Rufus Sewell, who stars in the haunted-jungle tale VINYAN (now out on DVD from Sony Pictures; see an exclusive clip below), thinks acting is a sham. More to the point, he agrees with writer extraordinaire David Mamet that acting schools are just out to rip you off—including London’s School of Speech and Drama, which he himself attended. However, he does acknowledge the benefits of such institutions as well.
“I believe it’s definitely worth getting that training, but I also don’t disagree with Mamet,” Sewell says. “It’s all a damn sham anyway, but if you want a part in the sham, you go along with it to a certain extent. I had no idea on how to become an actor, and it was very useful to be in a room with a lot of aspiring performers and have someone come along and look at us. If you act for three years with minimum risk, you end up learning a lot, I believe. I agree on both points—Mamet and my own experience, where acting school was beneficial.”
One thing is certain: Sewell can definitely act. VINYAN, the latest feature entry in a résumé that also includes DARK CITY, BLESS THE CHILD, SHE CREATURE and THE ILLUSIONIST, benefits considerably from his performance, and stands as a more layered, emotionally invested film than director Fabrice Du Welz’s well-received 2004 underground hit CALVAIRE/THE ORDEAL. VINYAN is a more divisive movie as well; Du Welz does the unexpected here, setting out to make a slightly phantasmagorical feature that explores deeper psychological terrain, which has had genre-festival audiences scratching their heads.
Sewell, who plays bereaved father and husband Paul Belhmer, isn’t surprised. “I always imagined it would when I read the script,” he notes, “because [Du Welz] has a lot of fans from a specific genre, and this film isn’t actually any of those things. It’s quite hard to define.”
The difficulty in marketing such a potentially undefinable film is something Sewell can sympathize with, yet he feels VINYAN might be unfairly labeled. “In order to sell it, what is often the case with stranger, less distinct movies is that the people responsible try to represent it as one particular thing,” he notes. “So the people who see it on the strength of that are wrongly disappointed.”
Sewell is largely an instinctual actor, and ultimately he is driven by character and not the requirements of genre. He simply connects with a project, and is not really concerned with how it can be molded to fit a specific category. “What I loved about VINYAN when I read it was that it wasn’t…well, I certainly didn’t see it as horror,” he says. “Some of the elements did remind me of some of my favorite creepier movies—like an amalgamation of DON’T LOOK NOW and bits of JACOB’S LADDER—but certainly not a horror film by any stretch of the imagination.”
Sewell’s first impression of Du Welz’s script, which centers on a couple who venture out into the dark recesses of the Thai rain forest to search for their child—believed dead after being washed away in the great tsunami of 2004—was quite different. “When I read it, I didn’t imagine it as particularly gory,” he recalls. “To me, what was very powerful was its overall pervasive emotion. It’s a very sad and very moving story to me, and very powerful psychologically, and I hoped it would not fall into one or the other camp of a specific type so it could be an easily sellable movie.”
Sewell, who has a son of his own, isn’t sure if having a child helped him respond to the tragic loss that Paul and his wife Janet, played by Emmanuelle Béart, endure in VINYAN. “I don’t like to dissect why I feel a certain way,” he says. “I very much sympathized with the characters’ plight, particularly Paul’s. He’s so incredibly stuck in this kind of thankless situation, and is desperately trying to hold it together for the sake of his wife. He’s incredibly worried about her and doesn’t know what to do; he doesn’t want to support her delusions, but at the same time he doesn’t want to be accused of not doing every possible thing to get their son back. I very much felt for him, and it wasn’t that I’ve never been in a similar situation, but I didn’t want to toy with my emotional memories. You don’t want to screw around with stuff like that.”
What hasn’t been explored in many reviews of VINYAN is that its story is ultimately about closure. As a couple and as parents, Paul and particularly Janet cannot put the loss of their son behind them, and they rashly and desperately embark on an expedition to track down a remote orphanage of forgotten children in the hopes of finding him. Being Westerners, Paul and Janet’s inability to process what has happened conflicts with the Eastern view that death is simply a part of life. “Its harder to get closure on it, because there’s no real room for [death],” Sewell explains. “People don’t actually know what death is in our society. When people die, most of the time, people’s reaction is to walk around in bewilderment, because we haven’t really factored it into our society. We’ve kind of cartoonized it.
“People don’t really get what death is,” he continues. “That’s one of the problems when people close to you die—no one actually knows what it means. We’ve seen it in films, where people are dispatched with explosions and such, but we haven’t really factored it into our lives, so we don’t really understand it. It’s a very infantile view of death that we seem to have.”
While filming VINYAN in Thailand, Sewell witnessed first-hand how Western hang-ups about death don’t really factor into the Eastern mindset. “The way that people spoke about their losses was very different from how we speak about such things in the West,” he explains. “People kind of have a ‘camera sense’ here, by which I mean they have an emotional reaction and they’re aware of the emotion they’re supposed to have, and they get caught in between the two. People are kind of television-like in the way they respond in the West. In Thailand, I found people to be surprisingly forthright and unemotional in their accounting of extraordinary stories of how they had lost loved ones.”
coco makes this comment
Wed 08 Apr 2009 00:41:39 CDT