Cliff Curtis & Benedict Wong Interview

Q: We have a lot of questions about religion and science… and God…

Cliff: Who?

Q: Who is your favorite author of science fiction?

Cliff: My favorite would have to be George Lucas 'cause that's the only science fiction guy that I know. I don't know cause I don't follow sci-fi. I'm not a huge fan of it. Are you?

Benedict: Ah, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Cliff: Ah, yeah, Kubrick.

Q: Did you have to watch certain movies in order to prepare for this movie?

Q: More than Solaris?

Cliff: Who was that by?

Benedict: Solaris by Tarkovsky.

Cliff: Man, you're good! I forgot that one.

Benedict: If fact, we didn't watch sci-fi. We watched more things that…

Cliff: More about people on a mission.

Benedict: Like The Right Stuff.

Cliff: Wages Of Fear.

Benedict: Wages Of Fear, you know, an impossible situation where the stakes are very high and human failure is unacceptable.

Cliff: So it was more about the drama.

Benedict: What else was there? The Right Stuff, Dust Belt, Alien, and Wages of Fear.

Cliff: Those were the four films we actually watched.

Q: Who was in that Wages Of Fear?

Benedict: I think it was like a French guy, 1950s.

Cliff: It was an international cast

Benedict: All driving a truck of hydrochloride.

Q: Oh, OK. We heard that you guys all had to live in a dorm together also, to prepare for the film.

Cliff: Yeah, we had a sort of, we all lived together for about a week and a half in a sort of confined student dorm.

Benedict: Not a lot of personal space, you know. Toilet, shower, bed, desk, window. That was it.

Cliff: Then a social room that was about half the size of this, and eight of us stuck in it.

Benedict: We were just rammed in together, cooking… I cooked fish the first night and the flat stank of fish all the time. Then so, we had about an 8 week rehearsal period and I just think the was Danny did it was great. Coming from a sort of theater background, he sort of gently brought us all together really and things that we were doing like scuba diving and sitting in a two seater airplane, experiencing four gee's, four times your weight and doing two hundred miles per hour vertical and then experiencing zero gravity. Then you're floating and doing loops and going to…

Cliff: Flight simulation…

Benedict: Fifteen (unintelligible) flight simulator, landing planes, lectures with the European space agency with futurists, physicists, engineers, psychologists.

Cliff: Just to grasp this essence of the idea. Just to be a team of elite astronauts, you know.

Benedict: We were treated like a theater troop, like a troop of actors. There was no movie star… A film set can become very hierarchical in terms of you know the culture of how films have been made. I think we were much more like a theater troop, weren't we?

Cliff: Yeah.

Benedict: A group of actors, telling a story.

Q: Are you religious?

Cliff: I was raised Catholic, you know, but I don't know. Religion seems to have taken over really, over science these days. I'm more sort of Buddhist in a way.

Benedict: Religion seems to have…

Cliff: It's taken over anything. It's taken over politics, it's taking over… Religion is having a resurgence really, isn't it? A huge resurgence. So I suppose the interesting about the film is that it's deeply philosophical. My character, Doctor Saul, in essence believes that he's experiencing a form of god by his relationship with the sun. It's the source of all life. What other definition for god could one want, if you're in a space station.

Q: He's a psychiatrist?

Cliff: Yeah, and that's what's interesting isn't it? He's kind of using himself as a guinea pig. He's trying to figure out what happened on Icarus 1 . Why they failed. He doesn't believe that it's technical failure, he believes it was a human error. So therefore, he's also trying to serve humanity by bringing science to the mission by saying, "whatever happened on Icarus 1, I must prevent from happening on Icarus 2.” He's using himself as a guinea pig to try and figure out, If I'm… The closer I get to the sun, it has this effect on me. So he's measuring it and trying to extrapolate out of that, “Ok, so I see, either I'm going mad, or I'm actually speaking to God.” Which one am I experiencing and how am I going to keep this crew on track so that they achieve the mission? Pretty interesting stuff for a sci-fi movie!

Q: Can you relate to this?

Cliff: I suppose I can. You know, I've done… I suppose I can, yeah. I was going to put myself on a very intense retreat, a (unintelligible) retreat, you even fast for seven days, you don't eat for seven days in prayer. You don't! So it's about… the journey is about deprivation. It's about sensory deprivation. We don't' have… our social circle is confined, we don't have contact with our families, with our society, with our planet. We think we're going to miss home? This is real homesickness. So I could relate to it in terms of extremity, like deprivation. I've done similar things.

Q: Are you both Green? (Question from Italian reporter)

Benedict: Are we what?

Q: Green.

Cliff: I'd drive a Prius, yeah.

Q: Green is a way to live now.

Benedict: Yeah, I recycle. But I find so many [ways to be lazy] you know, I'm guilty. My footprint is huge.

Cliff: Just got to keep planting trees, trees behind you.

Benedict: Yeah.

Q: What was it like to work with Danny Boyle. What did you think at first and then after the shoot, what happened?

Benedict: It was great. I've great respect for Danny.

Cliff: Yeah!

Benedict: He's through and he's visionary and he'll just… the one-on-ones with him, he just… I think he's mastered the art of keeping a process really interesting and alive and intelligent. Keeping you curious about what you're doing. It's not just a matter of getting your script, reading your script, and learning your lines, getting in front of a camera and mapping it out and doing my job. He did this really neat thing, where he brought us all together as a team, make us bond, made us have shared experiences, many shared experiences that we could talk about. He didn't come on the karaoke did he?

Q: Did you get to karaoke?

Benedict: Yes! But that was extra-curricular! Then he did this neat thing where he gave us each individual notes about a character that no-one else on the ship knew about. Like really personal things. Things to do with our personal like that we wouldn't have shared with anyone else on the ship.

Cliff: I still don't remember what it was. I can't remember mine. It's gone now.

Benedict: But you see, I had the profile of everyone on the ship. I should know everything about everybody but he sews a seed of doubt that maybe I don't.

Q: You had a profile about all the other…

Benedict: Characters. Yeah. He made me feel like I did but then he made me feel like maybe I didn't.

Q: When you were a teenager, did you dream of going into space?

Cliff: That's a great question.

Q: Yeah, because some actors are obsessive about space, like Max. He speaks always about space and missions and…

Cliff: I'm more into the tropical island with someone I love. That's more my style! That's like saying “If the sun was dying, I would get my family and my friends together and we'd have a really great meal and have a party and laugh and watch the sun go down.” That's what I'd want to do. I wouldn't want to get in a tin can and float off for two years and kinda change the course of nature

Q: And you?

Benedict: Um…I suppose I secretly hanker to be in a science fiction film and I really like it. It's a real feasible future and um, I just feel quite blessed (unintelligible) with a really great group of actors and Danny as well. It's just, everything seems to have aligned itself in a…I just feel very fortunate to be (unintelligible) but whether or not ah, I'd do the Ivan thing. Yeah! But here's the thing, there's kind of this notion that humanity has the right to change the course of nature and to prolong life, whether it be the life of an individual or where we're talking about the unborn child or whether we're talking about like the life on the planet. This is a hugely, deeply philosophical question. Do we have the right to prolong life beyond the natural course of life itself? Of course we've got the right to because we can and we do…

If I was to make a correlation between me and my character, to would be this: that my character starts off like that, saying I'm a scientist, I'm an astronaut, and I must serve my broader community by prolonging life on the planet. However, what he becomes fascinated with is something that I possibly would become fascinated with, and that is, imagine what is on the other side. Imagine if we released ourselves from our illogical irrational attachment with this life and we all had the opportunity to see what existed beyond this dimension. Now that's fascinating, and I think that's what my character starts to explore. He starts to think, “I think there's something else out there other than my phone bill, my keys to my car, whether my relationship is going to work, I think there's another dimension, and that somewhere in the sun there and I want to go and… Can I see it? I want to see what's out there.” I think that's a fascinating premise for a character and for a life, don't you?

Cliff: I sure wish that we could figure out our politics a little bit better. But it's very natural, I'm from Polynesia, and so it's very natural on this planet for us to do this. We're an island culture, and so when we had problems on our island we just looked for another island, and another island, and another island. This is how we populated the planet. So that's a part of who we are. Until we can undo that instinct, and say we're either going to stay here and fight it all out, or stay on this island and hug each other until we all get along, or we're going to look for another island to live on. That's what we've done on this planet. I can't imagine that we're going to stop doing that if we can find a possibility of another life somewhere else. I think that's inherent in the makeup of man, to seek other possibilities.

Q: Each of the actors in this film pretty much has a different cultural background, right?

Benedict: It just made it more real, really. All of these people being from all over the world. As an actor, it was great really, a whole different blend of people who you'd never normally get to work with.

Cliff: For me, I have a specific story in that. I told my agent that you know, I'm going to stay home. I'm not going to do another terrorist, gangster, or drug dealer. I'm sorry, let's find something else. I know I'm not white, I know I'm brown, surely there's another role for me out there in Hollywood. This was one of the first ones off the rank and I thought this is really interesting. So it is possible for people of color to actually play roles where they contribute to society, not just scare society into being frightened of difference.

Benedict: Yeah, I've been promised one on earth now, the next one… You know, a contributor, a philosopher, a poet, something other than simply fulfilling the sort of box in which I've built a career out of. I'm not being ungrateful, but you know…

I think there's lot's of people in Hollywood that are trying new things and this film's a result of that. I think the casting director's trying new things, but I think yeah, it's a reality, sure.

Q: What's next for you?

Cliff: Gosh, ah, Fracture with Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. I play a detective. Diehard, I play FBI, I'm Bruce Willis' sort of his boss.

Q: Which one is it?

Cliff: Diehard, Quattro.

Q: I guess it's fun being one of the good guys.

Benedict: Yeah, I like doing that kind of thing, just to make it different...

[end]

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Staci Layne Wilson reporting