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Transcript
COLIN FARRELL: Very classy, BAFTA. No surprise.
Look at that. You’ve got Jenny the donkey, you’ve got the yellow gloves, you’ve got the lobster, you’ve got the penguin. That’s incredible. Anyway, here we are… [sits down on sofa]
[OPENING TITLE]
Hi, my name’s Colin Farrell and I’m playing back some films that, for various different reasons, mean something to me.
Here we go, I’m going to kick it off now with, I don’t know what the first one is, but I’m going to find out. Boom!
[TITLE: BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER]
[CLIP STARTS]
“LORD DOYLE” (FARRELL): It’s the truth I’m running away from. I’m not just an addict, I’m a liar and a thief. A fraud.
[CLIP ENDS]
The film, Ballad of a Small Player, it’s a very chaotic slice of cinema and the character I play in the film, is a man who’s demonstrating ever more erratic behaviour as he is imploding psychologically, emotionally. He is from the first frame, really – it’s a pretty rapid descent into his own private madness.
And that scene represents a kind of, a break in the tide, albeit a very brief break, where he finds himself in a situation with a woman, where – and she is someone who’s always as much of a pretence as my character is living within – as much as he’s constantly presenting this persona to the world that is very far from who he is. But is a persona that he thinks he needs to present, so that he can achieve the means he dreams of achieving, which are things like status and wealth.
And it is a moment in the film where the two of them find a simpatico with each other, and they see in each other aspects of themselves that they aren’t comfortable in viewing of themselves. But as often happens in the human experience, when we see parts of ourselves in another person, it can either be a great agitation or it can be a – it can imbue us with a sense of peace and a sense of commonality, which can be a grace.
And so there’s a grace in that scene. There’s a vulnerability, and there is more than anything, and most profoundly, there’s an honesty. So, I actually really enjoyed shooting those scenes because the rest of the film, as I said, was incredibly chaotic and it was an experience of kind of, constant sensory overload.
From first frame, I mean, we are hitting the audience over the head in the most bombastic fashion, with the beautiful cinematography of James Friend and the lights and the sounds and the sensory overload of Macau. And then also, you know, Volker’s score is so pounding as well and my performance isn’t subtle. I mean, it’s all very grandiose.
And so to have that scene, both to perform it with Fala and I think for the audience as well, it is a, kind of essential kind of, break in the proceedings.
Now, onto a film directed by the great Wim Wenders, Perfect Days.
[TITLE: PERFECT DAYS]
[CLIP STARTS]
HIRAYAMA (KŌJI YAKUSHO): [in Japanese] The world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected and some are not. My world… and your mum’s are very different.
NIKO (ARISA NAKANO): [in Japanese] What about my world? Which world am I in?
[PAUSE]
Does this flow into the ocean?
HIRAYAMA (YAKUSHO): Yeah.
[CLIP ENDS]
FARRELL: [pauses, laughs] I just think it’s one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen.
Even just, just that observation that he makes there, “The world is made up of different worlds. Some of them are connected and some of them are not.” I just- that, the simplicity of that and how you could riff for hours and write a thesis on just that thought alone. It’s so powerful. And so there’s just endless nourishment from a film like that.
You know, there’s been a couple of films in the last two years; one was this, Perfect Days, and the other one was All of Us Strangers, and they were two films when I came out of the cinema in Manhattan, I remember clearly going, who do I love enough to text about these two films? Because they were just so heart and mind-altering for me.
It seems like we’re all ever more aspiring towards living lives of excitement and it’s been talked about ad nauseum, and everything seems to be about excitement and achievement and ambition.
But this, this presents a world and a man’s life that in my 20s I might have watched and gone, God, you know, repetition- Isn’t repetition boring? Isn’t repetition death? Isn’t repetition-
But the sneaky thing is, even though he has a system of existence that he sticks pretty cleanly to every day in how he wakes, how he folds his bed, puts it away, puts the pillow on one side, waters his plants, it is beautiful, the care he takes with what he does.
And I think it seems to me from the outside looking in, the seeming repetition of his life, very cleverly, you begin to see that, even his character, through his observations of nature every day when he goes to the park and he sits on the bench with his sandwich and he watches the light filter through the leaves, the repetition allows him the space to be connected to the excitement of life in a way that all of us who don’t have any repetition and are looking for, you know, keep things first time, first time experience, we miss the actual beauty of the mundane that exists around us at all times.
I found it liberated me from that thing that I fall afoul of, which is the importance of achievement. And his great achievement in this film is just the simplicity of living a really good life, that is utterly connected to the world around him and accepting of the world around him. But he’s incredibly contained, not controlled, but contained.
I just thought it was an extraordinary, extraordinary treatise on the potential magic of the seemingly most normal life. And, and I thought that was a very powerful thing.
And Wim Wenders was, you know- Paris, Texas was a huge film for me. I’ve talked about it before because it was the first time I was introduced to a kind of different type of cinema, a different style of cinema, where the potential for film to explore the deepest, most secret aspects of the human condition.
Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders was the first time I was like, Oh my God. I felt such deep agitation and such deep empathy in watching that film.
Next is In Bruges.
MCCONAUGHEY: The Lost Bus.
[CLIP STARTS]
KEVIN MCCAY (MCCONAUGHEY): Try! Try it now! Yes!
MARY LUDWIG (AMERICA FERRERA): Okay! Okay! Okay! Go! Go! Go! Go!
Get down! Get down! We’re going through the fire.
[CLIP ENDS]
MCCONAUGHEY: Based on true events from 2018, the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, where 85 people were deceased.
And this is a story that we picked out to tell about two folks, a bus driver and a teacher, Kevin McKay and Mary Ludwig. And this is the story of the six hours that they had that day, trying to escape, trying to survive.
The fact that it was based in truth gave me a little more reverence. You know, as an actor, you kind of sink into the saddle a little bit more and you have more purpose to go tell it.
Then I got on the phone with our director, Paul Greengrass. He was somebody I wanted to hop in and take that journey with. If you do a Paul Greengrass film, you’re finding and creating things along the way.
You have the events that happen, right? And that’s the director’s job. The needs and your obstacles; that becomes personal to the actors.
I always need a monologue before I can have my dialogue. So what is Kevin McKay’s monologue? What’s the, the stuff that we call subtext? It’s said in the one line where Kevin says, “I was too late as a son, now, I’m too late as a father.”
In there is, all regret and remorse. And like so many men that I know and so many I see, that look up at their- around 50, and they look around their life and they’re like, “Oh…what do I have to show? I failed in my job, I failed in relationships.”
Some of them, like the Kevin I portrayed in this, it’s because when the going got tough, he snuck out the back door. You know, in life.
Some men are wandering because they were like, “I did the right things, I made the right choices. They told me- I was told if I did this, this and this, I could move up and I could succeed. And that didn’t pay off. That form of the American dream did not pay me back.”
He gets asked to make a decision, and he makes one of the biggest decisions he’s made in years to go back and get his mom and son and evacuate them, so this fire doesn’t get them. And right on top of that, which is very Paul Greengrass, because that decision alone is enough to push the entire second act.
But no, 30 seconds later, dispatch is calling saying, “I’ve got 23 stranded kids on the east side of town. Does anyone have an empty bus over there?” Well, guess who’s got an empty bus? So, these massive decisions and 180s on top of each other, Paul compounds the obstacles on top of you.
But I needed that monologue, for myself, of who Kevin was as a father. That sort of subtext infers how a man like that and how I portray him, how he listens, what he doesn’t say, what he’s not saying in between the lines, how he walks, how his shoulders sit, how he regrets, how he leaps into action here at the end, which in that scene is basically at the end of their rope.
Boom. Fire. Guess what? We’re not going to sit. I’m going to jump, instead of fall. Don’t know if we’re going to make it. This looks like a suicide mission but I’m going to follow through, for the first time in a long time in my life. And to get through hell, sometimes you’ve got to drive right down the throat of the dragon, which is this fire.
This is a horror film, at a very basic level. If you like a horror film, you get a horror film here. And at the same time, you’ve got a beautiful human drama that I think audiences will be able to see themselves through Kevin and Mary, the characters America and I play, in here. And maybe leave going, “Oh, I’ve got a second chance on my plate right now.”
Just when you think you’re at the end of your rope. It’s another example of how humanity, the will to survive, we have an extra gear that we don’t give ourselves credit for usually,
And if you like amusement park rides, if you like rollercoasters, if you like that kind of adrenaline, you will enjoy this ride.
[TITLE: IN BRUGES]
[CLIP STARTS]
KEN (BRENDAN GLEESON): Listen. I’m going to give you some money and put you on a train somewhere.
RAY (FARRELL): Back to England?
KEN (GLEESON): You can’t go back to England, Ray. You’ll be a dead man!
RAY (FARRELL): Ken, I wanna be a dead man. Have you been missing something?
KEN (GLEESON): You don’t want to be a dead man, Ray.
RAY (FARRELL): [sobbing] Ken! I killed a little boy.
KEN (GLEESON): Then save the next little boy.
[CLIP ENDS]
FARRELL: Oh Brendan. He’s just one of the greats, you know.
A few actors I’ve been lucky enough to work with that they don’t have dishonest bones in their bodies, as human beings. And it translates so beautifully and powerfully. Like Sally Hawkins. Just a wizard of a human being and an actress, you know, and Brendan, a similar ilk.
But In Bruges was, yeah- oh it’s just such a great script. It was just such an extraordinary thing to read. And when I read it, I think I must have been feeling pretty down on myself, because I tried to talk Martin McDonagh out of hiring me for it. And I said, “You should really- the script is too good…”
I gave it a whole spiel of why I felt he would be doing his brilliant writing a great disservice by putting me in the film, and thankfully he recognised and reminded me that I wasn’t a casting director and told me that he still wanted me to be in it. And then I was like, “Okay, you’re the boss, and so I’d love to.”
And it was just an amazing time. You know, it was when I fell in love with Brendan. He’s an incredibly important figure in my life.
Again, it’s just it’s about a lot, but it’s open to interpretation, what it’s about. And purgatory is mentioned in that, and some people have, you know- it does have a sense of the purgatorial to it, because there is the waiting game. It’s kind of Pinter-esque as well, because you can almost hear the tick, tick, tick, tick, as these two lads are hiding out.
Martin McDonagh was travelling through Bruges and part of him really loved it and enjoyed the beers and enjoyed the beauty of it, and then part of him was kind of bored, and so he basically took his extraordinary brain and split it into two. And Brendan was one half of his mind and I was the other half.
And yeah, there’s tonnes of heart in the film. And he does that, Martin. He’s sneaky. You know, his films are very there’s a kind of anarchic aspect to his films. They kind of fly in the face of convention. They kind of go against the rules. Some of his dialogue is a little feels a little bit punk rock almost. And his humour is, is, is very singular.
But at the core of all of his films is a deeply felt sense of love for the power of change and growth. And you see in all his stuff, so he’s a deeply heartfelt writer, as funny as he is and as cool as he is as a writer, which he is. He’s incredibly cool, very funny, and very, at times topically minded, but not jadedly so.
And he’s not strident. He’s not a preacher. There’s nothing didactic about what he does. But at the centre of it all, is an enormous amount of heart.
As an actor, you end up working with people and you end up becoming close to them through the intensity of your shared experience in the space of 6 or 10 or 12 weeks or whatever it may be, that you’re working on a gig.
You know, someone doesn’t have to be in your life forever to have changed the course of your experience of life, you know, or to open your eyes or to give you a moment’s comfort and offer you a kind of a dignity that you can’t access yourself. And I think Brendan very much was, kind of that for me as well, you know. Amazing experience.
And then, of course, we ended up doing [The] Banshees [of Inisherin] with – [picks up toy donkey] Ahh Jenny. Sorry Jenny, choked on one of his fat fingers.
I was nervous about Banshees, ‘cause I wasn’t sure when our characters come to odds, which is basically in the first scene, and their relationship begins to fall apart, disintegrate, so ultimately violently. I wasn’t sure if Brendan would want a bit of space from me.
Like In Bruges, we were like that [gestures with two fingers together]. We were, you know, tied at the hip and in Banshees I was a bit, I was like, I wonder, will he want a bit of space, and it wasn’t that way at all. I mean, we took whatever space actors need to take before a scene is shot and you’re off on your own doing your thing, but, but we were very much together as well. Very much side by side. Co-creators and collaborators and friends, you know. Magic.
The last clip is a film written and directed by Oliver Stone that was born of his experience, during the Vietnam War. And a film I saw, I don’t know at what age I saw it, but I found just enormously affecting. And that is Platoon.
[TITLE: PLATOON]
[CLIP STARTS]
[Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) raises his arms as he’s gunned down by enemy soldiers]
[CLIP ENDS]
FARRELL: Jesus.
This was such a profoundly moving moment, when I saw it for the first time, and I’m not sure what age I was, but I remember seeing it. I was just crushed. I was just heartbroken by it.
Obviously, it’s an incredibly powerful image. It’s given a certain amount of time and space. It builds so beautifully. You’re with Willem’s character and then it shows you from up there and Adagio for Strings, is playing and is rising.
And that piece of music is so moving in and of itself and is so, gut-wrenchingly filled with the sorrows and the horrors of loss and the grief of same.
And there’s that one shot of him on the cover of the VHS with his arms [raises arms] you know, pleading to the heavens, and you wouldn’t know if he was asking for forgiveness for his own involvement, or if he was asking for safe passage.
I just thought it was incredibly powerful, incredibly moving and incredibly, foreboding, as well. With regards to the death of goodness.
PRODUCER: [off camera] What is the one film, you think everyone should watch in their lifetime and why?
FARRELL: Oh Lord… Jesus. Oh God…
Back To The Future.
PRODUCER: [off camera] Perfect.
FARRELL: Yeah, Back To The Future.
Thanks everyone. Thank you.
