|
 |
Find interviews by: | ||
| | |
Luke Goss (Part 3) Go back to Part 1 or Part 2 of this very long interview
"It is actually gathering speed, I do notice. I’m top-billed on this and that’s not easy. To be honest, I think the creature deserves it, but Victor’s in it a lot but people think of the creature so realistically I think anyone who plays this character should get that. But now that Donald Sutherland’s doing it, William Hurt, it’s like a blessing. Then I’ve got Cold and Dark; Tim Roth I think has said he wants to do the movie. He’s only got a nine-day shoot on the film; he plays my partner in the film. It’s another lead role, a starring role. It’s called Cold and Dark, and I play John Dark. “The thing about movies is: you can only read them and hope they come out how they read. There’s as much chance of that happening as moving your own tail, which you don’t have. But you can be responsible for reading it and enjoying it and hoping the directors and the DPs and the editors and the set designers and everything bring it all together, bring it to fruition. Look at Daredevil. I was going to do that, I was going to be Bullseye. Obviously they had an option on Farrell, 20th Century Fox, and they optioned that, but I was going to do that role. Of course Colin Farrell has got more of a name. “I had a different slant on it; that didn’t turn out how I imagined. The conceptual art was bloody fantastic: dark, like Batman, the first one. It was so gothic. I watched Daredevil and there’s loads with the kids. I don’t want to see the kid for too long, maybe a couple of minutes to establish, but then let’s get back into the darkness of this character. I would just enjoy the loneliness of that character so much. I think you have to try and choose roles that test you, put things on the line a little bit, when you get an opportunity, like with this one. And like with Nomak. “You know, I can photograph quite well. You can take a picture and I can look half-decent; I don’t always look like a bullfrog. But if the role means I have to look like one, I sometimes in this perverse way like doing it. I’ve played a couple of roles, like when I played a drug addict, when I looked like shit. With Nomak, I looked like shit. And in this film, I don’t look like a pretty boy, to say the least! But he has great presence. And that’s what it’s about. So I enjoy going against type, I like that, which is bizarre considering I started in Bros. I’ve been acting longer than I was ever a musician. I was in Bros for five years and in three months I’ll have been acting for ten years. But I’m playing character roles, which is a blessing for me. “Because when I started acting I was offered all these ‘eyebrow’ roles, and now I’m being offered these parts. I get excited, and not in an immodest way, it’s not an arrogant thing. I get excited when I hear people say they want an actor who can do this role, so they call me. I guess intensity has paid off. I need roles that I feel: I would want to watch them. They don’t have to be safe bets; not all of them are. I don’t know who said it, it may have been Anthony Hopkins because he says many wonderful thing, like, ‘We get paid to wait and we act for free.’ It’s so bloody true, somebody said this, maybe it was Malkovich. He said something like, ‘At the beginning of your career, your roles choose you. And then you get in the wonderful position where you choose your roles.’ It’s just so true. If you’re in that wonderful position of having more than one option - and I am at the moment - you can make a choice of, say, the best of three options. But you’re going to work. “I don’t believe in any actor who says, well, I’d rather not do that. Don’t be stupid: work. Don’t do shit - I agree with that. But work if you can, because you’re learning. I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning. But I’m praying for that day when I’ve got these wonderful things on the table. Imagine the ideal situation: to have five great scripts on the table and I want to do all of them. To say to the producers, well, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do all of them. But can you wait two years for me to get round to this one because we have to do this? And they say, yes, if you can sign a contract now saying you’ll do it, we’ll do it. And I want that, that’s the dream: to be in that position."
"It was one of those wonderful things again. I had just been offered The Crow, another Crow sequel. I said no to it, and they said, ‘What could we do?’ I said, ‘You’d have to rewrite 80 per cent of it.’ They said, ‘Can we?’ I said sure. So I came up with this whole idea about: the boy needs to see his father killed, and so on. I think they’ve used all that now, so if they like it, great. Lance Mungia, the director, is a really great guy, I really like him. “We were in the middle of negotiations for The Crow and I got a call from Thomas Chung, the film’s producer and Michelle’s partner, as in not husband but partner. And partner in business too, because Michelle’s also a producer on this movie. He called me and said, ‘Would you be interested in playing the male lead in this movie Silver Hawk with Michelle?’ And I’m like: with Michelle Yeoh? Are you serious? I said, ‘Send the script round.’ I got it on very funky new, 17-inch, Superdrive Powerbook - which I’m completely buzzed about. I read and it and said, I love it. Two weeks later the deal was done, including every part of the negotiations - and I flew to China. “I play this part of Alexander Wolfe and she plays a kind of vigilante in a way, a modern-day kind of Batman. It’s near-future, stretched and sometimes not stretched, due to both the director and the budget. I play a character that wants to take over the world but I immediately decided not to play him like this. People don’t walk around thinking they’re villains and Alexander Wolfe doesn’t walk around thinking he wants to take over the world. He walks around thinking he wants to make the world a better place. In his delusion, he’s actually a dictator and an evil guy, and through his actions he’s someone not to be fucked with. She has every right - you’ve got to get rid of him. But he doesn’t walk around like that, he intuitively believes he’s doing the right thing. “So in my back story I invented this thing that was not on the page: his father died young, he inherited a few billion dollars. Through his trust fund and people looking after him, he’s kind of buffering. He has never really made any mistakes, and he sees people make mistakes daily, which is the wonderful thing about life. I decided to play him like that, really. He looks at life and sees people make these mistakes, and through this subliminal suggestion that he’s in - in other words, complete dictatorship - he can save people from making these mistakes. And put himself in a position of power; he has to be in power to implement that kind of control. But he doesn’t feel like he’s doing anything wrong. It’s almost like he prefers any idea of utopia. Whether it’s communistic or complete dictatorship, that can’t exist without taking people’s freedom away. Unfortunately he doesn’t see that. But I don’t play him like this at all. “There’s this thing where he’s in an explosion and he’s lost his arms from the elbows down, So he has these metal gloves that are handmade; he doesn’t always show them. He has his underground lair with all these computers, he operates his empire from them. She takes care of business. A couple of cool things in the middle of the movie, and I haven’t told anyone about this because I went straight from China - a 26-hour day - I got on a plane and flew straight here. Three months in China, no days off, through SARS and everything. Straight to here, not one day off. Reading a 300-page script. “There’s this panda, a real panda they let them use. Because it’s a co-production between Hong Kong and America, they let them use a panda. These people are trying to steal a panda, and she’s on a bike, on this souped-up BMW, hurtling along. She’s doing her thing, wire-work as you would expect. She stops the truck and you actually see her with the panda. You can’t use pandas, they’re an endangered species. But Michelle Yeoh is in the cage with this panda biting her arm! “And another great thing, another great vibe, is that they actually jump the Great Wall of China on a bike. It wasn’t CG, it wasn’t a set, they were actually given permission and they did jump the Great Wall of China for the movie. It’s so extravagant, for a few seconds of slow motion in the film, and then back into action - they go to the great expense of jumping the Great Wall of China. I don’t know how the whole movie’s going to turn out. Michelle is wonderful, generous, incredibly talented. I think Thomas is a very lucky man and he knows it. I also have to say credit to him on the record. He’s a wonderful guy. i think of them both as personal friends."
"Incredibly, incredibly lonely. Incredibly isolated. Being in China for three months without hearing your native tongue is very hard to explain. Being on a movie set where nobody speaks English, not even ‘good morning’, not even ‘hello’. On that level it was very isolated. Through the SARS thing, which was a bit unnerving at times. Every twenty minutes you had to disinfect your hands. Wearing masks inbetween takes. Having temperature checks three times a day. Thermal imaging camera just before you go into stores or your hotel. Having temperature check before you go into anywhere. My driver got the flu so I had to go to hospital and have X-rays on my lungs to make sure I wasn’t contaminated, like everybody did. If you had flu, just normal flu, you had to be quarantined for 14 days. I didn’t get flu or a cold once, thank God. You had to be quarantined for 14 days and you’d get six, seven, eight calls a day to check you’re in your room. It’s very, very tense. “But the only difference is that you have to be able to do stuff. Luckily, I’d trained to be in Blade. For Silver Hawk I did two weeks’ training with the ex British champion in wing chung, and I did four weeks’ training with one of their guys from Hong Kong in Shanghai. You have to be able to fight because they don’t do three- or four-move combinations, they do 15-move combinations. There’s a scene where Michelle’s on a wire and it’s simulated to be like a bungee, and she does go up a hundred feet on a wire. Sure, her double does some of the dangerous bits where she crashes through window, but she does do the hundred feet up in the air. “When you do stunts, when you break glass, when you turn from explosions, you do that stuff. Hong Kong teams, they do stuff that would literally make a producer’s nuts fall off in America. It’s true. And rightfully. Unless you’re as capable as some of these guys, who have been fighting since they were six, a producer in America would be right to be scared. Because you shouldn’t do it on a movie set. As Wesley once said to me: it’s just a movie, don’t ever put your life in danger. But those guys, they’re as hard as nails.” Official website: www.lukegossforum.com Go back to Part 2 of this very long interview, where Luke discusses ZigZag, Charlie and Plan Nine from Outer Space: The Musical. Or go right back to Part 1 where he talks about landing the Frankenstein role and how it compares with Blade 2. | ||
| | |
Are you actually aiming your career anywhere, or just holding onto it as it hurtles along?
Tell me about 
How did you find the Hong Kong production compared with Britain or Hollywood?