Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

The news report about it is here.

While I would have liked to see Viola Davis win – and I think Davis needs it more – it’s hard to deprive Meryl Streep her victory, some 30 years after her last win for Sophie’s Choice.

She was insanely overdue to win again, especially in light of the run of great work she’s done since her ‘comeback’ in Adaptation in 2002. Streep is arguably at the height of her powers right now, and that’s pretty astonishing when you consider that she’s 62 years of age and into the fifth decade of her career.

Meryl’s win was certainly one of the every few highlights of a dreadful ceremony, and a safe, predictable awards season.

My latest features for movies.ie

The 2012 ‘Black List’, on the back of the release of Safe House.

A selection of the best host quips and acceptance speeches from Oscars past.

Courtesy of the Discovery Channel

*One of the best modern examples of Hollywood art imitating life imitating art was Colin Firth appearing as himself in the book Bridget Jones’ Diary, and then being cast as the love interest Mark Darcy in the movie adaptation.

Something similar is happening right now regarding British journalist Emma Forrest’s chronicle of her battle with mental illness, Your Voice in My Head.

The 2011 memoir is being lined up for a movie adaptation, with Harry Potter alum Emma Watson in talks to play Forrest.

However, it’s not certain who will play her lover in the book known only as ‘Gypsy Husband’ (or ‘GH’), or even how prominent a part he’ll get.

That’s because ‘GH’ is widely believed to be based on Forrest’s ex-boyfriend, Irish actor Colin Farrell.

The Dubliner has never publicly commented on the book, or the speculation around it. But seeing as ‘GH’ is a key element in the core part of the story, it’s hard to see how any movie adaptation could avoid using him in the narrative.

How mad would it be if Farrell ended up playing the part in the adaptation? Or, to get even more Charlie Kaufman on it, if a younger Irish actor played a version of Farrell? Reel Life will be keeping a close eye on this one.

*Casting its gaze over the reviews of films playing in the Berlin Film Festival, Reel Life is most intrigued about Iron Sky, a German sci-fi satire about a group of Nazis who have been hiding out on a secret moon base since 1945 and are now planning to return to power on Earth in the year 2018.

The best part about Iron Sky’s success is that discussing it allows Reel Life the chance to use its all-time favourite German expression, one that’s used to describe the bigger historical and cultural process of Germany coming to terms with its past: ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’. Say that ten times real fast.

*Fans of Nicholas Evans’ mega-selling book – and Robert Redford’s 1998 movie adaptation of – The Horse Whisperer should keep an eye out for the forthcoming documentary Buck, which focuses on Buck Brannaman, the real life equine counsellor who inspired the original story. Buck trots in cinemas in these parts in April.

*Lastly, it’s Oscar weekend, and though it’s shaping up to be an eye-gougingly boring and predictable affair, with every pre-Oscar award-snatching frontrunner more or less guaranteed a win, Reel Life is determined to create drama and excitement where there is none.

So for what they’re worth, here are Reel Life’s last minute, no-guts-no-glory tips for Oscar surprises on Sunday night:

I predict that The Help’s Viola Davis will snatch the Best Actress gong from under the prosthetic nose of Meryl Streep’s Maggie Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

I’m also betting on Bridesmaids’ scene-stealer Melissa McCarthy pulling off an upset by winning Best Supporting Actress ahead of sure-thing Octavia Spencer.

Lastly, I see Terence Malick coming from nowhere to bag the Best Director prize for The Tree of Life. My reasoning? If the Academy made that much of an effort to nominate him in the first place, Malick must have support amongst voters.

*I’ll be live Tweeting (Twitter code for ‘being a sarcastic smartarse about’) the Oscars from 1am on Sunday night/Monday morning if you care to follow me @Tweet_Dec

My interview with Mark Strong in ‘Day & Night’ in today’s Independent

Mark Strong has finally made enough high-profile films to be recognised and attract attention in the US, but of his recent work, it’s not Sherlock Holmes, or Tinker Tailor Solider Spy that American movie executives and fans mention to him most.

Instead, it’s The Guard, the surprise hit Irish comedy he made last year with Brendan Gleeson.

“People love that film all over the world,” he tells ‘Day & Night’ when we meet at the Soho Hotel in London. “I think what audiences outside of Ireland like about it is the exotic nature of it, and how dark, and witty, and unapologetically rude it is. I would have thought The Guard won have been too harsh for American sentiments. But they really loved how non-PC it was.”

The British-born, half-Italian actor recalls that he and co-star Don Cheadle were the “honorary non-Irish guy” on the Connemara set. “We’d all sit around after a day of filming, sink a lot of Guinness, and hear a lot of stories,” he says. “It was just good fun.

“I remember on my last day on set, I was waiting on a car to go to the airport. I saw Don Cheadle sitting at another table in the hotel, and it was his first day. I remember thinking, ‘You have no idea what you’ve just landed in the middle of’.”

The filming of Strong’s latest movie, Black Gold, was another matter entirely, however. It’s an epic set in the Arab states in the 1930s at the dawn of the oil boom, focusing on the story of a young prince (played by Tahar Rahim from the hit French prison movie A Prophet) who is torn between allegiance to his conservative Sultan father (played by Strong) and his modern father-in-law (Antonio Banderas).

Right as the film was being shot in Tunisia last January, the ‘Arab Spring’ began with mass protests occupying the streets of Tunis to oust president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

“People were worried, because they didn’t know quite what was going to happen,” explains Strong, who was at home on a break from filming when the revolution started. “People were given the option to leave if they wanted to, but most wanted to carry on.

“Our producer, Tarak Ben Ammar, tells a story of the day he saw a mob coming towards the studio in Tunis, and he thought, ‘Oh, this is it now’. But the crowd was actually coming to protect the studios because they felt this was the kind of thing they were in the streets for in the first place. We relaxed once we realised it was a benign revolution of young people trying to overthrow an old order.”

In that sense, the movie’s timing is positively spooky as that exact same generational clash between tradition and modernity underpins the entire story of Black Gold, arguably making it, by accident, the first ‘Arab Spring’ film.

“What Tarak and [director] Jean-Jacques Annaud were trying to do all along with this film was to tell a story about the Arab people that most Westerners don’t tell about the Arab people,” Strong says.

“I saw the movie as a genuine attempt to tell a story about a part of the world that is as romantic and fascinating as it is dangerous. We’ve been told about the danger ad nauseam, but to tell a sweeping romantic tale like this might be a wonderful antidote to that.”

Though the film – indeed its very title – has oil at its centre, it’s not an overtly political movie. Even if it was, Strong, who identifies himself as “a socialist by birth, coming from no money”, wouldn’t be in a hurry to shove his opinions on the matter down the public’s throat (memo to Sean Penn).

“I’m the first to roll my eyes when that happens,” he says. “I’m an actor, not a political commentator. I can tell you my opinion much like we’re having drink in a pub. But if it’s given credence because I’m actor then that’s entirely wrong. Why should I be qualified to talk about anything?”

Well, for one thing, the fact that the 48-year-old has slowly but steadily built an impressive CV of killer roles (quite literally) means that he’s probably more qualified than most to preach about the vagaries of the Hollywood system.

Strong worked for many years in TV shows like Prime Suspect, before working his way into supporting movie roles. His biggest screen break came when Ridley Scott cast him as an Arab character, Hani Salaam, in Body of Lies.

“I thought it was absurd when Ridley asked me to play Hani,” he laughs. “But when I was cast I thought, ‘Christ I need to make this character work’. I’m half Italian so perhaps that lends itself to me being believable in these roles.”

However, Strong’s most high-profile screen incarnations to date have been as villains in major movies like Stardust, Sherlock Holmes, Kick-Ass, and Green Lantern.

Despite others around him expressing concerns about typecasting, Strong had a longer-term strategy in mind.

“I have an actor friend who played a villain in a big film, and in order to avoid typecasting he turned everything down for the next two years and never worked,” Strong reveals. “He always regretted that.

“I enjoyed playing those parts, I couldn’t turn them down, and they were with directors I really wanted to work with. It’s quite difficult for Brits to get into the American film industry, but one entrance we do have is playing the villain. Those were the calling cards for Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Irons and Gary Oldman.

“But what has happened is what I thought would happen: slowly, but surely I’m getting the parts I was getting before I played the villains, sympathetic characters like Jim Prideaux in Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, and an action hero in [the upcoming] Welcome to The Punch.”

Though Strong will be playing the villain – sorry, “antagonist” – in next month’s Disney epic John Carter, the actor actually filmed that two years ago, all of which means that The Guard has earned an even more special place in Strong’s affections.

“That was a villain with an existential crisis,” he says. “This guy just wanted to get married and settle down. So that part almost felt like a goodbye to my villainous roles.”

As for John Carter, Strong is confident about its bona fides as an action blockbuster, and hasn’t let the failure of last year’s Green Lantern sour his view of these kinds of movies.

“I was disappointed by the response to Green Lantern because everyone worked on it with the best of intentions,” he says. “The problem was that in a summer that had Thor, Captain America, and X-Men: First Class, this was too naïve. It was really so faithful to the comic book that was it was like a film for 10-year-olds.

“What people wanted and were expecting was a post-modern look at that particular character, not a dead straight comic book hero movie.”

PANEL:

Strong can’t speak highly enough of his last movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but admits that it was a hard one to sell to audiences.

“The trailer was slightly misleading in the sense that it made it seem like this really tense search for a mole at the heart of the secret service, when it was really this elegiac, two-and-a-half hour movie that’s very anti-climactic,” he says. “It’s a beautifully intelligent movie, and I’m so proud of it.”

*Black Gold is in cinemas today.

My interview with Denzel Washington in ‘Day & Night’ in today’s Irish Independent

Given his reputation as one of America’s greatest living actors, it’s thrilling to walk into a London hotel room to find a thoughtful Denzel Washington in full-on contemplative thespian mode, pondering a mystifying object in his hands, not unlike Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Yorick’s skull.

Except, in this instance, the object in question is a packet of McVities digestive biscuits that were randomly gifted to the actor by another journalist just before our interview.

“I’ve never heard of these before,” he says, perplexed, before placing them carefully back on the table in front of him.

In person, Washington comes across as something of a gentle giant. He’s tall (almost 6’1”) and bulky in build, which might be deemed intimidating only for he speaks so calmly and politely, is dressed so casually in the ‘trendy dad’ garb of chunky sweater, jeans, and trainers, and, at 57 – a youthful 57 mind, but 57 nonetheless – gives off the relaxed, and relaxing, middle-age vibe of someone who is demonstrably comfortable in his own skin.

Or maybe that’s just what Washington wants you to think. After all, it’s not as if he’s slip-sliding into comatose old age.

He boxes five mornings a week, and has done so for 20 years, and with a kinetic, demanding role in the new action thriller Safe House, nobody could deny that Denzel Washington, to paraphrase the title of another one of his other movies, has still got game.

In Safe House, Washington plays Tobin Frost, a traitorous CIA operative who, for reasons that are not entirely clear, turns himself into US custody in South Africa.

But when the ‘safe house’ to which he he’s been remanded is attacked by mercenaries, rookie agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) reluctantly helps Frost to escape leading to a frantic fight for survival through the bustling, murky streets of Cape Town.

When it came to preparing for the role, Washington says he relied on the old skills that he learned while studying journalism in college some 35 years previous.

“I still look at my work as investigative journalism, but I don’t write the story, I act it out,” he explains. “When I played a reporter in The Pelican Brief, I did my research with Bob Woodward, the famous Watergate journalist.

“He said that when he approached a big story like Watergate, he might start two years out, gathering information. Not that I have two years, but in the process of developing the material for, say, Safe House, you circle it, and get more and more information.”

One of the key pieces of research that Washington clung to in order to get under this character’s skin was a book, The Sociopath Next Door, by Martha Stout.

“That led me to believe my character was a violent sociopath,” he says. “This guy Frost is a manipulator. He has charm. He wants to win. He’ll lie. He’ll steal. When he’s about to be tortured by waterboarding, he immediately mocks the guys for using the wrong towel to put over his mouth. This is probably why he got hired by CIA in the first place.”

Washington adds that he was so determined to keep audiences on their toes that he even advocated killing Reynolds’ lead character halfway through the movie, Hitchcock-style.

“There’s a big scene at a soccer stadium, and I said to Daniel [Espinoza, the director], ‘Why don’t I shoot him?’ he says, before breaking into a laugh. “In the middle of the movie, it’d be like, ‘Y’all thought he’d last longer, huh?’”

The role also requires Washington to engage in a series of whiplash-inducing action set pieces, and he proudly admits to still doing all his own stunts. The key, he says, is to be smart about it.

“All the close-ups, all the fights, all the running on roof-tops – unless they were wide shots and didn’t need me – that was all me,” he says.

“Daniel, the director, wanted the fighting to be rough and dirty. Where you get hurt is when there’s tension. That’s why street fights don’t last long because you’re tense.

“I know how to fight relaxed. I’m not wasting a lot of energy. When choreographing fights I find the places to relax. I’ll let the other guy push himself back into a wall rather than have me shove him the whole way. I’m good at not exhausting myself.”

For Washington’s fans, Safe House will inevitably bring back memories of the actor’s most famous villainous role, that of the corrupt cop in Training Day (2001).

At the time that role was such a surprise to Hollywood, because Washington, one of the most popular movie stars in America, had up to that point made his name playing ‘the good guy’.

Think of Denzel Washington and the parts that come to mind are apartheid campaigner Steve Biko in Cry Freedom; the civil war soldier in Glory (for which he won his first Oscar); and the lawyer who represents Tom Hanks’ Aids sufferer in Philadelphia.

“Before Training Day I was never asked to play a quote-unquote bad guy, probably because of typecasting,” Washington says. “It’s interesting that they gave me an Oscar for Training Day because they probably thought it was a real stretch for me. That was the easiest part I ever played. And it was a lot of fun.

“Of course, as Hollywood goes, that’s all I started getting after that, so I put the brakes on it because I didn’t want to get typecast again. So really, since then I think I’ve only played two for “bad guys” in American Gangster, and now this, and not for any other reason than they were interesting stories and characters.”

In Safe House, Washington’s character is the cynical, world-weary type who tries to alert a naïve young colleague to the harsh realities of the world. I wonder if Washington has become similarly cynical after a 30+ year career that saw him graduate from a role in the medical soap opera St Elsewhere to become one of Hollywood’s top players?

“I think I’ve gone through that phase, and now, at 57, I’m in a place where I enjoy it more now,” he replies. “When I turned 50, I looked in the mirror and said, ‘This isn’t the dress rehearsal. This is it’. I want to work hard and do the best work I can do.”

In 2010, Washington won a Tony award for appearing in the Broadway play Fences opposite Viola Davis, who might just become only the second black actress to win a leading role Oscar this Sunday night.

Ten years to the day since Washington and Halle Berry won lead actor Oscars on the same historic night, I ask Washington if things have really changed for the better, or even at all, for non-white actors in Hollywood?

“You can’t get nominated unless you have a good role,” he answers. “Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker won Oscars after me because they had great roles.

“Viola Davis has been a great actress for a long time. She left to go make The Help the week after we finished Fences, so she could potentially win a Tony and an Oscar for two roles in a row. But she had two great parts.”

He continues: “Just getting a good part is harder nowadays for everyone. The top guys in the business who seem to be getting the plum roles, like Di Caprio and Clooney, get nominated [for awards] a lot because they’re getting the best shots.

“It’s odd because the more success you have, and the more money you make, the less of those good roles you get. At some point, you have to decide, ‘Well, I’m going to back down and choose the role over the money’.”

Finally, does he have any regrets in his career? Perhaps a role that got away? “There are two films I didn’t do: Seven and Michael Clayton,” he says, smiling. “Michael Clayton was going to be Tony Gilroy’s debut as director, so for whatever reason I didn’t trust working with a first time director. My mistake. That obviously didn’t belong to me, it belonged to George Clooney.”

He pauses before breaking into laughter again. “I didn’t lose any sleep over it. I’m fine. I got my digestive biscuits. I can just go home!”

*Safe House is out today.

Repugnant homophobe and presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has been relentlessly targeted online for his anti-gay views. Here are two of my new favourites: a mock magazine cover, and an image of Santorum made up of a composite of nude male pictures.

My Upfront column from ‘Day & Night’ in today’s Irish Independent

You might think a noisy, busy crèche a strange place from which to work of an afternoon, but alas, owing to said establishment’s free wi-fi, and my own temporary lack thereof at home, that’s exactly where I’m writing this column.

The thing is, this place isn’t meant to be a crèche, nor is it advertised as such. Instead it’s a local coffee shop of mine, but one that has been taken over by an invading force of mums (for the most part), prams, babies, children and their toys of varying degrees of size and racket-causing potential.

This isn’t some freak abnormality either. In fact I’d bypassed three other places before this one as they were all similarly occupied by a mini-army of miniatures. And that’s just on a weekday. Weekends are another matter entirely.

Like all occupations, past and present, the brutal choice comes down to this: collaborate or resist. And, when it comes to the topic of children in places like cafes and restaurants, I feel as if I have to resist.

I had always assumed that when the great societal war came, it would be – as prophesied in the Book of Bridget Jones – between singletons and ‘smug marrieds’. Now it looks increasingly as if the battle will be between single/childless people, and those with kids.

Let me say outright that I’m not a complete crank. I don’t hate kids. I have seven young nephews and nieces that I adore.

However, I also accept that adopting that defence is somewhat akin to the line, ‘I’m not homophobic, because some of my best friends are gay, but do you guys have to hold hands or kiss in public?’

My problem isn’t with the kids. Rather it seems that when a lot of parents have kids, something clicks in their brain that causes them to find their children’s behaviour – especially the bratty kind – utterly adorable.

How else to explain the ‘aren’t you so cute?’ looks and smiles that I’ve seen mums and dads give their offspring in cafes when the child screams until (s)he gets a slice of cake, or when the child decides (s)he wants to cycle their bikes in between the others patrons’ tables, hollering and shrieking at the same time?

It might simply be that nobody has ever said the following to such parents: nobody, even people with their own kids, finds your child’s behaviour adorable but you.

There’s a reason everyone, parent or not, smiles knowingly when they hear the line: ‘children are like farts, you can just about tolerate your own’.

It’s a tricky one, because we’re all customers. But some people have been arguing publicly lately for bans on children in certain restaurants, while in London where I live, there’s talk of creating strictly child-free cafes for people like me who want somewhere quiet to work, or read, or chat with a friend.

Are bans and segregation ever the solution to anything? I think the essence of the problem is simply that some people have no concept of, or respect for, spatial awareness.

In fact, I’d go as far as to argue that most problems in crowded, urban places are caused by this lack of spatial awareness, be it in restaurants, on public transport, in offices, wherever.

So people park their bags and/or prams wherever they want. They speak loudly to their companions and/or on their phones. They play their music out loud on buses (I’ll never understand that one).

And they – and, by that, I mean some parents – let their children run, cry, shout, and play wherever they happen to find themselves, even though, by rights, the only jurisdiction where such behaviour is entirely appropriate is the home.

Parents think about that one, will you? And in return I’ll promise to minimise the noise from my incessant, w*anker-y computer tapping at the table next to you. Can’t we all just get along?