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Jane Eyre: Michael Fassbender interview

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 Jane Eyre: Michael Fassbender interview Empty Jane Eyre: Michael Fassbender interview

Post by Admin Mon Aug 29, 2011 4:24 pm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/8706510/Jane-Eyre-Michael-Fassbender-interview.html

Jane Eyre: Michael Fassbender interview
The X-Men star Michael Fassbender takes on Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre
Michael Fassbender stars in Jane Eyre
Image 1 of 2
Michael Fassbender tops the Hollywood wish-list Photo: Nadav Kander

By Vicki Reid

9:00AM BST 29 Aug 2011

Halfway through filming Jane Eyre last spring, temperamental weather was causing delays and exacerbating myriad niggling production problems.

'Everyone was exhausted,’ the film’s director, Cary Fukunaga, says, 'and there was a dip in morale.’

One evening, his lead actor, Michael Fassbender, invited Fukunaga, Mia Wasikowska (who plays Jane Eyre) and the producer Alison Owen for supper, where he cooked and served a splendid dish of lamb.

'We all just sat around and enjoyed one of the small, perfect things in life, a good meal,’ Fukunaga says. 'And I remembered exactly why you make movies: it’s not just about the project, but about the process, and I think one thing that makes Michael special is his ability to stop and pause for a second.’

This insight is a reassuring one, because in terms of work Fassbender has, in his own words, 'been flying for the past 18 months’.

After years of solid grafting in films and television dramas of varying quality, it was his visceral performance as the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s multi-award-winning Hunger in 2008 that brought him to prominence and straight to the top of every casting director’s wish-list.

Aside from the forthcoming Jane Eyre, in this year alone Fassbender has starred in the fantastically successful X-Men: First Class, and has films with stellar directors such as David Cronenberg (playing Jung to Viggo Mortensen’s Freud in A Dangerous Method) and Steven Soderbergh (Haywire, a revenge thriller with Ewan McGregor), and McQueen’s much-anticipated follow-up to Hunger (Shame, an uncompromising drama about the nature of sexual addiction), all due for release before the impending awards season.

Anyone less talented might be charged with veering towards overexposure, but Fassbender has the ability to move seamlessly between genres, and there is the sense that, at 34 years old, he is seizing all opportunities, relishing the realisation that this hard-won success is his to enjoy.

As James McAvoy, his co-star in X-Men, tells me, 'He’s taken charge of his life in the last five or six years, and I think that feeds into his ability to take control of a script or a character. And he now has that belief, that he can do it, and that he deserves to be there.’

Certainly Fukunaga had only Fassbender in mind when it came to casting Jane Eyre, his performance in Hunger having made a deep impression.

'I hadn’t seen that sort of fierceness in an actor in a long time,’ Fukunaga says. 'There was an intelligence, an intensity and a masculinity that is very difficult to find in a leading man.’

For Fassbender, Jane Eyre is a book that he grew up with; his mother and older sister are 'massive fans’ and he says rather touchingly that he wanted to be in the film 'for them, really, to see what they would make of my Rochester’.

We have met at a central London hotel, it is June and it is raining. Fassbender has arrived straight from the photo shoot, and the first thing he does after a cigarette in the drizzle is order a glass of champagne.

Although dressed anonymously in a dark T-shirt and jeans, what makes him stand out is his hair. Dyed a yellowish blond, it gives him an almost preternatural air, accentuated by the laser-blue of his eyes. He claims to hate it, but it suits him.

Fassbender has an exuberant charm; I am greeted with a large hug (I have met him only briefly once before), as if that were the most natural and only way to say hello. There is a restless energy about him; he will chatter away, but then consider some answers carefully. At one point in our conversation he flippantly describes himself as 'irresponsible’, and it is easy to imagine him as someone who works hard and plays hard. ('There were a few martinis shared,’ McAvoy admits during our conversation, 'and they will always be cherished.’)

Fassbender is two months into filming Ridley Scott’s long-anticipated science-fiction epic Prometheus (hence the hair) with Noomi Rapace, but it is a closed set with all details kept strictly under wraps, and he neatly sidesteps any questions relating to the plot.

'When I read the script I was like, wow, this is really fresh, and in keeping with the traditions of the Alien films we’ve already seen, but it’s taking us somewhere very different.’

It is indicative of Fassbender’s demented work schedule that when we meet he hasn’t yet seen Jane Eyre. The film was released in America earlier this year to critical acclaim, and he had time only to walk the red carpet in New York before returning to the set of Shame.

There have been 18 previous films of Jane Eyre, and while this one is not groundbreaking, it is heartfelt, beautifully filmed and acted, and undeniably moving. Fukunaga mines all the gothic elements of the novel, combining the bleak beauty of the surrounding moors with the darkly awe-inspiring setting of Thornfield Hall to provide the perfect backdrop for the intense romance between Rochester and Jane Eyre.

Fassbender’s Rochester and Wasikowska’s Jane are the perfect foil for each other; her grave features come alive in his presence, while his black moods are lifted into a teasing playfulness. She is a fiercely independent young woman who disregards convention and status, while he hates the society he is forced to be part of. 'These characters are real equals to each other,’ Fassbender says. 'He’s very untrusting of the world and Jane actually melts away his defences.’

Wasikowska originally trained as a dancer, and consequently brings to the role 'a beautiful physicality and a discipline that comes with that profession,’ Fassbender says. 'People are going to see she’s the perfect Jane.’

It is Fukunaga’s follow-up to his debut film, Sin Nombre, which dealt with the realities and suffering of Central American immigrants trying to find a foothold in the US, and though they might seem like two very different films, both essentially deal with loss and the search for a better life.

Because Fukunaga is American, Fassbender says, 'he hadn’t grown up with the book, and this meant he brought a fresh eye, he wasn’t as reverent and he has the confidence to make bold decisions. He’s a real academic, he does his research and he knows how to frame a shot so beautifully.’

Moira Buffini wrote the script, and turned the structure of the novel on its head. The film begins with Jane’s frantic escape from Thornfield, after discovering the appalling reality of Rochester’s marriage to Bertha, hidden away for so many years in an attic. Taken in by the Rivers family, her miserable childhood is shown through flashbacks, until she lands the job of governess to Rochester’s ward, Adele. At Thornfield she is taken under the wing of Mrs Fairfax (a scene-stealing performance from Judi Dench), and quietly, gratefully lives for several months before the whirlwind arrival of Rochester.

Fassbender’s Rochester is a tormented soul, constantly on the move, either outside in the grounds or on his horse, his moods switching in a moment; one minute playing the piano, the next shouting and storming out into the garden with his shotgun, firing indiscriminately. 'I almost thought of him as bipolar,’ Fassbender says.

He wanted to show Rochester as 'a Byronic hero, somebody who is carrying the past with him. I wanted that attic room on his shoulders all the time. I wanted to show somebody who had a lot of guards and defences and tricks. I had this feeling that he had been to some very decadent places in his life, and his guilt and bitterness and his lost youth is there in flashes. It’s through Jane that he becomes healed, so I wanted to show a sick person in some respect, and by the end he’s found a peace and a reconciliation.’

Fukunaga is keen to point out the playfulness that Fassbender brings to the character. 'Michael can be tortured and still be intelligent and communicate through his eyes and his emotions all the stress of the life Rochester’s lived,’ he says, 'but also still have that sense of humour, which is key to their attraction to each other.’

Michael Fassbender first took to the stage in a pub theatre aged 17, as one of the Ugly Sisters in a rather surreal-sounding production called Fairytales Fairytales 123 – 'it was an amalgamation of Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Cinderella’ – written and directed by his school’s drama teacher, Donie Courtney.

'I just watched him like a hawk,’ Fassbender says now, 'and thought, OK, I’ll give this a go.’ It resulted in him directing his own production of Reservoir Dogs, based on 'nothing more than pure naivety and passion’. But he was hooked, and 'once I realised perhaps I could be quite good I committed to it 100 per cent, it was my one and only priority.’

Up until that point, Fassbender says he felt 'like I was always a Jack of all trades, and not even a Jack, probably a Jim’, as he meandered between different potential career options, with initial dreams of being a lawyer ('I liked the drama of it, I guess’), then an architect ('I failed my technical drawing’), and at one point a war journalist ('I thought that might be interesting’).

Born in Heidelberg, Germany, Fassbender was two when his parents, Josef, who is German, and Adele, who is from Northern Ireland, moved to Killarney in Co Kerry. He describes his childhood in curiously disparaging terms: 'I guess I was quiet and sort of stupid.’

It was his older sister, Catherine, now a neuropsychologist, who was 'super-bright, she was reading books since she came out of the womb’. He preferred to 'play with things as opposed to reading, and actually I think I was embarrassed to read, especially out loud’.

Music was his saviour in his early teenage years. 'I had heavy metal, that was a great help to me. Banging your head,’ he laughs, 'kills so many brain cells you don’t think too much.’ He was in a band of sorts, with a friend called Mike, but they managed only one gig in Dingle. 'We tried to busk but it was raining, so we persuaded this guy to let us play in his pub, but we were playing heavy metal and it was lunchtime, so it was like “turn it down guys, turn it down”. In the end we were playing on unplugged electric guitars, so we said, let’s just give it up.’

His parents ran a restaurant – they are now retired, 'so hopefully they can go on some adventures’ – in which Fassbender worked from the age of 12, at weekends and in the summer. 'I always had to put half the money away.’ He credits his father with giving him a strong work ethic. 'He always instilled the idea of don’t do it at all unless you’re going to do it properly.’

His mother introduced him to her favourite films, specifically those made in America in the 1970s: 'Early Scorsese, Sidney Lumet… she was a big fan of Al Pacino and De Niro, and they were the beginnings of my inspiration.’

Fassbender moved to London aged 19, to study at the Drama Centre. He secured an agent and dropped out in the last year, and almost immediately went on tour with the Oxford Stage Company in a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

His first major television role was the 2001 Steven Spielberg-produced Second World War drama Band of Brothers, and he was convinced, at 24, that his time had come. He remembers one of his best friends telling him that they believed he was going to do really well as an actor, but that it might take him another five years. 'And I was like, what are you talking about? Don’t tell me that s$#!, man, I’m on a roll here.’ He laughs. 'And sure enough he was right: it was only when I was 27, when I stopped working behind a bar, where I could actually sustain a living from doing this.’

During the years that followed Band of Brothers Fassbender was sporadically employed, turning up in television series including Holby City, Murphy’s Law and Poirot. He admits to reaching the point of considering an alternative career. 'I was thinking, what if this doesn’t work out? I haven’t been to university, I’m not the most academic person… but then I thought, well, I do know the catering industry, so I’m going to learn as much about making cocktails and running a bar. So I started managing a bar, and then suddenly I was getting auditions.’

The quality of work went up several levels; in 2006 he played a Spartan warrior in the gloriously over-the-top Hollywood blockbuster 300, and the following year a frustrated artist married to Romola Garai’s romantic novelist in François Ozon’s melodrama Angel. But the recession hit, fewer films were being made, and so to be cast as the lead in Hunger was a huge vote of confidence for Fassbender. 'It literally changed my life,’ he says. 'For somebody to take such a risk and give me the opportunity to do that was massive.’

Hunger was the Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen’s first feature film, and it told of the 1981 protests in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland, culminating with Bobby Sands’ hunger strike and death aged 27. The horror of the filthy cells, the beatings, strip searches, the intense determination of the prisoners and the brutal desperation of the warders are shown without comment, filmed with a stark beauty and lacerating emotional impact. 'Steve managed to tell a human story,’ Fassbender says. 'It avoids politics, it’s about what human beings are capable of doing to each other.’

The film won 30 awards, including the Caméra d’Or at Cannes. Fassbender describes McQueen as a 'genius. I know that word gets thrown around an awful lot, but he is. He expects the very best of you, and he’s got such a great bullshit radar. When you work with Steve there’s definitely no safety net; it’s scary, it’s challenging and it’s totally rewarding.’

For the episode where a priest (played by Liam Cunningham) visits Sands in jail to try to persuade him to forgo his hunger strike, Cunningham moved into Fassbender’s flat in Belfast and they rehearsed the 23-minute scene over and over again for days, in order to film it in one uninterrupted take. 'On take three the boom guy collapsed as he had been holding that thing up there for so long,’ Fassbender remembers.

He uses an example of McQueen’s notes during one of the takes to try to illustrate his working method. 'He said, “It’s getting a little bit like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. I want you to behave more like God.” I looked at Liam and he was like, ooh f***, and it sounds silly but we were maybe a third into the scene and I swear in Liam’s eye and in my mind I understood what he meant.’

Production was halted for 10 weeks so that Fassbender could lose three stone before filming Sands dying. He consulted a nutritionist, rented a house near Venice Beach in LA and ate 900 calories a day, his diet consisting of nuts, berries and sardines. 'My dad remembers me aged seven giving up everything sweet for Lent,’ he says. 'Lots of people would take a break for St Patrick’s Day, but I didn’t, and I think actually he thought I was a bit of an alien. So I wanted to know if at 30 years old I still had the same discipline.’

Fassbender reunited with McQueen earlier this year to film Shame, with Carey Mulligan. McQueen wrote the script with Abi Morgan, an original story about a sister moving in with her brother and how this affects his promiscuity. 'It’s about sexual addiction,’ Fassbender says, 'but it’s also about relationships, and how human beings communicate with each other; how do you really allow yourself to open up and deal responsibly with another person?’ It will be shown at next week’s Venice Film Festival, and already there is huge anticipation. 'I’ve really found my teacher in Steve,’ he says, 'and hopefully he’s found an apprentice in me.’

Fassbender finds his way into roles by methodically reading and re-reading the script 'until it just sort of settles into me, and it’s almost like putting on a new skin every day’.

This approach was challenged when he worked with Andrea Arnold on Fish Tank after Hunger. It was a film that made a star out of Katie Jarvis, a 17-year-old whom Arnold’s casting director discovered on a railway platform, arguing with her boyfriend. Jarvis played Mia, a solitary, aggressive teenager living on a rundown Essex housing estate, constantly at odds with her mother and 11-year-old sister.

The family’s lives are turned upside down by the mother’s new boyfriend, Connor, a charismatic Irishman played by Fassbender. Arnold wanted to give the actors the pages they were working on only the night before they filmed, 'which made me panic a bit’, Fassbender admits. 'I know why she did it, she didn’t want anyone to preload any scenes, but I like to run things a lot of times before, then let it sit, rot a little, then come back to it.’

He persuaded her to give him the week’s scenes the Friday before, which helped. It was a new way of working, but, he says, 'I just thought I can trust this woman, she’s a brilliant artist, let’s give it a shot.’

He found he enjoyed it. 'Andrea’s one of those directors who can and do work in a chaotic environment, but she’s one of the few and rare people who can actually harness it.’ For all his character’s sexual charisma and charm ('at one point I thought I was going to sleep with the whole family and I was like, oh, Jesus, here we go’), Connor turns out to be irresponsible, weak and a liar.

'I like playing these guys who are human beings,’ Fassbender says in Connor’s defence. 'Hopefully the audience is sitting there thinking, I understand that guy, or I’ve got elements of that, and perhaps it makes people think about things a little bit.’

As McQueen comments, 'Apart from being big and strong and bold, there is a fragility to Michael, and certain things are revealed through him that we can see in ourselves, and that’s very rare. He has a heart, you’re never disconnected from him.’

The chance to play a flawed and complicated character was what attracted him to the role of Magneto in X-Men: First Class. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, it is a prequel to the X-Men series. Set in the 1960s against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it tells the genesis of the superhero mutants and the friendship between the scientist Charles Xavier (played by James McAvoy) and Fassbender’s Erik Lehnsherr. Lehnsherr is blessed with magnetic kinetic powers (he raises submarines out of the water), with which he is determined to avenge his mother’s death in the Holocaust. Xavier and Lehnsherr’s subsequent falling-out leads to Lehnsherr forming his own mutant army and reinventing himself as Magneto.

The film touches on themes of alienation, prejudice and minority rights, and 'I thought within a popcorn film,’ Fassbender says, 'that could be really cool to explore.’ He saw his opportunity with X-Men.

'It’s an action film,’ he says, 'where the action is actually there to back up the emotional journeys of the characters, as opposed to the other way around.’ Fassbender admirably commits to Magneto, and his performance is the dynamic force of the film.

'No matter how much at times we were thinking this is silly as s$#!,’ McAvoy says, 'Michael’s got the ability and the presence of mind and the intelligence to be able to elevate it, and that was immediately evident from the first moment we sat down and started talking.’

Away from a film set, Fassbender indulges his obsession with motorbikes, go-karts and cars. In a recent interview he went as far as likening a 1956 Porsche 550 Spyder to a Van Gogh. He has set his sights on obtaining his pilot’s licence, 'but maybe that’s a year away’. Although rumoured to have been dating his co-star from X-Men, Zoë Kravitz, it is something he has never confirmed or denied. He is keen to concentrate on his fledgling production company, which will champion new writers, and after our interview he is off to watch a screening of a short film he has recently produced.

Fassbender has embraced the dizzying trajectory of his career because, McAvoy believes, 'I think he accepts himself. I think he’s really at home with who he is, and that’s not something that every actor has. He has self-possession in bucket loads and that lends itself to screen presence. While he’s on screen he is in command. He is him.’

Fassbender puts it more simply: 'It’s crazy that I’ve worked with the people I have, that I’m actually allowed to earn a living out of it. I’ve always thought you mustn’t live your life where at the end of it you go, oh God, I didn’t do that because I was worried about what other people might think of me.’

In fact, he is currently trying to convince his mother to take the plunge and fulfil her childhood dream of acting. 'I’m really going to push her,’ he smiles. 'It’s never too late to do anything.’

'Jane Eyre’ is released on September 9
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Post by Admin Sat Sep 03, 2011 7:34 pm

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-08-31/news-interviews/29948973_1_catering-michael-fassbender-career

Michael Fassbender considered catering career
Aug 31, 2011, 12.39pm IST
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Michael Fassbender|
Fish tank

Michael Fassbender considered a career in catering when acting wasn't working for him.

The Irish-born star - who has appeared in movies including 'Fish Tank' and 'X-Men: First Class' - admits he was nervous when film roles did not come quickly, and his only faith was in the fact he would always have experience running a bar.

He said: "I was thinking, what if this doesn't work out? I haven't been to university, I'm not the most academic person. but then I thought, well, I do know the catering industry, so I'm going to learn as much about making cocktails and running a bar.

"So I started managing a bar, and then suddenly I was getting auditions."

However, the 34-year-old hunk is glad to now be involved in the career he is, and still has to pinch himself at his success.

He told the Daily Telegraph: "It's crazy that I've worked with the people I have, that I'm actually allowed to earn a living out of it. I've always thought you mustn't live your life where at the end you go, oh God, I didn't do that because I was worried about what other people might think of me."

Source: Bang Showbiz
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Post by Admin Sun Sep 04, 2011 1:02 am

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-08-30/news-and-interviews/29944580_1_heavy-metal-guitarist-pub

Michael Fassbender
Heavy metal guitarist Michael Fassbender
Aug 30, 2011, 01.21pm IST
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Michael Fassbender|
Jane Eyre

Michael Fassbender almost embarked on a career as a heavy metal guitarist.

The 'Jane Eyre' actor formed a rock band with his friend Mike when they were teenagers, but the project was abandoned a disastrous first concert in a pub in Dingle, Ireland, where he grew up.

Michael explained: "I had heavy metal, that was a great help to me. Banging your head kills so many brain cells you don't think too much.

"We tried to busk but it was raining, so we persuaded this guy to let us play in his pub, but we were playing heavy metal and it was lunchtime, so it was like, 'turn it down guys, turn it down'.

"In the end we were playing on unplugged electric guitars, so we said, let's just give it up."

Michael also had aspirations to be a lawyer, an architect or a war journalist when he was younger, but as soon as he started acting - first in a surreal production written by his drama teacher when he was 17, then directing his own production of 'Reservoir Dogs' - he knew it was what he wanted to focus his career on.

He added: "Once I thought perhaps I could be quite good, I committed to it 100 per cent, it was my one and only priority."

Source : Bang Showbiz
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