Interview: "Colin Firth First Person Singular" (Filmink Australia)

The March issue of FILMINK is available from February 15th across Australia, but you can buy the magazine now direct by emailing an inquiry to dina@filmink.com.au

This Interview is published thanks to FILMINK,

Australia's best movie magazine.

Interview: "Colin Firth and Tom Ford make 'A Single Man' one of their single great achievements " by Carla Hay (The Examiner)

Colin Firth and Tom Ford at the Toronto International Film Festival Press Conference for "A Single Man"


Colin, what’s your favorite color?
Firth: What’s my favorite color? Blue.


And how did it feel pulling the clothing off for your nude scenes?
Firth: [He laughs.] I preferred having it on.
Ford: Are you sure you don’t work for a U.K. paper? That sounds like a U.K. question.

Colin, was it difficult to shoot that scene when George gets the phone call that his lover has died in a car accident?
Firth: I find I can’t answer questions about that scene. I don’t know how it was arrived at. I do it happened the night Barack Obama was elected. It wasn’t the easiest day to be grief-stricken. I don’t know. I don’t remember.


We love to get on the set and kind of get emotionally ready. You go, "I’ve got the tears coming. Roll the camera. Here we are. I’m in the zone now." Roll camera. Cry. Histrionics. Or whatever emotion they’re trying to conjure. What I find difficult — and I remember we had exercises in this when I was a drama student — come into the room in one condition and be in another by the end of it. Something has to happen to change your mood. You can’t pre-prepare the end. So basically, I have to start the phone call happy, get a series of shocks, allow that to percolate, and end it in a state of complete devastation with the camera rolling. Tom let it go on; he let the magazine roll out, I think, for about 11 minutes...more

Interview: Colin Firth triumphs with an extraordinarily unique performance in 'A Single Man' by Carlay Hay (The Examiner)

In a recent New York Times article about you said that Tom Ford called you "fat" before you started filming "A Single Man." What kind of changes to your diet or fitness regime did you make to get in better shape?I didn’t do much change to the diet. I just ate less, I guess. I haven’t actually spoken about what version of that is true. The subtext is definitely the thing, but Tom, if he said that, I filtered it out. I didn’t hear it. 
He tended to handle me with honeyed tones. [He imitates Tom Ford’s voice] "You look great, really great. If you want to get a trainer, he’ll come to your house every day. I’ll pay for it." That means, "You’re fat." Whether Tom remembers literally having said it or having it euphemistically, it’s the same. And I guess he did me a favor: one final push in the war against gravity in my late 40s. It’s probably helpful...more

Interview: "Colin Firth plays against type" by Katherine Monk (Canwest News Service)

Warmth radiating behind a cool exterior is a natural draw and, for Firth, it seems to be a natural state of being, because, at some level, you can tell he doesn't care about all this entertainment business hullabaloo.

Just watching him entertain questions from reporters as he sits quietly - and ever so elegantly - in his deco chair at the Toronto International Film Festival, Firth is the embodiment of alpha male tolerance: He's just rolling with the punches as he greets the non-stop parade of inquisitors more...

Interview:"Complexity of character excites Firth" by David Mermelstein (Variety)

"I was faced with a character who has a fastidious exterior but within that experiences despair, frivolity, laughter, lust, regret, terror, melancholy, serenity -- all in the same day he's experiencing hysterical grief," says the actor. "I don't know how many roles I've had that offer that range of emotion and experience."

"I felt at liberty," he says. "In roles where the writing's not very good, you have to suppress things. It's frustrating playing someone stupider than you, but I had the measure of George: He was smart, and the way he masks his massive despair is poignant. That obsession with external perfection is a sign of panic. He has to control his exterior world because his interior one is chaos. His precision is all desperate measures more....

Interview: "Colin Firth, feeling 'Single' by Tina Daunt (LA Times)

"There was a serenity on the set," Firth said. "I was given the space to engage and to feel it. Tom didn't bombard us with instructions; we weren't given any really. But you knew by the way he said, 'That was great,' if it was or wasn't great.

"The movie is about isolation and the agony of loving someone who isn't there anymore," he said. "It's universal. It doesn't matter what your sexual [orientation] is. Love is love." more....

Interview: "A Single Man" Colin Firth by Ian Freer (Empire)

Interview: "Colin Firth's discomfort in skin-tight spandex for A Christmas Carol animated movie" (Telegraph UK)

"The spandex that we were put in bulges in all the places you don't want it to bulge and resolutely refuses to bulge in the places you want it to bulge," Firth said.

''I tried every form of fruit and vegetable available to me in my trailer, every culinary item, juicers, blenders and I thought 'well no, it's the spandex so it's obviously not me I'm fine,' and then I walk into Jim, hung like a waterbuffalo.''

''I tried every form of fruit and vegetable available to me in my trailer, every culinary item, juicers, blenders and I thought 'well no, it's the spandex so it's obviously not me I'm fine,' and then I walk into Jim, hung like a waterbuffalo.''....more

Interview: "Colin Firth on A Christmas Carol" by Simon Brew (Den of Geek)

Do you really hate Christmas?
No, I don't! I've just said [at the press conference for the film] that there's something that happens every Christmas that brings out the Scrooge in everybody! That's fair enough. There's always some person you don't want to hear singing a novelty song in the now increasingly three months leading up to Christmas. Please, never let that be me!

Christmas used to be one special day.
Now it's become three special months! And I'm complicit in that this year! It's only the 3rd of November, and I'm going to be switching the lights on. I have to say, though, how much of a Scrooge do you have to be to not get some thrill of pleasure from switching on the lights on Regent Street. It's fantastic. I know it's early, but hey, Disney need a good run! [laughs]....more

Interview: "A singular man" by Susan Chenery (The Australian)

"LAST time we met you may have noticed me looking at you strangely," the email said when Colin Firth went online one morning. "This is why," continued the email, going on to offer him a lead role in a film.


Trouble was, the email was not from any film director of whom Firth had heard. It was from fashion designer Tom Ford. "I didn't know what to think," Firth admits. "Like everybody else I thought, 'Isn't he to do with the fashion business, eyewear and all that sort of thing?' " Firth's scepticism was not unfounded; panic, in fact, might have been an appropriate response....more

Interview: "Dickens’s Victorian London Goes Digital" by Dave Kehr (NY Times)

“A couple of technicians flew out to Shepperton Studios and started to take data on my face and body,” recalled Colin Firth, who plays Scrooge’s nephew Fred in the new film, “which meant standing in my underwear on a platform while something that looked like a laser beam scanned me up and down. I turned around and there was a kind of a gray, clay figure on a screen of me, with all of the shapes and contours. And then they did something similar with my face. They had me do a million different facial expressions while a camera took pictures of me.


“Then a couple of months later I was in Los Angeles having more stuff like this done,” Mr. Firth continued. “You go into rooms with lenses on every surface of every wall. They give you a heavy spandex suit covered in dots that are read by some sort of beam that shines across the room you are in. This room is not called the set, but ‘the volume.’...more

Interview: "The dashing Mr. Firth" by Marianne Gray (Couriermail Australia)

He speaks Italian - his wife is the Italian documentary producer Livia Giuggioli - knows Italy well and has three children of his own.
"You don't consciously try to equate your own life with your work, but there was a familiarity here, with ideas and feelings about fatherhood, that just resonated when we were doing it.


But talking about his private life is not something you'll catch Firth doing willingly.
"The thought of someone wanting to write about me and my life makes my blood run cold," he says. "Even if an article is brilliantly written, it always feels reductive and surely we all resist being defined. "I would prefer it if you exhumed my life after I've gone." More

Interview: Michael Winterbottom on Genova (FILMINK Australia)

The November issue of FILMINK is available from October 16 across Australia,

 online or by emailing dina@filmink.com.au'.

This Interview is published thanks to FILMINK,

 Australia's best movie magazine.

Interview: Colin Firth masters the art of getting older, wiser and better (The Examiner)

Congratulations on winning the award for best actor at this year’s Venice Film Festival. People seemed to be impressed that you accepted the award in Italian. Your accent was pretty flawless. Did you pick up any tips from your wife on how to speak Italian? [Firth’s wife, Livia Giuggioli, is from Italy.]
No, she hasn’t taught me a damn thing! [He laughs.] I did know [I won the award] a few hours before. Word gets around a little bit. I’m not supposed to say that. The camera wasn’t on me when they announced it, so I didn’t have to do one those [he does a fake surprised expression on his face]. I knew nothing about [which film] won the Golden Lion Award or anybody else’s.
But I didn’t have to fake how I felt. Even when I talk about it now, still, it makes me a little speechless. What I first thought was, "That’s why people cry at the Oscars!" I’d never understood it. I wasn’t about to cry, but I can see why people get their breath taken away. It really is unexpected. It disarms. More

Interview: Colin Firth doesn't always have to play the romantic (Vancouver Sun)

"There are certain times in one's career when you take a role out of necessity. You just need a job. That's a very real concern for almost every actor. But the luxury of being employed on a regular basis is you can afford to, you know, evaluate each project and what it means to you," he says.

"That's not to say I think I've made some shabby choices in the past. It just means I can make a noble choice over a shabby one."

The eyes smile. The mouth does not. More

Interview: Colin Firth: Making Dorian Gray Was Challenging (Sky News)

The pair say they've become good friends but that hasn't stopped Colin from being honest about Ben's flaws.

"He's a real talent, I could see that from the first few scenes we worked together. But he keeps coming back to me for advice and when I offer it I just see this disappointment on his face every time. But he doesn't learn." 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