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The
Sydney Morning Herald, August 12, 1997
Man of menace no more, says debut director Spacey
Keen to downplay his "dark" performances ... actor/director Kevin
Spacey in Sydney yesterday.
He was the serial killer with no fingerprints in Seven and the bossfromhell
in Swimming With Sharks. Filmgoers are still wondering if he was
the semimythical master criminal Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects.
When a role calls for pure
When
a role calls for pure messwithyourhead menace, it's Kevin Spacey's
phone that rings.
Yet, in Sydney yesterday to promote his debut as a director the
tense drama Albino Alligator, starring Matt Dillon and Faye Dunaway
the Oscarwinning actor was keen to downplay his "dark" performances.
"I never try to play characters who are perceived as villainous
as villains," he said. "They don't think of themselves that way.
They may have a method to their madness and I try to play them without
comment and where appropriate a degree of humour."
And Spacey, a Tony awardwinning stage actor, said he was leaving
the psychos and sickos behind.
"Those characters are like weather," he said. "They move through
a script, create havoc in their wake and are never really affected.
I've begun to play characters that are emotionally available, that
aren't hermetically sealed."
They include a cop in LA Confidential, alongside Australians Russell
Crowe and Guy Pearce, and a lead role in the Clint Eastwood directed
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with Jack Thompson.
The making of Albino Alligator reveals a great deal about its director.
A drama about three inept robbers holding hostages in a bar surrounded
by armed police, it was made for just over $US5 million ($6.75 million)
in 34 days.
Dillon and Spacey were already friends, but the firsttime director
took six months to get up the courage to ask Dunaway to discuss
the project. "It was a great lunch," he said laughing.
About "90 per cent" of the film's action takes place in the bar.
Spacey rehearsed his ensemble for 16 days as if he was directing
a play, then shot the entire film in sequence.
"We tried to take the best of the process of theatre and apply it
to this film," said the actor who trained at New York's Juilliard
School of Drama. "It served us well because it allowed me to encourage
a certain degree of choreography."
Spacey said he was inspired by the claustrophobia of Sidney Lumet's
1957 thriller, 12 Angry Men. Lumet told him he had gradually decreased
the physical size of the jury room in which the film is set and
Spacey sought a similar effect using "lenses and the spatial relationships
between characters".
Despite the regular flow of film offers, Spacey remains devoted
to the stage. In a few months he'll fly to London to appear in a
new production of Eugene O'Neill's The IceMan Cometh at a 330seat
theatre away from the West End.
The Sydney Morning Herald | August 12, 1997
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