|
He's the American film star who has rarely conformed to stereotype, so playing the English lover of a famed French fashionista was something Alessandro Nivola took in his stride.
The early films in Alessandro's Nivola's film career set a pattern for what was to follow. He got a major break when cast alongside Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in Face/Off in 1997, and then took the lead in a low budget Michael Winterbottom film.
"Michael cast me as a Hastings fisherman in his film I Want You," Nivola recalls, "and from that moment on I was up for challenges like that. That was a period where a lot of the best scripts that I read came from England.
"When I first worked over there I was kind of unquantifiable because it was hard to place me in the class system or regionally, so I was given the chance to play a wide range of things. In fact I remember I was in a flat in Hastings, on my own, while the premiere of Face/Off was going on in some fancy hotel in Beverly Hills.
"I was on the phone to my agent who was yelling 'I wish you were here, man!' over the sound of Etta James singing in the background. It's a sensation I've had many times, a feeling of being away from where the celebrations of my own work were going on."
Nivola's latest film casts him as the English playboy who stole the heart of French fashion legend Coco Chanel. In Coco Before Chanel he plays Arthur 'Boy' Capel, with Audrey Tautou in the title role of the woman who reinvented herself as a fashion icon.
"This film required me to do so many things that I just didn't do well at all," Nivola sighs, "like play polo and dance the waltz and play Scott Joplin on the piano. I couldn't do anything this character could do, he was the perfect man. He was one of those old fashioned playboys who was incredibly good at many, many things where I’m just mediocre.
"When I first arrived on the set I was the only foreign person in the movie. The director didn't speak English very well, and Audrey spoke hardly any English. So I was just sitting at lunch surrounded by people talking and I really didn't understand what anybody was saying. By the end of it I was fairly fluent in the language, so now I find - ironically - I'm equipped to begin filming."
Mention of lunch really emphasises the cultural divide between making films in Britain and France. British film sets, while generous in the fare on offer and decent in terms of quality, differ a little from their French counterparts.
"A waiter would come up to your table and offer you three different choices of entrée," Nivola chuckles, "and there'd be baguettes and fine cheeses on the table, as well as a few bottles of Bordeaux. But other than that I didn't find the experience of filming all that different. It's just very civilised.
"They don’t work very long hours, you never feel like you're under much strain. You wake up at a decent hour, come to work around nine and by six o'clock you're back, in time to have dinner in some nice restaurant in Paris. I think the movie took us three and a half months to film. Had it been an American indie we would have done it in about six weeks.
The case for the kind of itinerant film career Nivola has chosen, rather than taking his chances in the Hollywood mainstream, seems all the more appealing for that. But more likely the films that dominate his CV, titles like Best Laid Plans, Mansfield Park, Love's Labour's Lost and The Girl In The Park offer the real clue to his motivation.
In the 12 years since he's been making movies only Face/Off and Jurassic Park III stand out as big budget multiplex fare. Career is one thing, real life is another and as a husband (to English actress Emily Mortimer) and father the pressures of fame are put into some perspective.
But in the end the job of acting becomes more than a route to celebrity, it's a personal challenge to play as many different characters as possible and maybe learn a little bit about yourself along the way.
"I became an actor because I was deeply unsure of what my own identity was," Nivola adds. "so acting has always been a form of escapism for me. For me, being an actor is a bit like that television show Faking It.
"Like, say, where you have three weeks to turn a classical violinist into a club DJ before they’re assessed by professionals to see if they're convincing or not. That's what it's like, totally terrifying, but I've always preferred putting myself in situations that are outside of my comfort zone."
ANWAR BRETT
Back to Editor's Extra
|
