Cate Blanchett and Joel Schumacher
Cate Blanchett and Joel Schumacher spoke at the NFT about the difficulties inherent in filming the life of murdered journalist Veronica Guerin - from respecting the feelings of her family to the subtleties of her accent
Peter Curran
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday July 15 2003
Peter Curran: Tonight, two very disparate talents have come together in the film you've just seen. Cate Blanchett is renowned for her 100% commitment and believability - her performances are as much about her reacting to what's around her as much as what's going on within her. And her partner in crime, Joel Schumacher, has had great performances as a director. Well, he tried hard with Val Kilmer and the jury's still out on that one, but he's gotten great performances out of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert De Niro and of course, Cate Blanchett.
PC: I wanted to start off, Cate, with your desire to play dead people. From a serious point of view, is there a problem when you're dealing with someone who's a contemporary icon, someone like Veronica Guerin?
Cate Blanchett: I suppose the only thing I had to compare her to was playing Elizabeth I in that there's so much written about her in Ireland. The liberties I had were different ... I'm not Irish but I knew very vaguely what she'd tried to achieve, even what she looked like. But on a human level I felt an incredible responsibility due to the recent nature of her death and the real and palpable grief her family still feels. And they're not in the public eye. So I wanted to make them feel that I'm getting to the quintessential Veronica, which of course is impossible.
PC: That's a hell of a job to do, to do the performance so that half a dozen people are not insulted by it.
CB: But film is a fictitious medium. We're not making a documentary and you only have an hour and a half, two hours to get to the heart of her. What also gave me a lot of license, I think, is that it's not a biopic. It's as much about what was going on in Dublin at the time as it is about her. And there's an inherent mystery in the film - what kept her going? What made her tick? So there is a lot of poetic license. We don't know what she said to her husband at three o'clock in the morning so that is an invention.
PC: What about you, Joel? What did you have to add to the story of Veronica Guerin to turn it from a documentary into a feature film that people who'd never even heard of her would get?
Joel Schumacher: Well, there was so much real drama that we didn't have to add very much at all. We could have made a 10-hour movie because she had a career in journalism before she got on to the drug case. She was becoming well-known for the stories she was writing about the scandals in the church. In fact, there was a famous case around this priest, Father [Sean] Fortune, who was a paedophile. She attacked Bishop Comiskey, who was protecting him in the 90s, at a press conference. And because it's basically an Irish Catholic country, she was denounced by everybody for daring to be rude to the bishop and taking him on. Of course in subsequent years Father Fortune was found out and committed suicide. She was going after these stories. There was also this bishop who had impregnated this woman and she followed him all the way to Nicaragua to get the story. So she was like a dog with a bone when it came to getting her story and she used to doorstep people. And by doorstepping John Gilligan and him beating her, she had him and was taking him to court, but he didn't want to go back to jail and that was the end of that. Everything you see - the bullet through the window, the bullet through her leg, the threats, the phone calls Gilligan made after he beat her and the murder - all of that happened. So we didn't need added drama. We tried to add the intimacy and the person, and Cate did a lot of research on her own. We had a great deal of help from her family, the police, Tony Hickey who investigated the murder - everyone helped, even her critics and people at other newspapers came forward and we had a lot of assistance. So we just tried to - without making her a saint - do honour to her story.
PC: It must have been interesting putting in those indications that perhaps she wasn't Joan of Arc. You know, going in to the red light districts of Dublin - and there was an element of overweaning ambition about her. Did you have to think long and hard about how strongly you were going to do that? I'm talking about this scene where she's just been shot and her husband's leaning over to comfort her and she's attempting to see past him and work the remote to see herself on the news again.
CB: It's called shock. She's just been shot in the leg. It's great as an actor - I mean, this woman had died and I'm talking at a very shallow level - that I had access to the primary sources: the interviews she gave, etc. But in the end, it's creating a character and the building blocks of character are the same. And what interests me is showing someone in as many different dimensions as possible - you flesh out the good side and the bad side. And we had the wisdom of hindsight of knowing what happened to her. She didn't have that; she was simply doing one thing after the other. And I believe strongly, and from my own experience of navigating my way through a public job, that the circumstances change incrementally and you simply deal with things as they come along. And the circumstances become normal, they just become the environment in which you're working.
JS: Also, when you have a close family and a good marriage, which she had, you know what your mother, brother, husband and co-workers are going to say to you in a situation like this, i.e. "Are you going to stop?" And so the scene with the TV is avoidance. She's in shock and she doesn't want to hear it from anybody. One of the things I liked the most about Veronica Guerin's character was that she did not stand down for boys. And the more they threatened her the more aggressive she became. You know that they're going to say to you, "Give it up" and she didn't want to hear that because she wasn't going to.
PC: There's my shallowness suddenly revealed, my thinking that she wanted to see herself on the telly.
JS: Tells us a lot about you, Peter. [laughs]
CB: The other thing to remember is that Dublin in the mid-90s was not LA. The access to guns and ammunition - they just weren't as readily available. I mean, the bullet that she was shot with originally was a dummy bullet which was stuffed into some 1942 pistol.
JS: They kept their guns buried in the cemetery and they had old weapons, so when he aimed for her head, it jammed and when he tried to do it, the bullet went into her leg. That's how it happened.
PC: So tell us a little bit about your working relationship - obviously actor and director say the most wonderful, warm things about each other. But tell us about your preconceptions about Joel Schumacher before you worked with him.
CB: I'd always wanted to work with Joel. The very first time I made a film, in Australia called Oscar and Lucinda, people said, "You gotta go to LA, make the rounds and meet everybody." So I met a lot of people who said, "Oh I love your work, you're so great" and "Don't you look pretty, who designed that frock?" Erm, K-Mart. And then I met Joel and he said, "Oh you've just finished doing Oleanna," and we just talked about [David] Mamet for like the half-hour that we had. And I rang my agent and said, [breathlessly] "Can I work with him?"
JS: That's when I offered you a part - I wanted her to play Nic Cage's wife in 8mm but Cate was going to do ...
CB: Something ... I think it may have been Elizabeth.
JS: Well, good thing you did Elizabeth.
[Audience laughs]
PC: From your point of view then, the qualities that you see in an actor. You don't, I suppose, know what they're going to deliver for you at the end of the day. Do you just go with a hunch?
JS: I don't know because I work with so many unknowns and so I just base it totally on the meeting in my office. The minute I see someone... when I hire someone like Brenda Fricker or ask them to be in my film, those people are obviously people whose work I admire.
PC: I guess De Niro and Seymour Hoffman are safe bets as well [for Flawless]?
JS: Yes, but you'd be surprised how many people didn't know who Philip Seymour Hoffman was. Only if you said, "the fat guy in Boogie Nights" would people know who you were talking about because they didn't know his name then. But I don't know, someone walks into your office and you're just glad they did.
PC: So, how do you explain Val Kilmer then? Were you having a cold that time?
JS: No, I saw Tombstone and I knew I was going to do a Batman movie. They said the franchise was dead and that we had to revive it. So I saw Val in Tombstone and I thought he was really great, so I hired him from Tombstone.
PC: The great John Schlesinger once said, "I wouldn't even cast Val Kilmer if I was making The Val Kilmer Story."
[Audience laughs]
JS: No one ever said John Schlesinger was a fool. But he was a good Batman and I think we should move on.
[More laughs]
PC: I think it's a good point to open it to questions from the floor.
JS: Thank you for coming; thank you for being here.
CB: And thank you for staying.
Q1: Joel, I've read that you experienced homelessness and drug addiction. How has that influenced your work?
JS: The surreal images in some of my films have been blamed on my drug days, I've heard that from certain sources. I don't know ... it's pretty far behind me now and that was quite a while ago. That was my path and when you come to terms with being a drug addict and an alcoholic, you realise that it's all about you. And I really didn't do this film as some crusade against drugs - it was really just that I had great respect and affinity for this character and I wanted to tell her story. Of course, her death did move them to change some of the laws. But drugs are a cancer in all of our cultures and the only people who win in the drug wars are the dealers; the new dealers because they're the people who come along and make a lot of money before they get shot by the dealers coming along after them. But I grew up in a poor neighbourhood and my father died when I was four and my mother was out of work all the time, so I was a street kid. I was on the streets and broke, and I left home when I was 15. So I've made all the mistakes anyone could possibly make and I'm just very lucky that I've survived because I'm the kind of person who has to put his hand in the fire 5,000 times before he goes, "Oh, this hurts! Maybe I shouldn't do this anymore." So that's my story and it's a boring cliché. But thank you for asking.
Q2: As a fellow Australian, Cate, what's happening with your accent? One minute you're French, the next you're Italian, this one's Irish. How do you pick up these accents and make them sound true?
JS: Because she's a genius.
CB: It's part of my job. You can't play Veronica Guerin [puts on heavy Strine] sounding like this. It just wouldn't wash. But what I find fascinating about doing an accent - unless it's a farce - is that it's not slapped on. In particular - in watching every interview Veronica ever gave both on television and on radio - when you listen specifically to the way someone is speaking, you listen to their breathing, to what they don't say, the way they choose their words and the rhythm at which they speak. She speaks a lot faster than I do, and when you begin to speak like that, the way you think changes. So it's often ... an accent, someone's syntax or their phrasing is ... a way into their psychology. And if I was doing an Australian [again the Strine], and notice that I always do my Australian accent like that, I don't necessarily assume that they speak the way I do, and my sense of being Australian is quite secure and I don't feel the need to imprint that.
JS: Also, when you're making a movie where the whole cast is Irish and the whole crew is Irish, they'll kill you if you don't do it right.
Q3: [To CB] Apart from this film, what's your greatest work to date?
CB: I think the only way to answer that, working in film, is to say, "the rejected take from Scene 17 in this film." You learn very early on in working in theatre that you think, "That was a good night" and everyone comes off stage and everyone is going "Wooh!" but the director comes back and says, "Oh God, I think we have to call a rehearsal at 8.30 tomorrow morning and run lines really slow." Your experience of doing it is often so different from the experience of the final thing. Something that you can think of as a disaster ends up being well-received. Or something that you pour your heart into, people can't stand. And in the end, it sounds corny but it's true, the measure is that if people you respect want to work with you, then that's okay, I can live with that.
PC: Tell us about the stinkers you fooled everybody with then?
JS: Don't tell them. [Laughs] I hope I haven't made my best one yet, I'm still trying to learn on the job. So I keep stretching and hopefully I keep making better and better films. I hope the good ones aren't behind me.
PC: You seem to be bringing the action tighter and tighter into the heart of the personality of the characters.
JS: The budgets are getting smaller and smaller. [Laughs] I'm becoming the oldest living student film-maker. We did Phone Booth in 12 days, it doesn't get shorter than that.
CB: You would have done Veronica Guerin in 12 days if you could have.
JS: We had 13. [Laughs] Well, here's the problem. If you accept a lot of money to do a film in Hollywood and you have a huge budget, they're going to expect a lot of asses in seats, as you would if you had to write a cheque for a lot of money. You want your money back; it's a business. If you work on a small budget with stars who are willing to cut prices and do interesting work with you, they'll take a risk on a smaller budget because they figure, "Well, maybe with video and DVD we'll make our money back."
They have to answer to their boards and they try to be artistic but it's a business - it is show business and it's more business now than it is show because all the studios now are owned by huge conglomerates and corporations, unlike the old Hollywood where everybody knew each other by their first names. They're responsible for the bottom line of how much money a film makes. They don't get to make movies so they're much more insecure than even we are because they don't really have a job.
You know, when you're in a mental institution, they give you basket weaving and ceramics to do so that you make a product everyday. You've got something to actually do everyday, like we've got a certain amount of film that we have to make everyday. They just make phone calls. So in the end they go, "Wow, I made 85 phone calls today; and three of the people took them." And all the things they did on the big hit movie are exactly the same thing they did on the flop. So they can't recreate what they've done - they don't have a body of work, in a sense; they just have a body of evidence against them. So as insecure and crazy as we are, they're much more nervous and crazier because they don't actually know what they do for a living. So they try to insure it - and year after year you see huge movies made with huge stars for a lot of money and they're flops. And little movies come out of nowhere and make a lot of money - and that's fair and that's what's great about our business.
PC: Well, it's great that that cynical boy from New York city is not around anymore.
Q4: Cate, do you have any theatre projects lined up here in London?
CB: The next play I'm doing - my husband's doing a new adaptation of Hedda Gabler which we're doing in Sydney next year, but I suppose the next play I'll be doing in London is Closer, which Patrick Marber wrote - an alright play, it did okay. [Laughs] So I'm doing that with a fantastic cast and Mike Nichols is directing it but that won't be 'til next year.
PC: You've been out in the desert recently with Ron Howard, haven't you [on The Missing]?
CB: Not in the wilderness for 40 days and nights, we were making a film.
PC: Ron Howard's known for a particular type of film and I wouldn't necessarily have put the two of you together. Did you have to resist his attempts to sprinkle sugar on things?
CB: No. I knew Ron was going to be a great and wonderful, good human being - that is just a given. But he was just so direct and clear and relentless. I mean, part of the reason why he didn't do The Alamo is that he wanted to do too many dark things to the story. I loved making it, I had a ball - cowboys and Indians. This is the thing, I love doing things which I'd never envisaged before. And so getting me on the back of a horse, with Tommy Lee Jones and shooting guns and chasing Indians, it's just not something that I would have expected myself to be doing.
PC: He's very businesslike, isn't he, Tommy Lee Jones? He scared the crap out of me when I interviewed him.
CB: He's fantastic but he can be a little intimidating.
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