With roles in four new films and a stage appearance in Krapp's Last Tape, actor John Hurt is making his presence felt. He talks to Michael Dwyer
This is John Hurt Month at Irish cinemas. At an age when most people in other professions would have retired, the versatile Hurt, who turned 66 in January, has been remarkably prolific of late, featuring in five films on release here this month. Never an actor to rest on his laurels, Hurt will be back on the Dublin stage next month in Krapp's Last Tape.
"I enjoy the diversity of all that I do," Hurt says with a shrug when these facts are noted on his recent return visit to Ireland, where he has lived on and off down the years. He's looking fit and fresh, doesn't drink any more, and he's on feisty form.
We start by talking about Short Order, the stylised musical in which Hurt plays a cameo for young Irish writer-director Anthony Byrne, with whom he worked on the intriguing short film, Meeting Che Guevara and the Man From Maybury Hill.
"I like Anthony," Hurt says. "I like what he's trying to do. He comes up with some very interesting ideas, and he's got guts."
Hurt stays off-screen in Lars von Trier's Manderlay, but makes his presence felt all the way, delivering torrents of expository and critical commentary in his narration of this slavery saga set in 1930s America. He also provided the extensive voiceover for Dogville, the first film in von Trier's proposed trilogy of films dealing with the US, although the third film now has been abandoned.
"It continues that strange relationship I struck up with Lars on Dogville," Hurt says. "Manderlay seems to have turned most of his fan-base. It was not well reviewed anywhere, as far as I can see, and it wasn't just people being PC but people feeling that the film was intellectually quite naive." Hurt recorded all his dialogue for the two films at a studio in Copenhagen.
"We worked very quickly. I did Dogville in two days, and Manderlay in just a day. I got on terribly well with Lars, I must say, but I didn't have to go through all the process that the other actors had. I feel quite peripheral in a sense because I come along afterwards and fill in the bits to make it somewhat cohesive."
He believes von Trier made a mistake in so publicly stating he had never been to the US and then making two films that were so critical of the country. "He put himself into an almost impossible situation, I think. I know he doesn't want to fly anywhere, but he could have got a first-class ticket on the QE2 and gone for a wander around and have a look at the place. He might have found it interesting to go into the boondocks and meet people.
"It's difficult to take his position, which is a very high ground position, particularly in this day and age when we're all talking about America and its present administration, and we're all immensely apprehensive at the collapse of our own civilisation and watching China being fed in order to gobble up the hand that feeds it. His criticism is strident, but not well placed."
Hurt is more proud of The Proposition, John Hillcoat's violent western set in the Australian outback in the 1880s. Impressively scripted by singer-songwriter Nick Cave, it features Guy Pearce and Danny Huston as Irish immigrant outlaw brothers in an unflinching picture of a brutal era set against striking landscapes.
"I think it's a fascinating film," Hurt says. "It takes the same canvas as the American western, but the interesting thing is it doesn't suffer from the American myth. It's not bound. I did a film that tried to stand outside the western and to take on the myth, and it didn't get away with it." He is referring to Walter Hill's iconoclastic 1995 western, Wild Bill, which starred Jeff Bridges as Wild Bill Hickok and Ellen Barkin as Calamity Jane.
"If you show Wild Bill as a wreck, an alcoholic, a man who's impotent and has glaucoma, a cheat and someone who shoots people in the back, you can't try to show him as a hero at the same time. It doesn't work because it's not within the western myth. On the other hand, The Proposition works even though it features a cold-blooded psychotic man who is prepared to live in a cave, which nobody else would do." Apart from Osama bin Laden? "Well, the film touches on and alludes to all kinds of things, doesn't it? The characters are very symbolic. The man I play is a jackal who's not unintelligent."
The cast and crew of The Proposition suffered for their art, working in primitive conditions. "The heat was unbearable," Hurt says. "We shot it in Winton, which is in the middle of Queensland, although most Australians never heard of it. It's 550,000 square kilometres, which is bigger than Belgium, and that's just the county of Winton. It's got such a tiny population that it's virtually uninhabited.
"We stayed at a motel that has a little swimming pool and is run by this Czech-Australian man who's perfectly charming. I had a great time, even though it was 55 degrees on the set and I was wearing a three-piece suit made out of overcoat material and a thick linen shirt. No wonder people died like flies there in the past."
Hurt followed that period picture with the futuristic thriller, V For Vendetta, which also features Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman, Stephen Rea and Sinead Cusack. "I play a self-styled totalitarian chancellor of England, which has become a Fascist state," Hurt explains, "and America is reduced to being the biggest leper colony in the world. How they are going to play it in the States, I haven't the faintest idea.
"The hero of the film is a terrorist who does what Guy Fawkes failed to do, to blow up the Houses of Parliament, which is quite shocking to see in the film. That whole sequence is brilliantly done, I have to say, with the face of Big Ben blowing out. As far as I'm concerned, mine is quite a two-dimensional part. I just appear and rant and rage. It's taken from a comic strip and it's on the level it's intended to be. But it was fun to do, and I wanted to work with those boys, because they're so eccentric and peculiar."
"Those boys" are the film's screenwriters and producers, Andy and Larry Wachowski, the brothers who wrote and directed the mega-hit high-tech Matrix trilogy. "Larry, of course, is halfway towards being a woman now," Hurt says, shaking his head. "It's a crazy world."
John Hurt Month concludes with the release of the Michael Caton-Jones film, Shooting Dogs, featuring Hurt in his finest screen performance for years, as a Catholic priest caught up in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Inspired by the experiences of BBC TV producer David Belton in Rwanda at the time, the film co-stars Hugh Dancy as an idealistic young Englishman working there as a teacher. Consequently, the horror of the genocide is shown through the eyes of two white people.
"That is an absolutely legitimate and, I think, very good dramatic device," Hurt says. "If you made a film about Rwanda entirely from the Rwandan point of view, you couldn't begin to understand it. Africa is a wild country. It's the wildest continent left. It is so utterly removed from our thinking that the only way of getting a glimpse of it is by having a conduit.
"You simply can't get inside that kind of condition, just as they could not get inside ours. That is the problem with the present American administration. They are not prepared to see that there are other forms of living that have no connection with theirs, and they are not prepared to bend towards that."
Does Hurt believe that politically themed movies can change anything, even if they are, as Shooting Dogs evidently is, rooted in sincerity and passionate conviction? "I know it sounds a bit lame to say," he replies, "but I hope people will go away from the film with the avowed intention that something like this can never be allowed to happen again. In a sense, that is lame because it will happen again, but you have to make these films if they come your way, and you make it with every good intention. In the end, I just don't know what difference that makes."
Playing a priest in the film, Hurt says it helped to have "certain connections in my family", and he reels them off. "My father was a Church of England clergyman. My uncle was the head of the Bush Brotherhood in Queensland in Australia. My brother was a convert to Catholicism while he was at Cambridge and he became a monk. Then he jumped over the wall, got married and had three children, and then he got the calling again. He met the Abbot of Glenstal and asked if he could join the community, and he did. That is cutting a very long story short."
Hurt is now preparing to reprise the sole role in Krapp's Last Tape, which returns to the Gate in Dublin next month as part of the Beckett centenary celebrations. Atom Egoyan's riveting 2000 film of the play has captured for posterity Hurt's magnificent, deeply immersed performance as the world-weary Krapp, a man riddled with regret and self-loathing as he spends his 69th birthday playing back a tape of his thoughts from 30 years earlier, when he sounded so much younger and life seemed to offer so many opportunities and possibilities. The play is even more powerful on the stage, as Hurt demonstrated in the Gate production five years ago.
"The whole piece is about being on your own in every possible way," he says. "It's a life that he has chosen, and we discover that he suffers deeply because he is on his own. He does things you would never do unless you were on your own. Like when he puts a banana in his mouth. It's a ritual he goes through - and if he thought anyone was watching him, he would be devastated because he knows he shouldn't do it. He's like a naughty boy because he knows bananas make him ill."
Clearly, what gives the play its universality and its enduring appeal is that everyone can relate to Krapp to some degree because everyone has some regrets. "I've never come across anyone who didn't relate to it," Hurt says. "I think there's something in the whole idea of living a life without love which rings bells with everybody. Whether they've made a conscious decision or whether they've made a compromised decision, it's very deep. And so many people live by compromise. To be reminded by a play that you have accepted to live your life in a compromise can be fairly shattering, I imagine."
Many of the audience, like Krapp, will shed tears before it ends.
• The Proposition, V For Vendetta, Manderlay and Short Order are on release. Shooting Dogs opens on Mar 31. Krapp's Last Tape runs for seven performances at the Gate Theatre, Dublin from Apr 18
