Russell on Rough Magic
| RC
Interview from Rough Magic from the behind the scenes section of the
French Region 2 version of Rough Magic.
Asked what he thinks the film’s about… It’s about a lot of different things. I think it’s about, in a broad sense, it’s about a spirituality or a magic we all contain and whether or not you can tap into it or whether or not you’re open enough to believe in it, y’know? Asked whether he has been in a period film before… Yeah, lots of different periods, y’know, so it’s just another period of time to sink into and look at and explore, it’s interesting. Asked if he thinks the time period is that much different than now… In the movies, they certainly were. But I think that’s got to do with a style of performance which was acceptable. I don’t think necessarily that people’s body language has undergone a dramatic change, y’know, the clothing has, certainly the language usage has and what people do to themselves y’know, (chuckle) public arena has. But I saw a lot of movies from the time period, the movies that were referenced to this film so I don’t think that we tried necessarily to recreate that, it’s more trying to get yourself in the space where, y’know, the way you communicate to people publicly and the sort of…I mean, there’s a different respect level in the times than there is now and I mean that between male and female basically, I think. Asked why he thinks that… I just think there was, it was more reasonable for a relationship to take a longer period of time therefore it’s a little bit more romantic or whatever. ‘Course these may also be just movie truisms and not necessarily true because I wasn’t alive in 1950 but y’know you can assume that from the divorce rates and marriage rates and engagements lengths and all that sort of stuff. Asked why he wanted to play this character… Because of that thing I was just talking about before about, I mean, here’s a man who’s All American boy grew up sort of like totally believing in his country and his country’s foreign affairs policy, shall we say. 2nd World War begins, Pearl Harbour happens, he enlists in the Marines, through a certain set of circumstances and lucky basically, fights in every theatre of war in the Pacific and finds himself volunteering to go to Japan for a special duty after the bombs because he’s so caught up in the fight for victory and the fight for right, y’know, that his own personal beliefs have been sort of suppressed, shall we say, for awhile, and when he breezes into Nagasaki with that attitude…Cuz, you’ve got to understand, y’know, for most people the war is not about big tracks of land it’s about and particularly in the Pacific, it’s about that beach, and that bush and that little hill over there and that tree and that cave, it’s a very small thing, y’know, so when he gets to Nagasaki with that energy that he’s been having and that and the resentment he’s built up against an enemy and he sees it’s a mass destruction and it starts clicking over in his mind that this is not just a bunch of soldiers that have been killed this is three and four generations of the same family, this is mothers and kids and dogs and canaries and everything, just wiped out, he sort of turns around which is one of the reasons why he does the job that he does which is basically under the guise of being a journalist he does whatever his political contacts which are also assumed to be military ask him to do and that he can’t go home and he comes from Westchester County, he keeps a place in Los Angeles and he lives in Mexico. He can’t go home, he can’t sit down and talk to his Mum. He can’t say, y’know, this is what I did in the last four years, y’know. He can’t sit there and talk to his Mother about what happened on Iwo Jima, y’know, when it was teeming down with rain and 10,000 men had dysentery and they were there to kill people. Y’know, he can’t just sit down and have a polite chat with his Mum about that, y’know, because it’s not gonna work and everyone wants to treats you like a hero and in his mental space, he’s not thinkin’ he’s a hero, he’s thinkin’ he’s a killer of people, y’know, he’s thinkin’ he’s a murderer. So he can’t face it, and it’s a journey, that 90 per cent of service men went through at the end of the war. Thanks to 7dlh7 |
