von The Wild Harp » 16.02.2009, 21:24
Sorry, das mit dem link klappt irgendwie nicht. Deshalb hier der Artikel in voller Länge:
Man for sex and Shakespeare
He is addicted to Shakespeare and dreams of turning the English poet's lesser known plays into film. But RALPH FIENNES is also the movie star who in periods ends up in one sex scandal after the other. Right now, he is in one of the most controversial films this year, the Oscar nominated "The Reader".
Kristian Lindberg at the Berlinale 2009
BERLIN Many people first noticed him as the mysterious title character in the war-romantic "The English Patient" from 1996. As the Hungarian Count Almásy in voluntary exile in North Africa the British actor Ralph Fiennes seems to summarize the whole film's atmosphere of fatal romance and melancholy. "Let me tell you about winds" was one of the lines he softy spoke to Kristin Scott Thomas as they huddled up together in a nightly sandstorm in Sahara. In that moment, there were only few female movie goers who didn't want to change places with his colleague.
The now 46 years old Ralph Fiennes has a voice and a manner which sharpens your attention whether he rushes forward on a stage in London in one of Shakespeare's high-flown, ingenious monologues or plays the commandant of a KZ camp in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List". A big part of the actor's star status builds on his ability to choose character parts resounding with real human feelings, but at the same time shy and difficult to access. In his parts he carries secrets which only seem to double, and they are never fully revealed when the credits roll over the screen leaving the audience with a wish for more.
His latest part in Stephen Daldry's screen version of the German novel "The Reader" is no exception. The film has even before its premiere at the Berlinale caused both admiration and indignant critique because it seemingly shows understanding for the worst criminals of the Nazi-reign. In the film Fiennes plays Michael Berg, an older German who tries to come to terms with the fact that he as a young man fell in love with one of the Nazis' active helpers, a female guard in a KZ camp who let hundreds of women and children die in a burning church. Even if the film can't be described as holocaust-revisionist - and even if the film's director flat out refuses that "The Reader" is a Holocaust film - it differs from previous films about the topic because focus is on the destiny of the executioners, not on their victims.
Ralph Fiennes has previously undertaken the part of a German during The Third Reich, but in "The Reader" he also incarnates the following generations' showdown with the past. And his appearance is perfectly suited, for Ralph Fiennes has a face with a past.
When Berlingske Tidende meets the actor at the luxurious Hotel Adlon close to Brandenburger Tor he is dress in jeans and a pale blue shirt, while his receding hair line has been turned into an abstract question by his smooth "skinhead haircut" - a reminiscence from his part as Oedipus in London's Westend.
Immediately the actor starts talking about the film's treatment of the Holocaust. It's clearly a topic he has had to address many times, but he answers all questions with a straightforwardness which makes a sharp contract to the evasive answers the director Stephen Daldry delivered at a press conference earlier at the festival.
"Even if the debate about the film has been about the guilt of the Germans, horrible genocides are still taking place around in the world, while we sit here, and it's the very few of us who wish to know about it. That's why there is a Michael Berg in all of us. We all look away when massacres are taking place in the Middle East and in Chechenia."
He doesn't like that the film is being called a Holocaust film. "It's a much larger film than that," he says, but in the same moment seems to realize that his statement can be misunderstood.
"As part of my research I read a lot of books about the Holocaust, and once more it made me feel that the topic never should be forgotten. There has to be taught about the genocide in schools, it has to be a part of our consciousness. If not, we are never going to make progress as a human race, sometimes I doubt if it is possible at all.
With that said, the interesting thing for me as an actor is the development my character goes through in the story. Holocaust is a black hole in history, but I didn't start working on this film with a feeling that I was to represent the showdown that followed after the war. Obviously, that would be a bad case of self-overestimation to think that I would be capable of that. So I am primary interested in exploring my character's inner life."
One of the parts that helped to establish Ralph Fiennes as an actor willing to takes risks was Amon Goeth, the KZ commandant in Steven Spielberg's hugely advertised wrestle match with the Holocaust, "Schindler's List" from 1993. It's that kind of part which in American films traditionally has been reserved actors with a modest amount of tools in their bag. Fiennes' Nazi is a brutal, sadistic murderer, but even in his shining madness did Fiennes let the audience get a glimpse of something that once was a sort of humaneness.
"It was disturbing to play Goeth. But let's face it - to actors, baddies is a gift. It's interesting to localize the inner moral compass, even the bad guys think they possess - also in a man like Goeth, even if his morals are very far away from what others recognise as something normal."
Does it feel like a burden to play a part with so many historical and political feelings surrounding it?
"No, I don't think about that aspect of a part. History as such is not a burden to me. What troubles me is the question of how to portray a figure as truthfully as possible - a figure, who has experienced such a tumultuous bite of the history of the world. It's about creating a human being that people believe in."
During the interview Fiennes has until now seemed like a gentle example of brilliancy and thoughtfulness. But if you have been reading just a little in the gossip magazines then you know that the actor has a darker side - a side he doesn't willingly let journalists dig into, and which back in 2007 almost threatened his status as a serious artist.
First he was caught in having sex with a stewardess called Lisa Robinson on a flight to India. The affair was discovered, because neither Fiennes nor the stewardess seemed to have put a damper on them self while they were busy becoming honorary members of the so called "Mile High Club" in one of the plane's toilets. A few months later a Belgian hotel manager had to ask the actor and four women to take it easy before their common skinny dipping became a case for the police.
Maybe it's one of those things that come with the job, whether Fiennes wants or not. He is after all a man who can make women sigh even if he is covered in burns and bandages as in "The English Patient". On the other hand it wasn't worthy of a gentleman not to move a finger as the stewardess lost her job.
Here Ralph Fiennes seems more impulsive than thoughtful. And maybe he is simply tired of the role as intellectual aesthete capable of reciting "Hamlet" endlessly. On the question if he, like in "The Reader", has used literature as a mean of seduction, he answer with an obscenity: "Yes of course! Piles of books are great for certain positions …, and since it has to be solid books I would use the Bible and Shakespeare."
After that, when Berlingske Tidende asks him if he has a personal philosophy concerning acting, he is right back on the track and demonstrates his talent for mute intensity. After a rhetorical pause that feels like thirty seconds, he answers:
"Well, I think it's about being open and exist in the moment. Reflection and analysis can stand in the way of the actor while instincts and openness in the moment are driving forces. Some see acting like an intellectual deed, and I don't agree at all. It comes much closer to sport where you mobilize your instincts in the right moment."
A smile and a nod signal that audience is over. For the moment the instinct is switched off and the talent is hurrying out of the building.
"Pain is easy to write. In pain, we are all drably individual. But what can one write about happiness?" (TEOTA)