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The Herald, Saturday April 29 2017
THX-E01-S4
The Herald, Saturday April 29 2017
THX-E01-S4
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SCREEN S HOTS
ame is fleeting... it doesn’t F make you any better, or stronger or faster EIGHTIES PIN-UP DENNIS QUAID’S LATEST MOVIE IS AN OLD-FASHIONED WEEPIE. HE TELLS E LLA WALKER WHY THE PART HELD A SPECIAL APPEAL AND WHY HE BELIEVES IN CINEMA AS A FORCE FOR GOOD
E ON THL SMAL N SCREE GEOFFREY RUSH ON PLAYING EINSTEIN
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Above, Dennis was married to Meg Ryan for 10 years and starred in several films with her. Left, Dennis with his co-star from his latest movie, A Dog’s Purpose
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ENNIS QUAID, at first, is not so friendly. He rubs his eyes continuously (blame the jetlag), his answers are short (if not snappy), but switch tack and ask him what kind of parent he is and he collapses into giddy laughter. “Oh, I can be a really embarrassing dad if I want to be!” says the father-of-three. “I take such glee in it. Just let your 11 or 12-yearold out [the car] and start to walk into school and, just as they meet their friends, you turn up Radio Disney really loud and say, ‘Hey!”’ He can’t stop guffawing. Get Texas-born Dennis, 63, considering the deeper stuff and he unfurls even further, becoming frank, insightful and rather witty. “It’s a fleeting thing, it’s not who you really are,” he says of fame. “It doesn’t make anybody any better, or stronger, or faster. It’s not a superhero power, being famous; sometimes it seems that way, because it’s good for restaurant reservations –
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really good for that!” He’s passionate about cinema being a force for good - “Either the world’s scary or somebody’s life is scary; it’s a place to go and dream and forget about you, or the world, or see that the world is a beautiful place” – and is committed to sharing his past struggles with anorexia and cocaine. “A lot of people do go through it,” he reasons, “and a lot of people are maybe looking to get out of it, thinking it’s an endless road, so why not tell my story? That’s part of
getting through it, to tell your story – because being in it is all about hiding.” For Dennis, cinema is about storytelling, and articulating emotions (“I don’t like to go and be educated, I like to go and feel things in the movies,” he notes), hence his latest film project, A Dog’s Purpose, directed by Lasse Hallstrom (The Cider House Rules, Chocolat). It’s a story of unconditional love, between a boy called Ethan and his dog, Bailey, who happens to have multiple lives, based on the book by W. Bruce Cameron. Dennis hadn’t read the script, but when his agent began explaining the story, “he got about four or five sentences in and I started to well up,
and I said, ‘Stop, I’m going to do it’,” the actor recalls. “I had one of those relationships with a dog when I was a kid,” adds Dennis, who plays the adult version of Ethan. “That classic boy-dog relationship with my basset hound, Gertrude; she knew my thoughts, we were together all the time, and I still think of her today.” A certified ‘dog man’, he currently has two French bulldogs, Batman and Gidget, and wasn’t worried about working with pups on-screen. “[Comedian] W.C. Fields said don’t work with kids or animals, because they’re scene-stealers, but they were fantastic to work with,” says Dennis, showcasing his trademark grin. “The dogs were so
THREE TO SEE Here is a trio of Dennis Quaid films that are well worth tracking down
Neo-noir thriller The Big Easy (1987) saw Quaid’s shady cop fall for the DA investigating him (Ellen Barkin)
Dennis plays charter pilot Captain Frank Towns in F light Of The Phoenix (2004), who finds himself stranded with his passengers in the Gobi Desert after his plane crashes.
eager, they’re not all self-involved like a lot of actors...” While A Dog’s Purpose follows one pooch through many incarnations, Dennis is circumspect on the idea of humans having multiple lives. “I have had that feeling before, just like a lot of people, that I may have had past lives,” he muses. “I don’t know, I’m enjoying the one I’m currently having, but I think it’s quite possible.” When nudged on what his past lives might have looked like, he shakes his head and offers wryly: “I was probably doing something shady...” Dennis’s film career began in the late-Seventies but really took off in Far From Heaven (2002) looks at questions of race and sexuality as it follows the collapse of an All-American family
Geoffrey Rush plays Albert Einstein in Genius
the Eighties, when he snagged roles in television – it’s basically running the Breaking Away, The Big Easy and The show”. Right Stuff. Dennis is a total convert, from being A 10-year marriage to actress Meg on the box himself (in Sky Atlantic sci-fi Ryan followed, as well as major roles in thriller Fortitude) to binge-watching The Parent Trap, The Rookie and the The Crown, and being miffed that acclaimed 2002 movie Far From doing press for A Dog’s Purpose has Heaven, alongside interrupted his Westworld Julianne Moore. marathon back home in When asked about the US. the impact his face (that You’d never guess he grin, those cheekbones) spent so much time on the has had – and still has sofa. For a man in his – on his career, he seventh decade, Dennis is Heart-throb? practically yells: undeniably trim. He puts it Heart-throb at “Heart-throb? Heartdown to being “blessed” 63?! Haha – throb at 63?! Haha – hell with a high metabolism, no! and the fact he was a hell no! “If someone wants to runner for 35 years, until throw out their heart over me, that’s he switched to cycling, “because it’s fine,” he teases, before adding: “No, it’s easier on the knees – and I feel like I’m also what got me in the door, playing 12 years old when I get on my bike”. romantic leads, but I’ve always considAge doesn’t terrify him though, and so ered myself an actor of characters.” far, he hasn’t felt his options choked by The Eighties already feel like a past the date on his birth certificate. “There’s life, he admits. “Well, yeah, because the always roles for older people, you just money was rollin’ back then!” Dennis play different things going through life, says with a laugh. “It’s a very different that’s what keeps it interesting.” world now in film than it was, and it’s As he stands up to leave, Dennis good that it keeps changing.” adds: “Find something you love to do He describes how, every decade of his and figure out how to get paid for it career so far, the focus has shifted – that’s the key to life.” from the director to the ‘movie star’ era, to the time of the producers and ■■A Dog’s Purpose opens in cinemas agencies, and now, “it’s the age of on Friday, May 5
USTRALIAN actor Geoffrey Rush plays Albert Einstein in Genius, a new 10-part TV series charting his life and work. The Oscar-winning star tells Jeananne Craig how the German physicist’s personal life was just as exciting as his professional achievements. Were you any good at physics in school? I HAD dreams of being an astronomer, inspired by the American space race in my childhood and teenage years, so I did maths, chemistry and physics right up until my senior year. Once we got into calculus and simple harmonic motion and equations and letters and x’s and y’s, I just could not respond in the way they were teaching it then. I went, ‘It’s just Egyptian hieroglyphics’. How much did you know about Albert Eistein before taking on this project? I PROBABLY had the cartoon, mythological version that most people seem to have, that he’s kind of famous for his hair. It’s entered the language, where people go, ‘He’s no Einstein’. Or Einstein can be pejorative, where school teachers go, ‘Oh thank you Einstein,’ if you say something smarty-pants. I had studied some physics at school, so I knew a little. But I knew nothing about what the series revealed, which is the complexity and contradictions within him, sometimes glorious, sometimes a little bit despicable, about his domestic life. It’s great that long-form TV is now very popular and successful, so you get to play a character and have 10 hours
just a trick or a joke’. And we found the right scene as he got a little bit more eccentric and a little bit more depressed and feeling as though he was yesterday’s man, and he’s Did you know he was schlepping around the house in such a ladies’ man? these slippers. I DIDN’T know about that, but I It was a nice touch. suppose if you put that equation together, he had a lot of Did you get to keep the slippers? celebrity. I think he had many young lovers because he moved NO, I should have. And the other bit that was great was a shot of around a lot. him wearing slingbacks belongHe gave up his German ing to Elsa [Einstein’s second passport and was a bit of a wife]. gallivant. He was bright and They were on the beach I some women find that deeply think, and I’m pretty certain he attractive. And he had humour. would have gone, ‘I couldn’t find my sandals this morning and I took the most practical pair of shoes nearby without any care for the fact that these are traditionally worn by women’.” with them, rather than an hour and 50 minutes in one film, which creates more biopic kind of pitfalls or clichés.
He was bright and some women find that deeply attractive. And he had humour.... On why Einstein seemed to be such a hit with the ladies
Do you think more people might study physics after seeing how successful Einstein was with the opposite sex OR people might take up the violin, you don’t know! It would be interesting to see if Princeton University gets more applications... One of the great revelations to me was the costume designer sending me photos and saying, ‘I’ve got a fantastic photo of Einstein here and he’s wearing the largest pink fluffy slippers,’ and I went, ‘Let’s find a scene where that is going to be useful rather than
Chemistry: Geoffrey Rush and his Genius co-star Emily Watson
Emily Watson, who you previously starred alongside in the book thief (2013) plays Elsa. Did it help that you already had a rapport together? WE were very aware that we were playing husband and wife, in Nazi Germany, once again. It was a great encouragement to find the difference between the Hubermans living in the south in Bavaria, and how that marriage worked and how they took in a refugee young Jewish man, and theoretical physics and the celebrity Einstein had achieved. We didn’t want to do our generic German married act! It kept us on our toes. You won an Oscar for playing the musical prodigy David Helgott in Shine (1996). Why do you think you get offered scripts to play geniuses? I DON’T look at my CV all the time going, ‘Is there a pattern?’ or ‘What should I do next?’ But there is an accidental gravitational pull towards playing real people. I like reading biographies, memoirs, I like the way good writing in that genre can enter into the reality of that person’s life and their mind. Though I’d like to think that I sometimes counterbalance it by playing a pelican [in Finding Nemo, 2003], or a pirate [in the Pirates Of The Caribbean films] or something from another planet. ■■ Genius airs on Sunday nights on National Geographic 9pm.