Behind the scenes with Sam Neill: the actor who has shared a filmset with Meryl Streep, Judy Davis, a pack of dinosaurs and, recently, Peter O’Toole…yet doesn’t feel qualified to tread the boards.
The hotel corridor smells of coffee. The sound of muffled laughter sneaks out from under a closed door. Sam Neill – real name Nigel, though it’s always simply ‘Sam’ on the credits – is holding court. People with questions and people with cameras are ushered in and out of different rooms. It’s a dreadful process, a publicity production line, but Neill has been doing this kind of thing, when required, for more than 30 years (My Brilliant Career, in which he starred with Judy Davis, came out in 1979). He’s rather good at it: the urbane and obliging interviewee is another role he’s learned to play, along with a raft of characters ranging from Merlin the magician to a Russian submariner. Now, in Dean Spanley, Neill has played a cleric who may or may not be barking mad.
So is he all talked out? “Ah, well”, he says – after letting slip that he was chuffed to see his old mate John Clarke*, whom he has acted with and directed, on a recent Big Issue cover – the drum-beating is more bearable if it’s for a project he actually likes. And, he adds, “it’s sort of necessary in this case because it’s so difficult to actually explain what this thing is.” This “thing” is Dean Spanley, a charming and intriguing film (directed by New Zealander Toa Fraser) that is much better than its title. It’s worth seeing for the cast, which includes British actor Jeremy Northam, Bryan Brown – with whiskers, playing (of course) an Australian – and the legendary Peter O’Toole, playing a crotchety old man. This probably wasn’t a stretch as the one-time Lawrence of Arabia will turn 77 in August.
Neill was initially reluctant to take the part, largely because it “just seemed immeasurably difficult”, but the producers were persistent and he liked the idea of working with O’Toole. It was only when he got to the set, he adds, that he thought: “Oh shit, now I’ve got to come up with the goods.” Can he imagine himself doing an O’Toole and still working in his late seventies? “Well”, he replies, “the awful thing is that it’s not that far away.” Actually, it is: Neill is a chipper 61. But, he continues, “I can’t imagine anything worse than retiring.” This sounds odd for a bloke who has, among other things, a vineyard in an especially scenic part of New Zealand, where he grew up after being born in Northern Ireland (his father, an NZ army officer, was stationed there).
His point, he explains, is that “It’s nice to feel useful, and all actors are pathetically insecure. I’m no different in that regard, and when someone says we want you to do a job, you feel somehow validated and wanted. We all want to be wanted, don’t we?” The main criterion he applies to mooted projects is: will it be fun? “If I think I’m going to have a miserable time, then I don’t respond.” And if this seems like a cavalier approach to a professional career, well, too bad. “With an old dog like me [an interesting choice of words, given his Spanley role] it’s too late to guide careers. If you’re 21 or just out of Neighbours then you probably do need some guidance. It’s far too late for any of that with me.”
He regards himself as a film actor, not a film star. To be a ‘star’, Neill once suggested, you have to live in LA, something he has never wanted to do. Scanning his many movie roles, one striking feature is how many are memorable for him being with other actors (or, in the case of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, with dinosaurs). He was with Davis in Career, with Meryl Streep in Evil Angels
(1988), with a young Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm the following year, with an even younger Anna Paquin and Holly Hunter (both of whom won Oscars) in The Piano (1993). In tennis terms, he’s done well on the international circuit as a solid doubles player rather than a singles champion: one of the Woodies, not Federer. It’s on the smaller screen, in TV roles, that he’s been leading-man material: as the dashing Ivanhoe and suave Reilly (Ace of Spies) in the early-80s. There’s more than a little of TS Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock in Neill. Indeed, you can imagine him reciting: No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do; To swell a progress, start a scene or two…
The irony here is that Neill does not regard himself as a stage actor. O’Toole, by contrast, did play Hamlet (in the 60s, directed by Laurence Olivier, no less). Neill never had any formal training as an actor. He says of this: “I think in some ways it has been an advantage because I’ve come sort of unschooled.” He has learned his craft through instinct and experience. He knows he can do it. But – and here’s the rub, as Hamlet might say – “It did leave me insecure. I think that’s in part why I don’t do any theatre, because I’ve never been trained in theatre… Voice control and that kind of thing. I don’t have that training at all… I have developed a number of skills as far as working in cinema goes and I’m happy to pass on those skills to anyone who wants to listen!” People do offer him stage roles from time to time, “and I almost invariably don’t hesitate to say something like ‘thank you, but I’m really not your guy’.”
This is contrary to what most actors would say. Neill knows that. “I enjoy working in cinema, and obviously there is a sort of slight snobbishness still in some actors – they think the real thing is the theatre, and that acting on film is what you do to subsidise the great art. I don’t believe that’s valid; I think working on film is quite a fine craft. And I like to paint with a fairly fine brush. With a lot of stage work, you’re painting with something…”
This explains his admiration for the old-school British actor James Mason. “I love complexity in performance,” Neill reveals, “and I love the way he always brought some shade to a light character or light to a dark character. Ambivalence is good.”
When asked which of his contemporaries he likes to watch, Neill answers: “Oh there’s many. Because I so much admire what other actors do and particularly people who can do the things that I can’t. And we all have limitations, you know … But one of the people I have been looking at recently is Brendan Gleeson. He’s with Colin Farrell in In Bruges (2008). I like Colin Farrell, too. But Brendan Gleeson’s performance in In Bruges was a beautiful, beautifully modulated performance.” He also mentions another film from last year, The Band’s Visit. “And I don’t know the name of the actor, but he’s got a nice big nose – you don’t see that very often on film – and a fabulous way of going about things. I’ve seen him in another Israeli film that was on SBS once. I still don’t know who he is but I’d like to find out, because he’s just so good.” (Memo Mr Neill: Sasson Gabai is your man.)
Neill has an Emmy and three Golden Globe awards on his CV, but thus far there have been no calls from Oscar. His thoughts on this year’s winner? “I thought Sean Penn was fantastic in Milk. I thought it was very beautiful, what he did. I don’t know anything about Harvey Milk, but I feel like I know him intimately, having spent a couple of hours with Sean on that.”
Penn, of course, is well known for his adoption of causes. Neill never makes as much noise as Penn, but he is also a man who says what he thinks. In 2005, for example, he launched the election campaign of the-then NZ PM, Helen Clark, and denounced “the fools and scoundrels running the world”. Clark won that election,
but lost office last year. Still, Neill says, her great achievement was keeping NZ out of Iraq. Many of those fools and scoundrels have also departed since 2005. Of the new US President he says: “I’m greatly optimistic about Obama. Although, at the moment, he’s probably got the worst job in the world. He hasn’t been left a terribly healthy legacy by the previous incumbent. But I think he’s a good man and I’m very excited about him being there.”
It’s notable that when talking about the current state of things, both economic and political, he becomes more animated than when talking movies. “I think it’s very easy to get caught up in the rather gloomy zeitgeist,” he says, when the financial crisis is tossed up as a topic. “And it doesn’t serve any of us any good. I think that people, in six months or a year or something, are going to get bored with all this; bored with feeling anxious and feeling panic and having a sense that the world is about to come to an end as we know it. People are just going to say: ‘look, alright, that’s enough of that, let’s get back to work and do what we do best’. I am reminded so much of Chicken Little – people running around screaming ‘the sky is falling, the sky is falling!’ And it sort of does, if you say it loud and long enough.” In this case, the media is cast as Chicken Little. “Yeah, panic now! If you’re not panicked enough, panic more! And it’s an interesting question: is this responsible reporting or is it actually shovelling coal into a furnace of insecurity? I’m sick to bloody death of it!”
There is a lot of sense in what Neill says. And when he talks about getting back to work and doing “what we do best”, he knows what that means for him: acting in films. Also, occasionally, talking about them. There are worse jobs. Dean Spanley, in which Neill has the title role, is a movie that you will probably leave feeling better than when you went in. These days, that’s no small thing. Sam Neill, actor, is playing his part.
By Alan Atwood
Photos by Getty
*John Clarke passed away in 2017
Published in Ed#325