YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?

FILM QUOTES POSE AS QUESTIONS. FILM STARS TRY TO COPE.

IN THE CROSSHAIRS THIS MONTH… TOM BURKE

You talkin’ to me?

I did spend a considerable amount of time in my late teens and 20s interviewing myself in front of a mirror. I remember sharing that with some drama students a few years ago, and there was a kind of collective laugh of recognition, particularly among the men. It ranged from imagining one was on Inside the Actors Studio, to something a bit more like daytime TV, you know? They always used to start off quite cordially, and I always used to end up winding myself up. I had to ditch that.

Do you have an ‘off’ switch?

My main concern is that I don’t always have an ‘on’ switch. I have friends who have a magnificent grasp of their own energy cycles. Mine’s always felt incredibly unpredictable to me. But there’s something about the irregularity of it that I’ve grown to love: when you’re feeling hollowed out, sometimes interesting ideas come that don’t when you’re in full motor mode.

So what are you afraid of?

In terms of work, there’s no point where you graduate. Nothing is ever without risk. You can turn up on any day of the week and produce something entirely mediocre. But I like that fear. I think the minute you think you’ve got onto some plane where everything you do is effortlessly brilliant, it’s probably not.

What kind of a man are you?

I immediately start thinking of that in terms of character. They say, ‘Don’t judge your character.’ I have over the years thought, ‘Hang on, how do I frame that in a way that doesn’t make me feel like I’m losing sense of my own sanity?’ I don’t think anyone gets off scot-free in a good movie. Even if you’re playing someone incredibly heroic and maybe, on the surface, quite innocent, you really have to dig a bit deeper. That gives it a complexity which, to me, is more true of real life, as I suppose that’s how I feel – there’s good and bad in everybody.

We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?

There’s an awful lot of literature that’s been around for an awfully long time on what madness is. There’s not an awful lot about what sanity actually is. I don’t know if we know. I suspect it’s an absolute that nobody would be able to sustain. And we’d all have different ideas about what it was anyway. So I think we’re all a bit mad.

What’s your favourite scary movie?

Funnily enough, I didn’t get into horror movies when I was in my teens, which is when a lot of people do. I understand why it’s such a big thing when you’re about to leave school and go into the wider world, because it’s a short, sharp dose of catharsis. You literally see the worst possible outcome. But it hit me in my 30s. I had this fear in me, and I suddenly loved horror films. I would say my fondness for them is peppered with humour. I have an odd tradition of watching The Shining on Boxing Day or Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, and I do find it very funny. I just do. And I suppose, in a more overt way, Evil Dead II. That, to me, is a fun thing to do on Halloween.

QUESTIONS TAKEN FROM:TAXI DRIVER, DEADPOOL, CREED, 12 ANGRY MEN, PSYCHO, SCREAM, SOURCE CODE, THE SOUVENIR

What would you do if you had less than one minute to live?

There’s too many people to try to send a text to. And I don’t tweet. I almost want that as a new WhatsApp group: ‘You’ve got less than a minute to live’, with a ready text in my notebook. I remember getting into a discussion on [the Only God Forgives] set. You have quite weird discussions on set, particularly when it’s a night shoot and you’re waiting around in the cold. It was: ‘How would one like to die? Where would one like to die?’ I remember I said, ‘In a field’, which made Ryan Gosling laugh. But I suppose what it meant to me was, I would want to be as still as possible. I would want to just take the deepest breath of my life, and be at peace with it.

Am I more real than you?

Ah, The Souvenir! There was no scripted dialogue in that film. I mean, occasionally there was, under the scene description, one thing that had to be said, usually a plot point. I said that in the first take we did. The character [Anthony] was based on a person that Joanna [Hogg, director] knew, and she said, ‘That’s exactly the sort of thing he would have said.’ You know, because we shot so much, and so much was improvised, I got to the end of each day and couldn’t remember what I’d said. But that was a line I absolutely took with me the whole shoot as a sense of who he was, and how he placed himself in that world.

KLOKKENLUIDER OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 1 SEPTEMBER.