It's difficult to sum up John Hurt's career in a short space, because he's had so many iconic, career-defining roles: as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant; Caligula in I, Claudius; John Merrick in The Elephant Man; Kane (the first victim) in Alien; Winston Smith in 1984; Max in Midnight Express; Giles De'Ath in Love And Death On Long Island—the list goes on and on. Over 45 years in television, film, and the theater, Hurt has been tremendously prolific, ranging from starring roles in his own vehicles to a lively side career as a narrator (for Perfume, The Story Of A Murderer, Lars von Trier's Dogville and Manderlay, and the Jim Henson TV series The Storyteller, among many other projects) and in animated films (as Aragorn in Ralph Bakshi's The Lord Of The Rings, Hazel in Watership Down, and many more). He has another five films currently in production. In his latest, Beyond The Gates, he plays a Catholic priest running a school in Rwanda, where he shelters thousands of tribal Tutsis during the 1991 massacre, and observes, with growing fury, the U.N.'s refusal to intervene. The A.V. Club recently spoke to Hurt about acting methods, the six questions journalists ask, and how actors are born, not made.
The A.V. Club: Your character in Beyond The Gates seemed unusually complicated, like someone with a lot of history and internal conflict. Was that nuance present when you first read the script, or did it develop over time?
John Hurt: That's a very good question, and a hard one to answer in retrospect. I think I always saw the possibility of it. I have a certain amount of experience, in a sense, in my own family, in regard to the kind of character. Whether it was entirely there—the script was not, when I first saw it, in particularly good shape, and it was really due to a great deal of very, very hard and very good work by [director] Michael Caton-Jones that the script became what it finally was. Certainly it was enough to entice me to say, "Yes, I think this is an interesting project. Let's have a crack at it." Not that [Rwanda] is the sort of subject you're waiting for. It's something which you feel, in a strange way—I don't want this to sound like some sort of terrible duty, but you feel kind of obligated if you're asked to do a piece like this, as it doesn't reflect the sweetest side of human nature. I think it was always there, but I don't think it was there as completely as perhaps it is in the finished product.
AVC: When you say you had experience with that kind of character in your family, do you mean because of your father?
JH: Well, my father's a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize. My uncle was also—both of them mathematicians, I might say, though that's absolutely apropos of nothing—and he was head of what was called the Bush Brotherhood in Queensland, Australia. So, you know, there is what they call "material to draw on."
AVC: So how do you go about developing characters? Primarily on your own? With the director? With the screenwriter?
JH: All three of those things, really. It's a collective process, on one hand; it's an individual process on the other. The truth is rarely pure and never simple, as dear Oscar [Wilde] would say. A great of it, of course, is, you collect as much information as you can and then you put it into the mulberry of your mind and hope that you come up with a decent wine. Sometimes you do; sometimes you don't.
AVC: What sort of process do you prefer in developing characters with a director?
JH: Very, very broadly speaking, you can put directors into two areas: One for whom you work, and the other with whom you work. And I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons. It's a great relief to feel that you're working with someone rather than for someone. You don't feel that you're being tested, as it were.
AVC: Which directors that you've worked with have fit best into your sensibility?
JH: Well, who's become my very good friend, Richard Kwietniowski—I've enjoyed working with enormously for those reasons. I did Love And Death On Long Island with him, and Owning Mahowny. And indeed, I work very well with Michael Caton-Jones. This is the third film I've done with him, and all three films are quite, quite different. So it's quite a broad experience with him. And somehow we know how each other ticks, you know? Since this is an interview, I'm having to be rather general, insofar as we don't have the time nor each other's presence to make it any more specific. Who else? Stephen Frears is another director that I enormously enjoyed working with, and I feel as though I worked with him more than I have, because I know him so well. Oh gosh, there are so many. I enormously liked working with Jim Sheridan in The Field. That was very exciting. I love working with Jim Jarmusch, though I've only done one film with him, Dead Man. And I'd love to repeat that, I have to say. And I'm massively enjoying the man I'm working with at the minute, Álex de la Iglesia, a Spanish director.
Oh, I've enjoyed working with lots of people, really. And then on the other hand, the older school: Fred Zinnemann, John Huston, Richard Fleischer, in my early, much more formative days. They were fantastic to work with at that time. Though I think one's constantly in formative days.
AVC: Do you think that what made those old-school directors fulfilling to work with is different from what makes directors fulfilling for you to work with today?
JH: That's tricky, because things change, you know? The public changed, for instance, in the 10 years before Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony. One could consider that old-fashioned, because he didn't realize what had happened in those 10 years in terms of the public. The public moves on, you know? We have more or less the same weapons. We have a certain talent, and we have a certain taste. But I consider myself very fortunate to have been on the end of that particular period, and to be able to have had a real working relationship with men like that. They were, at that moment in time, enormously exciting, but probably if they were working now, they themselves would not be directing in quite the same way, because things change.
AVC: Do you regret the change in public tastes and in the way movies have changed between then and now?
JH: Oh, good God, no. You can't regret that. I mean, really what one tries to do is not to lose touch.
AVC: How do you go about that?
JH: By hopefully keeping your sensibilities open and your options open, your mind open, and listening rather than talking. If you listen, you learn; if you talk, you don't.
AVC: But do you keep current by following new directors' leads, or watching current films, or through other methods?
JH: I think you get that from life, really. I mean, it all comes from life. It comes from where life is at the minute. And life, as we know from the last century and going into this one, is as turbulent as you could get.
AVC: So how do you use it to prepare for roles?
JH: I would be hard-pressed to tell you how in any sort of scientific, specific way. Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able—I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.
AVC: Is acting as it's being taught today different from acting as it was taught when you were in school?
JH: Well, that's constantly on the change, too. Yes, I think it probably is. I think it's interesting to see how things come into and go out of fashion. I think probably one saw what's called the Method—I don't like calling it the Method, because I don't think it's really got a great deal to do with Stanislavski, which is where the Method was born. It's more to do with Lee Strasberg, which is not quite the same thing. It's more a therapeutic approach to acting, in which you delve into your own emotions and apply them to the characters you're playing. That's quite unlike the style or the way in which I was brought up, which was to go to the character, to take whatever it is you have, and employ it in understanding the character rather than understanding yourself first. You could call this a lot of intellectual nonsense, really, but you're asking me, so I'm trying to answer.
AVC: When you're working with much younger actors in films like Beyond The Gates or Love And Death On Long Island, are the differences between your methods and your co-stars' methods ever an issue, or a difficulty?
JH: In the end, the game is the same. Football is still football. Now, they may play with different formations, they may have a different idea of training, but the game doesn't alter. I don't mind how any performer—indeed, why should I? How arrogant of me if I did?—manages to get to what they have to get to. It doesn't matter how you get there, as long as it isn't going to destroy other people on the way. And everybody will bow to the zeitgeist of their particular period, and I think you will certainly be in danger of losing touch if you are not aware of that.
AVC: You told The Guardian a few years ago—relatively famously, this has been widely quoted—that there are six questions a journalist asks, and all of them are "How do you act?"
JH: Yes, that's one of my more facetious answers. But it's a question that really intrigues people, for some r eason. It intrigues people that you can be other people. And to us, of course, it seems to be second nature, but if that is not a gift that you have, then it is obviously going to be intriguing. "What a privilege," they think, "to be able to go through life being able to be so many different people!" And it is a privilege.
AVC: You say "to us, it's second nature." Do you think actors are born rather than made?
JH: I'm convinced of it. I'm convinced that it starts that way. I think you can fan the flames, but I think in the same way that a mathematician is a mathematician—He's not taught to be a mathematician. He either has a feeling for equations and an understanding and delight in it, not only in the purity of it, but in its beauty as well. I don't think that's something that you learn at school. I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever, you know? Whatever your pool is.
AVC: Do you think that's true for most professions?
JH: I do. At the best level, at least. I mean, I could teach someone to act to get by, not that I would want to see them do that. In fact, it saddens me when I see someone struggling against the tide of their own abilities in order to stay in the profession when really they shouldn't be.
AVC: Do you feel you've seen a lot of that?
JH: Oh yes, you see a great deal of that, as you do in journalism. Do you not? Now come on, be honest.
AVC: Yes, that's true. About the six questions that journalists ask that all amount to "How do you act," though—that may be a boring question to keep answering, but is there a more relevant one to ask a professional actor?
JH: There probably isn't. The only difficulty is that there isn't an answer. As I said, it's not a science, and therefore there is no sort of clinical response. And of course, we're all far too afraid of being so arrogant to say "Either you can or you can't."
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