July 2010 By Philip Berk
The name Phillip Noyce immediately conjures up memories of his Rabbit Run Fence and The Quiet American, both released in 2002 to critical acclaim but limited theatrical exposure (at least in the U.S.)
Yet when he arrives alongside Angelina Jolie at his press conference in Cancun, Mexico, I remember that they worked together that same year on the Denzel Washington thriller, Bone Collector.
And if you’re wondering what he’s doing directing a non stop action movie like Salt, think again. Twelve years ago he almost cornered the market on that genre with Patriot Games, and Clear and Present Danger, and don’t forget, he cut his teeth on the suspense thriller Dead Calm that put Nicole Kidman on the map.
Noyce in person is a huge hulking presence of a man with a voice that demands equal notice.
He’s obviously a big fan of Angelina, and they’ve done well for each other with what should be a huge hit for both of them.
The two of them came onto the project almost at the same time, although there was another director, another actor involved.
Not entirely agreeing with my assumption, he interrupts, “There were a lot of directors on this, and in fact I first came onto it a year before I joined officially. It was a project that was started by Kurt Wimmer, the writer, who wrote a spec script. He took it to Sunil Perkash, a wonderful producer who took it to Lorenzo di Bonaventura and then together they took it to (Columbia studio head) Amy Pascal, who bought the project. It was developed for about a further year before I came onboard. We were then discussing it with various actors because of the title of the story was Edwin A. Salt, and that’s when we were speculating about who could play the lead, when we would start, when it would come out. Amy said, ‘Why don’t we reconsider this and think about Angelina.’ We all said that’s impossible. She’s just had twins and she won’t be ready. We’ll have to delay the film for a long time. We sent the script to her. She said, ‘Come on down to France,’ where we went for a week and discussed it with her and chewed the fat and discussed how it could be refitted for a female character. We considered all the pluses and all the minuses and it seemed as though they were all plus. The story, the relationships, became more complex and more emotional. For example, the relationships between Ted Winter, her mentor and boss, and her is different and has an extra emotionality when it’s between a man and a woman, and the action scenes, in a way become more exciting in a sense if it’s a woman against a lot of tough men, and the character herself and her own vulnerability is more exposed. The burden that she’s carrying, I think, you’re able to feel it more in the female character than a man, So we went ahead. I was there before Angie, but only for a few months.”
Salt takes a lot of twists and turns to tell its story and it’s one of those ‘Please don’t give away the surprise ending movies’ that will always be footnoted, “written with Tom Cruise in mind.”
So what sold Angelina on the idea?
In her own words, “I was sitting in my nightgown in bed feeling very, very girly and very soft, reading the script. I said to Brad, ‘I think I found something that will help me get kind of fired up again and physical again.’ Anything I was ready to do he was going to jump behind me on. But he was happy for me.”
The movie is a nonstop marathon for Angie. As a director, if you have an actor who’s willing to do almost anything that’s physically required — which is Angelina’s trademark — where does one stop and go, ‘Whoa, we’re not going to let you do this.?’
“Well, you know, she has wonderful collaborator, Simon Crane, who’s a stunt coordinator and who has worked with her on many, many films and has been a stuntman himself. She trusts him with her life, so there really is no limit to what she’ll try as long as Simon as the final arbitrator says it’s okay, and as along as Eunice, her stunt double, is able to demonstrate that the move, whatever it is viable — whether it’s jumping from a truck to another truck, obviously she’s doing that with a safety harness, a great big crane that’s traveling along and takes her through the air. So before Angie would do it, somebody else had to do it and it had to be tested, and so on.”
Did he ever hold his breath during a scene?
“You hold your breath and turn away, but to tell the truth, most of the stuff they ended up doing, I never thought the insurance company would ever let her do. There was so much more CGI in my mind at the beginning of the film and then it turned out — I mean, I took her up to that building that she’s dangling off the side, and climbing around, and I said, ‘Well, look, there’s your apartment and then you get out of that window over there and then I’ll shoot a shot and then we’ll put you in the studio and at the end of the film we’ll blue-screen it,’ and she said, ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, ‘no, no, no?’ A week and a half into the movie, she’s out on the ledge there just laughing, so the answer is yes, a lot of sleepless nights, because who wants to be responsible for that, but if the insurance company is going to insure her, what can I say?”
How has Angelina evolved over the years as an actress?
“When we made Bone Collector she was virtually unknown, just finding her feet, already an accomplished actress, of course. She was about to win the Academy Award on her very next film. She’d been in GIA, which was a tour de force of acting and commitment. But she was no ingenue, even though it was the beginning of her brilliant career. She was just finding how to really control that instrument that is her acting ability. Ten years later, she is a Stradivarius, really. That’s the difference and you didn’t have to suggest she could play every tune. It was a lot easier to work with her. Before she was a relative unknown. She could walk down the street. I remember her coming to my house to a party and nobody paid any attention. She was the wallflower. Ten years later, she couldn’t walk anywhere outside a quarried situation, without everybody paying attention, and inventing things about her life. But none of that did she ever bring to the set. Whatever was going on outside was kept outside. The person that came to the set was almost the same as the person ten years before in terms of her openness, except now she was much more experienced, so she had a lot to offer. You would suggest things. It was a dance, a very elaborate dance between director and actress, where sometimes the actress is leading the director, as they do in modern dance. On top of which, she was an ally. If there was a disagreement with the studio, inevitably, I had a great ally. Or a disagreement with anyone and now the ally was a superstar; so that’s a huge advantage to you as a director, particularly in telling a complicated story like this. And with all the different options that we had, she was always beside me. The disadvantage was, sometimes, when we were filming in the streets of New York, there was as much organization about how we could protect her as there was about how we would record what she was shooting. That was always a problem, her safety and the paparazzi interfering with the day to day shooting. But the big difference i’d say was ten years ago I had to finish all my sentences. This time we were down to a couple of words or a nod, and the communication was there. So it was really, very easy, like picking up an old friendship again.”
The bad guys in the movie are the Russians.
Does this spell the return of the Russian spy in James Bond-type movies?
“Maybe. It’s certainly been part of great stories, great characters, but of course, spying is the oldest weapon that humans have, and the idea that there are super spies out there working for Russia, working for America, working for China, working for any of your countries is not as fantastic as we’ve imagined, with this news in New York City. Of course, they’re out there. Of course if you’re game to try and spy you want to convince your enemies that you’re one of them. What we see in New York City is just the tip of the iceberg .
What reaction does he expect from Russian audiences who are now a big market for American movies?
“Well, my father was a spy, a military spy during the Second World War; so I grew up on stories of espionage, of trickery, chicanery, and as a kid, I would spy on people in my little country town. I fixed myself on somebody that was walking in the street and just followed them at a distance and tried to work out their secret lives; so, it’s always been my fascination. When I first read Kurt Wimmer’s script it seemed like a great fantasy. I thought wow, that’s fantastic. But then when I thought about it again, I thought of course there are moles. Of course, there are deep cover agents working for other countries. For me, as I said before, this is not about Russia versus America. It’s about the ultimate weapon, the human being, and it’s about the possibility of those human beings infiltrating the governments, the institutions of other countries, any country at the highest level. What greater weapon could you have, if you were an enemy of a particular country, than someone who has the power to initiate a military action, to influence government policy. They’re out there, and they’re not Russians necessarily. There’s probably as many Americans in Russia doing this as there supposedly are Russians in America. How do I think Russians will react? Well, of course, Russians had a love-hate relationship with the revered and feared KGB and its successor; so I’m sure that some people will be highly amused and entertained and as usual with any American story about Russia, there’ll be others who will be sensitive, but hopefully they will all see that this is not an attack on Russia but, rather, it’s an entertainment about the possibilities of human behavior and not just possibilities, the reality of what we do.
When did he first learn that his father was spy? Did he share his experiences with him?
“His experience being a spy was actually a respite from the war. He was going off again in Borneo to join in the useless war against the Japanese where the war had moved towards the Japanese islands, and the allies were cleaning up, and he’d just lost his sister who was executed. She was a nurse. And somebody stopped him as he was going on the boat and asked him to join this special unit called Z Special Force, who were training clandestine operatives to go behind the Japanese lines and who did a number of raids, for example, into Singapore Harbor where they disguised as Indonesians in a boat. Not my father. He was too big to ever be disguised as Indonesian. They blew up a lot of Japanese shipping. His main job was training people including Vietnamese in sabotage, and organize fifth columns to work against the Japanese in the occupied areas of Southeast Asia. He loved doing it because he wasn’t up there potentially losing his life in a war that had become meaningless — the real war was further up towards Japan — and he enjoyed all the privileges of being a spy. I remember he said he had a pass that virtually said ‘You’ll do whatever I say.’ and he could show it to anyone below General MacArthur. So every weekend he would go from Fraser Island where he was stationed across to the American Air Force Base, and he said he would show his pass, and he’d hop on an American plane that was going down to Sydney and see my mum, who was a nurse down in Sydney. Stories like that, but mainly the romance of it all, of disguise, of trickery, of fighting through human cunning rather than the human being as a weapon, all of that he instilled in me, and you just don’t forget those kind of stories. When he was dying, much later, he told me a lot of grisly stories about what they were doing, but that I won’t share those with you.”
Did it inspire him to become a director?
“It didn’t inspire me to make movies. It’s just that when I was given an opportunity to tell these kind of stories like The Quiet American and Salt and Clear and Present Danger, and so on — I loved that milieu and those people and loved talking to those people within that world — it was furthering a relationship with my dad and the kind of obsessions he developed.”
The film was neither made, nor will it be screened, in 3-D. Is that something he avoids, and does he see it as a fad or having a great future?
“I think 2-D and 3-D will exist side by side. I love certain films in 3-D, but I must admit that, along with my young son, sometimes I get a headache looking at those effects. I don’t think it’s not going to be the end of storytelling as we know it, but I see it as not a fad but another weapon in our arsenal of entertaining the audience. That said, I can’t wait to make a 3-D film.”
Many of his films are political. Is politics a passion of his?
“I think politics is what we play with each other in our families and in our work. Every single day, decisions are made according to who has the power. We decide where to go on holiday based on not where we want to go, but how many people we’ve go to please, so it’s all about lobbying and who’s pushing you and what’s best in the short term, the long term, and the longer term. Everything is up for negotiation, it seems, in the modern world. Maybe once upon a time, politicians used to tell the truth and you could leave your door opened and you could believe in a man’s handshake, and it wasn’t even necessary to shake hands. You could believe in things, but it’s no longer like that. You can’t trust anybody, can you? I think this movie and those kind of movies that I’ve been making about spies is just an extension of my own paranoia, which I believe is merely a microscope on the reality of modern life. We all wear masks and we’ll all lie to each other.
What constitutes a good action film?
“You have to care about the people in the action. If you don’t care about them, you’re in big trouble. It’s hard in this film, because the baddie is the goodie, so that’s why it was important to have someone line Angelina, who you’re not sure where you stand with her but you’re willing to invest in safely even when you think maybe she’s not a goodie. She emotes enough to connect with you.
And the key to a good thriller?
“You have to keep the audience off balance. It’s about what you don’t know as much as you do know, and hopefully you’ll still be asking the director the next day what happened even though you have the answer in your head.
Many of his films are political. Is politics a passion?
“I think politics is what we play with each other in our families and in our work. Every single day, decisions are made according to who has the power. We decide where to go on holiday based on not where we want to go, but how many people we’ve got to please; so it’s all about lobbying and who’s pushing you and what’s best in the short term, the long term, and the longer term. Everything is up for negotiation, it seems, in the modern world. Maybe once upon a time, politicians used to tell the truth, and you could leave your door open, and you could believe in a man’s handshake, and it wasn’t even necessary to shake hands. You could believe in things, but it’s no longer like that. You can’t trust anybody, can you? I think this movie and those kind of movies that I’ve been making about spies is just an extension of my own paranoia, which I believe is merely a microscope on the reality of modern life. We all wear masks and we’ll all lie to each other.”
What makes a good action film?
“You have to care about the people in the action. If you don’t care about them, you’re in big trouble. It’s hard in this film, because the baddie is the goodie, so that’s why it was important to have someone line Angelina, who you’re not sure where you stand with her, but you’re willing to invest in safely even when you think maybe she’s not a goodie. She emotes enough to connect with you.”
And the key to a good thriller?
“You have to keep the audience off balance. It’s about what you don’t know as much as you do know, and hopefully you’ll still be asking the director the next day what happened even though you have the answer in your head.”