Anthony Hopkins, at 69, speaks so softly that you can't help but worry you won't pick his words up. But, of course, his elocution is so good that every word registers clearly. He is explaining the challenges of playing hirsute King Hrothgar in Robert Zemeckis' new motion-capture film of Beowulf, which opened in Taiwan on Friday. The technicians placed little beads on his eyelids. "It was strange," he says. "They record every muscle. You stand in front of all these cameras and you do all these gestures. Once the computer has taken in all the information of your body, facial muscles and structure, you don't have any costume or makeup. You have these silly hats on and it is all recorded by 200 cameras. I don't know how it works."
Beowulf may be a bizarre hybrid of live-action and animation, but it is nowhere near as odd as the film Hopkins really wants to talk about: his own directorial debut Slipstream, which has just been released in the US. It is a willfully and wildly self-indulgent film. We can say as much without offending Hopkins, because he says as much himself. Imagine a cross between The Player and Being John Malkovich with a bit of Mulholland Drive thrown in and you will come close.
Slipstream clearly has autobiographical elements. It's about a someone called Felix Bonhoeffer (played by Hopkins), a Welsh screenwriter in Hollywood whose latest movie - like his life - is going off the rails. The piano music, much of which Hopkins wrote himself, has a hypnotic quality. The jokes about Tinseltown (the movie star who dies of overacting is one example) hit home. Hopkins even mocks himself, with asides about an impenetrable Welsh accent as well as a gag about a new Hannibal Lecter movie called Blue Dragon. A motormouth producer played by John Turturro sneers, "Hopkins? He's in or out? He wants more money? Fuck him."
PHOTO: EPA
More puzzlingly, Slipstream includes some jarring montage sequences in which we see footage of everybody from Richard Nixon (one of Hopkins' most memorable roles) to Adolf Hitler, whom he once played on TV, as Bonhoeffer becomes ever more delirious. A friend babbles about "past-life regression" and being "pulled back through the slipstream" into a world of dreams and fantasies.
Yes, Hopkins acknowledges, the film is "very difficult to encapsulate or put into words. It has the quality of a dream. Dreams are so illogical and non-linear and chaotic." It is not an easy film to talk about, either. Questions don't so much elicit answers as provoke mini-streams of free association. Why are there so many cars in the movie? "I dream about cars all the time," he says, as if that is explanation enough. Nor can he fully explain the presence of actor Kevin McCarthy and the constant references to his most famous film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
"Do you know who the conductor Thomas Beecham was?" Hopkins suddenly asks. Without waiting for an answer, he embarks on a digression about Beecham. "He was the conductor of the London Philharmonic for many a year and he was supposed to be a tyrant of a conductor. I saw an interview back in the 1950s where they asked him: 'Are you a tyrant?' He said, 'Oh, I am a disciplinarian.' All these people - the violinist, the flautist - they don't get paid much money. These people are doing it for love. At first, I don't tell them what to do. I let them go. Then, on the second rehearsal, I say, 'Let's do it again.' I bring the standard up. That's my job, but I never tell anyone how to play their instruments."
Hopkins goes on to talk about Georg Solti, Toscanini and Herbert von Karajan: disciplinarians all. "They were tough but they respected each individual musician. That's what I think directors have to do on set - respect everyone, crew in particular." "Respect" is a word Hopkins uses frequently, but not in connection with the mainstream media. Slipstream is often caustic in its satire at the expense of chat-show hosts, news readers and the newly but briefly famous. "They are the body snatchers. They have taken everything out of us. Look at American news programs. Most of them are adverts. It's showtime, war as showtime. Those anchor people are all weird and strange. I wouldn't say they are insane but with the lip gloss ... it's Disneyland."
There is something a little bizarre about hearing a celebrity who has chosen to live in California and freely admits he enjoys making big-budget Hollywood films decry the US obsession with celebrity - "the obsession with Anna Nicole Smith, the obsession with Paris Hilton. The whole world is obsessed. The national nightmare - will Paris Hilton be released from jail? You look at the magazines. Brad and Angelina - everyone is so breathless because 'Are they going to break up?' What is this about? It is insanity. But it feeds a mass of people who work day in, day out. They have a struggle to survive and have no other outlet but to be entertained. It's not the people's fault. It is the way the media exploits the people."
If Slipstream articulates his loathing of the mainstream news media, it also expresses his dismay at aspects of the movie business. He can't hide his exasperation with pampered movie stars who turn up late on set and would-be celebrities who crave exposure on TV, even if it is only as bystanders to a freeway shooting. The film portrays the Hollywood machine in a skeptical light. Nonetheless, the veteran star insists he has "a healthy attitude toward moviemaking." When he is on set and a movie descends into total chaos, his reaction is one of amusement. "And when you see actors who won't show up on time because their hairdresser hasn't cut their hair right, I just want to laugh. Or kill them," Hopkins said.
As he tells his students when he teaches acting at UCLA: "You know, if you never acted again, the world doesn't care. It will still go on." The remark isn't quite as dismissive of the profession as it may first appear. The upside, he suggests, is that even if acting is relatively inconsequential in the scheme of things, actors can take risks and be fearless. When it doesn't work out, that isn't such a big catastrophe. The world will keep on turning whether or not you lick your lips when playing a serial killer.
Slipstream, he insists, is not intended as an attack on Hollywood or actors. "But it is a light-hearted, wry, ironic look at the state of the actor. There are actors who come on set and you are not allowed to look at them. You've probably heard of those people. It's insanity!"
It is hard to know how seriously to take Hopkins' remarks. He is extremely self-deprecating and suggests that the film should simply be seen as "a hoax" or "a joke." He claims not to care what the audience thinks of the film. "If they like it, they like it. If they don't, they don't. I did it for myself and some friends as an experiment in time frames and in exploring the nature of memory and the subconscious."
One wonders, though, if he is giving Slipstream the soft sell to buttress himself against a hostile reception. (Slipstream did poor business when it was released in the US late last month and, at the time of writing, is yet to secure a UK distributor.) Although he wrote, directed, starred in and scored it, he continually tries to deflect credit away from himself and on to his collaborators.
Quite why Hopkins has turned film director at the age of 69 isn't immediately apparent. Why wait till now? On one level, it appears, the film is about himself. This is Hopkins in Proustian mode. Despite the Hollywood and Nevada settings, Hopkins says he was trying to achieve "that poignant feeling of loss." Some of the music echoes his childhood experiences in Wales during the war years, when he used to spend summer evenings listening to "someone in the street playing Chopin. I made up my own music, just the sound of a piano - the melancholy, heartbreaking sound of lost memories of childhood."
The film also expresses his confusion about himself and the world he lives in. "I have always been slightly lost - not sure where I am," he says cheerfully. "But that is a good thing, not a negative."
Hopkins remains a contradictory figure. He may joke now about how seriously actors take themselves, but in his roaring youth, he was as earnest about his profession and as tough with directors as any other stage or screen star. One moment, he says that he doesn't "have any roots" since leaving Wales to live in the US. "Now I am in limbo somehow." A little later, he speaks with undisguised nostalgia of Wales, where he will be returning at the end of the year to celebrate his 70th birthday.
"I dream constantly that I am back there," he says. "It is strange flexible geography. I dream that I am in the house I was born in. It is my background calling me back in a way. I am going to see people that I haven't seen in 60 years - kids I used to play with. We've contacted the people from my hometown. It's like Dylan Thomas' Return Journey. It is a very powerful memory structure I have of Wales."
In the past 15 to 20 years, Hopkins believes he has mellowed and become more philosophical about his craft. He now treats his directors with tolerance and (that word again) respect. Having made a movie himself, he realizes how difficult their job is. However, when he injured a tendon and was briefly confined to a wheelchair early on during the making of Slipstream, he was startled at how easy it was to delegate decisions. "You let everyone contribute and it makes life easier ... . This was relatively easy, for an independent film, to make," he says. "I like the independent movie.
It's a whole new breath of fresh air."
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