MM: How did you get involved with Jumpin’ at the Boneyard?
TR: I’d been here doing press for Vincent & Theo when my agent got me the script. I always said I wouldn’t come to America unless I was invited, and this was a good invitation. That was my first film in America.
MM: Tell us about where you grew up, family, school, artistic life, interests.
TR: I grew up in a kind of lower-middle-class area of London. My mother’s a teacher who was also a painter, and my father was a journalist. I did a play in school and became interested in that, then went to art college, dropped out after about a year or so and just signed on the dole and called myself an actor. I just did fringe work after that until I got lucky and got a TV film. That’s kind of it.
MM: Do you get back home much?
TR: Yeah. I try and get back a couple of times in a year. I like going back because now I stay in a hotel.
MM: Do your old buddies come up to you and go, “I saw that. That was fucking cool!”
TR: Or, “That was shit!” Yeah, they know me now. They kind of knew me before I came here, but for different stuff, working with Mike Leigh and stuff like that.
MM: Can you trace the arc of your career progress for us?
TR: I mean, I don’t know. I got very, very lucky. I did that [TV movie] called Made in Britain, after doing a lot of stage, and it was a leading role, an extraordianry role, and it became very controversial. Basically, that was my training, in a sense. I had Chris Menges on camera — steadicam — and he’s one of these extraordinary DPs. He’s a director too. He did The Mission and The Killing Fields, and he taught me about how to work in front of the camera. I got a crash course. I went straight from that to Mike Leigh and straight from Leigh to Stephen Frears, and then I did a bunch of weird shit and then it kind of picked up again with Peter Greenaway and Altman.
MM: What made you know you wanted to go into acting?
TR: I did a play in school as a joke and loved it, absolutely loved it.
MM: What was the play?
TR: It was a musical of Dracula and the experience was extraordinary. I didn’t want to stop.
MM: We read that there was a lot of nervousness going in, that you shit your pants or something.
TR: No, I didn’t shit my pants. I pissed myself when I walked out on stage.
With Harvey Keitel in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992).
MM: At what point in your career did the nervousness go away? Or has it?
TR: I have terrible stage fright. That’s why I haven’t done theater for a long time. But after the first performance, you come off and you’re just a blur, but then you think, well, I could have done that better. You’re already thinking as an actor. And I just took it from there. I went and polished it the next night — and then it stopped, it went away, and I’m thinking, I want to get this back. So then you start pursuing stuff, and I would screen the trades and go and audition for anything. I had no experience to draw on. Funny enough, when I went to see Coppola about the Kerouac thing he’s doing, they pulled out a photograph and hand-written letter that I’d sent to him back in the ’70s they still had it on file, saying you’re a really interesting director and I’d really like to work with you.
MM: Amazing. So it was a question of facing your fear each time, or did the fear go away?
TR: I don’t really get scared when I’m making a film. The process is different. The first day can get a little shaky, but generally you schedule something easy for the first few days and then just get into it. I don’t have it with film, but I really do have it on stage. And generally when you’re doing a 10-week run of of a play, by the end of the first week you’re cool, you’re over it. Then you’re trying to get it back because it gives you the edge. But it goes away. Whatever it takes to get you through that, if that’s what works, that’s what works.
MM: So there’s no terror in film acting? It’s only scary the first day?
TR: It was pretty scary doing the Woody Allen thing, purely because it’s Woody Allen. It comes with that baggage.
MM: That’s what Mira Sorvino said when we interviewed her. She said, “I was scared before when I worked with Robert Redford, but nothing like this. This is New York, and this is Woody Allen.”
TR: He tries to make you very comfortable, but it was hard for me because he wanted me to improvise with an accent that I was trying to do, and also they wouldn’t pay for a dialect coach.
MM: C’mon, Woody, pony up.
TR: Well, you know, that’s how he makes a film. It’s all on the screen.
MM: What’s the auditioning process like for you now? You said Woody just sent a letter and that was that. Do you still have to read for other people?
TR: I refuse to read, and the reason is I’m really, really bad at it. I’ve lost a lot of work that way. But I also would lose a lot of work if I read. So it balances itself out. I’ll meet with anybody, and I do, but I won’t read because I’m terrible at it. It’s embarrassing.
MM: Is there a particular directorial style do you prefer?
TR: I don’t have a preference. As long as they’re good. One thing I don’t like is: stand there, say that line, move over there, say that line — that kind of directing. Because you might as well have a mannequin in there. And a lot of first timers make that mistake because they’re nervous.
MM: A lot of our readers are aspiring directors, and some of them are trying to make movies on less than $100,000. Do you think that whole trend has peaked, trying to make movies for $25,000 or $50,000? You mentioned inside that a lot of studios are finding that they can throw money at a guy like Kevin Smith—
TR: —Yeah, and the first thing that happened with James Gray after Little Odessa was to get offered Casper
the Ghost to write.
MM: Why? How would they make that connection?
TR: I know. But he had a meeting with Spielberg and that’s why he went to the meeting. He wanted to know what the hell they were thinking.
MM: What did they say?
TR: They said, “Well, you know how to write characters.”
MM: If you love a character, if you love the director, but you’ve seen this all before, would you still do the movie?
TR: Well, Rob Roy was kind of like that. It was good guys, bad guys, the fight to the death at the end and all that stuff, but the character was so much fun. On top of which it was going to be Liam (Neeson) who is a friend of mine, and John Hurt and Brian Cox and Eric Stoltz and Michael the director, they’re all friends so you kind of figure well, I gotta do one, I’ve got to pay the rent, it might as well be under these circumstances. And the character was delicious. I could really go with it. Harvey Keitel’s a great example of that. There are times when you have to bite the bullet and do something. He calls it his whoring. He does Sister Act and Bad Lieutenant. It’s a good balancing act.
MM: There aren’t many actors who have that ability.
TR: No. You want to work towards that.
MM: He’s like the Michael Caine of American film.
TR: Michael Caine did as much weird shit as Harvey does. I think a lot of famous actors say that they’ll [take roles in independent films], broaden their horizons. Well they’re full of shit. They don’t take the movies. They just don’t do ’em. I find more New York actors, Steve Buscemi, people like that, will want to do varied stuff and explore things. But most people out in Hollywood really just want to make money. But Harvey’s very passionate. And he’s on a roll, too, an incredible roll.
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