Brendan Fraser
Brendan Fraser made his breakthrough by starring in two back-to-back films in 1992: The dumb frozen-caveman comedy Encino Man, and the smarter period drama School Ties, in which he played a secretly Jewish boy at an elite prep school. The dichotomy of those two films provided a solid sample of the next decade of his career: Alternating character dramas (Gods And Monsters, The Passion Of Darkly Noon, The Twilight Of The Golds) with big, sloppy comedies (Airheads, George Of The Jungle) and nichey comedy-dramas, he had a strangely patterned career that jumped around tonally and gave him as many flops as successes. Then in 1999, he starred in the special-effects-heavy blockbuster The Mummy. While he's done drama and comedy since then, his biggest roles ever since have been in big effects movies: The Mummy Returns, Monkeybone, Looney Tunes: Back In Action, and the new Journey To The Center Of The Earth, a movie he and director Eric Brevig are enthusiastically billing as the first digital live-action 3D narrative feature. The day after a sneak preview and Q&A; with Brevig and Fraser in Chicago, The A.V. Club sat down with Fraser for an enthusiastic, gesture-and-funny-voice-filled conversation about the film, improvisation, and being taken seriously as an actor. (Brevig's more sedate conversation about the film's technical aspects can be found here.)
The A.V. Club: In interviews, Joe Dante has specifically lauded your profound talent for "looking at a spot without looking through it"—
Brendan Fraser: Without winding up looking like this? [Crosses eyes.]
AVC: More like the kind of thing that comes up in commercials a lot, with kids not quite actually looking at the animated character flying around them—he was basically praising your skill at green-screen work. Do you think there are different disciplines involved in green-screen work than in smaller, non-special-effects films?
BF: [Laughs.] What can I tell you? I used to get sent to the principal's office for behaving like this, and now they're paying me to do it, okay? [Laughs.] It's like having imaginary friends, believing they're there. Your audience will believe they're there, and then it makes the CGI guys happy—Joe, etcetera, and all my friendly beloved happy nerds who helped make this movie, CGI-wise. From John Berton at ILM on down. It's a matter of being able to find a fixed point in space, then determine exactly what its physical properties are. Are you fighting it? Is it a mummy? Can you improvise with it, as I was screwing around on [The Mummy Returns]? I went to give the mummy a Curly poke in its eyes—I had too much coffee that afternoon or something. And of course if you poked a mummy's eyes you'd get goo on your hands, so I go [Recoils, makes face, examines fingers.] "Bleh!" I thought we'd have to go again. I could hear John Berton go [Hyena-like nasal laugh.] "Hyneah nyeh nyeh heh nyeh! We can use that!"
Seriously, this is important, because four or five years earlier, I was doing George Of The Jungle, CGI—and I had come of age in making films, so I had kind of gotten an education on how to make that ill-behaving child I formerly was— [Laughs.] How to use that talent for imagination, practically speaking, to collaborate with the CGI artists who are using technology that keeps quadrupling and quintupling itself over and over, to a saturation point. I think audiences aren't as easily impressed as once they were. I know even I feel that way, and I love movies. There's a glass ceiling that's been hit. You can't really see a film now that doesn't have some sort of—or a television show, or a little YouTube spot that you do on your laptop or whatever—that doesn't have some sort of special effect incorporated into it. Finding a way to stay true to whatever it is that it takes to act a scene out, and make sure that you use your imagination as best as you possibly can, still stay loose, and still allow yourself the liberty of doing what you need to do as an actor, and then work within the confines of what is actually possible…
So, George Of The Jungle. It was the 16th day of shooting this, and George is introducing a real elephant to his CGI pet elephant, who believes he's a dog, so the challenge was to create an elephant who had big puppy-dog eyes and a tongue that went [Pants rapidly like a dog.], like a Labrador, right? So we're lining the shot up, and there's the elephant, and everyone's got to be quiet and keep the fewest number of people onset so it doesn't [Panicked elephant trumpeting noise.], freak out or whatever. The shot was designed to have George introduce his pet elephant Shep, so I worked the elephant. [Mimes the shape of an elephant next to him.] And I figured I could stroke its trunk, like you would stroke… [Enthusiastically pets imaginary elephant at shoulder height.] "Good boy! Good boy!" So I'm stroking the trunk like that, and there's four or five guys with laptop computers on music stands, from I don't know where, watching me with hawk eyes, and there's little orange cones that are placed on the elephant as reference points. And I was stroking the elephant, and I was winging it during the shot, so what would you do with a dog? You would scratch it behind the ears, so I reached up to scratch the elephant behind the ear.
All these guys had aneurisms. They were like, "Eek!" And I went, "What's the matter?" and they went, "You can't shoot that!" and I'm like, "Shoot what?" And they came over, and we had this huddle-up like on the mound, like in Bull Durham, and I said, "What's the deal?" and they said, "You can't raise your right arm to scratch the elephant behind the ear. You can only use your left arm to stroke the trunk." "Why?" And all the CGI guys turn to each other and go [Murmuring crowd noises.], and the first AD just walks up and goes, "Because we don't have the budget for the shot, okay? If you scratch the elephant behind the ear, it will cost another $258,000. If you scratch it on the trunk, it's only $85,000. Okay, can we get to work? Thanks." We've come so far from there. You can do anything you want now.
AVC: In the Q&A; last night, Eric Brevig was talking about the 28-second shot he had to drop because it didn't fit into the budget, so presumably that's still an issue to some degree. Are you saying directors normally don't tell you not to improvise in big effects films?