Ich bin in der 13, du in der 12. So war das gemeint.
Heute hatten wir unsere letzte Englischstunde (eigentlich sind wir eher Frühstücken gegangen
) und unser Lehrer hat uns noch einmal ausdrücklich gelobt: Wir wären ein sehr guter Kurs und es wären immer seine liebsten Stunden in der Woche gewesen.
Ich glaube wir wurden ganz gut "zusammengestellt" - bei den anderen Kursen sieht es nämlich nicht so aus.
Da kann ich dir nur zustimmen.
Ach mann, ich will wieder nach Italien!
Ich möchte gerne ein Kleid.
Wobei meine Mutter meint, ich sollte besser etwas kaufen, was später auch garantiert noch einmal anziehen kann. Als ob es für ein Abendkleid nie wieder eine Gelegenheit geben würde!
May 2004 issue of Interview
EWAN MCGREGOR
So how does one of today's most versatile actors live up to great expectations? By confounding them. - by Graham Fuller
Britain's most engagingly ebullient and virile actor subverts that image in his latest movie. In writer-director David Mackenzie's Young Adam, Ewan McGregor plays Joe, a taciturn, amoral drifter working for Ella (Tilda Swinton) and Les (Peter Mullan) on a coal barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. When Joe and Les fish a woman's corpse from the water on morning, it's the prelude to Joe's unsmiling seduction of Ella and the unraveling of his tragic recent love affair with Cathie (Emily Mortimer). Reining in his charm (if not his magnetism), McGregor is as compulsively watchable as ever: What Joe is thinking at any given moment is the film's deepest mystery.
Based on Alexander Trocchi's 1954 Beat novel, Young Adam is a brooding masculine analogue to Morvern Callar (2002), Lynne Ramsay's lyrical evocation of Scottish existentialism - though, one might ask, who is Joe if not a great-uncle to McGregor's Alex in Shallow Grave (1994) and Renton in Trainspotting (1996)? While McGregor has been enthusiastically Irish (as James Joyce) in Nora (2000), American in Velvet Goldmine - 1998; Down With Love, and Big Fish (both last year), a Jedi in the current Star Wars trilogy, and even English in the likes of Emma, Brassed Off (both 1996), and Moulin Rouge! (2001), playing a Scot seems to ignite a primordial spark in him.
Graham Fuller: David Mackenzie has said you agreed to be in Young Adam just two weeks after he finished the script, so it was clearly an easy decision to make?
Ewan McGregor: It certainly was. I'd just come off a long line of big productions - Star Wars, Black Hawk Down [2001], and Moulin Rouge! - so I was gagging to do something smaller and from where I come from. I had some scripts to read, and Young Adam was sitting at the top; I picked it out 'cause I knew it was a Scottish story. All that was neither here nor there when I started reading the script, because it was just an incredibly beautiful piece of writing. Going on to read the book, I realized it was a very skillful adaptation. David really got Alexander Trocchi's style on the page. When you've got very little dialogue to read, you know you're in good shape. Screenwriters sometimes have a terrible need to write too much dialogue. It's usually a reflection of the producers' fear that things won't be understood, so they have to have all this expositional crap put into the mouths of the characters. And very often your job as an actor is to make sense of a bunch of stuff you wouldn't normally say, as opposed to delivering really good lines, which is the case here.
GF: How did you go about becoming a character who has so completely rejected social morality?
EM: Just by trying to understand why he has rejected it along with any sense of responsibility for his own actions. They all seem to involve someone else and are mainly sexual, so he thinks they can't have been his fault.
GF: How did Joe become that way?
EM: I think it harked back to his relationship with Cathie. He was in love with her, and they lived together for a long time; then she threw him out.
GF: Did you read the pornographic version of Young Adam that Trocchi also wrote?
EM: No. David had a copy but kept it away from us. There's a scene where Joe comes back to the barge and finds Ella masturbating with a teapot. David said at that point he thought he'd better put the book down because it would get in the way of him directing the film. [laughs]
GF: Did you try to think Joe's thoughts?
EM: I suppose that's the end you seek in acting. But I wouldn't know. I've never really worried about how you do it, and I've never been very good at explaining it. I just tried to play Joe right down the middle and let the audience decide about him. There are moments when he's not doing anything at all, and so I did my best not to play anything. There's an ambiguity in all of it.
GF: Was there any danger that the scene in which you pour custard, ketchup, and sugar on Cathie and then fuck her from behind could be abusive to the actress who plays her, Emily Mortimer?
EM: Not at all, because it's what our characters were doing. We absolutely worked on it together, and you take care of each other during something like that.
GF: Was it a difficult scene to do?
EM: It was actually wonderful to do, and I think Emily thought so, too. It was like performing a bit of theater. We played it right the way through from start to finish, like a little play. It read like an incredible scene in the script, and we really had to nail it for it to live up to itself. It was obvious that people were going to talk about it, so it had to be excellent. I think it says a great deal about Joe and Cathie's love, to tell you the truth. When he leaves the room you don't know whether it's been a rape or a sex game because it came out of nowhere. But when he gets back into bed with her after he's been to the pub, there's a moment when he takes her in his arms and says, "Oh, Cathie." And you realize that this is part of what makes their relationship tick. It may be a very dangerous, violent sexual act, but that's acceptable in their lives; maybe this is the way they have sex. Pushing it to the limits implies there's a real closeness, a real bond, between them that sets up the idea that they're really in love.
GF: Does the same apply to the scene where they have sex in the rowboat?
EM: Yeah. There's a great line in the book where he says she never gave herself more to him than when he was fucking her against the movement of the boat, because she was terrified of the water and it was so close to death.
GF: At the Cannes Film Festival last year, you complained that the British Film Council had not willingly backed the film.
EM: I was asked what I felt about it, and I told them. And the second you express yourself, you're hammered for it by the British press for being a moaner. Maybe you're meant to lie in interviews, but I've always thought that if you're going to do them at all you may as well tell the truth. The Council's lack of interest in the film was very frustrating for us. Eventually they put some money in, but it was an incredible ordeal to get it out of them. I was offended because I thought it was such a brilliant British movie. Its distribution in Britain has been handled appallingly, and as a result very few people have seen it. So many British films are made by people who put every ounce of passion and talent and time that they have into a piece of work, and then all of that love and passion is put into the hands of a bunch of arseholes in an office somewhere to sell. They fuck it up time and time again because they are a talentless, noncreative part of the film industry. It's the weakest link. If it's not some standard American thriller or standard British comedy, they don't know how to sell it and they don't try.
GF: What other occasions have angered you?
EM: One of the biggest ones for me was Velvet Goldmine. It wasn't a perfect movie - it was flawed in places - but, God, it was a brave attempt at something new and different. I remember seeing a screening of it at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and it was a fantastic event because everyone was in glam-rock costumes and the film played really well to that audience. But in London it was screened for people from the British film industry in a 400-seat theater, and the film clunked along with nobody laughing. Then they threw a party for 2,000 people, but it was more about getting some Page 3 model [a topless woman featured daily in Britain's Sun newspaper] along so they could take a picture of her than it was about trying to push the movie or encourage diverse, interesting work.
GF: Are you done with Star Wars now?
EM: I've probably got some pickups to do on it, and then that's me, done, yeah.
GF: I read somewhere that doing press for it made you depressed.
EM: Doing press for anything usually gets you down. I read that I was driven to drink. Well, that's bollocks. I've been driven to drink by lots of things, but I can't blame that on Star Wars [laughs]; I don't know where that comes from. I think I occasionally make the mistake of using irony when I'm speaking to the press at junkets. I had someone ask me recently if I'd given up acting because I'd once said as a joke, "I'll never work again." You think, Aw, for fuck's sake, pull yourself together.
GF: Do you regret being attached to such a vast Hollywood production for so long?
EM: I've made no qualms about the fact that the Star Wars films are difficult to make because of the lack of reality and the blue-screen work - it's really tedious. But I have no regrets about being in them. It's lovely that kids now have a relationship with my work, which hadn't happened before. And I got to play Alec Guinness's part, Obi-Wan Kenobi, so I'm thrilled.
GF: You're going to make a motorcycle movie next?
EM: My mate Charley [Boorman] and I are about to go around the world on bikes and we're going to shoot some of that, but it's not a movie as such. It's more a documentary of us. I don't know what it will be, really. We'll see when we get back.
GF: You and your wife [production designer Eve McGregor] have two daughters. Has it been hard to miss parts of their growing up when you've been away?
EM: No, 'cause I take them with me. We go everywhere together. I go nuts if I don't do that. This trip will be the longest time I've been away from them, so that'll be hard.
GF: As an actor, is it possible to have a longterm plan?
EM: It depends if you're career-minded or not. I'm not particularly. I'm much more interested in finding the right film for me to do at the time. It doesn't work for me to make a film because it's perceived as the kind of film I should be doing. The standards I set for myself demand more commitment than that. It's much more important to me to be committed to a film because of the script and the real need to be in it, as opposed to what producers will think and whether I'll get the next job from it. But I don't think there are any rules in this business. It's what works for you, really.
GF: Do you look back on your work?
EM: Yeah, I do. I'm really happy with all the films I've made. I don't think any of them have been a mistake, 'cause I've learnt something from them, and I don't worry about having turned down films that have been hugely successful. I don't judge my success in a movie by the box office 'cause there are some really successful films that are absolutely awful to watch. [laughs]
GF: So you're content?
EM: Yes. If you're in it for fame, you'll never be satisfied. I don't think you'd wake up one morning and say, "Well, I'm famous enough." Whereas you can be happy to go to work and come home felling you did your best - and if people like it, then that's good.
Das ist ein ganz neuer Artikel - allerdings habe ich keine Zeit ihn mir durchzulesen.
Gleich geht's auf die Abi-Party und um 5 Uhr morgens bauen wir den Rest unseres letzten Schultages auf.
Dabei liebe ich diese Sprache einfach!
Ich habe gerade gesehen, dass Shallow Grave im TV läuft!
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