Splice
Written by Sheila Roberts Thursday, 22 July 2010 16:49
Interview
As genetic horror Splice hits cinemas, star Adrien Brody tells us why experimentation is so important in his career.
In a private, state-of-the-art lab funded by a pharmaceutical giant, two brilliantly talented young bio-engineers, Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley), combine genetic components from different species into hybrids that could produce new disease-fighting compounds. It’s vital. It’s exciting. It’s the future. As Elsa tells Clive, it’s their job as scientists to push the boundaries. But how far?
“What takes place in this movie is not far from the truth,” notes Adrien Brody. “We’re living in a world in which science fiction is becoming reality, and that gives the film its weight. It’s frightening to a certain extent to see how precarious things can be, but also exciting because there is potential for wonderful things.”
We sat down with Academy Award winner Adrien Brody in Los Angeles to talk about his new film, Splice, directed by Vincenzo Natali. He told us about his character, his unusual love scene, what he looks for in the roles he plays, and the challenging landscape of rapidly advancing genetic research.
Is your character Clive an homage to Colin Clive in Frankenstein?
Yes, that’s intentional. I also see it as Clive Niccoli and Vincenzo Natali has some similarities too so maybe there’s a bit of the director thrown in there as well.
Clive is so dominated by Elsa; can you talk about that?
Well, have you ever been in a relationship? [Laughs] I think she is a tremendous force. The character that Sarah [Polley] plays is a tremendous force. There is a shared ambition that they’re both very highly intelligent, they’re both very successful in their field and she corrupts his sense of morality and there are all these things that he’s desperately trying to consider.
I think I tried to play Clive as someone who tries to play by the book but who falls into temptation. I think that’s what makes it interesting. You play a scientist who just has the intelligence, has the capability to do something tremendous and you have to understand that all of this is being taken from them. So their aspirations and what they’ve visualized as tremendous success and groundbreaking in their field is being stripped of them. It’s a desperate moment. There’s a bit of coercion on her part but he follows through and this is the problem.
Do you think we’ll mess it up like the scientists in the movie?
Well, there is the potential. Look, even with nuclear technology. This was supposedly designed to create something that is so devastating and intimidating that it couldn’t possibly be used. Here we are in a world, but the design of that wasn’t strictly for destructive purposes. It was to prevent it and that doesn’t necessarily work. If things like that can be created, that level of responsibility is beyond anything we could comprehend. We’ve witnessed the repercussions of that.
How do you choose roles? Is there any pressure as the youngest Best Actor Oscar winner not to do Splice or Predators?
Well, the only pressure I feel is when people wonder why I make certain choices. It’s a legitimate question. For many years I’ve worked very hard at proving something to myself and I’m very disciplined in my choices and I have not lost that discipline. What I’ve gained is the ability to be more playful with my work and my choices. I can’t live up to everyone’s expectations all the time and that’s not my responsibilityI have to live up to my own and making movies, when I did King Kong and it was very exciting because I wanted to work with Peter [Jackson]. King Kong is this iconic film and very different obviously from anything that I had done. I was amazed at how children and young people loved Jack Black. They loved him. Everywhere he went, they adored him, and none of those kids recognized me. It was a realization that I had a whole audience that doesn’t know my work. .
That’s one element to it but my choices have been to constantly try and find things that are different, that challenge me, that are unusual and to take some risk with it. I loved horror movies when I was a teenager. I loved them. I saw every Nightmare on Elm Street in theaters. I saw Predator in theaters when it came out and was in awe. So for me to have an opportunity to go in there and bring what I do to that and try and bring the level of complexity to the role, in Predators for instance to make [my character of] Royce a kind of tragic, flawed antihero character within this setting, and also put on a certain degree of muscle mass and kind of do this, that’s very exciting to me. Show me, give me access to a movie that’s comparable, a dramatic film that’s comparable to The Pianist and I’d love to do it. But if I’m not finding that, I have to also find new things and experiment with that and I love that process.
Is it more difficult to follow a good path as an actor with all the sequels, prequels, 3D…?
Well, I do many independent films. If you look at my resume, they’re still the majority and [Splice], by the way, is an independent movie. This is a wonderful situation where you do a film with a great director who’s very passionate about it, who has a real point of view, who’s worked on it for 10 years. You make it the best you can with limited resources and then it goes to a film festival and then it gets picked up by something like Joel Silver and Warner Brothers and sees the light of day and gets a marketing budget. That’s remarkable and that’s really rare, almost unheard of in this economy and the way this business is. So if you look at it, this is just another kind of independent movie but it’s kind of given its moment which is really amazing. The problem is to find roles within these films that speak to you. Unfortunately, most of them don’t. They don’t and most of them aren’t interested in me because they don’t care if...
...a good actor plays it?
I’m not saying that but the whole vision of the success of the film is based on kind of a formula and if I don’t fit in that formula, it’s very difficult to persuade people to alter it because it’s like a business model. It’s counterintuitive to creating art so you have to find something where you’re allowed to have some artistic freedom and the character can have some depth but also fit in that. I’m grateful to Fox, Robert Rodriguez, Nimrod Antal who directed Predators to give me that opportunity. I campaigned very hard. They were not believers at first. I told them I will deliver and I’ll prove myself. That’ll be determined to some degree by how the film does or by what the response is to my work, but I approached it with the same intensity that I would approach anything like The Pianist. I locked myself in the forest and I changed my whole diet. I didn’t do a lot of things. I didn’t eat very much, I handled it with a great deal of seriousness and I did a lot of military training and all that stuff.
