"Seriously Spacey"
As he makes his directorial debut with Albino Alligator, Kevin Spacey talks to Mick Brown about acting, the cult of celebrity and how he keeps his head in a crazy world.
Over breakfast in the dining room of the Dorchester hotel Kevin Spacey had waxed long and eloquent on the actor's role, the actor's responsibility--serious subjects, but then Kevin Spacey is an actor who takes himself very seriously indeed--through cereal, scrambled eggs, toast, and three refills of coffee, until the maitre d' asked if we would mind continuing in the lounge, the better for them to get with the vacuuming.
In the lounge, Spacey's thoughts turned to Samuel Beckett. "I love Beckett..." he said, a glimmer of almost beatific enthusiasm passing across his face. "Let me tell you a story..."
Some years ago, he said, he had been in Paris, filming Henry and June, but also thinking about Beckett, talking about Beckett, looking for Beckett. Each day, he would take lunch in an open-air cafe in the Place des Vosges, from where he would watch an elderly woman taking the air on the balcony of her apartment. He became, he says, obsessed with this woman, to the point of photographing her each day with his telephoto lens. "She looked like Beckett...You know how some people's lives are just etched in their faces..." Spacey swung his expensively-shod feet on to one of the Dorchester's gold-embossed, antique console tables. (You can't do that in here, I thought: but he was too preoccupied with his story to notice.)
You mean, the woman had character, I said.
"Exactly! There's a wonderful play, Hospitality Suite, which describes this perfectly. A young man asks an older man, do you think I look as if I have character? And the older man says, no, for the simple reason that you don't know yet what you have to regret.
"He says, you have things to regret, but you just don't know it yet. Because character is when the things you have experienced in your life, and what you've learned from them, map themselves allover your face." By that definition, I ask, does Spacey think he has character? "Buckets..."
So let's look at Kevin Spacey's face. The first thing to be said is that for a movie star Spacey is no matinee idol. At first glance, he looks as anonymous as a clerk in a hardware store: an oval face, crevassed cheeks, a certain hauteur around the mouth; a receding hairline; eyes that regard you with a certain guarded wariness. It's a face that is capable of hiding as much as it reveals--a very good face for the kind of roles which have made Kevin Spacey one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood.
Spacey limped into public recognition playing the crippled conman, Verbal Kint, in the demonically clever thriller The Usual Suspects--the role which last year won him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Spacey was the serial killer who put Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a box in Seven. Less well known, but no less powerful, was his starring role in the low-budget Swimming With Sharks, playing a bullying, utterly amoral movie executive, lording it over his hirelings.
In all of these films, Spacey's performance rested on having the kind of face you would pass on the street without a second glance, but the sort of presence that draws you compellingly into the skin of whichever character he is playing.
They were performances that suggested that in the field of quiet menace, unsettling psychopathology, all-purpose creeps and conmen, Kevin Spacey is impressing as a worthy successor to Dennis Hopper.
Spacey, who is 37 belongs to that select club of 'overnight sensations' who have spent years painstakingly building a career, only to have the public at large believe that they have appeared from nowhere. Seven, The Usual Suspects and Swimming With Sharks were all released within the space of a few months in 1995--the tip of an iceberg of years of acting in films and theatre--projecting him from anonymity to instant recognition.
But whatever joy Kevin Spacey's new-found fame may have brought him is tempered by a wilfully serious demeanour. Luxuriating in success is not Spacey's style. His manner suggests that would be unseemly, that it would offend his sense of gravitas. Stardom is regarded with the kind of wariness that people usually reserve for rattlesnakes, the razmatazz and hoopla of Hollywood with an almost calculated indifference.
Most actors nominated for their first Academy Award might be expected to arrive at the ceremony with their wife, girlfriend, or at the very least some photogenic starlet, provided by central casting, on their arm. Touchingly, Kevin Spacey arrived with his mother, "Sure, winning an Oscar is nice, but The Usual Suspects was written as an ensemble piece, and to be picked out of an ensemble is a little bit embarrassing"," He shifts in his seat, "All this emphasis on winning and losing instead of just wanting people to experience and to progress and to find something out about each other..." Spacey shakes his head. "There's too much of that in this business. It's all about who's up and who's down, who's hot and who's not. And it's all just copy, and it's trivia and it's meaningless."
Of course, Hollywood is full of rebels, publicly disavowing the system that sustains them, while living it up to the hilt. But Spacey is made of more serious stuff. He spent the day after winning his Academy Award not with a champagne hangover or en route to the Caribbean, but holed up in an editing suite, working on his first film as a director, Albino Alligator.
For Spacey, being given the opportunity to direct is clearly a much greater thrill than anything the Academy has to offer. "I'll never forget the day I got the phone call from my agent," says Spacey. "I'd had three or four conversations with him about the desire I had to direct, and forgotten all about it. And then one day he just called me out of the blue and said, you've been given an offer. I thought, what! I'd never met with anybody, never discussed it with anybody. Later on, I learned that my agent had been working on these producers for four or five months." Spacey laughs. "I shudder to think of the restaurant bills. And I said, what's it called? And he said, Albino Alligator. And my first thought was, what the hell can that be about?"
What it's about is sacrifice. Albino Alligator tells the story of three smalltime criminals on the run from the police in New Orleans, who take refuge in a basement bar, holding the handful
of customers hostage. It is a tightly-plotted, high-tension 'chamber' piece, a conscious homage to the 'box dramas' of the early Hitchcock films, which throws all the emphasis on acting, rather than style or special effects--exactly the kind of directorial debut, in fact, you would expect from someone as thoughtful and as intense as Spacey. (The performances Spacey gets out of Matt Dillon and Faye Dunaway are the best either actor has given in years.} The 'albino alligator' is the creature which, in the wild, the others sacrifice to make a deliberate gain. How far will the hostage takers go in order to save their own skins? Which of them will be the 'albino alligator'?"For me," says Spacey, "the drama of the story lies not just in whether people live or die, or even who lives or dies, but about the choices people might be faced with in this sort of situation, and what they are willing to live with. That's a compelling idea to me, and it was an idea that on a certain level I had been dealing with in terms of my territory as an actor . What is it that people are prepared to do to get what they want? Everyone is faced with that question. And certainly in an industry that has as many traps and seductions as the film industry you're faced with it all the time."
Spacey's road began as a peripatetic teenager growing up in California. His father wrote technical manuals for the aircraft industry for a living, but was often unemployed, and the family moved frequently. Spacey was a difficult child. At the age of 14, his parents shipped him off to military academy following a domestic fracas--"let's just say it involved my sister's tree-house and some matches"--where he lasted only a few months before being expelled for hitting a classmate with a tyre.
"I didn't like the mentality of military school," he says flatly. "I didn't like its violence, and I responded to being hit in the only way I knew how, which was to hit back, and I got thrown out. And I was f***ing delighted."
An interest in drama, and the support of his mother, turned him round. Leaving school, Spacey made an abortive foray into showbusiness as a stand-up comedian, doing impressions of Gary Grant and James Stewart before enrolling for two years at the Juilliard school of acting in New York. This led, in turn, to a job as an assistant to the legendary Broadway producer Joseph Papp, "handing out pens and pencils" while acting in "off-off-Broadway" roles.
"Joe came to see one of these plays, and the next day he called me into his office and fired me. I remember sitting there thinking, he comes to see a play I'm in, then fires me next day. What the hell does that mean? And he said, 'Young man, you should be acting, and you've gotten too comfortable sitting here making $125 a week; go and do what you have to do.' And he pushed me out of that door in the most fatherly way. And four months later, he and his wife were in the audience for the opening night of my first Broadway play ."
Spacey concentrated on building a career on stage and in television, winning a Tony award for his role in Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers. It was that play which brought him to the attention of Hollywood, and a role in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.
Since then he has worked methodically, turning his back, he says, on offers for films and television pilots which might have provided "gobs of money", but would have hampered his ability "to look myself in the eye when I shave in the morning", he adds. "I made a conscious decision to never allow myself to be put in a position where I had to make a choice that I did not want to make.
© 2000 - 2004 Driving Mr. Spacey!
