Go ask Alice: Gemma Arterton on disappearing into Alice Creed

There’s not a word uttered in the first I don’t know how many minutes. The men just get down to business, boarding up windows in the sad, anonymous flat, going to the hardware store, soundproofing—the menace begins with their silence. The silence ends with the muffled screams of the woman they snatch off the street, whisk away in their van, and hastily sequester. They gag her, cuff her to a bed, scissor off her clothes, prepare the bedpan, show her the loaded gun. From this claustrophobic set-up things only gradually loosen, or rather unravel. The Disappearance of Alice Creed, J. Blakeson’s feature debut, is taut, bracing, immensely resourceful, and twisty as all hell, sometimes too much so for its own good.

Best then to say as little as possible about the narrative, but it should spoil very little to discuss the acting. The always marvelous Eddie Marsan as the elder of the kidnapping duo is riveting, a control freak prone to losing control, a barking attack dog who just wants to have his belly rubbed, his goatee rendering his face rat-like every time he blows his top and the crinkles round his nose bunch up as though about to crack. As the junior, cutie-pie criminal, Martin Compston, the young actor who made an auspicious debut in Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen, has a tougher time in a perhaps unfairly demanding part as the centre of more than one game of trust. But I'm guessing it’s Gemma Arterton as Alice that you’re probably most curious about.

Arterton drew attention for her brief but memorable role in Quantum of Solace—mostly the sort of attention that’s accompanied by involuntary salivating—before appearing in such straightjacketing and spectacularly lame mega-movies as The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the new Clash of the Titans. Her name has of late most often been preceded by the term “Bond Girl,” which seems condescending when weighed against her RADA training, her eponymous role in BBC’s Tess d’Urbervilles, her already impressive body of stage work, and her upcoming starring roles in Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe and Burden of Desire, in which she’ll play a Haligonian. None of which, I freely confess, was I even aware of before preparing to interview her. But I suspect Arterton’s profile is about to change.

I met with Arterton in the lobby of a Toronto hotel. She was genuinely lovely, very friendly, thoughtful and chatty, twisting her dark locks while working through her responses. She seemed happy just to be discussing work that didn’t involve her wearing copper bikinis or enunciating hambone lines about time and destiny.

JB: What drew you to this project? It promised to put you into some nasty situations and couldn’t have seemed like the most appetizing shoot.

Gemma Arterton: It was appetizing to me because I’d just finished a film that I felt like I hadn’t acted in at all, or if I had it must have been terrible. So I wanted to make sure I could still act! [Laughs] I wanted to choose something really terrifying, something difficult. I also just liked the script. I was mostly getting things just like the things I’d already done and they mostly seemed really boring. I knew if I kept playing those roles my shelf life would expire quickly. This script came along because the casting director was a believer in me. I read it and thought it was brilliant. It was a glamourless role, very raw, visceral, so I went to meet J. He later confessed that before we met he just assumed I wouldn’t be able to do it. His preconceptions were absolutely fair. People don’t know what you can do until you do it.

JB: I guess he hadn’t seen your stage work? Or Tess?

GA: No, he hadn’t seen the stage work, and Tess isn’t really his type of TV. But I finally went in to read for it and he gave me the part on the spot.

JB: Were you at all nervous about placing yourself in such a vulnerable position with someone who hadn’t made a feature before?

GA: You know, I probably should have been. I guess I’m just a very trusting person. But the script made me think he must have a very good mind for psychology, and his short film showed tremendous potential. Everybody has to start somewhere. Someone gave me a role once that they probably had doubts about. Sometimes you just have to have faith. It was actually kind of great that he was a first-time director because he kept discovering what the film was really about along with the rest of us, and that’s how it should always be on a film set. It felt like a genuinely collaborative effort, very free and creative, which was such a contrast for me having previously made these very controlled movies.

JB: You spend so much time bound and gagged. Were there moments when things became too claustrophobic?

GA: I’m not the type of actor that likes to get too carried away. I always go for it in a scene, but as much as I can I then try to snap out of it right afterwards, you know, tell a joke, take a brake. But there were scenes where it got to be too much. There was one particular scene where I got so wound up. I asked them please to take me out of the handcuffs, and I ran into the toilet—which was actually the toilet you see in the film—locked myself in and just… [loudly gasps for air]. I just needed to get it out, but then I went back and we got on with it. When you’re crying all day it takes its toll. That’s only natural, that it emotionally wears you down. By the end I was just exhausted.


JB: Did you ever feel like you were playing multiple roles? You have these layers of acting going on, one being you, Gemma, trying to inhabit Alice, another being Alice trying to play the willing participant in, well, let’s just call it a scheme within the scheme.

GA: It’s true. Some of the most satisfying scenes to play are the ones where Alice is lying. One of my favourite screen acting moments ever is where Ben Kingsley’s lying about smoking on the plane in Sexy Beast. It’s brilliant because he’s making it up as he goes along. The audience knows that—you can see him calculating it in his head and yet it’s so subtle. Anyway, for me, as soon as I plan something it just becomes terrible. But if you’re very alert and working closely with your fellow actor it usually comes together. Eddie and Martin are fantastic. Even when the camera was just on me they would give it their best. Sometimes you’d hear them say, “Jesus, I just gave my best performance when the camera wasn’t even on me!” [Laughs]

JB: But of course their performance, albeit indirectly, does wind up on screen, because if things are working in the way you’re describing then what they’re delivering is reflected in what you’re doing, right?

GA: Absolutely. To me it’s so frustrating when actors don’t stick around when they’re not on camera. My first-ever job I had to do a scene—it was a Stephen Poliakoff film—and the actress I was working against wasn’t there. My first-ever acting job and for my whole scene I was doing it to a cross with a prompt reading the lines. What does Stanislavski say? Acting is reacting. If you give, they give. That’s how you get the best work. I have to say I was genuinely petrified at times with Alice because Eddie was so scary. Sometimes I didn’t know if he was going to punch me. Of course he was completely in control.

JB: He’s also scarier with the beard.

GA: I know! He’s actually got this cuddly, kind face.

JB: Sort of gnome-like.

GA: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s right. He’s the sweetest guy you’ll ever meet, always all, “Darling, are you all right?” Then as soon as he puts the balaclava on and starts shouting it’s terrifying. He snaps right in and out of it. That’s proper acting.


JB: Though it’s extremely selective with what it reveals, the film seems to demand that you imply a great deal of back-story for Alice.

GA: I did create a lot of back-story. I made all these little films of myself—I had quite a bit of free time out there on the Isle of Man. It was really helpful to get a sense of who Alice was. But when it came to performing all that work seemed really irrelevant because Alice’s situation is so extreme. If there were a film about Alice Creed before being kidnapped you’d see a completely different person than the Alice in our film. Over its course she transforms, becomes much more brutal, ruthless and manipulative. It’s her method of survival.

JB: In a way, your character remains the most mysterious, doesn’t she? We actually learn far more about her captors.

GA: I love that, because we’re usually so spoon-fed in cinema nowadays. I get frustrated with that. It’s nice not knowing every detail.

JB: Does playing a character like Alice, being at the centre of such a traumatic story, teach you something about others or yourself you weren’t aware of before?

GA: I learned a lot about thinking on the spot, the fight or flight thing. Your brain goes to this other place where you lose sense of time and space. And I learned a lot about myself actually, and about my work. One of the reasons I was making this movie was because I doubted myself quite a lot. I wasn’t sure if I could access those things needed for the role. What I learned was that if you’re focused on working intensely with the other person you can achieve almost anything. You’ve got the director to support you. You’ve got the other actors. You’re not doing it on your own.

Touching from a distance: Penélope Cruz and Lluís Homar on all that's elusive and alluring in Almodóvar's Broken Embraces

The first images we glimpse in Broken Embraces are difficult to locate in the chronology of its fevered, convoluted narrative. They hover somewhere in the midst of not only the movie but also the movie’s genesis. We see an actress on a film set preparing for another take. Her name, we’ll later learn, is Lena, and she’s played by Penélope Cruz. But these images were taken on the fly, without Cruz’s knowing they would be used in the movie, that she was meant to be performing. So in a sense it’s Cruz herself, not Lena, who we observe in this moment of pure presence pulled loose from the self-consciousness of the actor working for the camera, a stray fragment striving toward some symbiosis of art and reality. It is in any case a captivating entrée to this fourth collaboration between Cruz and writer/director Pedro Almodóvar.

“We are like lovers,” Almodóvar has said of he and Cruz, who decided to be an actress after having seen Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up, Tie me Down (1990) as a teenager. Indeed, Broken Embraces can be read as a love letter from an auteur to his muse. It’s a story told in four parts, encompassing two different periods in the life of its protagonist. Mateo Blanco was a successful director, until one day he decided to make a very Almodóvar-like comedy called Chicas y Maletas and cast as its lead an unknown named Lena, who was smart, gorgeous and possessed a raw talent. But Lena was tethered to a rich, older, fearsomely possessive man named Ernesto who once helped her when she was desperate. Mateo and Lena fall in love and gradually everything goes to hell—Ernesto is the movie’s financier, and he won’t let her go, even if it means destroying the project. Tragedy strikes, Mateo loses both Lena and his sight, and with this double-loss he also abandons his name. So Mateo Blanco is killed and Harry Caine takes his place, just a writer now, not a director, blinded, and thus better equipped to retreat into the shadowy embrace of the past. Until the past catches up with him. Mateo can’t get Lena back, nor can he regain his sight. But Harry Caine can illuminate some lingering mysteries about how it all happened. Turns out he can also finish his movie the way it was intended, which in Almodóvar’s cinema of cinema adoration is some kind of happy ending. In Mateo’s movie, if not in life, Lena can live forever.

It’s fascinating to see Almodóvar play with Cruz’s persona in Broken Embraces, peppering her image with a little Audrey Hepburn, a little Goldie Hawn, a flash of Rita Hayworth in Gilda (46). Yet Lena surpasses references, emerging as a complex and finally terribly moving character, the ostensible femme fatale overwhelmed by her own allure. She’s a woman desired into oblivion, tormented by compromise, crushed when she attempts an escape. Cruz hauntingly embodies this woman slowly being torn apart. I and a gaggle of other writers were able to sit with Cruz and during last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, where Broken Embraces had its North American premiere. More diminutive than I’d imagined, especially after having seen her inhabit the screen so fully in Almodóvar’s Volver (06), Cruz wore a simple floral print dress, pink cardigan, and platform sandals. She sat cross-legged, as if attempting to fill more of her chair. Yet when she spoke it was with a confidence and grace that defied her stature. “I don’t think Lena is weak,” she explained. “She has one challenge after another. She becomes a great actress in life, if not in movies. I see her as three women in one: who she really is you can see briefly when she’s in love; then there’s the character she creates to be with Ernesto; and there’s the character that she plays in Chicas y Maletas. Some days we would go from one to other…”

Some of Cruz’s earliest work was with Almodóvar. In Live Flesh (97) she was a prostitute giving birth on a bus. In All About My Mother (99) she played a nun. At some point she attracted the attention of American filmmakers and appeared in a flurry of American movies, like All the Pretty Horses (00), Vanilla Sky (01), and Sahara (05), yet she was rarely cast imaginatively. She might have become lost in Hollywood, another beautiful face with an exotic accent, typically required to do little more than fulfill a stereotype, arguably not unlike her fellow countryman Antonio Banderas, whose career was also launched with several highly memorable appearances in Almodóvar movies. But Volver changed that. Almodóvar had no difficulty imagining Cruz as more eccentric, more dynamic, more robust, and Cruz got an Oscar nomination. She didn’t win for Volver; she won instead for her supporting role in Vicky Christina Barcelona (08), where she did in fact play a stereotype of the fiery, nosy, lusty Spaniard—though she did it with tremendous verve, thank you very much.

Cruz with Almodóvar

Cruz is grateful for her success, yet seems equally cognizant of the role of luck in navigating the vagaries of the film industry. “The moment Lena meets Mateo and tells him she wants to be an actress—I couldn’t do it without crying,” says Cruz. “I was getting the feeling back of meeting Pedro when I was 17, and I was thinking, ‘What would my life have been had I not been able to share with him that I want to be an actress?’ I had to cry between takes.” Cruz and Almodóvar are close friends, so close that they feel able to read each other’s thoughts. But their camaraderie doesn’t compromise their work ethic. “I feel the same butterflies in my stomach when I’m on the set working with him as with any other director,” Cruz says. “My biggest worry is to have him go home disappointed at the end of our day of shooting. I want him to be happy, to feel that I’m giving him 100%, because he’s given me time after time huge amounts of trust. It’s intimidating because he’s so honest. He’ll tell you if you’re good, he’ll tell you if you’re bad. He’ll tell you in great detail. That’s what’s so addictive about working with him, this honesty.”

Almodóvar’s famous perfectionism and frank criticism had the same effect on Lluís Homar, who played Mateo/Harry. Not only a veteran of Spanish film and TV but a long-established actor and director in Barcelona’s theatre community, Homar had a significant role in Almodóvar’s Bad Education (04), but couldn’t have foreseen the commitment he was to take on with Broken Embraces. Homar also turned up to do publicity during TIFF, an endearing figure clad in red jacket, tight black jeans and cowboy boots, with pale eyes that sparkle in the sunlight. Those eyes spend much of the movie lost in some melancholy inner-vision disguised by Mateo/Harry’s habitual amiability. Homar and Almodóvar spent countless hours with a multitude of blind people to get a sense of Mateo/Harry’s state of being. It was only when they finally met a blind man who didn’t seem blind did Almodóvar tell Homar, “There’s Harry.” “It’s very strange,” Homar said of this model for his character. “He looks you right in your eyes, but he doesn’t see anything.”

In a sense, Mateo/Harry’s blindness helped Homar surrender to Almodóvar’s process. There are key scenes in Broken Embraces where Almodóvar will cast off his dominant shot/reverse shot pattern and let the camera simply glide between two characters in conversation, falling on one or the other in turn, though not necessarily when you might think. When asked about this method Homar shrugged and laughed, admitting that after the first few takes he had to just forget the camera altogether, to be truly blind as it were. Homar never worried about making a wrong choice because he trusted Almodóvar completely to set him straight. “He knows the characters so well,” Homar says. “Even when he says things to you over the course of production, things he just tosses off very casually, you want to run away and find a microphone to record every word. Each sentence or each gesture you’re to perform—he knows exactly what he wants.”

Among the elements that make Broken Embraces an essential chapter in Almodóvar’s career are scenes that literally demonstrate an aspect of his working methods. Toward the movie’s end, 14 years after Chicas y Maletas was released in a mangled version, Mateo is able to re-cut the movie, comparing various takes. Cruz initially thought that the “bad” takes would allow her and her co-stars to indulge in some broad acting, but her director was after something far more suggestive. “It was hard because we thought we could do whatever we want and just make it fun and exaggerate,” recalls Cruz. “But Pedro wanted something so subtle. I think that’s the point. If you see a scene play out, and then you see the same scene just two degrees lower or higher… it’s like music, if it’s just a little bit off you don’t feel the connection. It’s hard to explain what it is.”

Hard to explain yet unmistakable when you see it work. Broken Embraces is a somewhat wordy movie by Almodóvar’s usual standards, yet it still contains images so rich as to seem almost indescribable. There’s a moment when Harry approaches his television. On screen is the last image ever filmed of he and Lena together. He has the image slowed down so that each frame is frozen for a moment. He places his hands on the screen, fingers spread, as though able to touch what’s long gone, to embrace a faded memory through the intangible magic of the moving image. It may just be the most personal image Almodóvar has produced.

"It is not possible to talk about history without real human beings": A conversation with Jiri Menzel

Hunger for monetary gain is a mainstay in movies, yet there are scenarios in which mere greed falls short of supplying the motive. Jan Díte, a diminutive, good-natured Czech of plebian background, decides he’d like to be a millionaire. He regards it as a vocation, something to work toward, like learning how to build a log cabin or becoming a better tennis player. He studies the science of it. Jan also wants to make love to beautiful women, and this too he pursues with a sort of honest diligence. He goes into the hotel business. He bears witness to tremendous spectacles of decadence while quietly showering ladies with gentlemanly adoration, seducing them with modesty and sincerity and paying homage to their beauty by decorating their naked bodies with fruit. His actions read as essentially harmless, if indifferent to the world around him. That is, they would read as harmless, were Jan’s career not contemporaneous with the rise of the Third Reich.

Based on the novel by Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England is a very dark comedy rendered with a very light touch. Tracing Jan’s unintentional development as a Nazi collaborator—he falls in love with a German who can only screw with a picture of Hitler beaconing down at her—the film warns against the perils of political apathy, yet Jan remains essentially serene in his attitude, even oblivious. Rather than feel the burden of having been a collaborator, as he looks back on his life, he seems largely burdened by nostalgia. Told mostly in flashbacks rife with wordless comic sequences that are equal parts Buster Keaton and Busby Berkeley, Jan is played as a young man by the nimble Ivan Barnev, while the older, penniless Jan is played by Oldrich Kaiser. The actors do not look especially alike, but the dual casting is inspired. The balance of similarities and differences provide the film with a rich sense of time and fate’s weathering of the body and spirit.

Jiri Menzel is probably best known for Closely Watched Trains, which won the 1968 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. It was Menzel’s debut, and the first of several adaptations of Hrabal. He was only 28. I Served the King echoes Closely Watched Trains not only in theme and tone—the conflict between one’s seeking of love and sexual fulfillment and one’s duty to one’s job or one’s country—but also in poetic gesture. Re-watching Closely Watched Trains, I had to smile as the young hero foolishly ran after a departing train he has no chance of catching up to—something we see happen twice in I Served the King, the second instance being especially grave in its implications. Hrabal and Menzel worked closely on all of Menzel’s adaptations until Hrabal’s death in 1997, the younger filmmaker always regarding the elder author and his ideas with reverence. Menzel, now 70, is in fact an exceedingly humble guy, looking back on his extraordinary, prolific career as a director, writer and actor as one long stroke of good luck. Yet, despite his rusty English, he speaks eloquently about what defines his approach. “It is not possible to talk about history without real human beings,” he explains. We spoke over the phone, he in Prague, me in Toronto. His bone-dry humour cracked me up repeatedly. We had a good time. I’ve tried to tidy up his responses enough to read fluidly while still giving a sense of his particular cadence.

JB: What drew you to this material? Why now?

Jiri Menzel: I have been very interested in Czech history, in the nature of the Czech character. And I found that we Czechs we are very flexible. We adapted to the Austrian Empire, to the German occupation, to the Russians. We seem able to collaborate with anyone. It’s a bad thing. We need to reflect on our history, on who we are. Mr. Hrabal’s work is an education in this. For many centuries now, we Czechs are heretics. We believe in nothing. We are skeptics. Our goal is only to survive. This is not good.

JB: There is here, as elsewhere in your body of work, a striking juxtaposition between the sweeping events of history and those of an ordinary individual’s daily life.

JM: If I could understand everything you say, I would agree.

Both laugh.

JB: Okay, let's try this one. Would you describe yourself as politically active?

JM: No, I’m not political at all. To be that way you need to be very concentrated, very strong. I’m not so strong. No.

JB: But your films have prompted strong responses from those who hold political power—and from those seeking political commentary.

JM: Yes, but I would like the viewers of my films to leave the cinema without feeling that their minds have had political statements imposed on them. Probably later, the viewer can locate some political connections in his mind, but I don’t like to approach these things directly. I just want to wake up the questions, of morality, of relationships with others, of responsibility. I want only to wake up the questions, not give lessons.

Menzel and Hrabal

JB: This is your sixth adaptation of a literary work by Bohumil Hrabal. Is there something special you can trace in these books that speaks to your sensibility as a filmmaker?

JM: I like his work, as you know, but this film happened simply because the studio owned the rights and offered me the job. I was happy to have the chance, but it was not my initiative. Hrabal for me is very close because of his humour, and he is for me one writer who can describe man with all his weakness and better qualities and can do so without anger. Even the worst qualities in man he can describe with such elegance. Hrabal is not angry like much modern literature, which tends to be very pessimistic. Mr. Hrabal is full of humour and love.

JB: There is in your films an emphasis on work and, in several cases, how to avoid it—did you ever have ambitions to do something other than work in film and theatre?

JM: You are suggesting I have to look for another appointment?

JB: [Laughing] No. Honest. No, I was just wondering if you ever had other ambitions for your career than those you pursued. If you ever wanted a different job.

JM: I wanted to be a journalist because my father was a journalist. But when I was 15 I started to read the newspaper regularly and found the job was not for me because the newspaper was full of lies. This was the communist paper. So I escaped this fate and flew off to the theatre. From 15 to 20, I wanted to work in theatre as a director but I wasn’t accepted in theatre school for a lack of talent. I tried to work in television, which I thought might need new workers that didn’t have so much talent. I applied to the school for film and television and was given a chance there.

JB: Are there particular films that made an impression on you when you were young?

JM: In my high school, I had a chance to regularly attend screenings of many classic movies. In one week I could see all of Chaplin’s movies, in another, all of Renoir’s. I was able to see many great movies made during the silent era, movies from France, Germany and the United States, and they became part of my aesthetic. I was lucky to have that time because in film school I was not able to see many movies from the West.

JB: Have you felt like you’ve been able to make the sorts of films you wanted to make?

JM: I took it as my profession. I have never had the feeling to be an artist. I have respect for the man who takes his work as his profession. I don’t like art. Many artists are very far from ordinary people. My duty from the start, my decision, was to do everything for my neighbours. My father, you see, was a very educated man. An intellectual, very wise. My mother was a tailor. She was an ordinary woman. So I decided to do films for people like my mother, but at the same time, they needed to be films that I would not be ashamed to show my father. It’s not so easy.  

JB: Have you found filmmaking to be a radically different experience during the communist and post-communist periods?

JM: For me, nothing’s changed with regards to what I choose to do. I don’t see a big difference between the films I made in my youth and those I make now. Politics have had no influence on the content. The only difference now is that financially it’s not as easy as before. Now there is no ideological censorship, but it’s harder.

JB: I guess now you have economic censorship.

JM: Exactly.

JB: The performance style of I Served the King seems indebted to silent comedy and physical theatre. I think Barnev gives a truly amazing performance, but is it difficult to find film actors who can embody this style?

JM: No. I probably have a good feeling about personalities. I prefer that films convey information without words. It may be because in my youth I saw many foreign movies without subtitles. I tried to understand just from the eyes and movements of the actors as a way of reading what’s inside. To this day, I don’t like too much talking in film.

JB: I Served the King is often characterized as bittersweet. I read a quote from you somewhere recently I really liked: “It is bitter because it is Czech.” I wonder if you could elaborate on that.

JM: [Laughs] Well, thanks to this film, I know our character better. It is not very sweet. I mean, I am happy to be Czech. I have to be proud to have this nationality. But I think any man has to look at himself with different eyes. And it’s the same for our country. It’s good to read books about what the Germans think of Czechoslovakia, or the French or the English. It’s important to not be blind to our history, and I tried to get a little bit of it in this film.

JB: Of all the great Czech novelists of the last 50 years or so, Milan Kundera, whose novels are nothing if not at once bitter and comic, seems to be the most enduring as an international figure. Have you ever considered adapting his work?

JM: [Laughs] I asked him many years ago. One of my colleagues wished to make a film from one of his books, and, because Kundera was my teacher, I was in contact with him. But after The Unbearable Lightness of Being he decided that no more films would be made form his work. I asked him nice, but he was very determined. “Even you cannot do anything from my work,” he said. So I said to him, “I will wait for the moment when you need money.” He said, “So long as I’m alive, I won’t need that much money.” He is funny, but I like him. He’s a very nice man. He taught us comparative literature. He was very clever. He taught us what is the difference between Czech literature and that of other countries.

JB: You never considered being a novelist?

JM: Nah. I’m lazy for it.

JB: [Laughs] But making a movie is really hard work, no?

JM: Well, yes, but you are surrounded by people who work with you, who help you. Like a team. You just tell them what to do and they do it. You know, it’s kind of nice, actually.