All this talk of Birth in the comments section of the previous post had me searching for an interview I conducted with the film's director Jonathan Glazer shortly after the film premiered in Venice. Back in London, we spent quite literally hours talking for what turned out to be a piece only a few hundred words long. I've got 5000 unedited words transcribed on my hard disk and I wish I had the time to edit it into a Q&A for you because it was a fascinating chat, but I have too much to do pre-Venice to add that to my list. Still, here's an extract, with Glazer talking about his star, Nicole Kidman."I didn’t have to convince her, she convinced me really. She read it and she came and talked to me about it and she understood it entirely and you realise you have to go on a journey with someone to get… you know the story’s got in her, it’s all about her, and all you got to do is know that she’s prepared to examine that and dig deep enough to present that to you and be as vulnerable as she appears to be and she convinced me immediately that she was prepared to do that or she felt like that was what she needed and wanted to do. There wasn’t a question in my mind after that. I think the thing about Nicole Kidman is she is a great character actress and I think people mistake her for a star in a funny way. When they present her as one and you get the glitz and everything, the great character actress that I believe she is, gets lost by the celebrity that’s around her. But treat her like a character actress, that’s what she wants and that’s what she is. And she’s a brilliant one. Whenever I’ve seen her as a character actress she’s amazing, look at To Die For, a complete performance, that was almost my favourite one — the hunger in that character is palpable. And I think what she maybe bought to this film is the same hunger. What she knows in her life and the experience she’s had and the things she’s done, I think for me she inhabits this completely. You can’t cheat. There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to hide."
2 comments:
Would love to read the full transcript Mark. Any news on what Glazer is up to these days?
Will definitely try and get some more of the Q&A up sometime soon. But it will have to wait until after Venice, though.
Apart from commercials, he's prepping an adaptation of Michel Faber's Under The Skin. About human harvesting aliens in Scotland.
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