28 Feature

ROLE REVERSAL

Benedict Cumberbatch stars in the new movie The Power Of The Dog in which he plays a rancher who inspires awe and fear in those around him. In this interview he talks about his role and the making of the film, staying in New Zealand for three months, the benefits of Netflix and the future of cinema.

WORDS PETE CARROLL / THE INTERVIEW PEOPLE

THIS IS AN INCREDIBLE PERFORMANCE. Had you read the book before being offered this script?

I can’t remember what came first. I knew about the project so I guess I must have read the book possibly before I had the script.

The book is a phenomenal piece of writing and it’s a great, great, great blueprint for a character study for a film.

And it just gives that range to his history, why he is the way he is, which we don’t get until the film progresses.

Hopefully by the end we see he’s not just an a-shole, well he is, but there’s a reason why.

Tell us about the process of getting involved with the film and the preparation you did for the part?

I had a long runway with Jane [Campion].

Our first meeting was quite funny … I was terrified.

I was promoting another film but it was an ‘Avengers’ film, so I was having a lot of fun, it was very relaxed and enjoyable.

I was with my family and then suddenly this huge work thing was heading towards me.

I was re-watching ‘The Piano’ and I just built it up and built it up, it became worse than it should have been.

Then this sort of icon of cinema, this incredible female force of creativity stepped in and went, ‘Oh hello’.

She just had a little rucksack on and we had a conversation and a giggle and I said, ‘This is so surreal.’

She showed me a look book which was a beautiful first taste of where she wanted to visually go with the storytelling and the sensitivity and sensuality she wanted to bring out as well.

At the end of the conversation I went, ‘This is amazing, so are we doing this?’ and she was like, ‘Yeah, I just wanted to meet my Phil.’

I thought I was auditioning but it was whole conversation about, ‘Right, what do you need?’

I said, ‘Well, I need to know what it’s like to work on a ranch, I need to get my hands dirty, literally, and I need to be somewhere that’s like the location and I need to ride more and learn to rope and to braid and to treat calf skin, to do iron mongering and taxidermy and banjo …’

I mean the guy is a whittling, whistling, whatever you want – he is a polymath, he’s brilliant at it all.

The dexterity and sensuality mattered to me as much as his kind of brutality and his strength and his ability to deal with the elements of the animals and the men and all the kind of muscularity of the physicality.

So I went to Montana for a few weeks.

I hung out with some ranchers and an amazing cowboy – I am allowed to call him a cowboy because that’s what he calls himself – but he was an incredible guy called Randy.

I was staying in his house with his partner Jen and we woke up when the sun came up, no curtains in the room.

I just had this amazing experience for a few weeks. Lots of riding, lots of working with cattle.

Yeah, those are memories that I’ll take with me to my dying day. >>

Any other preparation?

The book was obviously always something I’d go back to.

And I’d try to read periodicals and history books about The Clark Expedition, for example, and about the politics of that era, about what the town of Montana itself was like.

I read an amazing book by a modern author called ‘Surrender’ about Montana now and the sort of disparate states of it all – but it still touches a bit on that era, what remains of it.

We spent about two weeks in New Zealand with crew rehearsals and I did some other work, which I don’t really talk about, with another helper, facilitator, very deep sort of psychological work.

And it just slowly, slowly came together.

Practicing him, being him physically – voice, movement, whistling, standing, muscularity. All of it.

What place do empty spaces have in your life?

What do they have in my life? Massive.

That makes me happy [looks out to sea], well, not the oil tankers but having that horizon.

Just seeing that mass of uninterrupted nature.

It’s immensely restorative.

I think we’ve all learnt that over lockdown, however urban we are.

Whether it was bird song or a flower blossoming on a window sill or whether it was being lost in an incredible landscape, it’s absolutely fundamental to who we are.

So, for me, it’s about recalibrating, regrounding myself.

And the role in that regard is a gift because he is nature.

He’s consumed by it and even his own true inner nature, which is expressed, but only in private. A character like this puts you in a vulnerable position as an actor. Was having trust in Jane an important part of dealing with that?

Yeah, but you want to build trust no matter how brilliant a director is, because when you are actually physically getting naked or emotionally getting naked, you are literally going, ‘I trust you to handle whatever I am going to give you.’

And she’s brilliant at fostering that.

Thank God, we adore each other. We get each other and we got on incredibly well, we had a great repartee.

“We were so, so lucky. Far away from home but we found a new home in New Zealand.”

– Benedict Cumberbatch

But, you know, she’s super smart and she wanted to … I think to begin with she wanted to sort of forge me afresh in some smelting factory of acting and just reduce me to something I’ve never been before.

And I went, ‘No you don’t have to do that, it’s in here, you can bring it out, I’m here, it’s there’ – and she found it.

I think one of the appeals to this kind of work in this era iof 1925, as well of storytelling, is how visual it is, how much dialogue is non-spoken, how much the camera tells us of an interior life.

And I knew Jane wouldn’t be shy of that and Ari [Wegner] as well, her DoP who is just amazing.

So that bond, that trust, it was there through everyone.

The amount of adoration her crew showed to us is sort of a testament to every single day.

That meant no one was afraid of getting it wrong, everyone wanted to try, and that’s really all you want.

You do the tight rope walk but you shouldn’t fear falling off, you just know you can get back on it again.

Did you watch any Westerns before doing this?

No, because I knew her world, I knew the world they were creating would be really good.

I just knew we would have every support to give us a world around us that we needed.

The art department worked so tirelessly with props and anything I needed or wanted to personalise.

Not in disrespect to other films but I felt also in order for it to be Jane’s vision, if I was thinking of a John Ford film or a Clint Eastwood revisionist Western or something, it wouldn’t be necessarily be very helpful.

Talking to Kirsten Dunst, she said you didn’t really meet apart from being on set together – is that a method thing?

It was helpful for both of us, actually because we get on very, very well but I’m quite sort of apologetic, I’m a bit of a people pleaser and Phil is neither of those things – so I had to be him and I had to really not worry about what people thought of me.

So when Jane introduced me to the crew, as I asked her to, she was really good the way she did it. >>

She said, ‘OK everybody, this is Phil. If you meet Benedict at the end of the shoot, he’s really nice but this is Phil.’

And I was like, ‘OK, cool’, that gives me full permission to just keep in character, to be him and not have to go, ‘Oh sorry, I’m just acting.’

Bizarrely there is very little time with us on set together anyway.

There’s the scene in the restaurant but he’s all focused on Peter and the rowdy group next door and lost in the past, he doesn’t really recognise Rose in that moment.

And then when his brother becomes infatuated with her – so he thinks – it becomes an all-consuming thing.

But even so, he confronts it straight off, the minute he meets her, savages her with a label, gaslights her and then offstage kind of throws these psychological tremors at her that just unfound her and push her into drink.

You don’t have to be around to do that much so weirdly we didn’t have much contact.

In fact, even saying it sounds so awful.

How long were you in New Zealand?

Three months lockdown and then we stayed on for a bit and then we had more filming to do.

Basically, we were filming on the South Island, I got to the studio, had one day, and then we had lockdown.

So we still had the whole studio shoot to do.

But I loved it. We were very lucky to be in New Zealand. Very, very lucky.

How was this experience for you?

Life changing. I’ll never forget it.

I was with my parents and my whole family, my children and wife.

My mum and dad had come over to have a three-week experience with us and they came on set seeing their boy riding a horse and steering some cattle.

We went on a little road trip and then it all happened – and they stayed for five months.

My dad is a severe asthmatic and my mum is 85 so I needed to shelter them, protect them.

It was that scary time, but it was time that we’d never ever get back as a family.

We were zooming and contacting people back home, realising that even if they were two streets away, you know, a brother and sister weren’t seeing each other for months and we were all together.

We were so, so lucky. Far away from home but we found a new home in New Zealand.

You talked about the Marvel films – is that more fun than fear?

Yeah and sometimes if you take the foot off the gas there’s complacency there as well.

You know, if you don’t think, ‘Oh god this isn’t going well, got to make it better’, you can get complacent about it.

But I think it’s natural to be in awe of someone like Jane before you work with them. I think it would be very unnatural not to have that feeling.

And I didn’t let it overwhelm me. Like I said, the minute I met her, the fear was …

Gone?

Not gone but it levelled into a place of like, ‘This is a human being who has got history and humour and there’s going to be sympathy and understanding and a connection and a joint purpose’.

And it’s not like me trying to please this great icon of cinema.

She’s happy to work with me and I’m really obviously very happy to work with her so it changes, it just evolves into being something else at that point.

But who doesn’t like a challenge every now and again? It keeps you fresh, for sure.

Finally, do you have any thoughts about the future of cinema in the streaming age?

Yeah a lot. But I think if Netflix is true to its mission, it’s not just about subscribers and reach, it’s also about fostering young talent – and I think they do.

This is my first engagement with them producing so we’ll see.

And it’s a very unusual time to test that question, that’s the other problem, it’s like, ‘Well what would we have seen over lockdown if not for streaming services.’

We’re very fortunate to be able to have that service.

As long as they are supporting good filmmakers and putting money into an industry that needs it, where it needs it – fantastic.

It’s that battle isn’t it between, ‘Well how long does a theatrical release have to be a theatrical release before people go – ‘I really want to see it at the cinema’.’

And televisions are getting bigger and bigger so if you sit close enough to them, is that not like a cinema anyway?

It’s not just the service, it’s how they are projected and viewed at home.

It’s not just about the provider, it’s about the technology used to amplify that experience.

And it’s not just people wandering around on their phones, people do watch things on big screens.

A couple of times I’ve been to those nice places where you sit down and have a drink and people are eating and it feels like being in 20 people’s living rooms and I don’t like that.

I want people to sit there and watch the film. I want to be part of a group, I don’t want to feel like I’m hearing someone eating Nachos two hours into a movie. That’s not why I paid to have that communal experience.

And I hope cinema doesn’t go that way, that we all have to be eating and drinking and sitting on sofas in order to see a film, that a seat and a two-hour attention span is still possible for the human race.

Because I think that kind of absorption in any art work is incredibly potent as a medium and it’s stood the test of time.

These inventions are all very new but cinema has been around for longer than streaming services so I hope it can foster a continuation of that. It’s very important.