch Show. Every Royal Court dramatist was invited to contribute ever-changing material to a revue about Enoch Powell, who could, by coincidence, be seen every morning at Sloane Square station going to work.
Nick Wright was sensitive to younger writers shut out from the main stage: Caryl Churchill and Howard Brenton especially. I championed Howard Barker’s first play for performance. But Nick also wanted what was then called the counter-culture. At its most louche and glamorous, this meant Sam Shepard premieres, but it also meant Heathcote Williams and The Rocky Horror Show. The fringe and the mainstream were at the time viscerally opposed: the Upstairs offered a kind of wobbly bridge between them.
There were downsides. A laziness grew up that meant that if the artistic directorship didn’t really like a play they could always shove it on Upstairs, as a way of hedging their bets. As the years went by, it sometimes seemed as if Upstairs had become a kiddy’s climbing frame for playwrights who were judged “not ready” for Downstairs – whatever that meant.
There came to be something you could recognise as a Theatre Upstairs play: hopeless, socially realistic and violent. But lately its matchless record has been refreshed. A theatre that has just programmed first plays by DC Moore, Polly Stenham and Alexi Kaye Campbell can look any playhouse in the world in the eye.
Interviews by Maddy Costa
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New Interviews Show “Harsh” Interrogation Techniques Split Apart Officials Charged With Questioning
July 19th, 2009 |
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Now, as the Senate intelligence committee examines the CIA’s interrogation program, investigators are focusing in part on Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, former CIA contractors who helped design and oversee Abu Zubaida’s interrogation. These…
Welcome to the cool club
July 16th, 2009 |
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It is the college that gave the world Damien Hirst. Are today’s Goldsmiths graduates aiming to shake up the world?
The atmosphere is hot and still. The only noise is the sound of examiners’ footsteps as they pad from one exhibition space to another – looking, absorbing, assessing. I’m in the studios of Goldsmiths College in London, where MA art students have just installed their degree shows and are nervously waiting to see what grades they will get. For them, education is over. Look out world, here they come.
A good degree isn’t everything, of course. A tutor here tells me that, contrary to popular belief, Damien Hirst does not have a close relationship with his former college because he has never forgiven them for awarding his work a 2.2 (lower second class). Still, Hirst’s name is synonymous with Goldsmiths. In 1988, while still a student here, he curated Freeze, a seminal show in a Docklands warehouse that, as well as his own work, featured pieces by Angus Fairhurst, Mat Collishaw and other fledgling YBAs. Goldsmiths and its then professor, Michael Craig-Martin (creator of the Tate’s infamous glass of water on a shelf), were credited with giving these students their go-getting attitude.
That was then. I’ve come to Goldsmiths to see how final-year MA students are feeling about their futures now, in the shadow of recession. Four budding artists from the class of 2009 meet me in a lecture room and I quickly sense that everything has changed for this generation. Their idea of a life in art has little in common with the fiercely ambitious artists the college was turning out in the early 1990s. Is it the economy? Is it the sheer number of artists competing for attention in today’s Britain? Have tutors’ attitudes changed here since the retirement of Craig-Martin? Whatever it is, these students seem to have no illusions at all about their chances of making it big.
Jason Underhill, a tall, bearded 26-year-old from California, has the studied air of an independent film-maker. And that’s what he is, albeit one who is just finishing a fine art MA. His graduation piece is a film called Howlin’, about aimless young people in an American city. It features bodies turning up in a supermarket freezer, and two characters looking down on a town they see as a scar on the beautiful wilderness.
There’s clearly an ambition here to say something as well as to make something, but Underhill – whose work featured in last year’s prestigious New Contemporaries exhibition in Liverpool – does not seem in any danger of getting overexcited about success. “I chose Goldsmiths because I needed to reconsider my position,” he says. “My ideas felt half-formed, possibly because I didn’t know how to address a place like California. I thought that some distance could help me articulate things.”
Annie Hémond Hotte, born in Montreal in 1980, is a painter. Although she started out on a musical path, she now can’t imagine life without painting: “My family are not very artistic so I had to fight a bit when I decided I wanted to paint. I didn’t want to do anything else.” Like the others, she’s on the fine art MA and her degree show features large-scale paintings of Pinocchio-like characters. They drip with thick, waxy colour.
Tina Hage, a photographer born in Haiti, studied media arts in Cologne before moving to London. At first, the photographs in her degree show seem to zoom in on moments of crisis in crowd scenes; then you realise that Hage, in her early 30s, plays all the parts. She is the quietest of the group and reticent about her art, preferring to let her digitally manipulated fictions speak for themselves – which they do, rather well.
Jon Moscow, also in his 30s, feels art is his vocation and he’s not too bothered what the world makes of him and his fellow students: “We consider that we are artists already – I became an artist for the art, not for the art world.” Moscow, from Cleethorpes, used to be a chartered accountant. But, during the 1990s, when Hirst’s generation were becoming famous, he quit to follow his artistic urge. He has exhibited in Düsseldorf and London. His room in the degree show is filled with sculptures and significant objects, arranged in a surreal style. “I make rooms,” he says of his work, before highlighting one of its drawbacks: “How do you sell a room?”
Much may have changed in art schools, but one thing seems to have stayed the same: the cool demeanour of the students. You could almost imagine this lot in a band together, with Moscow as the Jarvis Cocker figure. Goldsmiths is renowned for equipping its charges for the reality of a career in art: if charm is part of what it takes, they have plenty. However, while all four are determined to put art at the centre of their lives, they are sceptical about actually making a living from it, especially during a recession. “There’s nothing we can do about it,” says Hotte. “But you can’t say, ‘the art market looks bad so I’ll stop producing work.’ It wouldn’t make sense.”
Their response is to look forward to lives as artists, with the intention of supporting themselves by other means. “There are statistics from the Arts and Humanities Research Council,” says Moscow. “They make depressing reading if you’re interested in making a living from your art. A tiny proportion of artists do that, so I don’t even go there.”
This approach – passionate about the work, doubtful of economic reward – has always been the best attitude for an artist to have throughout history. It costs money to be a student and they expect it to cost money to be an artist: making films, printing photographs, buying canvases. But it’s something they have to do. They are what you might call hardheaded dreamers. Art, says Underhill, “is a strange relationship that you have with yourself”.
“We want to keep in touch,” says Hotte. “Not just in terms of showing our art, but in terms of making it, and having discussions. It’s a big part of the Goldsmiths thing, to meet people who push you.” This is perhaps the most important thing they’ve got out of their time here. You get the impression that the friendships forged at Goldsmiths will play a part in their lives for years to come, as they go out into a world they seem well-armoured for. “My biggest hope in the next couple years is to develop a practice as an artist making feature films,” says Underhill. “My biggest fear is that it will take longer than a couple years to do it.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Man on the edge
July 14th, 2009 |
No Comments
Aidan Gillen made his name playing chancers and scumbags and in his new BBC drama Freefall he portrays a venal City banker
It’s not easy to interview someone who you’ve last seen masturbating. But so it is with Aidan Gillen. As I approach him in the National Film Theatre foyer, I can’t help recalling a scene I’ve just watched. He plays venal City banker Gus in the forthcoming BBC credit-crunch drama Freefall; after clinching some ghastly multi-billion sub-prime deal that ultimately leads to the debt-ridden immiseration of thousands, Gus retreats to the office loos to celebrate in the manner he deems most proper. Never has the cockney rhyming slang “merchant banker” been quite so luridly literalised.
Harold Pinter described Gillen as “dangerous” after seeing him appear in a 2003 Broadway production of The Caretaker. As I walk towards him he wraps and unwraps his legs around each other repeatedly. His whole demeanour is an heroically uncomfortable array of twitches and leers.
“Having talked to a lot of those guys in banking, I realised that high finance is very exciting,” he says as we settle down in the bar. “It probably is terribly exciting to watch these deals fall into place.” But surely not so terribly exciting as your character finds it? “I don’t know. I don’t want to get too wanky about it, but I can totally sympathise with him. There’s pleasure in his life but there’s nobody to share it with. Hence, you know, that scene.”
Gillen is no stranger to, you know, challenging scenes. A decade ago in Queer As Folk, he played Stuart, uttering the infamous lines: “I’m a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I’m Moses and the parting of the red cheeks . . . And I am not a pervert.” (Gillen, a former Dublin altar boy, recalls watching some sex scenes from Queer As Folk with his mother. “She said: ‘How are they actually doing that?’ And my brother-in-law said: ‘It’s trick photography.’”) His performance was, like the series, widely praised. It was also typical of his astute preference for edgy small-screen dramas in recent years.
Before Queer As Folk came the role of Gypo in Antonia Bird’s Safe. At one point Gypo, a young homeless man, plunges a bottle into his chest in order to get free hospital treatment. More recently, Gillen starred as Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, a political reptile who unexpectedly grows a spine and a conscience while in office.
How did Gillen get the role? “They were casting the net wide getting actors who aren’t recognised, so that’s how us lot [he means the British and the Irish – Dominic West and Idris Elba also starred] got into it. It worked. I’d just been in The Caretaker on Broadway, which meant nothing perhaps to TV audiences there, but showed I could do what they wanted. Also many American actors don’t really want to blot their resumés by appearing as scumbags. British actors – and Irish ones too if I’m anything to go by – are less bothered about playing disgusting or even flawed people. They’re often the most interesting roles, after all, but in the US they can be career death.”
Gillen’s resumé, then, might not make much sense to an American actor: it teems with reptiles, chancers and scumbags (he was particularly effective as Mick, the swaggering, volatile pipe dreamer in The Caretaker, and as the slimy real-estate agent Richard Roma in a West End production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross). But he is proud of it. “There’s a common thread through Antonia Bird, Queer As Folk and The Wire,” he says. “I have been in control of what I’ve been doing, of the career I’ve put together.” I’m not sure how that control includes, say, his turn in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson buddy-chop-socky sequel Shanghai Knights, but let’s not spoil the story.
“I’ve made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that’s a good career strategy. Or at least, it’s my strategy to keep my head together. I keep going back to Ireland to reboot. And then return, showing up as someone else.”
Freefall marks Gillen’s return to British TV drama after too long away. “When I was 19 growing up in Dublin, I wanted to come to London. I’d done a lot of Irish stage work, which was great [in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars, for instance], but London was a magnet . . . the place where the great TV dramas were made. It was like someone wanting to be in a rock’n'roll band now.”
His fellow Wire star Dominic West has said that the UK lacks quality contemporary drama on TV. He told Radio 4′s Today programme recently: “If you turn on American TV, there’s a huge choice of nothing you want to see and, unfortunately, I think that’s the case here now as well . . . we don’t seem to be able to do contemporary stuff.” Does Gillan agree?
“So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale’s work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were Screen Twos produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke. And now David produces Freefall, so it shows the kind of British TV drama I admired is not quite dead.”
That said, Gillen has now retreated to live in Ireland and works there as much as he can. “I just wanted to get back home. I have always been travelling – New York and London. I want to give my kids a proper home.” He lives with his wife Olivia O’Flanagan in Kerry, and his children Berry and Joe attend a Gaelic-speaking school. “They have been brought up in London but because they have Irish parents they seemed to have an Irish accent – then when they got out to Ireland they sounded like Oliver Twist.”
His latest project is to star in the first Hammer film of the 21st century. Called The Wake Wood, it doesn’t sound like the camp Hammer horror that made films starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing so diverting 40 years ago. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s an Irish film written by a guy I know [writer-director David Keating]. It’s the kind of horror film that I like – The Exorcist and The Wicker Man.”
The film tells the story of a couple, Patrick (Gillen) and Louise Daley (Eva Birthistle), whose nine-year-old daughter is killed in a dog attack. To escape their grief, they relocate to a remote rural community. The locals introduce the couple to a secret, pagan ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground for ever. But what will they do when it’s time for Alice to go back? Gillen sensibly won’t divulge.
Why did he take the role? “I like to mix it up and do something completely different.” It was, he says, “literally the smell of the paint” that made him become an actor in the first place: “I was building and painting the sets. I didn’t want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.” He is 41 now, and in the intervening years says he “definitely thought about stopping more than twice. I have been doing this since I was very young. If I could wind it back I would have another life – I would like that, but I would also like to have this life too. For me, now, working and children is it. There’s nothing more to life” •
Freefall is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm. The Wake Wood will be released later this year.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Man on the edge
July 14th, 2009 |
No Comments
Aidan Gillen made his name playing chancers and scumbags and in his new BBC drama Freefall he portrays a venal City banker
It’s not easy to interview someone who you’ve last seen masturbating. But so it is with Aidan Gillen. As I approach him in the National Film Theatre foyer, I can’t help recalling a scene I’ve just watched. He plays venal City banker Gus in the forthcoming BBC credit-crunch drama Freefall; after clinching some ghastly multi-billion sub-prime deal that ultimately leads to the debt-ridden immiseration of thousands, Gus retreats to the office loos to celebrate in the manner he deems most proper. Never has the cockney rhyming slang “merchant banker” been quite so luridly literalised.
Harold Pinter described Gillen as “dangerous” after seeing him appear in a 2003 Broadway production of The Caretaker. As I walk towards him he wraps and unwraps his legs around each other repeatedly. His whole demeanour is an heroically uncomfortable array of twitches and leers.
“Having talked to a lot of those guys in banking, I realised that high finance is very exciting,” he says as we settle down in the bar. “It probably is terribly exciting to watch these deals fall into place.” But surely not so terribly exciting as your character finds it? “I don’t know. I don’t want to get too wanky about it, but I can totally sympathise with him. There’s pleasure in his life but there’s nobody to share it with. Hence, you know, that scene.”
Gillen is no stranger to, you know, challenging scenes. A decade ago in Queer As Folk, he played Stuart, uttering the infamous lines: “I’m a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I’m Moses and the parting of the red cheeks . . . And I am not a pervert.” (Gillen, a former Dublin altar boy, recalls watching some sex scenes from Queer As Folk with his mother. “She said: ‘How are they actually doing that?’ And my brother-in-law said: ‘It’s trick photography.’”) His performance was, like the series, widely praised. It was also typical of his astute preference for edgy small-screen dramas in recent years.
Before Queer As Folk came the role of Gypo in Antonia Bird’s Safe. At one point Gypo, a young homeless man, plunges a bottle into his chest in order to get free hospital treatment. More recently, Gillen starred as Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, a political reptile who unexpectedly grows a spine and a conscience while in office.
How did Gillen get the role? “They were casting the net wide getting actors who aren’t recognised, so that’s how us lot [he means the British and the Irish – Dominic West and Idris Elba also starred] got into it. It worked. I’d just been in The Caretaker on Broadway, which meant nothing perhaps to TV audiences there, but showed I could do what they wanted. Also many American actors don’t really want to blot their resumés by appearing as scumbags. British actors – and Irish ones too if I’m anything to go by – are less bothered about playing disgusting or even flawed people. They’re often the most interesting roles, after all, but in the US they can be career death.”
Gillen’s resumé, then, might not make much sense to an American actor: it teems with reptiles, chancers and scumbags (he was particularly effective as Mick, the swaggering, volatile pipe dreamer in The Caretaker, and as the slimy real-estate agent Richard Roma in a West End production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross). But he is proud of it. “There’s a common thread through Antonia Bird, Queer As Folk and The Wire,” he says. “I have been in control of what I’ve been doing, of the career I’ve put together.” I’m not sure how that control includes, say, his turn in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson buddy-chop-socky sequel Shanghai Knights, but let’s not spoil the story.
“I’ve made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that’s a good career strategy. Or at least, it’s my strategy to keep my head together. I keep going back to Ireland to reboot. And then return, showing up as someone else.”
Freefall marks Gillen’s return to British TV drama after too long away. “When I was 19 growing up in Dublin, I wanted to come to London. I’d done a lot of Irish stage work, which was great [in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars, for instance], but London was a magnet . . . the place where the great TV dramas were made. It was like someone wanting to be in a rock’n'roll band now.”
His fellow Wire star Dominic West has said that the UK lacks quality contemporary drama on TV. He told Radio 4′s Today programme recently: “If you turn on American TV, there’s a huge choice of nothing you want to see and, unfortunately, I think that’s the case here now as well . . . we don’t seem to be able to do contemporary stuff.” Does Gillan agree?
“So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale’s work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were Screen Twos produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke. And now David produces Freefall, so it shows the kind of British TV drama I admired is not quite dead.”
That said, Gillen has now retreated to live in Ireland and works there as much as he can. “I just wanted to get back home. I have always been travelling – New York and London. I want to give my kids a proper home.” He lives with his wife Olivia O’Flanagan in Kerry, and his children Berry and Joe attend a Gaelic-speaking school. “They have been brought up in London but because they have Irish parents they seemed to have an Irish accent – then when they got out to Ireland they sounded like Oliver Twist.”
His latest project is to star in the first Hammer film of the 21st century. Called The Wake Wood, it doesn’t sound like the camp Hammer horror that made films starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing so diverting 40 years ago. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s an Irish film written by a guy I know [writer-director David Keating]. It’s the kind of horror film that I like – The Exorcist and The Wicker Man.”
The film tells the story of a couple, Patrick (Gillen) and Louise Daley (Eva Birthistle), whose nine-year-old daughter is killed in a dog attack. To escape their grief, they relocate to a remote rural community. The locals introduce the couple to a secret, pagan ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground for ever. But what will they do when it’s time for Alice to go back? Gillen sensibly won’t divulge.
Why did he take the role? “I like to mix it up and do something completely different.” It was, he says, “literally the smell of the paint” that made him become an actor in the first place: “I was building and painting the sets. I didn’t want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.” He is 41 now, and in the intervening years says he “definitely thought about stopping more than twice. I have been doing this since I was very young. If I could wind it back I would have another life – I would like that, but I would also like to have this life too. For me, now, working and children is it. There’s nothing more to life” •
Freefall is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm. The Wake Wood will be released later this year.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Man on the edge
July 14th, 2009 |
No Comments
Aidan Gillen made his name playing chancers and scumbags and in his new BBC drama Freefall he portrays a venal City banker
It’s not easy to interview someone who you’ve last seen masturbating. But so it is with Aidan Gillen. As I approach him in the National Film Theatre foyer, I can’t help recalling a scene I’ve just watched. He plays venal City banker Gus in the forthcoming BBC credit-crunch drama Freefall; after clinching some ghastly multi-billion sub-prime deal that ultimately leads to the debt-ridden immiseration of thousands, Gus retreats to the office loos to celebrate in the manner he deems most proper. Never has the cockney rhyming slang “merchant banker” been quite so luridly literalised.
Harold Pinter described Gillen as “dangerous” after seeing him appear in a 2003 Broadway production of The Caretaker. As I walk towards him he wraps and unwraps his legs around each other repeatedly. His whole demeanour is an heroically uncomfortable array of twitches and leers.
“Having talked to a lot of those guys in banking, I realised that high finance is very exciting,” he says as we settle down in the bar. “It probably is terribly exciting to watch these deals fall into place.” But surely not so terribly exciting as your character finds it? “I don’t know. I don’t want to get too wanky about it, but I can totally sympathise with him. There’s pleasure in his life but there’s nobody to share it with. Hence, you know, that scene.”
Gillen is no stranger to, you know, challenging scenes. A decade ago in Queer As Folk, he played Stuart, uttering the infamous lines: “I’m a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I’m Moses and the parting of the red cheeks . . . And I am not a pervert.” (Gillen, a former Dublin altar boy, recalls watching some sex scenes from Queer As Folk with his mother. “She said: ‘How are they actually doing that?’ And my brother-in-law said: ‘It’s trick photography.’”) His performance was, like the series, widely praised. It was also typical of his astute preference for edgy small-screen dramas in recent years.
Before Queer As Folk came the role of Gypo in Antonia Bird’s Safe. At one point Gypo, a young homeless man, plunges a bottle into his chest in order to get free hospital treatment. More recently, Gillen starred as Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, a political reptile who unexpectedly grows a spine and a conscience while in office.
How did Gillen get the role? “They were casting the net wide getting actors who aren’t recognised, so that’s how us lot [he means the British and the Irish – Dominic West and Idris Elba also starred] got into it. It worked. I’d just been in The Caretaker on Broadway, which meant nothing perhaps to TV audiences there, but showed I could do what they wanted. Also many American actors don’t really want to blot their resumés by appearing as scumbags. British actors – and Irish ones too if I’m anything to go by – are less bothered about playing disgusting or even flawed people. They’re often the most interesting roles, after all, but in the US they can be career death.”
Gillen’s resumé, then, might not make much sense to an American actor: it teems with reptiles, chancers and scumbags (he was particularly effective as Mick, the swaggering, volatile pipe dreamer in The Caretaker, and as the slimy real-estate agent Richard Roma in a West End production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross). But he is proud of it. “There’s a common thread through Antonia Bird, Queer As Folk and The Wire,” he says. “I have been in control of what I’ve been doing, of the career I’ve put together.” I’m not sure how that control includes, say, his turn in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson buddy-chop-socky sequel Shanghai Knights, but let’s not spoil the story.
“I’ve made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that’s a good career strategy. Or at least, it’s my strategy to keep my head together. I keep going back to Ireland to reboot. And then return, showing up as someone else.”
Freefall marks Gillen’s return to British TV drama after too long away. “When I was 19 growing up in Dublin, I wanted to come to London. I’d done a lot of Irish stage work, which was great [in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars, for instance], but London was a magnet . . . the place where the great TV dramas were made. It was like someone wanting to be in a rock’n'roll band now.”
His fellow Wire star Dominic West has said that the UK lacks quality contemporary drama on TV. He told Radio 4′s Today programme recently: “If you turn on American TV, there’s a huge choice of nothing you want to see and, unfortunately, I think that’s the case here now as well . . . we don’t seem to be able to do contemporary stuff.” Does Gillan agree?
“So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale’s work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were Screen Twos produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke. And now David produces Freefall, so it shows the kind of British TV drama I admired is not quite dead.”
That said, Gillen has now retreated to live in Ireland and works there as much as he can. “I just wanted to get back home. I have always been travelling – New York and London. I want to give my kids a proper home.” He lives with his wife Olivia O’Flanagan in Kerry, and his children Berry and Joe attend a Gaelic-speaking school. “They have been brought up in London but because they have Irish parents they seemed to have an Irish accent – then when they got out to Ireland they sounded like Oliver Twist.”
His latest project is to star in the first Hammer film of the 21st century. Called The Wake Wood, it doesn’t sound like the camp Hammer horror that made films starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing so diverting 40 years ago. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s an Irish film written by a guy I know [writer-director David Keating]. It’s the kind of horror film that I like – The Exorcist and The Wicker Man.”
The film tells the story of a couple, Patrick (Gillen) and Louise Daley (Eva Birthistle), whose nine-year-old daughter is killed in a dog attack. To escape their grief, they relocate to a remote rural community. The locals introduce the couple to a secret, pagan ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground for ever. But what will they do when it’s time for Alice to go back? Gillen sensibly won’t divulge.
Why did he take the role? “I like to mix it up and do something completely different.” It was, he says, “literally the smell of the paint” that made him become an actor in the first place: “I was building and painting the sets. I didn’t want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.” He is 41 now, and in the intervening years says he “definitely thought about stopping more than twice. I have been doing this since I was very young. If I could wind it back I would have another life – I would like that, but I would also like to have this life too. For me, now, working and children is it. There’s nothing more to life” •
Freefall is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm. The Wake Wood will be released later this year.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Man on the edge
July 14th, 2009 |
No Comments
Aidan Gillen made his name playing chancers and scumbags and in his new BBC drama Freefall he portrays a venal City banker
It’s not easy to interview someone who you’ve last seen masturbating. But so it is with Aidan Gillen. As I approach him in the National Film Theatre foyer, I can’t help recalling a scene I’ve just watched. He plays venal City banker Gus in the forthcoming BBC credit-crunch drama Freefall; after clinching some ghastly multi-billion sub-prime deal that ultimately leads to the debt-ridden immiseration of thousands, Gus retreats to the office loos to celebrate in the manner he deems most proper. Never has the cockney rhyming slang “merchant banker” been quite so luridly literalised.
Harold Pinter described Gillen as “dangerous” after seeing him appear in a 2003 Broadway production of The Caretaker. As I walk towards him he wraps and unwraps his legs around each other repeatedly. His whole demeanour is an heroically uncomfortable array of twitches and leers.
“Having talked to a lot of those guys in banking, I realised that high finance is very exciting,” he says as we settle down in the bar. “It probably is terribly exciting to watch these deals fall into place.” But surely not so terribly exciting as your character finds it? “I don’t know. I don’t want to get too wanky about it, but I can totally sympathise with him. There’s pleasure in his life but there’s nobody to share it with. Hence, you know, that scene.”
Gillen is no stranger to, you know, challenging scenes. A decade ago in Queer As Folk, he played Stuart, uttering the infamous lines: “I’m a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I’m Moses and the parting of the red cheeks . . . And I am not a pervert.” (Gillen, a former Dublin altar boy, recalls watching some sex scenes from Queer As Folk with his mother. “She said: ‘How are they actually doing that?’ And my brother-in-law said: ‘It’s trick photography.’”) His performance was, like the series, widely praised. It was also typical of his astute preference for edgy small-screen dramas in recent years.
Before Queer As Folk came the role of Gypo in Antonia Bird’s Safe. At one point Gypo, a young homeless man, plunges a bottle into his chest in order to get free hospital treatment. More recently, Gillen starred as Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, a political reptile who unexpectedly grows a spine and a conscience while in office.
How did Gillen get the role? “They were casting the net wide getting actors who aren’t recognised, so that’s how us lot [he means the British and the Irish – Dominic West and Idris Elba also starred] got into it. It worked. I’d just been in The Caretaker on Broadway, which meant nothing perhaps to TV audiences there, but showed I could do what they wanted. Also many American actors don’t really want to blot their resumés by appearing as scumbags. British actors – and Irish ones too if I’m anything to go by – are less bothered about playing disgusting or even flawed people. They’re often the most interesting roles, after all, but in the US they can be career death.”
Gillen’s resumé, then, might not make much sense to an American actor: it teems with reptiles, chancers and scumbags (he was particularly effective as Mick, the swaggering, volatile pipe dreamer in The Caretaker, and as the slimy real-estate agent Richard Roma in a West End production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross). But he is proud of it. “There’s a common thread through Antonia Bird, Queer As Folk and The Wire,” he says. “I have been in control of what I’ve been doing, of the career I’ve put together.” I’m not sure how that control includes, say, his turn in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson buddy-chop-socky sequel Shanghai Knights, but let’s not spoil the story.
“I’ve made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that’s a good career strategy. Or at least, it’s my strategy to keep my head together. I keep going back to Ireland to reboot. And then return, showing up as someone else.”
Freefall marks Gillen’s return to British TV drama after too long away. “When I was 19 growing up in Dublin, I wanted to come to London. I’d done a lot of Irish stage work, which was great [in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars, for instance], but London was a magnet . . . the place where the great TV dramas were made. It was like someone wanting to be in a rock’n'roll band now.”
His fellow Wire star Dominic West has said that the UK lacks quality contemporary drama on TV. He told Radio 4′s Today programme recently: “If you turn on American TV, there’s a huge choice of nothing you want to see and, unfortunately, I think that’s the case here now as well . . . we don’t seem to be able to do contemporary stuff.” Does Gillan agree?
“So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale’s work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were Screen Twos produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke. And now David produces Freefall, so it shows the kind of British TV drama I admired is not quite dead.”
That said, Gillen has now retreated to live in Ireland and works there as much as he can. “I just wanted to get back home. I have always been travelling – New York and London. I want to give my kids a proper home.” He lives with his wife Olivia O’Flanagan in Kerry, and his children Berry and Joe attend a Gaelic-speaking school. “They have been brought up in London but because they have Irish parents they seemed to have an Irish accent – then when they got out to Ireland they sounded like Oliver Twist.”
His latest project is to star in the first Hammer film of the 21st century. Called The Wake Wood, it doesn’t sound like the camp Hammer horror that made films starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing so diverting 40 years ago. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s an Irish film written by a guy I know [writer-director David Keating]. It’s the kind of horror film that I like – The Exorcist and The Wicker Man.”
The film tells the story of a couple, Patrick (Gillen) and Louise Daley (Eva Birthistle), whose nine-year-old daughter is killed in a dog attack. To escape their grief, they relocate to a remote rural community. The locals introduce the couple to a secret, pagan ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground for ever. But what will they do when it’s time for Alice to go back? Gillen sensibly won’t divulge.
Why did he take the role? “I like to mix it up and do something completely different.” It was, he says, “literally the smell of the paint” that made him become an actor in the first place: “I was building and painting the sets. I didn’t want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.” He is 41 now, and in the intervening years says he “definitely thought about stopping more than twice. I have been doing this since I was very young. If I could wind it back I would have another life – I would like that, but I would also like to have this life too. For me, now, working and children is it. There’s nothing more to life” •
Freefall is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm. The Wake Wood will be released later this year.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Man on the edge
July 14th, 2009 |
No Comments
Aidan Gillen made his name playing chancers and scumbags and in his new BBC drama Freefall he portrays a venal City banker
It’s not easy to interview someone who you’ve last seen masturbating. But so it is with Aidan Gillen. As I approach him in the National Film Theatre foyer, I can’t help recalling a scene I’ve just watched. He plays venal City banker Gus in the forthcoming BBC credit-crunch drama Freefall; after clinching some ghastly multi-billion sub-prime deal that ultimately leads to the debt-ridden immiseration of thousands, Gus retreats to the office loos to celebrate in the manner he deems most proper. Never has the cockney rhyming slang “merchant banker” been quite so luridly literalised.
Harold Pinter described Gillen as “dangerous” after seeing him appear in a 2003 Broadway production of The Caretaker. As I walk towards him he wraps and unwraps his legs around each other repeatedly. His whole demeanour is an heroically uncomfortable array of twitches and leers.
“Having talked to a lot of those guys in banking, I realised that high finance is very exciting,” he says as we settle down in the bar. “It probably is terribly exciting to watch these deals fall into place.” But surely not so terribly exciting as your character finds it? “I don’t know. I don’t want to get too wanky about it, but I can totally sympathise with him. There’s pleasure in his life but there’s nobody to share it with. Hence, you know, that scene.”
Gillen is no stranger to, you know, challenging scenes. A decade ago in Queer As Folk, he played Stuart, uttering the infamous lines: “I’m a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I’m Moses and the parting of the red cheeks . . . And I am not a pervert.” (Gillen, a former Dublin altar boy, recalls watching some sex scenes from Queer As Folk with his mother. “She said: ‘How are they actually doing that?’ And my brother-in-law said: ‘It’s trick photography.’”) His performance was, like the series, widely praised. It was also typical of his astute preference for edgy small-screen dramas in recent years.
Before Queer As Folk came the role of Gypo in Antonia Bird’s Safe. At one point Gypo, a young homeless man, plunges a bottle into his chest in order to get free hospital treatment. More recently, Gillen starred as Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, a political reptile who unexpectedly grows a spine and a conscience while in office.
How did Gillen get the role? “They were casting the net wide getting actors who aren’t recognised, so that’s how us lot [he means the British and the Irish – Dominic West and Idris Elba also starred] got into it. It worked. I’d just been in The Caretaker on Broadway, which meant nothing perhaps to TV audiences there, but showed I could do what they wanted. Also many American actors don’t really want to blot their resumés by appearing as scumbags. British actors – and Irish ones too if I’m anything to go by – are less bothered about playing disgusting or even flawed people. They’re often the most interesting roles, after all, but in the US they can be career death.”
Gillen’s resumé, then, might not make much sense to an American actor: it teems with reptiles, chancers and scumbags (he was particularly effective as Mick, the swaggering, volatile pipe dreamer in The Caretaker, and as the slimy real-estate agent Richard Roma in a West End production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross). But he is proud of it. “There’s a common thread through Antonia Bird, Queer As Folk and The Wire,” he says. “I have been in control of what I’ve been doing, of the career I’ve put together.” I’m not sure how that control includes, say, his turn in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson buddy-chop-socky sequel Shanghai Knights, but let’s not spoil the story.
“I’ve made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that’s a good career strategy. Or at least, it’s my strategy to keep my head together. I keep going back to Ireland to reboot. And then return, showing up as someone else.”
Freefall marks Gillen’s return to British TV drama after too long away. “When I was 19 growing up in Dublin, I wanted to come to London. I’d done a lot of Irish stage work, which was great [in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars, for instance], but London was a magnet . . . the place where the great TV dramas were made. It was like someone wanting to be in a rock’n'roll band now.”
His fellow Wire star Dominic West has said that the UK lacks quality contemporary drama on TV. He told Radio 4′s Today programme recently: “If you turn on American TV, there’s a huge choice of nothing you want to see and, unfortunately, I think that’s the case here now as well . . . we don’t seem to be able to do contemporary stuff.” Does Gillan agree?
“So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale’s work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were Screen Twos produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke. And now David produces Freefall, so it shows the kind of British TV drama I admired is not quite dead.”
That said, Gillen has now retreated to live in Ireland and works there as much as he can. “I just wanted to get back home. I have always been travelling – New York and London. I want to give my kids a proper home.” He lives with his wife Olivia O’Flanagan in Kerry, and his children Berry and Joe attend a Gaelic-speaking school. “They have been brought up in London but because they have Irish parents they seemed to have an Irish accent – then when they got out to Ireland they sounded like Oliver Twist.”
His latest project is to star in the first Hammer film of the 21st century. Called The Wake Wood, it doesn’t sound like the camp Hammer horror that made films starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing so diverting 40 years ago. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s an Irish film written by a guy I know [writer-director David Keating]. It’s the kind of horror film that I like – The Exorcist and The Wicker Man.”
The film tells the story of a couple, Patrick (Gillen) and Louise Daley (Eva Birthistle), whose nine-year-old daughter is killed in a dog attack. To escape their grief, they relocate to a remote rural community. The locals introduce the couple to a secret, pagan ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground for ever. But what will they do when it’s time for Alice to go back? Gillen sensibly won’t divulge.
Why did he take the role? “I like to mix it up and do something completely different.” It was, he says, “literally the smell of the paint” that made him become an actor in the first place: “I was building and painting the sets. I didn’t want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.” He is 41 now, and in the intervening years says he “definitely thought about stopping more than twice. I have been doing this since I was very young. If I could wind it back I would have another life – I would like that, but I would also like to have this life too. For me, now, working and children is it. There’s nothing more to life” •
Freefall is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm. The Wake Wood will be released later this year.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Man on the edge
July 14th, 2009 |
No Comments
Aidan Gillen made his name playing chancers and scumbags and in his new BBC drama Freefall he portrays a venal City banker
It’s not easy to interview someone who you’ve last seen masturbating. But so it is with Aidan Gillen. As I approach him in the National Film Theatre foyer, I can’t help recalling a scene I’ve just watched. He plays venal City banker Gus in the forthcoming BBC credit-crunch drama Freefall; after clinching some ghastly multi-billion sub-prime deal that ultimately leads to the debt-ridden immiseration of thousands, Gus retreats to the office loos to celebrate in the manner he deems most proper. Never has the cockney rhyming slang “merchant banker” been quite so luridly literalised.
Harold Pinter described Gillen as “dangerous” after seeing him appear in a 2003 Broadway production of The Caretaker. As I walk towards him he wraps and unwraps his legs around each other repeatedly. His whole demeanour is an heroically uncomfortable array of twitches and leers.
“Having talked to a lot of those guys in banking, I realised that high finance is very exciting,” he says as we settle down in the bar. “It probably is terribly exciting to watch these deals fall into place.” But surely not so terribly exciting as your character finds it? “I don’t know. I don’t want to get too wanky about it, but I can totally sympathise with him. There’s pleasure in his life but there’s nobody to share it with. Hence, you know, that scene.”
Gillen is no stranger to, you know, challenging scenes. A decade ago in Queer As Folk, he played Stuart, uttering the infamous lines: “I’m a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I’m Moses and the parting of the red cheeks . . . And I am not a pervert.” (Gillen, a former Dublin altar boy, recalls watching some sex scenes from Queer As Folk with his mother. “She said: ‘How are they actually doing that?’ And my brother-in-law said: ‘It’s trick photography.’”) His performance was, like the series, widely praised. It was also typical of his astute preference for edgy small-screen dramas in recent years.
Before Queer As Folk came the role of Gypo in Antonia Bird’s Safe. At one point Gypo, a young homeless man, plunges a bottle into his chest in order to get free hospital treatment. More recently, Gillen starred as Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, a political reptile who unexpectedly grows a spine and a conscience while in office.
How did Gillen get the role? “They were casting the net wide getting actors who aren’t recognised, so that’s how us lot [he means the British and the Irish – Dominic West and Idris Elba also starred] got into it. It worked. I’d just been in The Caretaker on Broadway, which meant nothing perhaps to TV audiences there, but showed I could do what they wanted. Also many American actors don’t really want to blot their resumés by appearing as scumbags. British actors – and Irish ones too if I’m anything to go by – are less bothered about playing disgusting or even flawed people. They’re often the most interesting roles, after all, but in the US they can be career death.”
Gillen’s resumé, then, might not make much sense to an American actor: it teems with reptiles, chancers and scumbags (he was particularly effective as Mick, the swaggering, volatile pipe dreamer in The Caretaker, and as the slimy real-estate agent Richard Roma in a West End production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross). But he is proud of it. “There’s a common thread through Antonia Bird, Queer As Folk and The Wire,” he says. “I have been in control of what I’ve been doing, of the career I’ve put together.” I’m not sure how that control includes, say, his turn in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson buddy-chop-socky sequel Shanghai Knights, but let’s not spoil the story.
“I’ve made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that’s a good career strategy. Or at least, it’s my strategy to keep my head together. I keep going back to Ireland to reboot. And then return, showing up as someone else.”
Freefall marks Gillen’s return to British TV drama after too long away. “When I was 19 growing up in Dublin, I wanted to come to London. I’d done a lot of Irish stage work, which was great [in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars, for instance], but London was a magnet . . . the place where the great TV dramas were made. It was like someone wanting to be in a rock’n'roll band now.”
His fellow Wire star Dominic West has said that the UK lacks quality contemporary drama on TV. He told Radio 4′s Today programme recently: “If you turn on American TV, there’s a huge choice of nothing you want to see and, unfortunately, I think that’s the case here now as well . . . we don’t seem to be able to do contemporary stuff.” Does Gillan agree?
“So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale’s work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were Screen Twos produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke. And now David produces Freefall, so it shows the kind of British TV drama I admired is not quite dead.”
That said, Gillen has now retreated to live in Ireland and works there as much as he can. “I just wanted to get back home. I have always been travelling – New York and London. I want to give my kids a proper home.” He lives with his wife Olivia O’Flanagan in Kerry, and his children Berry and Joe attend a Gaelic-speaking school. “They have been brought up in London but because they have Irish parents they seemed to have an Irish accent – then when they got out to Ireland they sounded like Oliver Twist.”
His latest project is to star in the first Hammer film of the 21st century. Called The Wake Wood, it doesn’t sound like the camp Hammer horror that made films starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing so diverting 40 years ago. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s an Irish film written by a guy I know [writer-director David Keating]. It’s the kind of horror film that I like – The Exorcist and The Wicker Man.”
The film tells the story of a couple, Patrick (Gillen) and Louise Daley (Eva Birthistle), whose nine-year-old daughter is killed in a dog attack. To escape their grief, they relocate to a remote rural community. The locals introduce the couple to a secret, pagan ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground for ever. But what will they do when it’s time for Alice to go back? Gillen sensibly won’t divulge.
Why did he take the role? “I like to mix it up and do something completely different.” It was, he says, “literally the smell of the paint” that made him become an actor in the first place: “I was building and painting the sets. I didn’t want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.” He is 41 now, and in the intervening years says he “definitely thought about stopping more than twice. I have been doing this since I was very young. If I could wind it back I would have another life – I would like that, but I would also like to have this life too. For me, now, working and children is it. There’s nothing more to life” •
Freefall is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm. The Wake Wood will be released later this year.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Man on the edge
July 14th, 2009 |
No Comments
Aidan Gillen made his name playing chancers and scumbags and in his new BBC drama Freefall he portrays a venal City banker
It’s not easy to interview someone who you’ve last seen masturbating. But so it is with Aidan Gillen. As I approach him in the National Film Theatre foyer, I can’t help recalling a scene I’ve just watched. He plays venal City banker Gus in the forthcoming BBC credit-crunch drama Freefall; after clinching some ghastly multi-billion sub-prime deal that ultimately leads to the debt-ridden immiseration of thousands, Gus retreats to the office loos to celebrate in the manner he deems most proper. Never has the cockney rhyming slang “merchant banker” been quite so luridly literalised.
Harold Pinter described Gillen as “dangerous” after seeing him appear in a 2003 Broadway production of The Caretaker. As I walk towards him he wraps and unwraps his legs around each other repeatedly. His whole demeanour is an heroically uncomfortable array of twitches and leers.
“Having talked to a lot of those guys in banking, I realised that high finance is very exciting,” he says as we settle down in the bar. “It probably is terribly exciting to watch these deals fall into place.” But surely not so terribly exciting as your character finds it? “I don’t know. I don’t want to get too wanky about it, but I can totally sympathise with him. There’s pleasure in his life but there’s nobody to share it with. Hence, you know, that scene.”
Gillen is no stranger to, you know, challenging scenes. A decade ago in Queer As Folk, he played Stuart, uttering the infamous lines: “I’m a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I’m Moses and the parting of the red cheeks . . . And I am not a pervert.” (Gillen, a former Dublin altar boy, recalls watching some sex scenes from Queer As Folk with his mother. “She said: ‘How are they actually doing that?’ And my brother-in-law said: ‘It’s trick photography.’”) His performance was, like the series, widely praised. It was also typical of his astute preference for edgy small-screen dramas in recent years.
Before Queer As Folk came the role of Gypo in Antonia Bird’s Safe. At one point Gypo, a young homeless man, plunges a bottle into his chest in order to get free hospital treatment. More recently, Gillen starred as Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, a political reptile who unexpectedly grows a spine and a conscience while in office.
How did Gillen get the role? “They were casting the net wide getting actors who aren’t recognised, so that’s how us lot [he means the British and the Irish – Dominic West and Idris Elba also starred] got into it. It worked. I’d just been in The Caretaker on Broadway, which meant nothing perhaps to TV audiences there, but showed I could do what they wanted. Also many American actors don’t really want to blot their resumés by appearing as scumbags. British actors – and Irish ones too if I’m anything to go by – are less bothered about playing disgusting or even flawed people. They’re often the most interesting roles, after all, but in the US they can be career death.”
Gillen’s resumé, then, might not make much sense to an American actor: it teems with reptiles, chancers and scumbags (he was particularly effective as Mick, the swaggering, volatile pipe dreamer in The Caretaker, and as the slimy real-estate agent Richard Roma in a West End production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross). But he is proud of it. “There’s a common thread through Antonia Bird, Queer As Folk and The Wire,” he says. “I have been in control of what I’ve been doing, of the career I’ve put together.” I’m not sure how that control includes, say, his turn in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson buddy-chop-socky sequel Shanghai Knights, but let’s not spoil the story.
“I’ve made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that’s a good career strategy. Or at least, it’s my strategy to keep my head together. I keep going back to Ireland to reboot. And then return, showing up as someone else.”
Freefall marks Gillen’s return to British TV drama after too long away. “When I was 19 growing up in Dublin, I wanted to come to London. I’d done a lot of Irish stage work, which was great [in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars, for instance], but London was a magnet . . . the place where the great TV dramas were made. It was like someone wanting to be in a rock’n'roll band now.”
His fellow Wire star Dominic West has said that the UK lacks quality contemporary drama on TV. He told Radio 4′s Today programme recently: “If you turn on American TV, there’s a huge choice of nothing you want to see and, unfortunately, I think that’s the case here now as well . . . we don’t seem to be able to do contemporary stuff.” Does Gillan agree?
“So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale’s work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were Screen Twos produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke. And now David produces Freefall, so it shows the kind of British TV drama I admired is not quite dead.”
That said, Gillen has now retreated to live in Ireland and works there as much as he can. “I just wanted to get back home. I have always been travelling – New York and London. I want to give my kids a proper home.” He lives with his wife Olivia O’Flanagan in Kerry, and his children Berry and Joe attend a Gaelic-speaking school. “They have been brought up in London but because they have Irish parents they seemed to have an Irish accent – then when they got out to Ireland they sounded like Oliver Twist.”
His latest project is to star in the first Hammer film of the 21st century. Called The Wake Wood, it doesn’t sound like the camp Hammer horror that made films starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing so diverting 40 years ago. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s an Irish film written by a guy I know [writer-director David Keating]. It’s the kind of horror film that I like – The Exorcist and The Wicker Man.”
The film tells the story of a couple, Patrick (Gillen) and Louise Daley (Eva Birthistle), whose nine-year-old daughter is killed in a dog attack. To escape their grief, they relocate to a remote rural community. The locals introduce the couple to a secret, pagan ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground for ever. But what will they do when it’s time for Alice to go back? Gillen sensibly won’t divulge.
Why did he take the role? “I like to mix it up and do something completely different.” It was, he says, “literally the smell of the paint” that made him become an actor in the first place: “I was building and painting the sets. I didn’t want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.” He is 41 now, and in the intervening years says he “definitely thought about stopping more than twice. I have been doing this since I was very young. If I could wind it back I would have another life – I would like that, but I would also like to have this life too. For me, now, working and children is it. There’s nothing more to life” •
Freefall is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm. The Wake Wood will be released later this year.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Man on the edge
July 14th, 2009 |
No Comments
Aidan Gillen made his name playing chancers and scumbags and in his new BBC drama Freefall he portrays a venal City banker
It’s not easy to interview someone who you’ve last seen masturbating. But so it is with Aidan Gillen. As I approach him in the National Film Theatre foyer, I can’t help recalling a scene I’ve just watched. He plays venal City banker Gus in the forthcoming BBC credit-crunch drama Freefall; after clinching some ghastly multi-billion sub-prime deal that ultimately leads to the debt-ridden immiseration of thousands, Gus retreats to the office loos to celebrate in the manner he deems most proper. Never has the cockney rhyming slang “merchant banker” been quite so luridly literalised.
Harold Pinter described Gillen as “dangerous” after seeing him appear in a 2003 Broadway production of The Caretaker. As I walk towards him he wraps and unwraps his legs around each other repeatedly. His whole demeanour is an heroically uncomfortable array of twitches and leers.
“Having talked to a lot of those guys in banking, I realised that high finance is very exciting,” he says as we settle down in the bar. “It probably is terribly exciting to watch these deals fall into place.” But surely not so terribly exciting as your character finds it? “I don’t know. I don’t want to get too wanky about it, but I can totally sympathise with him. There’s pleasure in his life but there’s nobody to share it with. Hence, you know, that scene.”
Gillen is no stranger to, you know, challenging scenes. A decade ago in Queer As Folk, he played Stuart, uttering the infamous lines: “I’m a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I’m Moses and the parting of the red cheeks . . . And I am not a pervert.” (Gillen, a former Dublin altar boy, recalls watching some sex scenes from Queer As Folk with his mother. “She said: ‘How are they actually doing that?’ And my brother-in-law said: ‘It’s trick photography.’”) His performance was, like the series, widely praised. It was also typical of his astute preference for edgy small-screen dramas in recent years.
Before Queer As Folk came the role of Gypo in Antonia Bird’s Safe. At one point Gypo, a young homeless man, plunges a bottle into his chest in order to get free hospital treatment. More recently, Gillen starred as Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, a political reptile who unexpectedly grows a spine and a conscience while in office.
How did Gillen get the role? “They were casting the net wide getting actors who aren’t recognised, so that’s how us lot [he means the British and the Irish – Dominic West and Idris Elba also starred] got into it. It worked. I’d just been in The Caretaker on Broadway, which meant nothing perhaps to TV audiences there, but showed I could do what they wanted. Also many American actors don’t really want to blot their resumés by appearing as scumbags. British actors – and Irish ones too if I’m anything to go by – are less bothered about playing disgusting or even flawed people. They’re often the most interesting roles, after all, but in the US they can be career death.”
Gillen’s resumé, then, might not make much sense to an American actor: it teems with reptiles, chancers and scumbags (he was particularly effective as Mick, the swaggering, volatile pipe dreamer in The Caretaker, and as the slimy real-estate agent Richard Roma in a West End production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross). But he is proud of it. “There’s a common thread through Antonia Bird, Queer As Folk and The Wire,” he says. “I have been in control of what I’ve been doing, of the career I’ve put together.” I’m not sure how that control includes, say, his turn in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson buddy-chop-socky sequel Shanghai Knights, but let’s not spoil the story.
“I’ve made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that’s a good career strategy. Or at least, it’s my strategy to keep my head together. I keep going back to Ireland to reboot. And then return, showing up as someone else.”
Freefall marks Gillen’s return to British TV drama after too long away. “When I was 19 growing up in Dublin, I wanted to come to London. I’d done a lot of Irish stage work, which was great [in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars, for instance], but London was a magnet . . . the place where the great TV dramas were made. It was like someone wanting to be in a rock’n'roll band now.”
His fellow Wire star Dominic West has said that the UK lacks quality contemporary drama on TV. He told Radio 4′s Today programme recently: “If you turn on American TV, there’s a huge choice of nothing you want to see and, unfortunately, I think that’s the case here now as well . . . we don’t seem to be able to do contemporary stuff.” Does Gillan agree?
“So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale’s work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were Screen Twos produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke. And now David produces Freefall, so it shows the kind of British TV drama I admired is not quite dead.”
That said, Gillen has now retreated to live in Ireland and works there as much as he can. “I just wanted to get back home. I have always been travelling – New York and London. I want to give my kids a proper home.” He lives with his wife Olivia O’Flanagan in Kerry, and his children Berry and Joe attend a Gaelic-speaking school. “They have been brought up in London but because they have Irish parents they seemed to have an Irish accent – then when they got out to Ireland they sounded like Oliver Twist.”
His latest project is to star in the first Hammer film of the 21st century. Called The Wake Wood, it doesn’t sound like the camp Hammer horror that made films starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing so diverting 40 years ago. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s an Irish film written by a guy I know [writer-director David Keating]. It’s the kind of horror film that I like – The Exorcist and The Wicker Man.”
The film tells the story of a couple, Patrick (Gillen) and Louise Daley (Eva Birthistle), whose nine-year-old daughter is killed in a dog attack. To escape their grief, they relocate to a remote rural community. The locals introduce the couple to a secret, pagan ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground for ever. But what will they do when it’s time for Alice to go back? Gillen sensibly won’t divulge.
Why did he take the role? “I like to mix it up and do something completely different.” It was, he says, “literally the smell of the paint” that made him become an actor in the first place: “I was building and painting the sets. I didn’t want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.” He is 41 now, and in the intervening years says he “definitely thought about stopping more than twice. I have been doing this since I was very young. If I could wind it back I would have another life – I would like that, but I would also like to have this life too. For me, now, working and children is it. There’s nothing more to life” •
Freefall is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm. The Wake Wood will be released later this year.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Man on the edge
July 14th, 2009 |
No Comments
Aidan Gillen made his name playing chancers and scumbags and in his new BBC drama Freefall he portrays a venal City banker
It’s not easy to interview someone who you’ve last seen masturbating. But so it is with Aidan Gillen. As I approach him in the National Film Theatre foyer, I can’t help recalling a scene I’ve just watched. He plays venal City banker Gus in the forthcoming BBC credit-crunch drama Freefall; after clinching some ghastly multi-billion sub-prime deal that ultimately leads to the debt-ridden immiseration of thousands, Gus retreats to the office loos to celebrate in the manner he deems most proper. Never has the cockney rhyming slang “merchant banker” been quite so luridly literalised.
Harold Pinter described Gillen as “dangerous” after seeing him appear in a 2003 Broadway production of The Caretaker. As I walk towards him he wraps and unwraps his legs around each other repeatedly. His whole demeanour is an heroically uncomfortable array of twitches and leers.
“Having talked to a lot of those guys in banking, I realised that high finance is very exciting,” he says as we settle down in the bar. “It probably is terribly exciting to watch these deals fall into place.” But surely not so terribly exciting as your character finds it? “I don’t know. I don’t want to get too wanky about it, but I can totally sympathise with him. There’s pleasure in his life but there’s nobody to share it with. Hence, you know, that scene.”
Gillen is no stranger to, you know, challenging scenes. A decade ago in Queer As Folk, he played Stuart, uttering the infamous lines: “I’m a faggot-ass, fudge-packing, shit-stabbing uphill gardener. I dine at the downstairs restaurant, I dance at the other end of the ballroom. I’m Moses and the parting of the red cheeks . . . And I am not a pervert.” (Gillen, a former Dublin altar boy, recalls watching some sex scenes from Queer As Folk with his mother. “She said: ‘How are they actually doing that?’ And my brother-in-law said: ‘It’s trick photography.’”) His performance was, like the series, widely praised. It was also typical of his astute preference for edgy small-screen dramas in recent years.
Before Queer As Folk came the role of Gypo in Antonia Bird’s Safe. At one point Gypo, a young homeless man, plunges a bottle into his chest in order to get free hospital treatment. More recently, Gillen starred as Baltimore mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, a political reptile who unexpectedly grows a spine and a conscience while in office.
How did Gillen get the role? “They were casting the net wide getting actors who aren’t recognised, so that’s how us lot [he means the British and the Irish – Dominic West and Idris Elba also starred] got into it. It worked. I’d just been in The Caretaker on Broadway, which meant nothing perhaps to TV audiences there, but showed I could do what they wanted. Also many American actors don’t really want to blot their resumés by appearing as scumbags. British actors – and Irish ones too if I’m anything to go by – are less bothered about playing disgusting or even flawed people. They’re often the most interesting roles, after all, but in the US they can be career death.”
Gillen’s resumé, then, might not make much sense to an American actor: it teems with reptiles, chancers and scumbags (he was particularly effective as Mick, the swaggering, volatile pipe dreamer in The Caretaker, and as the slimy real-estate agent Richard Roma in a West End production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross). But he is proud of it. “There’s a common thread through Antonia Bird, Queer As Folk and The Wire,” he says. “I have been in control of what I’ve been doing, of the career I’ve put together.” I’m not sure how that control includes, say, his turn in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson buddy-chop-socky sequel Shanghai Knights, but let’s not spoil the story.
“I’ve made a point of trying not to play the same part, and of moving between theatre and film and TV. The idea is that by the time you come back you have been away for a year and people have forgotten you. If you like having time off, which I do, that’s a good career strategy. Or at least, it’s my strategy to keep my head together. I keep going back to Ireland to reboot. And then return, showing up as someone else.”
Freefall marks Gillen’s return to British TV drama after too long away. “When I was 19 growing up in Dublin, I wanted to come to London. I’d done a lot of Irish stage work, which was great [in Billy Roche's A Handful of Stars, for instance], but London was a magnet . . . the place where the great TV dramas were made. It was like someone wanting to be in a rock’n'roll band now.”
His fellow Wire star Dominic West has said that the UK lacks quality contemporary drama on TV. He told Radio 4′s Today programme recently: “If you turn on American TV, there’s a huge choice of nothing you want to see and, unfortunately, I think that’s the case here now as well . . . we don’t seem to be able to do contemporary stuff.” Does Gillan agree?
“So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale’s work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were Screen Twos produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke. And now David produces Freefall, so it shows the kind of British TV drama I admired is not quite dead.”
That said, Gillen has now retreated to live in Ireland and works there as much as he can. “I just wanted to get back home. I have always been travelling – New York and London. I want to give my kids a proper home.” He lives with his wife Olivia O’Flanagan in Kerry, and his children Berry and Joe attend a Gaelic-speaking school. “They have been brought up in London but because they have Irish parents they seemed to have an Irish accent – then when they got out to Ireland they sounded like Oliver Twist.”
His latest project is to star in the first Hammer film of the 21st century. Called The Wake Wood, it doesn’t sound like the camp Hammer horror that made films starring Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing so diverting 40 years ago. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s an Irish film written by a guy I know [writer-director David Keating]. It’s the kind of horror film that I like – The Exorcist and The Wicker Man.”
The film tells the story of a couple, Patrick (Gillen) and Louise Daley (Eva Birthistle), whose nine-year-old daughter is killed in a dog attack. To escape their grief, they relocate to a remote rural community. The locals introduce the couple to a secret, pagan ritual that will allow them three more days with Alice before she is returned to the ground for ever. But what will they do when it’s time for Alice to go back? Gillen sensibly won’t divulge.
Why did he take the role? “I like to mix it up and do something completely different.” It was, he says, “literally the smell of the paint” that made him become an actor in the first place: “I was building and painting the sets. I didn’t want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.” He is 41 now, and in the intervening years says he “definitely thought about stopping more than twice. I have been doing this since I was very young. If I could wind it back I would have another life – I would like that, but I would also like to have this life too. For me, now, working and children is it. There’s nothing more to life” •
Freefall is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm. The Wake Wood will be released later this year.
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