 |
|
|
 |
|
|
Q:
Okay. I've just gotta ask; how many hours did you have to spend naked
playing the Marquis de Sade? RUSH: Who's counting? Well, I suppose, the last week and a half, two weeks . . . It was probably the last couple of weeks. Q: Was that difficult at all to do? RUSH: I had no problems with it in terms of vanity. I mean, you have to check your vanity in at the door when you go into the studio with something like that. The costume designer said a great thing ... she said, "You know, you're wearing your nakedness like another costume," and I thought, "That's perfect. That's exactly what I need to keep doing." |
|
Q:
So was it better to be in that powder blue suit or naked?
RUSH: There's something very liberating . . . I can't divorce it from the specifics of this story, which is about a man being stripped naked and you do see him go from being a very foppish, flamboyant, arrogant, civilized, decaying creature to unmasking him. Who is the writer? Who is the man inside all of this posturing? Just when you think he might be humiliated and diminished by that act of repression, he messes further and much more darkly with the priest's mind. Q: What made you want to take such an unglamourous role? RUSH: The Marquis, for me, I think is as close as I'm ever going to get to being a romantic lead. I live with that. |
|
Q:
Touché. Was it also because you get to do play such a span of emotions
in 'Quills'? RUSH: To a degree. I like to explore a character ... and discover dimensions and surprises within a character through playfulness. That's very much how KATE WINSLET approached what I think was the necessary mood on set and MICHAEL CAINE is very much like that, so there was a great deal of, not sort of trivial whimsy, but [the film's director] PHIL KAUFMAN's like that. There's gotta be some kind of delusional fantasy at work here that can quickly take you into how, to a degree, flamboyant the character is because he's kicking out hard at the world and wanting it to kick back hard . . . He'd be a handful at a dinner party, wouldn't he? If you invited him over, you'd get the charm and you'd get the wit, but then you just might get this mouth, in more ways than one probably. |
|
| Q:
In what other ways did you gain insight into the Marquis de Sade? RUSH: I knew quite a bit about him because I'd been in [and translated] 'The Marriage of Figaro' and I'd been in 'Marat Sade' on stage. You can't even begin to touch any aspect of that compact period of the French Revolution without making contact with the Marquis de Sade, Robes Pierre, Napoleon, Thomas Payne and Beaumarchais. You're not looking at the history properly if you don't get impacted on by those kind of major figures. I went back and reread a lot of stuff and that's useful, but you can't play writing and you can't even work out who wrote this [or] what he's like . . .When they put the play on in the asylum and the doctor is scandalized, but he doesn't want to make a great public show but kind of berates the priest, we really liked the idea of when the priest comes back to the Marquis' room, the Marquis is hoeing into this great supper like he's at Sardy's waiting for the reviews to come out. [He's] enjoying the meal and thinking, "Fabulous! They hated it! Great!" It's just finding those tiny moments to give you some sort of insight as to how perverse he is without it necessarily being offensive. |
|
|
Q:
Was Kaufman a strong director in terms of his vision? RUSH: I think you only get into battles when you realize that you don't connect about a vision for the character, but I think you have to augment each other's vision and that's what happens. I think I brought much more humor to the role than he'd anticipated when he read the script. He was surprised. He'd come back from the dailies and he'd say, "How can you make this guy so likeable, because he's depraved and horrible, but I'm finding that I'm watching you on screen and being really interested in what the Marquis' thinking and doing." He encouraged that and then, on some days, he'd just whisper to me and go, "This is the scene where we have to see the man," and you know what he means. |
| Q:
What was this perspective on Sade? RUSH: I think everyone appreciates Sade. There was no intention to write a biography with this story - with the details and the shifts in his life, you'd be making an 8 hour movie. I think [that the film's writer] DOUG WRIGHT, on this version of the story, was fascinated by what he would describe as the symbiotic relationship between the oppressor being the artistic muse. The more hot under the color Jesse Helmes gets, the more prolific Robert Mapplethorpe becomes or the more vocal Robert Mapplethorpe becomes. The line I have in the film where he's being dunked in the chair -- not for corrective purposes, but kind of for political dissidence -- I say, "You self-righteous fuck. Don't you realize that the more you torture me, the deeper you root my principles in my heart?" There's something fascinating about that. If neither of them were there to challenge each other, Mapplethorpe might be very underground and forgotten. [Wright] was much more interested in that than, "I want to do a play where people wear powder blues and tights and I can write them some zingy one- liners." Q: How did you avoid taking your work home to your wife? RUSH: We've worked together quite a bit [on stage] and we hardly ever talk about what we're doing in a domestic situation. If I'm in something and Jane's not, or vice versa, then we inevitably use one another as a sounding board or a big bitch session about who you've been working with that day. You know what I mean? "You can't believe what happened in rehearsal!" or "The director's got no idea what he's doing!" I think Phil hoped there might have been some weird, psychotherapeutic type games that were going to go on in creating the characters, but it was there in the extraordinary scene... we know we're going to get something domestic from this guy who presents himself with such a cunning and manipulative personality [with] the wig and the touch of make-up and the old rancid, but fabulous, three-piece suit. |
©1999 - 2001
BeatBoxBetty.com
All rights reserved.
The BeatBoxBetty trademark is a solely owned property.