Fiennes finds voice-only acting presents challenges



By PHILIP WUNTCH
The Dallas Morning News
07/04/2003



Joseph Fiennes made young Will Shakespeare accessible to a new generation of moviegoers in 1998's Shakespeare in Love.

Mr. Fiennes' love-struck Bard made audiences feel they were entering an era that would be dominated by the Fiennes fraters. Older brother Ralph had already achieved fame with The English Patient, Schindler's List, The End of the Affair and, more recently, Red Dragon, Maid in Manhattan and Spider.

But unlike his active brother, Joseph kept a low profile in film. He's now heard in Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, providing the voice of Proteus, noble prince of Syracuse and boyhood pal of the title character.


Dreamworks
Joseph Fiennes spent two years working on Sinbad without meeting costars Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones.


"We all grew up in an atmosphere of artistic stimulus," the 33-year-old actor said in a recent phone conversation, referring to his family of six siblings. "I can't remember a time when I wasn't aware of a dashing pirate named Sinbad. For a very young child, that was artistic stimulus. I couldn't wait to jump aboard the movie."

He wound up working on the animated feature for two years but has no regrets.

"When I saw the finished film, it was sheer giddy excitement," he says. "I was there with my eight nieces and nephews, and more godchildren than I can count. And all of them responded to the movie with more maturity than I did."

He found being "locked up in a booth for hours over the course of two years" to be a fascinating experience.

"More and more actors are intrigued by animation," he says. "I've always loved radio work, which is very similar. But it's one of the toughest mediums. With only your voice, you have to reach out and spark the listener's or viewer's imagination."

He never met co-stars Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones until long after the film was completed.

"As an actor, your job is to listen to the other actors. But when you're doing a voice for animation, there are no other actors. No Brad, no Catherine. Yet when we finally met each other, we felt like we already knew each other."

Yet he feels animation to be "a truly collaborative form of filmmaking."

"It's just that the collaboration is not among the actors. Instead, it's a marriage between animator and character. While the actor is recording, a camera is in the room capturing all the actor's mannerisms. So you really do act the part as you speak the lines. The animators get so see all your ticks and gestures before they design the characters. It becomes a great collaboration."

Mr. Fiennes sees the character of Proteus as a truly noble being.

"He wants to enjoy life, the way he did with Sinbad when they were boys. Sometimes, of course, royalty cannot do that. But most of all, I felt the story had a wonderful father-son relationship between Proteus and his father, the king. I built on it inwardly. He wanted to prove to his father that he was a prince of worth. He wanted to honor his destiny of royalty."




Dreamworks
Proteus


Mr. Fiennes built on his own relationship with his mother in 1999, while the Shakespeare in Love rush was in full bloom. His mother, author Jini Fiennes, had died of cancer in 1993. But before her death, she published her sixth novel, Blood Ties, under her maiden name of Jennifer Lash. Blood Ties is the story of generational conflicts resolved with love.

Mr. Fiennes, his brother Ralph and sister Sophie, a documentary filmmaker, came to Broadway in 1999 to perform readings of Blood Ties . They also toured several European cities.

"People came to it thinking they would weep frequently, that it would be a very sad occasion. But my mother was a very humorous woman, and there was always humor in her work. It was a really funny, amusing evening, and to have audiences respond to it in the way she would have wanted was wonderful."

Mr. Fiennes chafes at the suggestion that he's done little film work since Shakespeare in Love.

"I've done stage work in Edward II and Love's Labour Lost , and I love stage work. But I do love the cinema, too. Enemy at the Gates was my only high-profile film, but I was making interesting, low-budget European films all the time. But in Hollywood, if you're not making Hollywood films, they think you're not working."

One of his brushes with big- studio filmmaking was unpleasant. Chen Kaige, the Chinese director of the current Together and global hits Farewell, My Concubine and Temptress Moon, directed Mr. Fiennes and Heather Graham in an English-language erotic thriller, Killing Me Softly. The film received only a marginal 2002 release, to devastating reviews.

"There were many things going on that I was only partly aware of while we were filming. Chen Kaige is a rare and extraordinary man, who has a wonderful voice in film. But because he had never made a film in English before, the studio treated him like he had never made any film at all. He is the Steven Spielberg of China, and he should not be treated like that."

Mr. Fiennes will next tackle Shakespearean text. He will play Bassanio in a movie version of The Merchant of Venice, to be helmed by Michael Radford, who directed the Oscar-nominated Italian film Il Postino (The Postman).

"Al Pacino will play Shylock. We don't have a Portia yet. And, now that I think about it, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it. Isn't it bad luck to mention a project before everything's fallen into place?"

But he'll have a hard time keeping wraps on that one. The actor who played Shakespeare in love now playing a Shakespearean character in love? For media attention, that's an irresistible formula.




 

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