Gary Oldman meets Martin Amis
from The Face Interview
By Jim McClellan (© 1992 The Face)
The next morning I take a cab up to Oldman's house in the
hills of Benedict Canyon. He's renting it off the actor who used to play
Lieutenant Kowalski in the old TV show Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea. It's got
big windows, big plants and a small pool. It's comfortable, not flashy.
Oldman says he likes it for the very un-Californian
very-all leafy woods, not a freeway in sight. Oldman hasn't brought much to the
place apart from a few shelves of books and the odd
painting. He takes me into the study to show off his latest acquisition, a
Toulouse-Lautrec. "Not bad, eh?" he smiles. Apparently he has a
Rembrant and a Renoir stashed somewhere.
It's the first time I've seen him without his make-up. He
still cuts an odd figure against the Californian elegance of his house. His
hairline's been shaved back and a few weeks of the rubber mask have given his
face an adolescent blotchiness. He's shirtless, still wearing the tracksuit
bottom from last night. When he gets cold, he pulls on a black MAI flying
jacket. While he paces around the kitchen, brewing tea and hunting (without
success) for some breakfast, I look out the window and see a pair of jeans in
the pool (it's his washing, blown there by an overnight storm).
Oldman looks tired, like he needs his Christmas break, but he
still seems buzzing with energy. He talks about meeting Martin Amis in Zagreb,
Croatia. Amis came up to him and went, "Hello Bexy." He knew all
Bexy's lines better than
Oldman. A few years ago Oldman was cast as John Self in a planned film version
of Amis' novel Money (the producers are still looking for finance). Before they
parted company in Zagreb, Amis asked whether he wouldn't also like to try his
hand at playing Keith Talent, the slob grotesque at the center of London
Fields.
Mention of Bexy sets him off on the sources for the
character, from routines he picked up from kids on the street to his
psychopathic gangster brother-in-law. He hasn't totally left the lads behind. He
talks about putting all the things
he's observed into a movie one day. He's already spoken to a screenwriter about
his childhood memories of his brother-in-law. "One day, I'd love to direct
that cockney movie, do it properly, get all those lads in there, all those
boys."
Dutifully, he runs through the list of future projects he's
got planned. His next film after Dracula will probably be The Saints, the story
of the artist Modigliani, which which he hopes to do this summer in Paris with
Phil Jouanou. He may work with with Sean Penn on his second directorial effort
She's Delovely (an old John Cassavetes
script). He may even have a stab at directing the
film version of David Mamet's play Edmund.
His mood seems much lighter.
He smiles ruefully about last night. "I don't know, I
was painting a pretty bleak picture of it all. I'm pretty exhausted right now.
That has something to do with it." The thing is, he actually feels he's
beginning to learn the trick of balancing acting and life, of borrowing from
what he calls 'the pain bag", using it in the work without it bleeding over
into
his real life. "And I have to learn how to do it. I've got
responsibilities. I have a three-year-old kid, I'm not 21 any more. I've got to
fucking grow up."
Is that one reason why he's most prepared to talk about his
personal life and his past more that most actors? "Maybe," he sighs.
"There are things I won't tell you. But I can only really talk about the
work so much. So maybe I am being candid. But I'm not being overly dramatic,
like, 'When I was a kid, sob, sob, I had such a hard life. 'But it shapes you,
all that. In a sense, when I talk about it, I'm talking about work."
Perhaps one answer to the question of why Oldman generates
such energy and intensity, why, out of his generation of British actors, he's
the one who has taken America, has something to do with this. A brilliant mimic
and an intelligent, committed researcher, he's technically accomplished the way
British actors often are. But
he also has an American willingness to pour his
own life into the parts he plays, whatever the consequences. Before I go, he
tells me about the last time someone recognized him on the street. He insist
that he isn't famous, that it hardly ever happens. Typically it wasn't an
autograph hunter. It was a student actor who wanted to know how to act like
Oldman. He didn't have time to talk properly. "But what I wanted to say was
'Be me', like have my life in a sense. That's what I work with. Just use your
life, because, really, it's all you've got."
Copyright The Face, februari 1992.
