Special Interview: "No more acting; Abuse fuels Meg Tilly's fiction", by Judy Gerstel (The Star)

Still, Tilly is comfortable with her 17-year-old son, Will, wanting to become an actor like his father, Colin Firth, who lived with Tilly in British Columbia for several years after they made Valmont together and before he became a heartthrob as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones's Diary. 
"He is very talented," she says with a measure of pride about her son.....more

Interview: "Family Matters" by Rob Driscoll (IC Wales)

Archived completely due to unavailability on the internet

Forget glitz and glamour, Colin Firth returns to cinemas tonight in a poignant British film about a father and son. He tells Rob Driscoll about his own relationships with both his parents and his children

YOU could say Colin Firth is a bit of a chameleon. The heart-throb British actor has just returned from Greece where he has been singing some Abba.
Dressed in full obligatory ‘70s-style spandex, it was part of his performance in the film version of the stage musical Mamma Mia! with the likes of Meryl Streep, Julie Walters and Pierce Brosnan as co-stars.

And this Christmas he will be seen flirting outrageously with a dragged-up Rupert Everett in St Trinian’s.

It’s all a far cry from the role that made him a true superstar – the smouldering Darcy in the 1995 BBC version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which was sexed up by Cardiff screenwriter Andrew Davies.

But one suspects that, out of his latest big screen projects, the movie of which Firth is most proud is a far humbler, less glitzy affair.

Behind the clunky title of the new British film And When Did You Last See Your Father? hides a strongly emotional, unapologetic study of family relationships with the power to reduce many of its audiences – especially men – to tears.

Based on Blake Morrison’s award-winning autobiographical memoir of the same name, the film is an extraordinarily honest and unflinching exploration of a father/son relationship, as Morrison deals with his father’s terminal illness and imminent death.

In the film, Firth plays the real-life Morrison, with Jim Broadbent as his father Arthur, ultimately struck down by cancer. As soon as Firth was offered the part, there was no hesitation about accepting it.
“Everyone can relate to this movie,” explains Firth. “We’ve all had a father or a father figure. The issues in this film are so wired into absolutely all of us, that I really don’t think you have to look that far to find bits of your life that overlap.
“One of the reasons why people respond so much to this story is that everybody’s got unresolved issues in any important relationship, and this story is so starkly honest about that. Yet you don’t come out of the cinema depressed.
“It gives you some rather difficult truths that apply to all of us, and I think there’s something soothing and edifying about that. I don’t know why, I don’t know if it’s because you realise you’re not alone with all your inadequacies in that department. But I think it makes you feel actually better than coming out of a sugar-coated fantasy.”

Indeed, the very notion of Hollywood getting hold of this project and heaping it with gloss is a terrifying one. The strength of And When Did You Last See Your Father? is in its deadpan truths and refreshingly un-flashy honesty.
Firth immediately empathised with a screenplay that refuses to shirk from all those petty embarrassments of a suburban upbringing in baby-boomer Britain that still hover over his conscience.

In the film, Firth’s parents are played by Broadbent and Juliet Stevenson, while his wife is played by Gina McKee. TV star Sarah Lancashire makes a telling big screen debut as a family friend of the Morrisons whom we slowly realise means much more to Arthur.
The essence of the central father and son relationship is further expressed through flashbacks to Blake’s teens – a family holiday, a fumbled affair with the au pair – where the awkward and introverted Blake is constantly crushed by his father’s flirtatious ways and need to be the centre of attention.
“The more you enter the film, it’s clear that there’s so much of this that is immediate to everyone,” says Firth, whose own father is 73.

At 47, Firth is also a father himself to three children – the younger two by his Italian wife Livia Giuggioli.
“My father couldn’t be more different from Arthur Morrison, but I still had issues, and I have that dreadful piece of programming in my system, that however far I think I’ve gone in life and however much I’ve moved beyond the trials of living with my parents, it only takes five minutes walking into the parental home and I’m 16 again,” he smiles.“The film’s made me realise that there’s the danger we let our parents die with things unsaid – though, of course, I’d like to think there’s nothing unresolved with my parents.”

Firth had read the book on which the film is based several years ago, although he never imagined seeing it on the big screen.
“I loved the book from the moment I read it for all sorts of reasons,” recalls Firth, who is an executive producer of the forthcoming documentary feature In Prison My Whole Life, the latest film from Welsh director Marc Evans.
“I responded to the flavour of the ‘60s, the ‘80s, washing your car on a Sunday, putting up a camping tent come hell or high water, being stuck in the family car in motorway traffic jams, all of that.
“It was such a self-contained piece. The adaptation is quite a big reinvention of the book. There’s nothing of a film in the book. There are little episodes you can imagine being filmed, but it doesn’t have that shape, that quality – it doesn’t cry out to be a film at all. It’s a series of brilliant, courageous observations.”

Familiar as he was with the material, there wasn’t much time for the eternally-in-demand Mr Firth to prepare for the challenge of playing an autobiographical figure.
“My preparation basically involved getting on a plane in New York and arriving just in time to shoot,” he chuckles. “It was a bit on the hoof. I’d lived with the idea of it for quite a long time. But I’d met the director Anand Tucker before, we’d chatted about it, and I’d known the book for a good 10 years. And then there was a lifetime of having a Dad…”

As for Firth’s own parenting skills, he insists he tries to make himself available to his children.
“I think that’s a constant issue for any working person, questioning your availability,” he says. “Actors, in fact, have quite a lot of down time, and however all-consuming the work period is, the down time is real down time at home, probably more so than with people who have a regular job. So one thing balances off the other.”

Firth is optimistic that there will be a very real audience out there for this movie, which stands out from the usual diet of formulaic thrillers, romances, comedies and period adaptations. “I really do think its success hinges on its unflinching honesty,” he says. “Blake wrote the book fairly soon after his father’s death, and he was probably in an unguarded period.
“He might have been more cautious if he’d written it a bit later on, but what we have is something very real when it comes to warts-and-all portrayals. If it was just the usual love-fest, I don’t think many people would care.”

And When Did You Last See Your Father? opens today.

Interview: "Proof good guys can finish first" by Evan Fanning (The Irish Independent)

'HAVE you seen Rock 'n' Roll, the Tom Stoppard play?" Colin Firth asks me. Colin Firth is a vinyl junkie, which is why we're talking about a Tom Stoppard play and not about his acting career, or his relationship with his father, or even his new movie, And When Did You Last See Your Father?

His collection, he says, is big. "It hasn't been expanded in many years, but it's big for where I stopped buying. It takes up a few shelves... and I've still got the turntable," he says, rather enthusiastically.
Despite being a lover of vintage vinyl, Firth has embraced modernity and now downloads most of his music -- mainly, he says, due to "laziness". However, the perfunctory nature of buying online has made the 47-year-old somewhat nostalgic for a different time.

"In some ways the download thing has driven me back to the hard-copy satisfaction," he says. "CDs never gave me that anyway. Every vinyl lover bangs on about the cover and the artwork and the gatefold and the inner sleeve, and I was a sucker for all of that. And CDs were crap....more

Interview: "Colin Firth: portrait of a young writer" by Sheila Johnston (The Daily Telegraph)

"If a film succeeds in weaving a spell over you, you won't really question it." When he was shooting Girl With a Pearl Earring, everyone was sceptical about the choice of Scarlett Johansson. "By the time it came out, there was endless talk about how uncannily like the girl in the painting she was.....more

Interview: "Colin Firth's Darcy dilemna" by Tim Teeman (The Times UK)

Something went awry in Firth’s teenage years. “I loathed authority but was frightened of it. My rebellions were sneaky, passive. I didn’t smash windows or get into fights – if I did I was strictly on the receiving end. Like Blake, I took refuge in books with the hope of getting laid by name-checking Dostoevsky. It wasn’t Hardy or Austen for me, but Camus. I grew my hair long, pierced my ears and then got slightly stranded by the punk thing.”

Firth Sr could cope with the long hair but not Firth’s “bad choice” of friends. There was a charismatic hard nut at school who led Firth astray. Or “the misdemeanours that go along with wanting to be rock-and-roll and hippy, the music festivals, staying out late.” Drinking? “I was a bit naughty in that respect,” he says. Drugs? Firth looks stricken. “I’m not at liberty to go into detail about such misdemeanours. Yeah, it was all the usual stuff. If Labour Cabinet ministers can confess to some of those things, I probably can as well.” How did your father find out about the drugs? Did you smoke cannabis at home? “Nahhhuhhhh,” Firth mutters. “It was a whole series of things and was as much as to do with what he suspected. It wasn’t one incident.” The worst rows with his father “were about washing dishes and homework. There wasn’t a massive meltdown,” he insists.

But his teenage rebellion was concerted. “I would have gone to university had I not allowed myself to be derailed into moody adolescent laziness. I liked to characterise it then as a defiant decision to resist the system. But I was just resistant to schoolwork. If someone wanted me to read Shakespeare, I wanted to read Thomas Mann. If someone tried to make me listen to Brahms, I had to listen to Hendrix.” On the morning of A-level retakes, “I thought, ‘F*** it’ and went back to bed, it felt like a treadmill I didn’t want to be on.” Firth pitched up, “like Dick Whittington”, in London wanting to act and he got a job at a theatre switchboard. He read Kafka in his cubbyhole, and “stared into the abyss”, until he met a casting director who smoothed his way into drama school and then to a part in Julian Mitchell’s Another Country....more

Interview: "Colin Firth: Eben verrückt ... (just mad)" by Leif Kramp (Teleschau Gemany)

Original interview with thanks to Angelika.
Translation with thanks to Colinfever and Carola.

In our interview Colin Firth speaks , with a twinkle in his eye, about his relationship with children, the curse of Mr. Darcy and he lets on why he would sometimes rather occupy the director’s chair.

T: In you new movie you fight for the well-being of the 12-year old Roman Emperor Romulus Augustus . Do you get along with children in real life as well?
CF: I’m dealing with them, nothing more. I do like working with children. But I usually like it best if they are someone else’s children. (laughs) It can even be fun to be with them, because I can make myself scarce any time they start getting on my nerves. And I can return as soon as the storm calms down.

T: You are a father yourself. Where do you get parenting tips?
CF: In spite of the scores of books on parenting , that can be found on mile high shelves in bookstores ,we haven’t improved as parents. Even an armada of guide books doesn’t help. Everyone has to find their own way- there is no easy solution, even if the books suggest otherwise.

T: Why is it that you appear to be playing a brusque character most of the time?
CF: I am not interested in characters who are sociable. Indeed I find them most unpleasant. People who don’t have any problems and don’t search for them and have everything just fall into their laps, aren’t interesting in real life or in a movie. Even action heroes, whom we love best, follow the Harrison Ford principal: You never know how he’ll master any given challenge.

T: Your greatest success was as a romantic hero- your favorite role?
CF: To be honest I have always been fascinated by Indiana Jones. The concept is pretty easy; ordinary man against destiny. Nobody knows if he will make it. He has obstacles to overcome he has to be honest with himself in order to make it. Inadequacy. Failure, it doesn’t matter which. That is what I’m interested in.

T: Do you feel haunted by Mr. Darcy?
CF; Not really. Darcy is someone who is mostly mentioned when I am sitting among journalists. I do know that I will be connected to this character for my whole life. But he’s no ghost always hovering around me. Sometimes I even forget about him, especially when I am at work. Then suddenly he is here again, when I am sitting in front of a microphone and I know that I have to talk about him once again.

T: Sounds like torture. 
CF: To be labeled or categorized means to an actor to have a recognizable name, an identity which makes you well-known to the masses. That can be useful.

T: Do you think you could have achieved a similar popularity with another role?
CF: Who could have foreseen this? An archetype comes into being when people are ready for that character it has to be the right time. They recognize in it their hidden wishes and fears. A hundred years ago it was Dracula, a lascivious figure, that stole people’s souls and sucked their blood. Frankenstein became an icon because the, then still young, industrial society had waited for a character like that, who showed people that he could surpass himself. That he could bring creatures to life, but wasn’t able to control them.
On a much less unspectacular level I also hit the right nerve at the right time with Mr. Darcy. But to this day I can’t really explain why. He was pretty unfriendly, distant , and ignorant.

T: Are you more attracted to amiable or ambivalent characters?
CF: I think all actors have an inclination to the dark side. And I try to help my characters get a certain kind of ambivalence even if they are amiable. I am always searching for particular features that make the role more versatile.

T: Where lies the appeal of obscure characters?
CF: As actors we shouldn‘t judge our characters, but justify them and their actions, even if it might appear strange to the audience. After all we hope to get them on our side in the end. You can’t immerse yourself into an identity and leave out what you don’t like. It’s all or nothing. Mr. Darcy is an appalling patron in the beginning and I really tried hard to increase the distrust of the audience. In the end it’s a much better experience if the audience likes one or more traits of the character and doesn’t begrudge Darcy his success in capturing the girl’s heart.

That’s an enormously long journey taken in an incredibly short time for an actor, but the sympathies of the audience is much more sincere because they thought differently of the character before.

T: Is this the reason why you often portray a character who is actually deeply kindhearted underneath it all?
CF: Even roles of criminals have potential. The most favorite villains of movie history are the ones that can get the audience on their side. Take Hannibal Lecter for example, a nearly ideal model of a criminal icon in movie history: reason for its popularity is Anthony Hopkins’ charisma. It’s simply incredible that a worldwide audience will favor a cannibal! But ever since then we can’t get enough of his movies, no matter what topic, as long as Anthony Hopkins is in it.

T: Anthony Hopkins is a famous representative of the English Method Acting.. How different are Hollywood and British cinema?
CF: I’ve worked with innumerable American actors and by now it is quite unusual to me to be in a British movie that doesn’t have an American actress in its cast. The difference between Hollywood and British productions isn’t that big. It’s mostly the audience that assumes an entirely different philosophy.

T: why is that?
CF: It might be cultural differences, which don’t have anything to do with quality. While Americans prefer to film a drama that takes place in a trailer park, the British might decide to make a movie portraying a conservative Prime-minister. I’d love to see Eminem in the role of the British conservative.
He might even pull it off. The cliché of the pompous British actor is no longer valid.: Daniel Day-Lewis, Tim Roth, Gary Oldman are all very versatile and have been featured in more US productions than European ones. My schooling in London was based on Stanislawski and Strasberg, which was also Method Acting , yet I have developed an American way of approaching acting. It all got mixed up quite fast.

T: How do you prepare for a role? 
CF: Nowadays I no longer prepare myself as intensively as I did in the past. I used to research for weeks and tried to adapt myself to my character’s situation in advance. When I was in my twenties all young actors trained for boxing rolls, because we were all fascinated by Robert De Niro’s “Raging Bull”. We no longer had the desire to be the typical British actor. It was a real cult that developed around the Method Acting. A whole generation of drama students was hypnotized by it.

T: Why do you think differently today?
CF: There is a danger that the method will eclipse the performance itself. It can have positive results when an actor doesn’t put his role aside after the filming is done, just so he won’t distance himself from the character, but often that gets more attention than the movie itself. When Renée Zelllweger makes changes to her body in a way that would be out of the question for most actresses ;then you can talk about an amazing achievement. And all of us are impressed by the magic of the change. However everyone involved in the movie was bombarded with questions about her diet. The move itself became unimportant. In my opinion the process shouldn’t become the actual product for the public to become interested in.

T: Are you happy in you occupation?
I experience true happiness, if you can call it that, when we rehearse, best on stage. In the moments when I perform for an audience or when I film the finale scene I simply fulfill my contract. I am nothing but a hard worker.

T: Isn’t it time then to think about alternatives?
For many years I have been traveling from one movie set to another and have worked with very many capable directors. And sometimes they really haven’t got a clue . On such occasion I have often thought to make suggestions, in a way that would sort out the misery within 5 minutes. But I didn’t. Maybe it is just an illusion that I could direct a movie. I’ve even dabbled in scriptwriting. But the greatest difficulty is that success dilutes the will to change. It is much easier to accept the next offer of a role when things go well. And the times are very good at the moment. Until I feel a deep dissatisfaction, my alternative plans are put aside.

T: What does acting mean to you?
CF: One thing I can say for certain is that acting doesn’t help at all when you are having emotional problems, it even makes it worse.

T: What do you mean?
CF: Someone who behaves in real life like an actor, a bank assistant for instance, would quickly end up in a mental institution or prison. A lot of successful actors use bad expressions and have no sense for what kind of behavior is acceptable . You can’t really blame them, since we are permanently encouraged to cultivate such feelings in our line of work. Besides nobody cares if the actors becomes a better person or not when the filming is done. If one works in a mine you might inhale toxic fumes and as a flight attendant you might become dehydrated. Actors just have to struggle with bad social manners.

T: You hear over and over again that actors expect therapeutically consequences from their occupation.
CF: A movie isn’t supposed to heal you, it is supposed to work in itself. I remember a famous colleague at the theater, who was completely mad. I won’t mention his name of course. He was on tour in Europe with a play that used a lot of body paint. Someone discovered that he had bruises under his body make-up, which he never washed off. A doctor talking to him for hours wasn’t concerned about the bruises but his mental health and diagnosed him as mentally ill. This colleague had to work mighty hard so he wouldn’t be admitted to an institution. They thought he had already found his institution on stage. If he weren’t so talented he’ d been already in a mental institution. What we actors do is simply mad.

T: What can be done about that? 
CF: We have to pay attention not to lose our sense of reality.

Interview: "On the move: Colin Firth" by Garth Pearce (The Sunday Times)

So what does he drive? A classic Jaguar perhaps, or maybe something discreet from Bentley? No, until a couple of years ago at least, Firth, 46, was to be found behind the wheel of a dependable Morris Minor. He was still happily driving his very first car, bought in his twenties for £2,000. It might not have won over Bridget Jones, but it was good enough for him. “I am not a Bentley sort of chap,” he confides".

He says the new Prius will be ideal for his young family. He and Livia were married in 1997 and now divide their lives between Italy and London with their two boys – Luca, 6, and Mateo, 3....more

Article: " We must stop a deportation that is likely to end in murder" by Colin Firth (The Independent UK)

Since then he has observed all restrictions imposed on him and reported weekly to police. He is also engaged to a woman from the DRC who has exceptional leave to remain. His detention notice includes unsubstantiated charges: "You have previously failed or refused to leave the UK when required to do so." There is no evidence of this. It also reads: "You have not produced satisfactory evidence of your identity, nationality or lawful basis to be in the UK."

People who flee their country never do, as the adjudicator had pointed out. But the HO obviously thinks he is Congolese, or they wouldn't be deporting him there.....more