The Ghost Writer

Speaking of dreadful weather, Brosnan and co-star Ewan McGregor — who was entertaining another reporter in an adjoining room, perhaps 20 yards away — had been enlisted to try to normalize the climate surrounding Roman Polanski’s new film “The Ghost Writer.” With Polanski under house arrest in Switzerland awaiting possible extradition to the United States for sentencing in his late-’70s sex-crime conviction, Brosnan and McGregor had clearly been tasked with refocusing the discussion on the film as a canny, enjoyable political thriller, and on its director’s impeccable craftsmanship rather than the ugly and tragic details of his private life. One could argue, in fact, that all the controversy and conversation has only helped “The Ghost Writer,” which has opened strongly in New York and Los Angeles, and won Polanski the best-director award at the recent Berlin Film Festival. (According to producer Alain Sarde, Polanski remarked that even if he could have gone to Berlin, he wouldn’t have: “The last time I went to a festival to get a prize I ended up in jail.”)

I had been instructed that Brosnan would have no comment on Polanski’s current legal predicament or on the disturbing act of sexual predation to which he pleaded guilty in 1977. Indeed he politely declined to discuss all such matters and has gone only a little further with other reporters. (“The life of Mr. Polanski has been a very turbulent one and one fraught with tragedy,” he told David Chen of SlashFilm.)

Rather than beat my head against that wall, I invited Brosnan to expound on his on-set collaboration with Polanski. Perhaps that’s illuminating in a different way (and perhaps not). Brosnan’s character in “The Ghost Writer,” disgraced former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, bears an obvious resemblance to Tony Blair. As Brosnan observes, he ended up “being an actor playing an actor playing the role of the British prime minister.” But Lang also bears a bizarre and accidental resemblance to Polanski himself — he’s a charismatic ladies’ man, well known around the world, who has fled into exile in a foreign country to avoid facing the consequences of his past misdeeds. (Pedantic footnote: Since Polanski is a native-born French citizen, he hasn’t literally been an exile or an expatriate since leaving the U.S.)

It must be a little strange to come back to this film, which I know you completed more than a year ago, and have it become a major news event because of these, let’s say, extraneous factors.

It’s always like that with films, in a certain sense. You revisit them with members of the press, sometime later, and you can’t even remember them. As soon as they’re done, they’re done. Nevertheless, with something like “The Ghost Writer,” and a director like Roman Polanski, who is the finest expression of artistic intention — he’s quite unique, and it’s somewhat indelible, the experience of working with him.

So it was the idea of working with Polanski that drew you to this film?

Absolutely. That’s the reason I said yes to this project. I was quite taken with the challenge and the offer from him to play this ex-British prime minister. That’s the last thing I ever expected to get, being a good Irishman by birth and heart. I saw the humor in that too. I thought it was quite ironic. I never asked Mr. Polanski, “Why me?” Maybe next time I speak to him, I will: “By the way, why did you cast me?” Ultimately, because he thought I was a good enough actor to pull this off, but with Roman, he’s always dealing with metaphor and humor.

Right. Well, having the man who played the most famous fictional British secret agent play the disgraced former prime minister…

An ex-James Bond playing the ex-British prime minister! It all seems to sort of be making sense now!

We don’t want to give anything away, because this is a film that takes quite a few twists and turns. But maybe that’s a subterranean clue to the nature of the character.

Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure it’ll be spoken of or mentioned, as we have now. But I thought it was a great book by Robert Harris. I thought it was a wonderful page-turner. These are not the kinds of books I read, but nevertheless they seem to find me. “The Tailor of Panama,” “The Fourth Protocol” — there’s a ribbon of them in my career, and I find them very enjoyable to be part of. When they’re constructed well, they’re great pieces to play and great worlds to exist in as an actor. And then, of course, Polanski. It all goes together so well. He was very sincere and genuine to the book, because the book was so well constructed by Harris.

What is Polanski like on the set?

You want to be your best for the fellow, as you want to be your best for every director. But none more so than Polanski, because he’s so intense, and so into every aspect of the filmmaking. He gives you line readings, which can be quite abhorrent to an actor. To me, I found it quite humorous, because his accent is so Polish and so thick, it doesn’t quite fit into the context of playing the British prime minister.

[Unreproducible "Polanski accent":] “Don’t play it like that! It goes like this: ‘Give my friend a Calvados!’” I had to say, “Roman, this is doing my head in.” You have to match wits with him.

Well, I know he started out as an actor in Poland in the ’50s, in films by Andrzej Wajda and others. He’s acted a lot, actually.

Oh, he’s still an actor. He still loves to play out all the roles. When you enter onto the stage, you’re in the domain of Polanski. It’s his world. He rules. He ordains every movement and gesture and color, the look of the piece. We shot in Berlin, we shot at Babelsberg [the oldest studio in the world, where many classic German films were made]. That’s a potent place of cinema and structure and time.

Right. So that big beach house we see in the film, which is supposed to be in Massachusetts, that was all built in a studio.

All built in a studio, with the classic green screen for the Cape Cod landscape outside. So you’re just looking at green when you’re sequestered on set.

Is that peculiar, working that way? You’re used to doing location work, aren’t you?

Not at all, not at all. You know, you’re trained as an actor from a very early age to use your imagination, stand on an empty stage and see Birnam Wood come toward you, see the tree of Godot, or see whatever. Well, you’ve got to have the tree of Godot, sorry! But you know what I’m saying.

So it was more like doing theater, maybe, than most of the films you’ve made.

Yeah, it’s a very theatrical experience. Not that I’ve done that much green-screen. I did a bit in the world of Bond. Babelsberg, I think, gave us all a feeling of the past, and the presence of Polanski gave us a feeling of the past. You’re working with a man who’s 76 years of age, and who’s acquitting himself on the set like a first-time film director who’s passionate for his first movie, and who’s deeply knowledgeable about the camera and the presence of actors before the camera, and how to position them for the most effective storytelling.

That set alone, that bunkerlike set, that gave us a lot of ambience. Then, when we were outside — I mean we weren’t outside that much; Ewan was outside a bit, when he rides his bike around the island — the desolation of the landscape informs the film. Certainly the film ends on a note of desolation and foreboding.

Your character bears at least some resemblance to a living ex-prime minister, and certainly Robert Harris’ novel has been interpreted as an attack on the Blair legacy. How much or how little did you think about that?

Well, that was my first question to Roman Polanski when we met in Paris over lunch: “Am I playing Mr. Tony Blair?” He said, “No, you’re not playing Tony Blair.” However, all emblems and indications and roads seem to point toward that particular man. I had to hang my hat on someone, so I looked at footage of the performance of Mr. Tony Blair playing the British prime minister, and then I looked to the pages of the novel and the script, the character of Adam Lang, who leaves university, who is a fantastic actor, who is a star prime minister, a populist. Then you come to the role of you being an actor playing an actor playing the role of the British prime minister. So it becomes this kind of play within the play. This kind of Max Escher-like transformation.

The character of Ruth [Lang's wife, played by Olivia Williams] really gave me a lot. When I looked at her malevolence within the piece, you know, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth came to mind. None of which was spoken about with Olivia or with Roman. But just the sensation of drama, of Jacobean drama, was very present.

Yes, the portrait of a political marriage the two of you create is very complicated, very tricky, full of nuance. You mean to say you never really discussed it?

She and I had one dinner when she got into town. I remember that my day’s work was over, and I called her. She’s a true character. She said, “Hello, darling, let’s have dinner!” She’s a very passionate actor, Olivia. We spoke a little about the life and history of the characters, but beyond that — you look at the text and you play a role.

Well, actors on your side of the Atlantic are mostly free of that American method-acting disease, where you have to write an 800-page biography of the character…

God, no! No! I was taught in the Method by some of the finest teachers of the Method. I’ve worked the Method and lived the Method, but at the end of the day, if you understand the role, you know how to act the role — pretend the role — then so be it. There are times when, of course, you do use yourself. The age-old adage: What if I were prime minister? What if I were in this situation? The wolves are at the door, the long knives are out, you’re running for your life, and you realize you’re adrift politically, spiritually, emotionally. You need your wife. And she’s not there. How does that feel?

I need to wrap this up by asking you at least one Bond-related question. You’re a member of a pretty exclusive club, the former 007s. How do you think Daniel Craig has done with the role?

Well, I know Daniel is a fine actor, and you have to be a good actor to play the role, that’s for sure. It’s not something easy. I mean, you know, Sean [Connery] is the man I look to all the time — he was the Bond for me. I haven’t seen Daniel’s performances as Bond. I never really watched the Bond films, to tell you the truth. When I was playing the role, I didn’t watch myself. My sons are always saying, “Dad, why don’t you watch James Bond with me?” But I have better things to do.

If I tell you that “Beginners” is rooted in Mills’ own story, and that after Mills’ mother died a decade or so ago his father came out to him, found a much younger lover, and spent a few years as a Pride-flag-flying, book-club-joining, socially active Los Angeles gay senior before his own death, that leads you toward one understanding of what kind of movie it is. Christopher Plummer plays the dad, Hal, in a generous and heartbreaking performance that I hope will not be forgotten come Oscar time, and Ewan McGregor plays the autobiographical protagonist, a depressed and lonely graphic designer named Oliver. I have no idea how the public perceives McGregor at this point, and he’s certainly not the red-hot leading man he once was. But I can’t be alone in thinking he’s getting better and better all the time. He seeks out understated roles in mid-size quality films (“I Love You Phillip Morris,” “The Ghost Writer,” now this), and he has that mysterious Dean-Brando-Pacino ability to take a moment when nothing is officially happening and make it urgent and powerful.

But that description also might make it sound as if “Beginners” were a sweet, slight personal story, with a possibly tedious political agenda, and doesn’t convey anything about how subtle and beautifully crafted it is. Drawing on his experience as a designer and his knowledge of film history, Mills has created a complex work of collage and montage, with a mixed-up chronology that breathes naturally and never feels arty or artificial. Indeed, while “Beginners” isn’t one-fifth as showy or as labored as Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” — the standard of comparison for all self-reflective family films at the moment — it actually considers many of the same questions about mortality and loss and memory and parenthood, and employs a similar narrative strategy (minus the dinosaurs and the direct address to supernatural entities). Mills’ direction and Kaspar Tuxen’s natural-light camerawork feel lo-fi and naturalistic, but from its first moments “Beginners” is an ingenious construction that tells several stories at once.

We begin in 2003, the film’s present tense, when Oliver is cleaning out the house after Hal’s death (and if you’ve ever gone through that particular out-of-body experience, you’ll identify with him right away). We can see that Oliver is shattered, but we don’t know anything yet about Hal or their shared and separate lives, or about the specific nature of Oliver’s sadness. Beginning with death, the end of an individual’s life, has a peculiar elegance, in that it reminds us that human life is not primarily a question of individuals, and that places and objects and memories and threads of consciousness connect us across generations. From that point Mills puts the story together in fragments, going forward into Oliver’s tenuous relationship with Anna (Mélanie Laurent) — a winsome French actress he meets at a Halloween party where he’s dressed as Sigmund Freud and carrying his dad’s adorable Jack Russell terrier — and backward into several levels of personal and social history. We get bits of Oliver’s childhood, in which his dad is notably absent and his eccentric, showboat mother (Mary Page Keller) dominates the scene, we get highlights from Hal’s brief but ecstatic career as an out gay septuagenarian and heartbreaking scenes from his fatal illness, we get startlingly effective little slide shows on the recent history of American culture and on the climate of intolerance that drove Hal into the closet in the first place.

See, here’s the thing about the potentially slight and distinctly personal material of “Beginners,” or its whimsical tone, or the message of love and tolerance it might be said to impart. Mills is fully aware of those things and embraces them, which is exactly the right decision. I’ve already mentioned that Oliver’s slow-brewing romance with Anna involves a Freud costume and an irresistible pooch, but I haven’t brought up the roller-skating, the late-night graffiti bombing or the fact that Anna communicates (at least at first) entirely without speaking. (Or that Arthur, the Jack Russell, occasionally communicates with Oliver via subtitles: “Tell her that the darkness is about to swallow us if we don’t do something.”) They’re like the lovers out of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” mixed with the ones from Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” dropped into the contemporary Los Angeles of “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” and they’d be utterly intolerable if their emotions weren’t so raw and so real. And also if Mills didn’t interrupt their story to remind us that Anna and Oliver have the freedom to have a wounded, noncommittal, angst-ridden 21st-century relationship because they don’t have to go fight in a world war, they’re not being persecuted for being gay or Jewish, and nobody expected them to move to the suburbs and start making babies before they turned 30.

But if Anna is Oliver’s future tense — in real life, Mills is married to the artist and filmmaker Miranda July — the heart of the story lies in his relationship with Hal, which does not entirely conclude with the latter’s death. (Another thing those of you who have lost parents will identify with.) It’s clear that this relaxed, funny and affectionate dad, who is slowly dying of cancer but won’t admit it, is almost a stranger to Oliver, mostly for reasons that have little to do with his sexuality. We see a few different iterations of the hilarious coming-out scene, by the way, in which Hal tells Oliver, “I don’t want to just be theoretically gay — I want to do something about it!” But there’s no sitcom-style cutaway to Oliver’s shocked or hushed or sympathetic response, partly because it’s just not that kind of movie but mostly because he’s not a guy who lets his emotions show that easily.

After Hal goes to a gay disco for the first time, he phones Oliver to ask what kind of music they were playing. “That sounds like house music, Dad,” says Oliver, and Hal writes it down by the phone so he won’t forget the term. Hal gives Oliver a Pride decal and Oliver has to explain to him that, yes, he and the rest of the world knew what that rainbow-striped flag was years and years before Hal did. When Oliver sees his father laughing with his gay-movie-club buddies or passionately making out with his personal-trainer boyfriend, Andy (Goran Visnjic), he views the older man not with dismay or bafflement but with a kind of wonder. He realizes how much of himself Hal sacrificed to play the role of father and husband for all those years, and that rather than feeling bitter about it Hal has chosen to embrace the tail end of his life, not to mention a gay culture he can barely comprehend, with a joie de vivre that Oliver can’t even fake on his best days.

It’s probably tearing Mike Mills up that his dad isn’t here to see “Beginners,” both because it’s a wrenching testimonial of how much he loved him and learned from him and because it’s a marvelously funny, touching, deceptively casual and marvelously constructed work of cinema, miles beyond the arty, A-for-effort potential of “Thumbsucker.” In one scene that got to me more than any other in this heartbreaking movie, the tranked-out Hal mistakes the objects in his hospital room — family photos, the smoke alarm, some decorative painting — for the elements of an art installation. Hal was a museum curator, and he’s right of course: Those things do fit together in some mysterious pattern. Allow yourself to see them in the right way, and they’re beautiful.

“Beginners” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.