Arthur Newman Roundtable Interviews By Courtney Vaudreuilfor
Here is our entire interview with Colin Firth and Emily Blunt for their film Arthur Newman. I want to thank Courtney Vaudreuilfor covering the Press Junket for SandwichJohnFilms.
Wallace Avery is suffering from a middle aged malaise. Despite having a steady job, nice apartment, beautiful girlfriend, and young son, Avery is unable to move past his unsuccessful attempt at a pro golfing career. Desperate to start over and abandon his past shortcomings, Avery leaves everything behind and becomes a new man, Arthur Newman. Directed by Dante Ariola and starring Oscar® winner Colin Firth and Emily Blunt, the eponymously titled film ARTHUR NEWMAN explores whether one can ever truly start over and, more importantly, the consequences of living a purely selfish life.
Did you guys have the same vocal coach?
Emily: We did actually.
Colin: She had a good one, I had a bad one.
Emily: No, we had the same one. [Laughs]
Is it easy to get into an American accent?
Colin: No.
What’s the toughest part about speaking with […]
Colin: It’s not. You focus on a character and that’s his voice. It’s not negotiable after all, that’s who you hear. It’s just him – it’s not anybody else. It’s not any of the other 280 million Americans – it’s just him. So you just have to own who he is and do it as you hear it.
Did you go in and out during, you know, when you weren’t shooting? Did you go back to your British accents?
Emily: We did, unfortunately, because we’re both Brits. And so normally when I do an accent, like, for example, when I did Looper, I was working with this little boy, and so I’d kind of stay in the accent more or less so that he didn’t get confused. But, I didn’t have a chance with Colin. We’re so completely British! You find another Brit and you just kind of…
Colin: It sort of spills in, though. Your speech pattern changes. It’s not unlike working with a stutter, in a way. It starts to find its way into your speech. And again, a stutter isn’t everybody’s stutter, it’s not a stutter. It’s this guy and this is how he expresses himself and these are his issues. So again, you just actually start to not make it general – it’s just this.
What did you find in the script that you were particularly attracted to and made you want to play the character?
Colin: It had a lot of unknowns for me. I mean, I read it and I felt there were a lot of questions. I like the idea of – I’m always fascinated by the notion of ordinariness – or apparent ordinariness – people who you could dismiss as ordinary or boring. People whose lives seem to be a series of disappointments, rather than …. I mean even the way, you know, if we talk about The King’s Speech, that’s a character who’d written himself off as the ordinary member against a very extraordinary background. The potential for drama in what seems to be an unremarkable or quiet life I think is something that does endlessly fascinate me. Even heroism, not written on a big super hero stage, possibly just found in the suburbs.
Emily: The script in general terms was just completely refreshing in how original it was. It was pretty uncompromising, actually. It didn’t want to conform to being any genre or anything I could kind of sum up in a one-liner pitch. I liked the idea of the more we mask ourselves, maybe the freer we are able to be within ourselves. I think that idea that, I think everyone at some point has wanted to escape or runaway or take on a different identity – I think we’ve all felt it. I don’t really particularly feel these characters are necessarily crazy. I think that they just are acting on that impulse I think a lot of people have. But I just couldn’t my finger on quite why I was so drawn to the script. I think that’s always quite good way in, if you feel that there’s ambiguity there, something to play with.
As actors, you play different people all that time, so does that mean that you are more like the characters, or because you do it for a living you have less need to escape?
Emily: We have less need to escape, I think, because we do it all the time. We go away for a few months a year and you get to be someone else and live this strange, insular Never Land-like experience.
Colin: I think our challenge is how to get back to Kansas.
Emily: Dorothy! How do we get home?
Are you guys avid golfers? Do you go watch PGA? Did this movie make you appreciate golf more?
Colin: I had never watched a single golf swing in my life. So it was a foreign language to me. Completely.
Emily: I like playing golf. I’m terrible. I’m really really bad. But I like whizzing around on the golf cart with beers in the back – that’s fun. That’s probably about as good as my golf gets.
Colin: I have enough weaknesses without needing another thing that’s going to just suck up – I’ve seen what’s happened to friends of mine getting lost in golf. I’ve always been a little bit afraid ….
Emily: It’s a bottomless pit.
So what did you do to prepare for this role?
Colin: There’s a driving school in London. They have an indoor driving range. ‘Cause I didn’t have to be seen to play a whole game of golf, there was just a few swings. So I tried to get some lessons in for what that looks like. I never got further than hitting a small object at 300 yards. I could see there’s that – it sounds sweet when you hit it – I can see that actually becoming an addition. You a golfer?
No, I’m not.
Colin: There is something that happens. There’s a thrill that runs through you when it works. So is there something that you can relate to like that, either a sport or some hobby that you are obsessed with?
Colin: Well, I watch a lot of football. Our football. Yeah, it can become an obsession. I actually had a season ticket and I used to go very very regularly. I still do. I take my kids – went three or four times this season. We live far away now, but yeah. I don’t know if it’s an obsession, but it’s something that I can have strong feelings about.
What’s your team?
Colin: Arsenal.
Did either of you know people close to these characters or any parts of people?
Emily: I grew up with someone like Mike.
Colin: I realized I based my character entirely on somebody. I don’t think I realized it until at least towards the end that’s what was happening. That person doesn’t know this.
Emily: They’ll never know ‘cause no one ever knows themselves. That’s what I’m convinced about.
At the end of the film, Arthur has undergone a pretty significant transformation in terms of becoming more accountable and he also is dressing differently, and he just kind of looks different –
Colin: To Emily’s immense relief!
E: As sexy as those salmon polo shirts were…
Colin: The collective a sigh of relief on the entire crew when I showed up in something that was not salmon or pink.
Emily: And you didn’t have trousers hiked up to your nipples.
Colin: The [new] trousers came below the belly button.
Emily: Oh they were so lame! I remember that first costume fitting you had! [Laughs] And you were like, ‘Really, is it embarrassing?’ I was like, ‘It’s amazing!’
Colin: A costume can go a long way towards forming a character.
Where do you think Arthur was going from there? Do you think he was going to get on-track or not?
Colin: It’s interesting actually. One of the things I like about the story is that question does come up. We had this discussion endlessly. I’ve done a lot of films, whether they’re good or not, that isn’t necessarily something that is a conversation.
Emily: Well because everything is [usually] so tied up in a bow.
Colin: When you’re doing a historical character, everyone knows what happens. So if the character dies, that’s it. There are an awful lot of cases where you wouldn’t have that [conversation]. This is one that actually does provoke that. Will they meet up again? Could something flourish? Will his son accept him? All of the issues they’ve been discussing through the film have a lot of questions still in place.
Emily: But, I like that because I think sometimes a tidy resolution can be really unsatisfying. It’s just more exciting to not quite know sometimes.
One of the things I noticed is that they didn’t actually have sex together as themselves until the very end. They only had sex as other characters. What do you think that was about.
Emily: Because intimacy was terrifying to both of them, so I think they both just had to pretend to be other people in order to allow one another to touch each other, to laugh together, to do anything that resembled any kind of connection.
Colin: They both had issues of their own kind. Mike does not want to be touched. But, if she’s not Mike then maybe there’s another way.
Emily: I think Mike desperately wants to be touched. She just doesn’t know how to.
Colin: And Arthur, who doesn’t want to play this game, he’s got all his sort of Boy Scout-ish sense of protocol about things, ‘We shouldn’t be here’ and all of the rest of it. I think he badly needs to break down a few barriers. I think that is the beginning of a transformation for him. He doesn’t think she should be doing this, he feels uncomfortable with it. But, he actually just so…well he badly needs sex for a start. But, he just needs to be close to somebody and if this is how it has to be, then he’ll do it. And he finds out that this is a way that makes it easy, but obviously it’s not sustainable.
Was this the first thing you did after King’s Speech and what has life been like post-Oscar®?
Colin: No, the first thing I did after King’s Speech was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and then this, I think. I took quite a lot of time off. And nobody noticed. I remember once saying rather casually to them, ‘It might be nice to just take six months of not doing this’ and then there was the whole thing of ‘temporary retirement – he’s going to take a sabbatical.’ Actually, people do it all the time. Actually, nobody knows you’ve done it. So I took almost a year out really after filming King’s Speech because Tinker Tailor was a very brief engagement. So quite a bit more time went by.
How was that year? What did you do that you hadn’t been able to do?
Colin: What during it?
Yeah, during your sabbatical.
Colin: Oh gosh. Family for a start. I think it’s very all-consuming what we do, partly because maybe you’re on location or the hours or because you’re just immersed in what you do, and also promoting a film. Particularly during awards season. You’re just constantly moving and you’re never really at home or on the same time zone for very long. There’d been a couple years running of being a part of that. I just think it was time to reconnect with the more permanent aspects of my life.
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