Interview: Sir Anthony Hopkins
old dog new tricks
Even on the eve of his 70th birthday, Anthony Hopkins is not about to let the grass grow under his feet. The way Hopkins sees it, you’re never too old to wear a see-through wetsuit, make your first art film, or bark like a dog for the hell of it. Judy Kerr meets a man who likes to surprise
words by Judy Kerr/IFA
portrait photography by Eyevine
Looking a little dishevelled, Anthony Hopkins is in affable mood as he faces journalists at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. At 69 years of age Hopkins, the veteran Welsh screen actor best known for his Oscar-winning portrayal of sophisticated serial killer Hannibal Lecter 16 years ago, remains a man of contradictions.
A dyslexic who nonetheless has a photographic memory for names, dates and scripts; an ex-alcoholic bruiser with a reputation as a ‘man’s man’ who is a self-taught virtuoso pianist (he initially intended to pursue a career in music), Hopkins has always enjoyed confounding expectations.
For an actor who can boast such an eclectic CV, from the turning point of understudying Olivier and working with the RSC in the 1960s via potboilers like Hollywood Wives in the 1980s, to a string of successes in period cinema pieces such as The Remains of the Day and Shadowlands in the 1990s, it is no surprise that Hopkins is still willing to experiment. His latest movie, directed by Robert Zemeckis of Back to the Future and the more recent The Polar Express, is no exception – he spent most of his time in a see-through wetsuit. Hopkins plays the legendary Danish King Hrothgar in this modern retelling of Beowulf – the epic 10th-century poem about bloody battles between a Geat warrior (from what is nowadays known as Sweden) and monsters terrorising a Danish settlement.
The reason for the wetsuit? Like The Polar Express, Beowulf was shot using ‘motion capture’, where multiple cameras shoot live actors and ‘capture’ them in 3-D inside a computer, after which animators design images and environments.
Proponents argue that it merges the best of both worlds, the subtleties of human reactions, with the magic of animation. Hopkins recalls: “What seems to me so strange is that they designed costumes for it. So they put a beard on you, cloaks and everything. Then they photograph you and before each scene they put you through a body scan so that the computers can take you all in – it’s an ingenious process – and then you never see it again.
“It makes for a difficult acting style without your usual tools, because you go around with little ‘bubbles’ on your face [these are used as reference points for the computer, to calculate the movements of the actors].
“You have to go through an hour of all this stuff on you, then take it all off and it’s all stuck on with glue. It’s not easy, but I guess Bob is a good director, and I think this motion capture is his obsession. It’s interesting. I haven’t seen it yet, though, it takes a long time to process.”
Hopkins’ last film venture was alongside Ryan Gosling in the thriller Fracture, in which he played a cold-blooded killer for the first time since his Hannibal Lecter days. The actor reveals that he based the character, wife-murderer Ted Crawford, on an Irish con-man and manipulator he once knew.
“It’s not just a question of playing killers,” he muses. “But this was the best script I’d had since Silence… I’d seen Primal Fear and some others the director, Greg Hoblit, had done, and I’m a fan of this sort of slow-building thriller, like Sleepers or Presumed Innocent. I think audiences like to be tricked or given the chance to see if they can work out a puzzle. I’ve watched some movies with big reputations recently, but sometimes I can’t even see what’s going on because there’s so much business with the camera.
“It’s as if the directors and the studios don’t believe anyone has got an attention span anymore, which I think is a big lie. I feel audiences are quite happy to let the film unfold instead of this pandering to what I think the studio believes is sub-intelligence. All this, ‘We’ve got to please the kids,’” he scoffs.
For Hopkins, the script is of paramount importance when it comes to choosing projects.
“It sounds weird, but I can usually get a hunch that it’ll be good if it’s just minimal description or stage directions,” he explains. “The Fracture script appealed as it was very clear and economic in delivery. There was one line in particular, in the interrogation scene, where the cop, Willy [Ryan Gosling], asks me a question and I give him a stupid answer. Willy says: ‘I’m not going to play games with you,’ and I reply: ‘Afraid you have to, old sport.’ I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ It’s very much like the Lecter thing – the clever put-downs, the sharp, incisive kind of wit.”
Hopkins readily volunteers that young actors often confess how intimidated they feel by his presence – he is touched when told that his own cameo role was the stated highlight of the cast of the recent Bobby Kennedy biopic – and has an unorthodox method of alleviating tension on the set.
“I bark like a dog – just for fun, to keep everyone happy because it gets pretty intense sometimes. People get too serious. It’s only a movie. It’s not the end of the world. People say, “What’s that?” Ryan liked my barking. He was so convinced, he said: ‘There’s a dog in here.’”
When it came to acting, however, up-and-coming talent Ryan Gosling seems to have had no qualms about challenging the maestro. “He’s very bright and he was more concerned about getting the end of the film right than I was, because I don’t have that kind of analytical mind. Maybe I’m just getting lazy or old or something.
“For instance, we had done a scene at the end where I have a struggle to get the gun. But I felt something missing, and test audiences said the end was disappointing. Anyway, months later I got a call from my agent telling me that they wanted a reshoot, and he sent me the new script. It was just terrific, and I think Ryan and Greg and a few others were the ones who really worked on getting it right. So I thanked him for making it better. It’s a bit like Presumed Innocent in that it’s a very quiet ending. I think that’s terrific.”
With only one unfulfilled ambition left as an actor – to be directed by Clint Eastwood, whose “no fuss” style he admires – Hopkins is branching out into a number of directions. However, his self-directed Slipstream met with opprobrium when it premiered at Sundance Film Festival. The film, which he also wrote, starred in and composed the music for, centres on an ageing Hollywood screenwriter who suffers a mental meltdown. It was condemned by many critics as an unintelligible vanity project, with one notably describing it as “in contention for the biggest howler at the festival”.
Hopkins justified himself at the time by claiming that he had deliberately tried to alienate the audience, to “remind them that they are watching a hoax”, asking defiantly, “What were people going to do, arrest me if it wasn’t any good?”
As Beowulf hits cinemas, Hopkins has a raft of intriguing projects in the pipeline, all involving fellow Oscar-winners. Next year he stars with Benicio Del Toro in The Wolf Man; he’s to play Tolstoy in The Last Station with Meryl Streep and at some point there’s the delayed Hitchcock, to be directed by Ryan Murphy, who created hit US TV show Nip/Tuck (Helen Mirren is lined up to play Hitch’s wife, Alma Reville).
“It’s not about the making of Psycho per se, but how Hitchcock felt such a failure all his life. He had a very troubled relationship with everyone. They pulled the script back as they had to check with the Hitchcock estate, and they wanted to rewrite it. I don’t know why.”
Sir Anthony Hopkins – he was knighted in 1993 – has had his share of darkness in what has been a life packed full of incident and endeavour. Now, as he approaches his 70th birthday in December, he insists he takes things less seriously, making time for reading, beach walks, his family.
“I’ve reached a point where I’m free of wanting to do anything else. It’s wonderful not to care.”
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