The Irish Times

May 2001

"Your man gave me his plane." So Colin Farrell describes how he travelled from Prague to attend the Dublin Film Festival which closed last Sunday night. "Your man" is Bruce Willis, the latest in a lengthening line of stellar co-stars for Farrell, the handsome young Irish actor whose rise through the Hollywood ranks has been meteoric over the past year. "He knew I was coming over to Dublin and the only way I could get here from Prague was through London," Farrell explains over a pint in the Shelbourne. "He said he was going to London for the weekend in his jet and he asked me if I wanted a lift. Then, Friday morning he came into work and said he'd changed his mind about going to London, but if I wanted the jet, I was welcome. "I didn't say, 'Ah, shur I couldn't do that.' I said, 'Are you sure?'. He said, 'Go on, it's just sitting there on the runway'.

So we took the jet - myself, my girlfriend, my sister, and one of the actors from the film, Terence Howard, and his mother, an Afro-American woman who said she had always wanted to come to Ireland since she heard about Glockamorra in a song when she was about 10. The five of us got on the jet and had a few gargles and before we knew it, we were in Dublin Airport. It was great."

A few hours later that same evening, Farrell and I are engaged in another interview, this time before the film festival audience after the first Irish screening of his breakthrough movie, Tigerland, and when I raise the subject of his air transport to Dublin he evades the question and seems genuinely embarrassed. There is a mild nervousness about his demeanour that wasn't evident earlier in the evening - nor when he came on stage at the world premiere of Tigerland at the Toronto Film Festival last autumn. Clearly, it's always most daunting to face a home audience.

That Toronto screening nine months ago introduced Colin Farrell to world cinema audiences - and triggered off a succession of starring role offers that has kept the young Dubliner hopping from one film set to the next. After Tigerland he played the leading role, as Jesse James, in American Outlaws, which was filmed in Texas. Then it was on to Los Angeles to reunite with Tigerland director Joel Schumacher for Phone Booth, and then on to Prague to join "your man" Willis in Hart's War. Next stop, on Wednesday of next week, will be Los Angeles, when Farrell co-stars with Tom Cruise in the new Steven Spielberg movie, Minority Report.

This whirlwind of activity in such a short period of time is a long way from being best known for playing Danny Byrne in Ballykissangel on the telly. Colin Farrell, who will be 25 on May 31st, was "born and bred" in Castleknock in Dublin and now lives, on those very rare occasions when he gets home, in the city's Irishtown area where he has a cottage.

Colin was the youngest of the four children born to Rita and Eamonn Farrell, a former Shamrock Rovers footballer. He started out as an actor in Owen McPolin's low-budget feature Drinking Crude, and his performance caught the attention of agent Lisa Cook, of the Lisa Richards Agency, who signed him up. He joined the Gaiety School of Acting in 1996 and dropped out after a year when he got the role in Ballykissangel. Then he played a semi-autistic 17-year-old in In a Little World of Our Own at the Donmar Warehouse in London, featured in Falling For a Dancer on television, and played one of the criminal sidekicks of the Kevin Spacey character in Ordinary Decent Criminal.

"Everything has happened so fast. So much of it has to do with being in the right place at the right time. Being asked to meet Joel Schumacher was just an unbelievable slice of luck. Isn't it mad the way things happen? Just because one person like Joel thinks you're ready to do his film, suddenly so many people are interested in you. I feel so lucky, because I know there are many actors out there who would have done an amazing job playing Bozz, my character in Tigerland. So many actors, but I was lucky to be the one that was chosen."

He had several meetings with Schumacher before landing the leading role in Tigerland, a tight, gritty drama set in a Louisiana boot camp in 1971 as a platoon of young men are put through a gruelling training regime before being shipped off to Vietnam. Farrell gives a charismatic, star-making performance as the cocky, rebellious soldier, Bozz, who defies and frustrates the authority figures.

"Tigerland only opened on about four screens in New York and Los Angeles, but the critics seemed to love it," says Farrell. The Boston Film Critics Circle were so taken by his performance that they named him best actor of the year. "I still haven't got the bloody award," he says. "They had a dinner, but I was working on Phone Booth, so I couldn't go to it." And there was a general consensus in the film business that Farrell was among the last dozen or so from which this year's five Oscar nominees for best actor were chosen. "I heard that, man," he says. "It's mad, isn't it? I remember reading it but never gave it much thought. I mean, Oscar and me mentioned in the same sentence. I didn't even want to think about that."

How does he deal with all the obsequious love-bombing from Hollywood producers and agents which inevitably follows whenever a significant new discovery emerges? "It doesn't bother me," he says with a shrug. "I see through all the shite. It's not that they want anything to do with me because I'm a decent guy, but that there's a possibility that they're going to make money out of me. It's all bullshit."

He is altogether more appreciative of a genuine gift, as when Kathy Bates sent him a hamper after she played his mother, Ma James, in American Outlaws. "After she finished her scenes and went home, she sent me a hamper with a load of goodies in it," he recalls. American Outlaws, which also features Timothy Dalton and Scott Caan, "is not the real Jesse James story because he and his gang were cold-blooded killers," Farrell says. "It was just a laugh, nothing heavy about it all. It's aimed more for kids, really. A lot of action and adventure and a bit of romance."

And a whole lot of horse riding. "I'd done a bit of riding for BallyK - trotting a few yards into shot on Razor," he laughs. "But this was all-out galloping. These horses had bigger CVs than I had. They could do anything, stopping on their marks, whatever. Unbelievable animals. It was like power steering."

After savouring the wide open spaces of Texas where American Outlaws was filmed, Farrell found himself spending the best part of 12 days alone in a claustrophobic telephone kiosk when his Tigerland director, Joel Schumacher, gave him the leading role in Phone Booth, a psychological thriller set in "real time". Farrell plays a slick New York publicist who picks up a ringing public telephone to be told he will be shot if he hangs up. "It was originally to be Jim Carrey in the role," says Farrell. "Then Mark Wahlberg was supposed to be involved and then Will Smith. Then Tigerland came out and it got all those good reviews.

"Phone Booth cost only $10 million and it was shot in just 12 days. It was a real head-wrecker to do a film in so little time. I arrive in the phone booth about seven minutes into the film and I don't leave it again until a few minutes before the end. "So every day on the set I was in this little Bell Atlantic phone booth and wearing the same clothes every day, the same watch, the same hair, the same everything. The guy who played the hitman was in an old hotel down the road from me and they gave him a rifle with telescopic sights so he could see me, and I was wired so he could hear me. They were recording him and me at the same time."

Although the cast of Phone Booth also includes Forest Whitaker, Katie Holmes, Radha Mitchell and Ron Eldard, it involved Colin Farrell working without other actors for most of the movie, which he found strange and tough, but he found there was something about shooting the picture so fast that it kept the adrenalin pumping for him and the rest of the cast and crew throughout the hectic shooting schedule.

"I think, in a way, it was kind of easier than doing a movie that takes four months to shoot and you're just getting through about a page-and-a-half of dialogue in a day and you're waiting around all the time between set-ups. But it was very intense. I had a headache the size of Christmas. It was mad, but mad in a really good way, because you didn't have time to ponder over what you were doing."

In each of the feature films he has made over the past year, Farrell plays an American, and he feels he has had variable success with the accents: "My New York accent in Phone Booth is pretty dodgy, I think. My Texas accent in Tigerland was better. I enjoyed doing that. I went down to Austin for four weeks before shooting just to listen to people and get into the accent. In Hart's War it's not a specific American accent beyond the fact that the guy I play is very well-bred, well-educated, very articulate." In Hart's War he plays the title character, a young military lawyer, Lieut Tommy Hart. "He's very wet behind the ears," Farrell says. "He comes from a very privileged background and got a greased path into headquarters without ever having to serve on the front line. Then he ends up in this German prisoner-of-war camp towards the end of the second World War - and he's the most naive person there.

"There are all these compounds of POWs - Italians, French, Americans. Bruce Willis plays the highest-ranking officer within the American compound. He's the one who picks me to defend this black soldier who's accused of murder. They have this court-martial within the system which the Germans preside over but which is actually run by the Americans themselves." Generally, actors in Bruce Willis's position have the power to approve their co-stars. Was that the case with Hart's War? "I think so," says Farrell. "I heard he did. He's a cool guy to work with. Very easy to get on with."

The film is directed by Gregory Hoblit whose thriller, Primal Fear, introduced a major young acting talent in Edward Norton. Hoblit has been consumed by Hart's War for the past 10 months, Farrell says: "He's working his arse off. I don't know how he ever gets any sleep. He wants everything to be so precise, down to the tiniest detail. But he's doing great work. Anything I've seen of it so far looks great. It's a huge film. There's a lot going on in it."

Again he got the role on the strength of his performance in Tigerland. "I'm still riding on the wings of it," he says. "You see, nothing else has been released yet. I'm waiting to be told 'f*** off back home'. Ed Norton was supposed to do Hart's War and I don't know what happened, but it didn't work out and they wanted to start shooting. Someone suggested me to Gregory Hoblit and he came down to Texas to see me while I was there working on American Outlaws. I met him and had dinner with him and we chatted and I got offered it."

Farrell's rapid rise does not appear to have changed him in the slightest. "I don't think it has," he says without a hint of false modesty. "And I don't want it to. I'm not in it for that reason. I really am not. Anyhow, I've been working so hard I've hardly had to time to think about what has happened." He pauses for a few seconds and laughs out loud. "Of course, I'm overpaid now, which is good." Is it true that he now earns $2.5 million a movie? "Yeah," he says. "That's what I'm getting for Hart's War. It's ridiculous. I couldn't work any harder on that picture for $100 million. And I'd work just as hard for £100 a week. I really would."

Does he wake up in the morning and feel the need to pinch himself? "Never, and it's not that I'm quite used to it now, but it has been non-stop. But it's not that I've taken it for granted or that I ever thought I deserved it. I just wake up every morning and I could have a hangover or I could have a piece of toast - but I don't wake up and pinch myself. But it's mad because I'm just so lucky, whatever way the stars are aligned, because nothing was planned or routed." His girlfriend, actress Amelia Warner, is similarly unfazed by his success. "It's not like she's flippant or anything like that," he says. "She just takes things as they come."

She most recently played Simone, the teenage bride of the sadistic doctor played by Michael Caine in the Marquis de Sade movie, Quills. Or as Colin puts it with a wicked laugh: "When she was putting out for that old geezer." They have been together for six months. "I met her in La-La Land, Los Angeles. She was over there doing publicity for Quills and I met her at a really wanky party. As soon as I saw her it was like a big bright light was coming from her in this room full of posers. She would stand out a mile in any room."

And his family are really enjoying his achievements, he says. "They're loving it. In a way, I think they're feeling the whole success thing probably more than I am. Not that I'm not aware of what's going on, but I just never seem to stop working. And I'm just doing a job, even if I am overpaid for it. My ma loves the whole thing. She was over in Prague a few weeks ago."

The hectic pace continues next week when he finishes filming Hart's War in Prague and two days later flies out to Los Angeles to co-star with Tom Cruise in Minority Report, Steven Spielberg's science-fiction thriller based on a Philip K. Dick story set in a futuristic judicial system where killers are arrested and convicted before they commit murder. Farrell's only disappointment is that he has no scenes with Meryl Streep, who has a small but important role in the film.

Yet again it was his performance in Tigerland which got Farrell the role. "Steven Spielberg saw it and apparently he had another actor in mind," he says. "I think it was Matt Damon and he backed out because of a scheduling clash." He was invited to meet Spielberg on the Hollywood studio set of the director's recently completed production, AI (Artificial Intelligence), which features another very busy Irish actor, Brendan Gleeson, in its cast.

"We met in Steven Spielberg's trailer," says Farrell. "I was there first and my hands were dripping. Then up he comes, and he's cool, just fine, and he was eating a sardine sandwich. I told him I used to love sardine sandwiches as a kid and I hadn't had one since I was about 12 - and he offered me half of his. So Steven Spielberg cut his sardine sandwich in half and gave it to me. "We talked for a while. I hadn't read the script. I only got to read it last week. It's mad, you know. A huge sci-fi film. It's set in the future, in 2036. It literally will be amazing."

Minority Report takes Colin Farrell up to the beginning of July, the time set for the start of the threatened actors' strike. Whatever the outcome of the strike negotiations, he's eagerly looking forward to taking time off after starring in five US feature films back to back. "I love travelling," he says. "I went to Australia with a couple of mates for a year when I was about 18, and we had such a good time. This time I want to take two or three months off, go to South America or Asia or somewhere and grow a beard and get locked in dodgy bars and just switch off."