SALON - March 17, 1998 - Richard Covington
Gabriel Byrne is one slippery chameleon. In the past few years he has appeared in a dizzying array of roles -- bouncing between a fearsome d'Artagnan in "The Man in the Iron Mask," the enigmatic mechanic in "Smilla's Sense of Snow" and the rhyming mobster in "Mad Dogs." In the midst of his rising career, the black-haired, rumpled Byrne also managed to produce "In the Name of the Father," to write, direct and produce "The Lark in the Clear Air" and to publish his memoirs, "Pictures in My Head." Not only is he a jack of all acting trades, but he's master of a few others as well.
His breathtaking versatility may be his own worst enemy. At 47, with more than 40 pictures behind him, the immensely talented Byrne has yet to star in the leading role he so richly deserves. Instead, he's built his reputation with quirky, indelible performances among ensemble casts in roles that range from the crooked ex-cop in "The Usual Suspects" to Winona Ryder's impassioned boyfriend in "Little Women."
The eldest child of an unemployed Guinness factory worker, Byrne developed an affection for romantic literature from his mother, a nurse who read Victorian poetry. At 12, Gabriel entered a seminary in England, hoping to become an African missionary and escape the dreary Irish weather. Expelled at 17, he enrolled at University College in Dublin to study archaeology, went on a few digs, then ended up teaching Spanish in an all-girls school. One day, he filled in for a student in a play with a neighboring boys school and "got bitten by the acting bug."
After hooking up with Jim Sheridan's Dublin theater troupe, Byrne was spotted by John Boorman, who gave him a small role in "Excalibur." But it was not until his portrayal of a hard-bitten gangster in the Coen brothers' "Miller's Crossing" that his film career took off. Byrne married actress Ellen Barkin in 1988 after they met on the set of "Siesta." They divorced in 1993, but remain on friendly terms and share joint custody of their two children.
In between takes on the French set of "The Man in the Iron Mask," Byrne discussed the threat of American movies and the promise of Irish ones, the boom in Irish culture and the decline of authentic film actors.
What originally attracted you to "The Man in the Iron Mask?"
Randall Wallace, the director, had a very specific idea in his head of the cast he wanted. From the beginning, he saw me as d'Artagnan. He's quintessentially a romantic character -- the prototype of the man of action, but also the man who's willing to die for love. I think it was Orson Welles who said that every actor should have a secret with every part that he plays. So every single scene that d'Artagnan plays in, he carries this secret with him that is only revealed at the end of the film. You find he's been carrying this thorn in his heart for years and he's been unable to tell anybody about it.
Did that psychological aspect of the character appeal to you?
Yes. One of my favorite periods in literature is romanticism, mostly the English romantics. It's the image of the romantic hero on the cliff with his hand to his forehead, tortured by life and love and so forth. Now it's unfashionable to admire that kind of man. Feminists today would say, thank God that kind of sullen, cruel, self-obsessed, tortured individual is no longer held up as an example of what men should be. At the same time, there's something darkly and irresistibly attractive about that kind of a hero.
It sounds like the Caspar David Friedrich painting of the romantic on the cliff. With the wind-blown hair and the hero looking out to a lost world to be regained.
That's exactly the image I was thinking of. I love that painting. D'Artagnan is a cousin to that man on the cliff, although he's directly involved with the struggle of life. He's cousin to romantic heroes like Rochester and Heathcliff.
Are "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" books that you still care about?
I've never fallen out of love with books like "Wuthering Heights" or "Jane Eyre." When I read them both for the fourth time, I absorbed them whole and unquestioningly. "Jane Eyre" was the first book I ever read. It was read to me by my mother and we went to see the movie of it, Orson Welles' "Jane Eyre." I think I was 8 or 9 at the time. I can still see the image of that black horse on the heath, rearing up in the half-darkness, from that angle, with Jane looking up in the mad eyes of Orson Welles. It gave me nightmares for years and years afterwards.
You went away to England to a seminary at age 12. Wasn't that pretty young to leave home?
It was young. They were very clever, the order of priests. They went into the classroom and they appealed to our imaginations. Outside, it was an overcast, wintry day in Dublin. You're sitting there and you're 11 or 12 years old and they're showing you pictures of Africa and horses, mountains and blue skies. They never mentioned it takes 10 or 12 years of study and celibacy. All you thought was: I won't have to sit at this desk anymore. They sold an escape into Africa. I don't resent the time I spent there because they gave me a great education and a wonderful appreciation of all the things I was deprived of.
What were you deprived of?
I was deprived of everything -- especially girls.
How long did you stay?
Five years. Then in 1964, I went to see the Beatles playing in Birmingham, then Manfred Mann, the Rolling Stones. We [aspiring missionaries] would go to these concerts dressed completely in black. There were all these screaming girls, then you went back to the quiet of the seminary. We thought, there's something not quite right here. I went to London in 1965. I can't describe to you how bizarre it was to go from the cloistered silence and the routine and the regulations of everyday seminary life to New Bond Street surrounded by girls in miniskirts.
Did you know right away that you wanted to leave the seminary?
I suffered a lot of guilt because I'd been inculcated with the idea that once you'd made your decision, it was forever.
Even if you came in at age 12?
Yeah. The Jesuits have a motto: Give us a boy till he's 7 and he's ours for life. I wouldn't say we were brainwashed, but we were inculcated with powerful ideas about loyalty, perseverance and temptation. [Byrne breaks off the conversation to shoot a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a double role as both Louis XIV and the man in the iron mask, and returns afterwards to his dressing room.]
Do you know when you've done a scene well?
No, I never do. I was just saying that to Leo today. There was a beat we were trying to get in this scene. He said, "I wondered did I get that?" I said, "I think you did." He said, "I don't know."
When do you get confident that you've got it?
I don't think you ever feel confident that you've got it. It's an unpredictable thing. You look at some things and say, God I really thought I missed that, and I actually got it. There are other times where you think you got it and you missed it.
Seeing the completed film is a very strange experience. It's moments of your work taken out and incorporated into a whole. I understand why some actors don't go to see the movies they're in. Sometimes the reality you've conceptualized is at total variance with what you see. It's unimportant if I think it's good or bad. It's irrelevant. The result is not up to you, in a weird way.
When you're in a film as an actor, do you sometimes have the impulse to direct it because you've had the experience of directing?
Sometimes you do, but you have to trust the director's vision. If the director is a guy who really cares about his movie, he'll listen to your suggestions. He doesn't have to follow them necessarily, but he'll listen. The astute director will incorporate a better idea.
What are some of your favorite roles?
Each film is a different experience. Sometimes in the most successful movies, I've had a rotten time. And sometimes in the most unsuccessful ones, I've really enjoyed myself. Shooting this picture in Paris for four months, it's been an incredible time for me here. I'd never been in Paris for this length of time.
What do you enjoy most about it?
Coming from a city like Dublin, I hate to be dwarfed by architecture. In New York, the architecture is there saying you are much smaller than your surroundings. There's a sense of being overwhelmed by stone, concrete and glass. The perspectives in the streets are enormous. Fifth Avenue goes on forever. Aesthetically, it's wonderful to walk around a city like Paris where your eye falls on a building and you can study it and absorb the contours of it, take in its sense of perspective and grace -- all this makes me love architecture. I think it was Goethe who said architecture is music in stone. There's something about the architecture of Paris, the way the city is laid out and the perspectives that make you feel comfortable. There's just the right proportion of trees, greenery, houses, streets. It makes you feel content.
What's behind the current boom in Irish culture, even with kitschy spectacles like "Riverdance" and "Lord of the Dance?"
I think it's because the themes of Irish culture are universal. There's a combination in Irish music of wild, untrammeled gaiety and at the same time, a melancholy about it. I think bands like U2 and Hothouse Flowers and some of the younger bands coming up have taken that kind of music and electrified it, rockified it and found that people all over the world relate to it. We're emerging now for the first time as an incredibly confident nation after many hundreds of years of oppression and repression in terms of colonialism and the Catholic Church. Our Berlin Wall has come down. We are embracing our own culture, which for a long time we were taught to be ashamed of and taught was of no value. We don't define our culture now in how it relates to Britain. That's come in tandem with an economic boom. We are probably the most economically accelerated economy in Europe today. For the first time, the tide of immigration out of Ireland is reversing. People are coming back from America and Europe and bringing in those outside influences to affect the people who stayed. It's a very exciting time to be part of the whole creative flow in Ireland.
How do you figure in that flow?
I've always gone back to do pictures. I've just been appointed a member of the Irish film board, which means now I can influence the kind of films that are being financed and made there. Ten years ago, nobody came to Ireland to make a movie. Ardmore Studios in Dublin were on sale for less than a million pounds; you could buy an entire functioning film studio for a million and a half dollars. Now movies are being made there one after the other. We had a brilliant minister for the arts, a man named Michael D. O'Higgins, who was responsible for initiating the big tax breaks for movies to come in. The environment there is incredibly movie-friendly.
What's happening to film actors these days? Why does it seem they're becoming interchangeable, more bland? Where are the wild-man actors like Robert Mitchum?
There was a time when stars were actors, they were one and the same. The last time that really happened was in the '70s, when you had American actors like Pacino, De Niro, Duvall, Hoffman. The '80s brought in a different kind of star, where it wasn't about acting, it was about marketing. There are a lot of stars who command a lot of money and can greenlight a picture, but whether one would call them great actors is debatable. And there are an awful lot of great actors who aren't stars. The packaging of movies becomes about the attachment of a bankable star. The big summer blockbuster, for example, those movies are about formulas and are tied into theme parks and merchandising and product placement, which are not good for movies. Whether that star can act or not is an absolutely moot point. The point is: Can this person open this movie in Mongolia and Montana. If they can, yes, then the movie gets made. It's not good ultimately for movies. Personally, I look forward to a time when this is reversed and you get real actors back at the helm.I believe audiences get what they're given, not what they want. I constantly hear people saying I went to this movie and it was so dumb and so stupid, but I didn't have a choice.
Do you see that changing? Are audiences rebelling?
I don't know. Last year in Europe, American movies took 70 percent of the box office. I look at the Champs-Elysées and I say: How many French movies are playing in the 17 or 18 cinemas on that street? There's two or three; the rest are the same movies you can see in any mall in America. And France is actually pretty good about playing French films.
What is the end result of this juggernaut of American movies in Europe? It's representative of a world perspective that's not European. You find that American movies, for good or bad, are beginning to erode the native voice. If you make a European movie, the first consideration is: How will it play in America? That is not the first consideration with an American movie. Because the distribution network is firmly in place, an American movie doesn't have to worry about changing place names or cultural allusions. If the American cultural onslaught continues and they win the battle worldwide, what's the end result? These movies dumb down people in America. There are Europeans who say: I don't want this to be my only choice. Sure you can make your movies, but don't take our choices away from us. When you deprive a country of its own voice, that's an incredible cultural invasion.
It's a loss for Americans themselves who stand to be infused with new ideas from outside.
That's exactly the point. One of the things I find about living in America is that, to a great extent, people there don't have a sense of geography or a sense of history. This kind of cultural preeminence that America enjoys at the moment is dangerous for everybody, because it's a one-sided view of the world. There are people who think that in 150 years Europe will be a cultural satellite of America. I read the other day that, every two weeks, a language is lost, from some small island. The French Academy complains of words being lost. Gaelic is almost dead.
I thought it was still taught?
They do, but nobody speaks it any more, except in tiny areas. For all intents and purposes, it's a dead language. Welsh is a dying language. There's a huge struggle to keep the Breton and Basque languages alive. Ideas and language go together. If we're being gobbled up culturally and linguistically, it's not hard to imagine that one day, we will all be part of one huge monoculture.
What drives you to be an actor?
In my book, I say I fell in love with the dark womb of the picture house. Being in an enclosed womb like that with a group of people and yet being alone, being with these images, was a transport. I was transported out of this world into another. I've never lost that addiction.
All through my adolescence I used to see 10 to 15 movies every two weeks. I would go non-stop. I would go in on a Saturday for a double feature and go from one movie house to another. I'd see maybe 12 movies in a weekend and five or six during the week.
At least it was a way to escape from a house full of six kids.
Yeah. They say that acting is the shy man's revenge and cinema certainly is the refuge for a lot of lonely, shy people. You can be alone and not lonely in a cinema. It's almost like being in church. You're part of a congregation, but at the same time your personal relationship is beyond the crowd. But the crowd is part of that feeling.
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