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Staturesque: The ceiling-scraping Liam Neeson


Liam was interviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival. Source: Canada.com
by Katherine Monk

See the article below

Staturesque: The ceiling-scraping Liam Neeson
A priest, a lion and next, the U.S. president who abolished slavery
 
Katherine Monk
CanWest News Service

Tuesday, September 13, 2005
The more serious he gets, the quieter Liam Neeson becomes. By the time he talks about Hurricane Katrina, race relations in the United States and his forthcoming portrayal of the president who abolished slavery, his deep booming voice fades to a whisper.
For now, the tall, handsome and elegantly grizzled Neeson is easily audible as he settles into a hotel couch at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Here with a new movie from director Neil Jordan, Neeson happily talks about his life as a working actor and the persistent insecurities that come with knowing 80% of one's professional colleagues are out of work.
"The truth is I love the insecurity part of it, it keeps me on my toes," says the already ceiling-scraping thespian. "I think you become bland and predictable without the stress and angst. There's a certain lethargy that sets in."
Neeson has no real reason to be stressed out. He's been busy the past year with an Oscar run for Kinsey, a blockbuster in Batman Begins, voiceover work as Aslan the Lion in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and a few new movies. He's currently preparing to play Abe Lincoln for Steven Spielberg, and now he's in Toronto with Breakfast on Pluto, a survey-style movie that follows the life of a happy-go-lucky cross-dresser in Ireland during the '70s and early '80s.
Neeson does not play the cross-dresser -- that job was for It boy Cillian Murphy (Red Eye, Batman Begins). Neeson plays a priest who finds the abandoned baby Patrick (a.k.a. Kitten) on the church doorstep.
"I've known Neil for 25 years, and he called me two years ago with a small part. I asked him what it was, and he said I want you to play a priest. That was it. I said yes. It was a no-brainer. The only thing I said was you have to squeeze me into 10 days. That was all the time I had."
With so many commitments and offers, Neeson says he and his wife, actress Natasha Richardson, have developed an unspoken system that allows them to talk shop when they need to, bounce ideas and scripts off the other and balance the needs of their two children against the demands of successful careers.
"There's a myriad of stuff for me. It's a constant juggling act, and I won't go more than three weeks without seeing my family, but when I do leave I make sure we talk about it. I tell them what I'm doing, and they ask why. And I tell them it's to pay the bills. Then they ask: 'Do you die?'
"I sort of reduce the whole story to a 60-second overview. I also try to give them a moral reason for doing a certain project. With Breakfast on Pluto, the moral was the importance of family and a boy looking for his mum."
The search for family may be the central thematic line that keeps the audience on the hook, but covering nearly 20 years of history, Breakfast on Pluto picks up other subplots along the way, from intolerance to The Troubles. Though the film constantly verges on tragedy, Jordan brings a decidedly light touch to each scene.
"It's funny, I watched the film for the first time last night, and it struck me how Neil handled those scenes. I lived through The Troubles. I'm a Northern boy. As a student, we would hang out at the pub after lectures, and the troops would come in and order everyone out because of a bomb threat -- and we'd be upset about it. We wondered when we'd be able to get back inside to finish our Guinness, without really thinking about the remote-control robots that would be going in to look for the supposed bomb. We treated it quite lightly because we'd grown up with it. It was part of life."
Though his kids have grown up in relative safety, Neeson says he knows they deal with similar issues -- on a less immediate basis -- through television.
"They know what's happening now in New Orleans. They've seen the pictures."
It's around this part of the conversation, as we head into the dark heart of the American psyche and its reluctance to acknowledge the legacy of slavery, that Neeson takes out his invisible remote and hits the volume button.
First, he talks about his preparations for the role of Lincoln and the incredible honour of just being asked.
"The more I read about the man, the more remarkable he becomes: His stance on keeping the United States -- which was then 33 states -- together, and the whole Civil War, in which 600,000 Americans died. He went through it. He lost two sons, battled manic depression. He was this inspired leader who saw it through when everyone in the world was watching and judging America's experiment with democracy," says Neeson.
"The script isn't in a finished form just yet, but the issues addressed in the film are hardly outdated. I don't think the United States has experienced such a level of embarrassment in recent history as it has with [Katrina]. The so-called leaders of the country are not leading. And now, there's this question of corruption. Of the millions in donations, how much money is really going to go to the people who need it?"
If Neeson's voice grows any softer, he'll be muffled entirely by the white whir of the air conditioning.
"Before Schindler's List, I wouldn't have believed movies had a lot of power for social change. But having seen what happened with Schindler's List, and touring the world with it, it really made me realize the power of images," he says.
"The caveat is responsibility. Knowing how powerful movies can be, we have to be responsible for what we put out there, and ask ourselves why we are telling this story. It's like giving my kids the 60-second rundown: You want to have a moral reason for doing something."

Posted: Di - September 20, 2005 at 08:49 nachm.      

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