.png)
3 hours ago
8 ARTICLE AD
The Dublin International Film Festival came to an end at the weekend after one of its most varied programs yet. Guests visiting the event included deep-dive documentary-maker Alexandre O. Philippe, attending with his Texas Chain Saw Massacre meditation Chain Reactions; director Jason Buxton, there with his acclaimed Ben Foster-starring thriller Sharp Corner, soon to be released by Vertical; Albert Serra, supporting his surprise San Sebastian winner Afternoons of Solitude; Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, honored by a curated retrospective; and British ’60s pop-culture icon Twiggy, subject of Sadie Frost’s film of the same name. From closer to home, director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Thomas Martin brought their cult Cannes hit The Surfer, and the UK’s Polly Steele came with Four Letters of Love starring Helena Bonham Carter and Pierce Brosnan.
Under the always assured stewardship of artistic Gráinne Humphreys, DIFF took a big swing by opening with The Return, Uberto Pasolini’s retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey, in the presence of star Ralph Fiennes, then still in the high heat of awards season for the Oscar-nominated Conclave. But the big stars this year were the double whammy of Ed Harris and Jessica Lange, both in town to attend the world premiere of their first film together in 40 years — A Long Day’s Journey into Night, based on Eugene O’Neill’s famous play — and also receive the festival’s highest honor, the Volta award, named after Dublin’s first cinema.
Speaking at The Complex, Dublin’s fantastic arts space, Harris revealed that he had become an actor by accident. “I was big deal in high school playing football,” he said, “and I actually went to Columbia University in New York to play football with one of the worst Division One football teams that ever existed. I think at one point we lost 23 games in a row. And then I realized the following summer, when I was working out, that my athletic career was pretty much over with. And I didn’t know what to do with myself, because that’s what I really cared about: football and baseball. I was a pretty good student, but I wasn’t intensely interested in any particular subject. I don’t know what I was doing at Columbia because I didn’t learn a damn thing.”
Things changed, however, when caught a play in the holidays. “My folks had moved back to Oklahoma,” he recalled, “and I saw one actor in summer theater there playing Tartuffe [in the play of the same name by Molière] and Sancho Panza in The Man of La Mancha, and he was really great. I think his name was Pat Rucker. He was hysterical and having a great time. The audience was having a ball, myself included, and I remember sitting on the porch going, ‘What am I going to do with my life? Maybe I could do that acting thing. People applaud you. It’s like scoring a touchdown.’ So, I started studying it.”
Though he has a near-impeccable record in terms of his acting career to date, Harris confessed to a rare lapse of judgment. “When I was younger,” he recalled, “I actually turned down Full Metal Jacket to play the sergeant. And Stanley Kubrick, I remember talking to him on the phone. He said, ‘You’re kidding me, you don’t want to play this role?’ And for some reason I turned it down. I don’t even remember why. I think that had to do with my family. I might’ve been drunk at the time and didn’t really want to think about it. I felt it was a one-dimensional character on a certain level. But that’s kind of unusual, not to want to work with Mr. Kubrick. I don’t know who I thought I was.”
Coming more up to date, Harris was just as frank about his much-touted project The Ploughmen, his third film as director after art biopic Pollock and indie western The Appaloosa and set to co-star his daughter Lily. “Well, that’s the film I’ve been trying to do,” he said, “and I’m about ready to call it quits because, I mean, I keep getting a cast together and then everybody gets too old for it. So, I don’t know if we’re going to do it or not. And at this point I’m going, ‘Do we even still want to make this movie?’ You know what I mean? Initially, it was something that I felt passionate about, and it’s kind of waning. So, I don’t know if I’m ever going to do it or not. I still feel good about the script, but my daughter’s 10 years older than she was when I was first going to shoot it. I’ve got to rewrite it if I want her to be in it, and I don’t know if I care enough to do that.”
Jessica Lange, Harris’s co-star in the underrated 1985 Patsy Cline biopic Sweet Dreams, was similarly self-effacing in her masterclass, explaining how she was plucked from obscurity to make her debut in the 1976 blockbuster remake of King Kong. “That was very bizarre,” she admitted. “I was working at a restaurant in the Village. It was a famous old writer’s bar, very well-known at the time, but not chic or anything. Just like, it was an old Village bar. Somebody had said to me once, ‘Why don’t you try modeling and make a little bit of money?’ So, I went and saw this woman who had a modeling agency. I never got a job, but she talked to me, and she asked me what I was doing. I said, ‘I’m taking acting classes and working as a waitress at The Lion’s Head.’ Then, out of the blue, I got a call from her one day, asking if I would want to fly to Los Angeles and audition for a film.”
“So, I said, ‘Yes,’ of course. They flew me out and I arrived and at MGM — which was my favorite studio even as a little girl — and it was just this kind of weird fantasy come true. First of all, they weren’t going to audition me because they didn’t think I was right for the part. They didn’t like the way I looked, and they weren’t interested. But the woman back in New York said, ‘You flew her all the way out there. Just run some film on her and then send her home.’ So, they did, and, yeah, that’s how it happened.”
Unsurprisingly, being thrust into the limelight, and on such a high-profile tentpole, came at a price. “It was horrifying, it really was,” she recalled. “We shot basically right up until the time the film came out. I mean, that’s how crunched we were in the schedule and how over budget, over schedule, we were when we wrapped the film. It was coming out the next week, and I was flying home to Minnesota for Christmas. I got on the airplane, and somebody was sitting on the airplane with Time magazine and the cover of this Time magazine was me in [King Kong’s] hand. I was so absolutely mortified that I went back to my seat, and I started to cry. I was embarrassed by the whole thing.”
After covering her glory days — playing Frances Farmer (in Frances); working with Scorsese on his Cape Fear remake; and winning an Oscar apiece for Tootsie and Blue Sky — Lange brought things up to date with her successful late-career entry into serial television. “I’d hit these kind of doldrums where I wasn’t liking the films that I was doing,” she said. “I didn’t like the parts I was being given. I did things that I probably instinctively knew I shouldn’t. But as an actor, you keep thinking, “I’ve got to work. I mean, I have to work.” You’re not like a writer or a painter or something where you can do this on your own by yourself. It’s a community, so you have to keep working.”
“So, there’d been a long stretch where I was just distracted,” she continued, “because my kids were growing up. Life had kind of overwhelmed everything. And I got a script to do [HBO’s] Grey Gardens, and suddenly it reminded me of what I was passionate about, what I loved about acting and making films. So, that changed everything. And then after that, a couple of years later, out of the blue, one day I’m up at my farmhouse, I pick up the phone and it’s Ryan Murphy. I had no idea who he was. But he started talking to me about a project, about this and that, and I thought, ‘Well, yeah, why not? Why not try this? I mean, it’s something entirely new. Nobody’s done stuff like this before.’ And so I said yes, and I ended up doing the first four seasons of American Horror Story.”
(Lange then went on to speak very highly of Murphy, but when asked by a member of the audience if she would make another season of A.H.S., the answer was, rather unexpectedly, an emphatic no.)
Before concluding on Sunday by hosting a weekend masterclass with Eddie Marsan, the festival gave out a string of prizes. Highlighting the most promising emerging talents in the Irish film industry, the festival’s Discovery Awards were awarded to Cara Loftus, writer of Spilt Milk; Clare Monnelly, writer of Cat & Mouse; and Albert Hooi, cinematographer on Bunker Baby and Nay Day. The Avolon World Cinema Award went to the British-Indian co-production Santosh, directed by Sandhya Suri; Best Documentary to Myrid Carten’s A Want in Her, and The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) Human Rights Film Award went to Testimony by Aoife Kelleher.
