When people talk about Liam Neeson, the first thing that comes up is his size.
Understandable: he’s 6ft 4in, in a business that makes Tom Cruise look like
a giant. And then they’ll say, ‘He’s such a gentle man’ – as if that makes
him a freak of nature, when in truth, big men are often slow to rankle,
having nothing much to prove except forbearance. It’s unarguable: he is an
imposing figure. People look up to him, literally. He towers over Ewan
McGregor, Orlando Bloom and Harrison Ford. Acting opposite Jodie Foster in
Nell, he might as well have been playing King Kong.
Then you take in those shrewd, pale blue eyes and the web of warm, friendly
lines around them; the big, bold brow, so often furrowed with concern; and
the lank, still somehow boyish hair (even now, at 55). It becomes clearer
why he has played almost as many priests as warriors over the past quarter
of a century. For Martin Scorsese, in Gangs of New York, he was both:
“Priest” Vallon, a crucifix in one hand and a blade in the other. For Steven
Spielberg, he was the saintly Oskar Schindler; and George Lucas cast him as
Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Jedi mentor, Qui-Gon Jinn, in the Star Wars series. Not bad
for a college dropout from Co Antrim. Raised a Catholic in predominantly
Protestant Ballymena, Neeson has kept the faith. “The more times you say the
Our Father or the Hail Mary, the more it actually reveals the truth to you,”
he says. Who better then, to speak for lordly Aslan in The Chronicles of
Narnia? And when it was his turn for a cameo on The Simpsons, it was only
meet and proper that Neeson played Father Sean, in an episode titled The
Father, the Son and the Holy Guest Star.
I meet him at the Toronto film festival – in fact, the first time I see him,
it’s in the gents, with his arms around Viggo Mortensen. A little research
suggests they’re probably remi-niscing about a misbegotten enterprise by the
name of Ruby Cairo. You would think they’d rather forget it. (Everyone else
has.) Neeson is headlining Seraphim Falls, a revenge western he has made
with a near contemporary, Pierce Brosnan. The two Irishmen arrive together
at the premiere and the crowd whoops it up. It’s a toss-up who’s the bigger
attraction, Oskar Schindler or James Bond. But Neeson has the height
advantage, smiling beatifically over the heads of the autograph-hunters. So
what if he was in the running to play 007 before Brosnan nabbed the role?
Seraphim Falls is a terse, gruelling chase film, shot against the punishing
landscapes of New Mexico. Produced by Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions, it’s as
elemental and dramatically pared as Gibson’s Apoca-lypto. Neeson plays
Carver, a civil-war veteran and paymaster to three hired guns hard on the
trail of Brosnan’s former Union captain, Gideon.
Dressed in jeans and a black shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and looking a
little battle-weary, Neeson is friendly in a businesslike sort of way;
surprisingly forthright and humble, though hardly expansive. When he tells
me he has less patience for everything that goes with the job these days,
it’s implicit that talking to the press is right up there. Seven years ago,
he suffered a potentially fatal motorcycle accident when a deer leapt onto
his bike and the pair of them drove into a tree. It’s the sort of experience
that reminds you who’s the boss. “One lady sent me the prayer of St Francis
– for the deer,” he recalls with a chuckle. He gave up motorbikes for good;
he doesn’t smoke now, either. But maybe fatherhood has had a greater effect.
Certainly, all job offers have to be weighed for their impact on his time at
home in NYC with his wife, Natasha Richardson, and their two boys.
So, what compelled him to devote a month to Seraphim Falls? “It was a
childhood dream to do a western,” he explains. “Pierce and I looked at each
other during the costume fitting: two guys from Ireland playing cowboys. We
used to watch the John Ford films when I was a kid.
I have a vivid memory of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. That’s the one where John
Wayne ages; he’s about to retire. Victor McLaglen gets into a bar fight ...
I have such a memory of my father crying with delight and laughter at
McLaglen. That’s my first memory of the western: tears coming out of his
eyes.” He tells me he bought the 1950s Lone Ranger series on DVD. “I
thought, ‘Perfect, I’ll sit down with the kids. They’ll love it, I’ll love
it, it’ll be a trip down memory lane.’ My kids are 10 and 11. Within
seconds, they were going, ‘Dad, what is this? Black-and-white!?’ They were
so bored. I watched the DVDs all on my own.” On the face of it, Carver is a
different breed of man from the ethical role models, mentors and father
figures Neeson has dedicated himself to of late – men like Daniel in Love
Actually, Ducard in Batman Begins, Alfred Kinsey and his next great
challenge, for Spielberg, Abraham Lincoln. “Let him bleed,” this dour
avenging angel pronounces twice in Seraphim Falls’s opening minutes, after
Gideon has been winged by a rifle shot, and we see that he means him to
suffer. That he does, at length, and in extremis.
“I love Moby-Dick,” the actor offers, pressing his fingers flat to the table
between us. “I found Carver had a certain Ahab quality. I’m fascinated with
the rage that destroys people and nations ... I grew up in Northern Ireland,
of course. Lived all through the Troubles; saw violence, the results of
violence, at first hand. It’s always terrified me and fascinated me. So it
was a gut reaction, something about how that rage can eat you alive. I can
understand that. I haven’t known it myself, but I knew guys who did. Some of
them aren’t on this planet any more because of it.”
He attributes his survival to boxing. He was an amateur champion for three
years running, until he began to suffer blackouts at 15. It’s also where he
broke his nose. Small beer, apparently: “To have a sport, a very healthy
sport, where you could get rid of aggression in a structured way and nobody
actually got hurt ... I think it saved my life.”
Whatever attracted Neeson to the film, it wasn’t the creature comforts. He has
admitted that the green-screen work in the Star Wars films made him feel
like a puppet. This one is something of a throwback; the writer-director,
David Von Ancken, was adamant that his actors should feel the dirt beneath
their feet. In a 45-day shoot, 42 days were spent at the mercy of the
elements, in temperatures ranging from below freezing at 1,100ft to hot as
Hades in the desert flats.
“It was tough, physically,” he acknowledges. “Some of the locations were hard
to get to, and you’re on horseback nearly all the time, which brings its
difficulties. The director wants you to ride up a certain way, and
inevitably the horse wants to do something else.” Did being in situ
affect the performance? “Oh my God ... We shot in the desert in New Mexico,
and you feel those millions of years in that place. It charged all of us. I
brought back shards of pottery that were just lying around in the dirt. They
were at least 1,000 years old. You realise your place in the world when
you’re standing in that location. It belittles you, it really does.” But the
landscape can also be ennobling. There’s no more mythic American archetype
than the cowboy, after all. When Von Ancken notes that Carver is “always
focused on the horizon”, he doesn’t mean he’s long-sighted. Though it begins
in stark, elemental fashion, the film gradually shifts onto the abstract
plane of spiritual fable. Not that an actor can play that, precisely.
Perhaps it comes with the territory?
Neeson agrees. “There was very little dialogue; it wasn’t on the page. You
just have to say to yourself, ‘I am enough.’ If you’re walking up a hill and
you’re out of breath, just do that. Trust it. Don’t be stoic about it. If
you’re out of breath, you’re out of breath. If you’re tired, you’re tired.
So I tried to trust that, rather than play a character. Pierce found that,
too. Just trying to be enough. I think it’s what good acting should be. It’s
also the hardest thing.”
He tells me a story the actor Robert Wagner told him, several years ago, about
doing a film with Cary Grant in the 1960s. They finished a scene, and Grant
came over and confessed: “I’ve just learnt something. Finally, after 30
years, I’ve learnt how to breathe during a scene.” Neeson shakes his head.
“Cary Grant comes across as not just the most elegant but the most at ease
man on the planet – the guy is so happy in his skin, you know? But I totally
understood what he meant. His was a totally crafted persona, in the same way
John Wayne was and I’m sure Jimmy Stewart was, too.”
It sounds almost Zen, the way he talks about his craft. I wonder, is that what
keeps him going back to it? “I love the acting,” he says. “Whether I do it
well or not doesn’t matter. It is great to be with a film crew. Wonderful to
have that romantic gypsy existence, to arrive in some desolate part of a
foreign country with 200 guys and girls, truck and vans, and set up your
circus, all focused on trying to tell this little tiny snippet of a story.
That focus on a film set when everything is ready, it’s religious, honest to
God.
“I’m not good when I don’t work for too long – it drives my wife up the wall,”
he goes on. “And this job is always feast or famine. All the demons come
back into you. I start feeling vulnerable: ‘I’m not good enough, that’s why
I’m not working.’” Still? “Oh yeah. All the time. But then I’ll talk to a
good actor – Meryl Streep or someone – and they’ll say they feel that, too.
So at least I’m in good company.”
Seraphim Falls opens on August 3
Joanne, I believe Schindler's List was about accepting that here was a man who had foibles but saw the madness which surrounded him and decided to do something about it.
Dean, Belfast, NI
Very interesting article about a great actor - but Schindler was hardly angelic despite his actions. In fact what he did is more surprising because of the sort of life he led (drinking, gambling and womanising).
Joanne, Wellington, New Zealand