FILM INTERVIEW: COLIN FARRELL
Jerry the Vampire Returns in Remake of Horror Comedy 'Fright Night'
From one drama after another, Colin Farrell is beginning to spread his wings and choose his own rolls, giving us a taste of what he's like on comedy. Fresh on the heels of Horrible Bosses, where he is virtually unrecognizable as a pot-bellied comb-over, Farrell surprises us as a vampire in the remake of 1985's Fright Night. The versatile actor sat down with Buzzine to talk about the appeal of vampires, his boy-crush on the original character played by Chris Sarandon, and which movies scare him the most...
Izumi Hasegawa: Can you talk about the fine line your character has between his sexual allure and his scariness?
Colin Farrell: So he allures you sexually first? I loved the original; love the original still. I love Chris Sarandon's work as Jerry. I think as a 10, 11, 12-year-old boy, I kind of had a boy crush on Chris Sarandon in that film, because he was so dignified and so elegant and charismatic and alluring, as you said, and yet threatening at the same time. I didn't feel I would have been so concerned about walking in his shadow, had the character not been designed in a really different way, because I think Chris Sarandon's vampire had some kind of human attributes as well. He seemed to have a sense of compassion, even for Charlie, in the original. He wanted to play Charlie and he wanted to be very diplomatic. He said to Charlie, "You know, if we just stay apart from each other, things don't have to be nasty." I had a version of that scene at the kitchen door, but it's a little bit different. It's someone who really thrives on cruelty, and he's just as I am, in such a malevolent way, that I felt it was really liberating because I wasn't emulating what Chris did. I was just playing this character. Yes, there's was a certain amount of sexual gratification in the kill, but he was just really arrogant and filled with hubris more than anything, if there was any human characteristic that was pulled over from the days that he was a human into his vampire life. It was the propensity for cruelty. So it was fun to explore a character that doesn't have any human virtue -- no fear, no remorse, no compassion, no desire to meet his romantic counterpart. It wasn't that vampire. It was a very brutal and very dangerous and very malevolent creature.
IH: What was that day like, when Chris Sarandon came to shoot?
CF: It was cool, man. Kind of wild, big time. You take endorsements anywhere you can get it in this business. You really do. You put significance where you want to put it, and you take it away from where you don't want it to be, and it felt like a really nice benediction, having Chris there, because he read the script and he liked the script enough to be part of it. And he holds his experience in high regard on the original film. He holds the experience in such high regard that it wasn't just the case of 'pay him and get him.' He read the script and he was like, "Okay, they've done something fun with it. They've done something really interesting and novel," and he was glad to be part of it.
IH: It seems that there is more blood in this film compared to the first. Did you enjoy the blood?
CF: I enjoyed. I mean to say that there is a farcical element to this film, which is not an insult to it -- I mean that as a compliment. There was a farcical element, of course, to what I did with Jerry the vampire, and engaging with it on that level was a blast. I suppose the cornerstone of the character that I played and what his hubris was born of was ... it must be strange to know that you are the most powerful person in a room, literally, physically. What's it like? But literally, he looks at human being Jerry as a child would look at a butterfly before he tears his wings off -- this kind of sick fascination with the human being as behaviorist, and also this simultaneous boredom and distain with human beings. So it was fun to toy around with because it's very far away from where I would live.
IH: Is it a delight as an actor to find a character so diverse?
CF: It's so much fun, and I come off the back of doing three or four years -- it felt like straight down-the-road drama, and drama that was offered up by the experience in the making of it, being in different context of course. But the roles were dramatic and the situations were dramatic, and I was l playing characters that were going through a lot of hardship making their lives, whether it was The Way Back or even the Ondine, even though he was cantering love for the first time in a long time. He was also dealing with sickness of his daughter and alcoholism in a small town, etc. -- weighted themes. So I was ready. I said to my agent, "I'd love to find something that's really different from anything we've done in the last 10 or 15 years, or something that's fun that I could just go to work and be expansive." And I think I certainly did that in Horrible Bosses anyway. Horrible Bosses and Fright Night came up within two weeks of each other, and they just seemed like they were really disparallel.
IH: So your agent was doing his job...
CF: He really was. He took it, he listened. It was the first time in 15 years I was like, "Wow, he actually listened." Really disparallel experiences and choices. You've heard it before. You've heard actors say it before, but ideally, the more you can mix it up and just have contrast in what you do... I remember when I started acting, there was no choice. There was no, "Do I like that character? Do I like that role?" You were an actor. You auditioned for shit. You were lucky if you got a callback, and if the callback went successfully and you got the part. Not that it didn't matter -- it always matters if you like or don't like something, or if you connect to it or you don't, but you did it regardless, because you had to make a living. I'm not saying I was there for a long time; I moved through that period, for whatever reason, fairly quickly. I was very lucky, I think. But I had a choice, is what I'm saying, and having a choice to be able to mix it up is a real cool thing.
IH: How was your experience at Comic-Con?
CF: It was crazy, man. Absolute chaos and insanity. It was great. It was really enjoyable, and it seemed like the right place to take the film. It really is the Bastien of film fanaticism, and this is a film that a lot of fans hold very dear to themselves, so it seemed. This film isn't like a $20M or $30M whatever... It is million-dollar exercise in nostalgia, but at the same time, ideally, being in love with the original. I would love if the fans of the original liked this film. Not in comparison to it -- they're very different films. But, "Okay, if we're going to re-make this, let's take it to the lion's den. Let's take it to where the fans are, and let them sit and be the judge of it." So it had its first public screening Friday night at Comic-Con. I don't know how it went. We weren't there, but we're in Houston.
IH: You have recently said that you now feel like when you were 17 years old. What has changed to make you feel like that?
CF: Did I say that? I said that?
IH: I read it in the news.
CF: You must believe everything you read. I'm sure I did say it. Oh yes, I was saying that I'm enjoying the work again. When I started doing this, I did some acting workshops in Dublin. It was a lot of fun, and it inspired or led me to build on a natural curiously as a human being that I have with the behavior of human beings. And then, through many things, I just lost sense of why I was doing this again.
IH: Would you visit the horror genre again?
CF: Sure, any genre. There nothing that's in theory or idea being excluded at the same time. Nothing that I'm definitely pursuing.
IH: Many people are obsessed with vampires. Why do you think this is? And are you obsessed about anything?
CF: Do I have anything that I obsessed about? That's a longer conversation. Vampires have always been portrayed as forever-young, eternally beautiful; they've been designed as usually having an ethereal beauty, but there is also a sense of loneliness, this desire to be loved, this seeming existence of two things -- that which human beings aspire to -- heighten senses, great power, and the lack of experience of the disadvantages, that some would say, of getting old and sickness, but at the same time, they seem to also experience the desire for love. My guy doesn't experience this, but a lot of the vampires I grew up on are looking for a romantic counterpart in their life. And there's something very sensual about the vampire. They're very powerful, they're timeless, and the act of the bite, whatever, is incredibly erotic. So there are a lot of reasons why people are fascinated by them, and they're in human form. So it's an interesting mix of the mythical and the mystical within the human form. It doesn't seem like too far a reach, like a unicorn. I wouldn't mind being a unicorn, but it seems like it's more possible for me to be a vampire somehow.
IH: What kind of horror films do you like?
CF: I grew up on Halloween and Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street was probably my favorite.
IH: Did you see the remakes of those movies?
CF: I did. I saw the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street. Missed the mark in some ways, but that's not the intention when people go out to make these films. You really intend to make a great film, but sometimes it's tough to catch magic in a bottle twice, if you're talking about the same subject. And I don't know if we did a worthy job on this film. I have no idea. I hope, with this, if it's half as good, half as fun to watch as it was to make, it's one of those things, because we really enjoyed making it, and hopefully it will find some fans.
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures' 'Fright Night' is released on August 19, 2011.
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