Cinema Confidential Interview - Red Dragon (2002)

von **AmonFan** » 02.03.2006, 18:50

FROM THE NEWS ARCHIVES OF CINEMA CONFIDENTIAL

INTERVIEW: Ralph Fiennes of "Red Dragon"
POSTED ON 10/03/02 AT 11:30 A.M.
BY ETHAN AAMES

By Julie Wohlberg in New York City

Before we get into the intellectual side of your performance, Ralph, you look buff. Did you spend a lot of time pumping up for this performance?

I did, yes. He’s described as a body builder and even though I couldn’t get as big as maybe a body builder should be, I tried to put on as much as I could.

Were you lifting some impressive weight?

Impressive for me, but not for some of the guys I see down at the gym.

Was it like Gold’s Gym in California?

No, I worked with a guy called Paul McCauley who was responsible for getting Tom Hanks to lose weight for "Cast Away." He’s a great guy, and he kicked my ass every day for 2 hours, and I had to eat a lot, to put on…it was quite a strain. It was quite different from the way I normally work out. I like to keep fit, but I never lift very heavy weights.

I think you kind of surprised everybody here. This isn’t the kind of role that people would normally associate with you. Why did you suddenly decide to do something really different?

Well, it appealed to me on many levels, and I think it’s a great role in terms of way extreme behavior, with the tattoos. The look was very particular, with the scarred face, but principally it appealed to me because you get to play the many sides of the guy. He’s not just a cut-out psychopath. There’s this whole relationship with Emily Watson, which, when I read the screenplay, I thought made it a part that I really wanted to play, because I could play his confusion and his uncertainty, and how to deal with this woman who’s very direct. She’s very open, and she can’t see him, so in his mind she can’t judge him, because I think he thinks of himself as being very deformed, even though in reality he’s not too bad. I think his esteem is very low, and that is why he’s killing people and wants to feel omnipotent, and suddenly this very honest, open, and simple approach from this woman threatens him, throws him off, in his head, throws him off balance.

How far did you go to get in touch with the serial killer mind? Did you do some dark exploration and research?

There’s all kinds of nasty things under my floor. No, I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head, they were quite disturbing. There were these memoirs by one guy who’s in prison now, writing about deliberate manipulation and humiliation of people, which he was very proud of. Very disturbing stuff, about how he enjoyed, it was a link to that very detached way of thinking, that “I will manipulate people to do this for me so I can kill them.” This was a guy who enjoyed people weeping and begging and crying for their lives before he killed them or strangled them. And he would get aroused and ejaculate while he was killing them, and he enjoyed getting an erection while they were dying. So you get into that sort of stuff, and then it’s not funny, it’s kind of upsetting, but because it’s something coming from them, you get a foothold into the way that someone like Dalahyde would think.

Did you design your teeth? Did you get involved in that?

Yeah, well, I had to be really clear about what having a cleft palate does, and if you’ve had it badly fixed, how you would really have your hard palate brought together but would have really no teeth. So I actually had for most of the film, I wore good-looking dentures, which is what he would have worn, and they would be, even if you can’t see it, connected to a prosthetic that would fill up the hole in the roof of the mouth, so you can talk normally. But then he has developed his own weird thing about putting in his grandmother’s teeth, which he puts in when he murders people, he bites with them. I also found out that it’s very hard to wear someone else’s dentures. This one dentist, who made the prosthetics, told me that it was impossible to wear someone else’s dentures, but then at the same time he said, “Well, you can pretty much make anything fit into your mouth if you practice at it.

"Red Dragon" opens this Friday in theaters everywhere.

http://www.cinecon.com/news.php?id=0210032