As noted here last month when he joined Movieline for a round of My Favorite Scene, Irish actor Ciarán Hinds is known to work frequently. OK, a lot. And this week, the face you know from scores of high-powered indies (including There Will Be Blood and Margot at the Wedding), studio blockbusters (Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Race to Witch Mountain) and a TV watershed here or there (Rome) stars in his first leading role in The Eclipse. Writer-director Conor McPherson's genre-bending tale present Hinds as Michael Farr, a widower dealing with grief, single fatherhood, a clinically depressed father-in-law, a hyper-jealous prick (Aidan Quinn) going after a mutual love interest (Iben Hjejle), and ghosts. Or so Michael thinks -- and so the viewer thinks, thanks to McPherson's exquisite cocktail of atmospherics and jolts and Hinds's vulnerability to phantasmagoria of what may (or may not) be his own making.
In a free-wheeling interview with Movieline, Hinds spoke about how to act in a ghost story, the spookiest legends of Ireland, watching Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis build There Will Be Blood from scratch in eight weeks, and a few spoiler-ish insights about playing a Dumbledore in the next Harry Potter film.
This is a different project for you: You're the lead now, and you're out promoting it. I know you've promoted some of you're previous films, but--
I haven't! I've never traveled to promote anything I've been in. I've only been to about two or three premieres. The way I work, I do bits, and then I'm off to something else, whether it's theater or another project. For this, I'm actually working on something I don't have a huge role in, so I have gaps in between in London. They thought it was important that I come out with Conor to talk about it. It's a small film. This is the first time I've gone whistle-stop, city-to-city. Funny enough, you think, "Oh, that'll be nice. I'll get to see something." You get to see that much. [Pinches his thumb and forefinger an inch apart.] Sometimes you don't realize how tired you are at the end of the day. It's very weird, because we talk and we sit, and then you think, "Where did the time elapse, anyway?"
Got it. Well, maybe I should start, then, by saying I made the mistake of watching this at home, alone, in the dark, before I went to bed. And... it freaked me the hell out.
OK! OK.
Did you have a similar impression at all while making it?
It's funny you say that, because watching it at home on a DVD -- I'd wondered about the experience of that. I've only seen it in the cinema. The idea of seeing it on a [big] screen really does hold up because Conor uses landscape a lot. He doesn't use that many close-ups, where in television they use a lot. You don't see their whole bodies. But he creates an atmosphere of people's bodies and how they relate. And then the audience, when they get jolted up or find something funny, that shared experience is quite nice. But it's good to know that watching it at home it's still scary.
Oh my God. "Who's that coming down the stairs? Are they going to knock on my door? Is it actually someone? I don't even know!"
Yeah. I think it's because Conor is such a fine writer; he's talking about serious issues that concern him. Time, space, things we don't know. The idea of visitation from a thing, or our emotional history, guilt and grief. There's a whole mixture of stuff. I think he uses the imagery quite sparingly. It's not relentless. But even from the beginning, there's something like, "What's that at night?" It's strange, completely. Also, to suggest that the main character is slightly unbalanced since he lost his wife, and that kind of grief is bottled up? Everything's just... off. You hear things. You're a bit more sensitive because of your emotional recall. Your emotions are heightened. You hear things that you wouldn't, normally. Suddenly, you're in a slightly different position, becoming more attentive, more alert. Even things that like the sounds of pipes in the house. You're like, "What's out there?"
How did that impact you when you were making the film? Did you take that head space home with you?
Uh... no. I think it's important not to. You'll wear yourself out for when the work needs to be ready. Grief is exhausting. When you learn -- maybe through my age or experience -- trying to harness the energy, whatever it is, muted energy or a concentration to find yourself in a place? You try to use it for when it's really necessary and can arrive. Having to work with Conor in theater and now on film, the idea is that the camera will find that grief -- that truth. It's not about presenting it or going out and sharing it. It's about letting it be there honestly as much as you can. The camera will pick it up. With Conor, there wasn't a lot of direction and stuff. He said, "I hired you because I think you have something in you, and when you look into yourself, you'll be able to find something to go on this journey. If I need something at certain times, I'll suggest them or talk about them."
Another interesting thing about this film is how it genre-hops from love-triangle potboiler to a drama about grief--
And then it's a ghost story!
Right? What did you make of that when you read it the first time?
When Conor first presented the script to me, it was quite thin. Obviously it was in development, and it was quite crazy: "How did we get to there?" But knowing Conor and his writing, there are bits that may not necessarily be there now, but are cooking in the head and will be addressed. We will work them out together. I didn't have any bother trusting that it would be a journey well worth going on, wherever it led to. In the end we're both quietly thrilled it has a life. You make a small film, and there's backing from three Irish companies. One of them is Irish TV, so you know that they'll show it. But the fact that it goes to a festival and now has this life? Going into the cinema? When you see it on the screen, you say, "That's what we made it for."
Ireland's not necessarily a place we think of as haunted, unless we're talking politically or spiritually. But not necessarily by traditional ghosts. Should we?
You know, Christianity has its own superstition anyway: Why you turn three times, what this saint means, why you pray to the patron saint of lost causes, why you go this way or that way. But pre-Christianity, we were a Catholic nation, I suppose. And if you go through Catholic mythology, there are all these druids and banshees. The banshees are the ones with all these screams. And you know, it's weird, because as a kid reading all these legends -- like the Greek legends with Achilles and Agamemnon and Hercules? We had Cú Chulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill -- bigger men who would slay a hundred men with a single blow. We have stories like that. The rivers would run red with blood, and this man would tie himself to a tree and still [persevere]. I mean, extraordinary imagery. And there would always be something like shape-shifters, where the druids would come down and help and aid and heal. And I guess the closest to that would be the witch/wizard type.
And the banshees were the ghosts of the air -- "the shriek of the banshee." There were a couple of moments in this where we're talking about a noise or a sound, and all of the sudden we'd hear something outside. And she's lying down and says, "What is that?" "Oh, it's a bird." But really it's like, "Fucking hell -- what the fuck is that?" The sound that Conor puts in was the shriek of a banshee. So there is that, maybe deep in our soul or the psyche.
Do you believe in ghosts yourself?
I don't disbelieve in them. Like when we talk about the senses: We know we have five. But apart from quoting film titles like The Sixth Sense or the myth of the seventh son of the seventh son -- who has the powers of healing -- we have an understanding of things that seem to us otherworldly. Or maybe they're not otherworldly. Maybe they're part of this world, we just haven't had our eyes open to them yet.
You've played so many roles, but more than the eclecticness of the roles or scripts, I look at the directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Solondz--
Sam Mendes. I don't know how I got to work with these guys.
Do you think yourself as a director's actor?
I know I don't go looking for directors. I always wonder why they chose me. Really. There are a lot of choices to make. You say, "Why?" It's still a mystery. Whether somebody said, "He's not difficult to work with," or "He's cheap," whatever the reasons. And there's more than one reason. Maybe they see you in something, and whatever they see, they like enough to want to use. One moment I thought, "Maybe I'm just in fashion." I really don't know, because that, too, will pass. The way I look at it is that someone has put their trust in you, and you say, "Wow, that's fantastic." Then you say, "Don't fuck up." For them, because they somehow asked you to do something. You have to find out not the reason why they asked specifically, but the way to fulfill what they've asked you to do. Now, sometimes it's a bit scary -- "I don't know if I'm up for this" -- but somehow you have to find a way.
I was just watching There Will Be Blood again a few weeks ago, just to see how it held from blowing my mind in 2007. And yep--
It does?
It holds up.
Good. I'm glad, because I'm looking forward to seeing it again. I haven't seen it since it came out.
Three years on from making it, what is your take on the reception for and the ensuing culture around that film?
Well, I was there, and some people come up to me and say, "Did they cut a lot of your stuff out?" I say, "Yes, I did other stuff. Whether Paul [Thomas Anderson] said, 'That was so bad, put it in the bin,' or whether he said, 'I'm just going to focus on the main issue, which is oil and religion,' and then narrowed it down in an extraordinary, brilliant way, that's OK. I admire the film so much, and what I loved about it was that I was on there for seven or eight weeks, and I was working, and sometimes I wasn't working. And just to observe two great, great artists... I don't use the word "artists" lightly. "Art" is for art. These guys -- Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson -- where they're coming from is this mindset and physicality and desire and a drive. "Whatever this is, this is all the time we've got." And so I watched them not just for their creativity, but to see them roll their friggin' sleeves up and work and work and be like laborers and never give up and never say, "I think we got that." Just keep going.
You'd see the state of them by the end of the week; they were doing six-day weeks. They were knackered. They'd get a couple of drinks and were preparing for the next week. I mean, relentless. And it shows in the work. Also the camera, just working, working, working. "Give me another lens." They used all the time they had. And then when I saw it, I wasn't just amazed. I was thrilled, because they sort of broke the rules of how you're supposed to make a film. We've got license to do more kinds of different films in Europe than in America. Of course you can get somewhere, but it's difficult to break into American markets. Just the idea that he broke the rules of how you're supposed to make films in America -- for something that big -- and that was a thrill visually. And to watch it being made -- to see. So I'm looking forward to seeing it again.
[SPOILER ALERT] How did you wind up in a Harry Potter film (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) playing a member of the Dumbledore clan?
Dumbledore's kid brother! Dumbledore was about 123, so that makes me 115. Dumbledore's passed away in the story, but there's some link back to his earlier childhood that needs to be revealed to the... well, they're not so much kids anymore. They're young adults. I was asked, "The director wants to meet you, because he knows your work and thinks you might suit this role." We just met, and he was very lovely. It was just, "I'd like you to do this; I think it's going to work out." It was only like four days', five days' work. But it did involve a lot of prosthetics. What's great is that I won't be hassled by anybody in the street because they won't know who was in there.