William Hurt's latest role is in spooky film 'The Village'. He talks to Michael Dwyer about fear, death and the intensity of acting
The intensity with which William Hurt infuses his roles as an actor is just as evident when he is being himself; or, at least, when he meets complete strangers in interviews. On my way to meet him at a midtown Manhattan hotel a few weeks ago, I knew what to expect. We had met before, in London in the winter of 1985, when the critical acclaim for his performance in Kiss of the Spider Woman was building. A few months later he would receive the Oscar for his remarkable portrayal of a flamboyant homosexual man escaping from the harsh reality of confinement in a South American prison by inventing romantic movies.
Back then, we spent an hour together in his room at Claridge's Hotel, and I got to ask a single question dealing with the motivation that drives an actor. Hurt proceeded to give me a private masterclass in acting, freewheeling from one tangent to another, dramatically throwing open the windows, leaping around the room, and mingling personal and professional experiences into one wide-ranging monologue. It was unlike any interview I experienced before or since, and it was fascinating.
Hurt's new film is The Village, M Night Shyamalan's spooky, stylish drama set among a close-knit reclusive community in rural Pennsylvania, where they live in a remote village surrounded by woods apparently populated by predatory creatures.
Cast as one of the elders, Hurt features in a fine ensemble cast with Joaquin Phoenix, Bryce Dallas Howard, Adrien Brody, Sigourney Weaver and Brendan Gleeson.
Initially, Hurt seems unusually straightforward as he talks about the movie's writer-director, Shyamalan, who first made his mark with The Sixth Sense.
"He's very quick, very clear and everything is so well thought out. You have to keep up with him. You want to make a contribution, but you need to be concise. He doesn't stop for long, elliptical, diversionary chats, which is something I like to do. I can handle that. When I get into company like that, I can become very quiet. I yak a lot when I'm looking for the idea, or when I want to establish the idea."
The initiation process, as Hurt describes it, was in three stages. "The first was the call from the agent, and she said Night was interested in talking to me about the role. She also said Night wanted to know if I would be willing to rehearse for the film and, to me, that is the most important moment of the whole process, as I strive for rehearsal the whole time. I've spent 25 years fighting to get rehearsal time. So when I heard that, I said, 'Great, send me the phone book and I'll even do that for him.' Then I read the script and I was very happy with it."
However, as he immersed himself in the screenplay, Hurt had many questions to raise about the choices the villagers make and how these are resolved.
"To me, it was a big issue as to how we would let this go. In this country, if you set up a separate community, you are still beholden to the laws of the township, the county, the state and the Feds. My mission, in reality, was, challenge."
He digresses. "Personally, I want to be buried in a pine box. That's against the law in most states because it's considered a danger to the daisies or whatever. So, if my children want to do that for me, they've got to find a pine box and put me in it, carry me to a place no one will think of looking, dig a hole and bury me in it. And then, because they're breaking the law, they've got to lie about it for the rest of their lives.
"I saw the other side of that on my way here this morning. I saw this big guy on a big Harley and he was obeying the law because he had a helmet on his head. But the helmet was so small it wouldn't save anyone if they fell off their toilet. It was just a little can, but he was obeying the law."
As ever, Hurt never loses sight of the point he started out to make. "So, what these people in The Village have produced is an experiment where they try to create a culture in which they treat children in such a way that they will conceive of different things to what we have in the so-called civilised society in which we live, that allows random violence against innocent people as a requirement for democracy. They have gone out of their way to seek a different way of life, and then they have to deal with it when a crime is committed.
"The distinguishing factor is the crime. Ways of life require structures, no matter what form they take. People talk about rule of law, but since when do laws rule? It's an interpretation. Everyone interprets law all the time. It's people who put laws into effect and keep them there. Show me a contract that wasn't made to be broken, rewritten or restructured."
I ask Hurt if the sense of trepidation engendered by the elders in The Village should be read as an allegory for the present-day climate of fear in the US, as described by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11. "If Pearl Harbor was the sleeping giant that woke us up, what happened on September 11th woke up the sleeping giant with the IQ of four," he says. "We're living under this illusion of safety but, unfortunately, we are willing to forget that other people don't live in safety. They don't live with, you know, 60 per cent obesity or within happy, protected borders. Suddenly, one day you realise that your IQ actually atrophies under conditions when it isn't challenged. It's a muscle, and you use your muscles or they use you." Anyhow, parents instinctively create a climate of fear for their children, he believes.
"We all do it. Stevenson was a great storyteller, but why does anyone want to tell kids scary stories? Do children want them? They're like kittens or puppies. They want to be scared in a way they can walk away after without bleeding. They want to start training their apparatus to be able to deal with the dangers they sense are out there, but which they can't put a definite shape on at a young age. They want to develop a speedy reaction time and a sophistication of instincts.
"We all do it - playing with fear in order to control fear. That's the basis of fairytales and why we go to scary movies, even though a lot of them are crap. Some of those movies make it possible to do more violence because you're not really dealing with fear that way so that you can do less violence. It actually anaesthesises you."
Does he believe that climate of fear will change if John Kerry wins the US presidential election in November? "I don't know," he shrugs. "I'm voting for Nader. I want to vote for someone who says what he thinks, even if he is a little older. You can't keep waiting for consolation prizes. If you keep building consolation prizes into your culture, then you're just staving it off. In acting, you're taught by teachers never to think in the negative. You can't act a 'not' - otherwise you get yourself in knots. So, if you start choosing consolation prizes, then you will live in consolation, not in creativity. It's like admitting you've lost."
We return to the subject of The Village, and I make the error of describing Bryce Dallas Howard, its young leading actress, as a newcomer - although, strictly speaking, this is her first film role. "That's the problem with films," Hurt begins. "To most people, she probably seems new. No one seems to know that she has done a lot of work on the stage. She was an actress before she did this film and she always will be an actress. That's what's great about her. She has a craft. She's not a discovery, except on the film scene. I don't see it any other way, even at this late stage.
"Maybe it could be that I'm still pretending that something doesn't exist, that film isn't different, that it's still art. I really don't believe that some of the actors I know, who are better actors than I am and who don't get well-paid work, are not better actors. I've done 70 plays as well as 70 films. I did one play on Broadway, Hurlyburly, which everyone seems to know about, but the other 69 were plays, too.
"I spent the past three and a half months in a play at a theatre with 176 seats. That paid me 250 bucks aweek. Nobody heard about it, certainly nobody big in the film business, but my heartbeat was certainly in it, and those were all just as important as the heartbeats I'm having right now."
That play was Michael Healey's Canadian-set drama, The Drawer Boy, which was staged at Galway Arts Festival and the Peacock in Dublin two years ago, and Hurt appeared in a production in Portland, Oregon, which closed on the night of his 54th birthday in April.
"I played the slow guy in the play," he says, "and a year ago I played Richard III up in Winnipeg in temperatures of under 35 below." Was his a traditional reading of Richard III? "Not to me, anyway - from the outside, maybe, but from my side, no. Some people saw it."
As our scheduled time together draws to a close, Hurt frets that he may not have had enough time to address everything in adequate depth. "One thing I fear in my work is generalising anything. I don't want to go home at the end of the day feeling that I have generalised. That doesn't feel good. Most films aimed at very large audiences tend to generalise their messages, if they have any, because they want a lot of different people to see the film. I myself believe that the more specific you become, the more available you are.
"I always work to use the tools I have to push towards fulfilling the scene I am doing, so I do a lot more preparation with other people than I think is typical for film acting. I'm starting a film in Texas in a few days and I've been working with a couple of the other actors on the side already, talking about the characters and their histories, the dialogue, the structure of the screenplay. I've always been that way.
"In the old days, when I had lots of energy and no kids, I could knock on the door at three in the morning and say, 'You got a cup of tea? I've got the script here. Will we work through it?' And we would open up the whole thing, getting the shape of it and \ one aspect relates to another. Ideally, I would like six weeks to prepare for any film, but you're very lucky if you get three, or even one." Which is where we came in.
The Village is released here next Friday, August 20th