Guy Pearce Saves All His Movie Scripts, and Other Insights Into His Process
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The post Guy Pearce Saves All His Movie Scripts, and Other Insights Into His Process appeared first on Consequence.
Heads up for future film historians: Guy Pearce keeps the scripts for all his past projects on a shelf in his home, and they sound fascinating. “I end up sticking things all over the script, like a school project,” he tells Consequence via Zoom. “People laugh at me all the time about it, but I say to them, ‘Go into the art director’s room or go into the makeup trailer and look at all the pictures all around the walls of the world [we’re making].’ I need to create the world that we’re in on my script as well, like in the binder. Because it just keeps me in there. It’s great.”
He explains his process like so: “I love visual stimulation. So if I can find images — if it’s a historical character then obviously there’s a lot of great historical stuff that I can plunk on the script as well. And then it’s a nice memento at the end of a project. I’ve got a shelf at home that have all my jobs all lined up next to each other. So I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to that stuff.”
He laughs. “Other actors say, oh no, I just throw it out when I’m finished. I’m like, ‘How can you do that?’ It gives me some sense of identity, I suppose. And you get things along the way, you know, you get call sheets and you get cards from producers or you get whatever other stuff you get along the way, and it all goes in there. That all becomes a bit of a museum piece.”
Pearce’s script collection, at this point, includes projects like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, L.A. Confidential, The Hurt Locker, Iron Man 3, Mare of Easttown, and of course Christopher Nolan’s breakout film Memento. His newest release is the thriller The Infernal Machine, in which he plays Bruce Cogburn, a reclusive writer who finds himself being targeted by a mysterious stalker.
Much of The Infernal Machine is set in the American southwest while shot in Portugal, the lonely rural backdrops enhancing Bruce’s isolation, while also giving the production a good excuse to avoid large crowds and other scenarios that have been more complicated to film since the beginning of the pandemic. But as Pearce explains below, that didn’t have too much to do with the conception of the project…
So something that struck me while watching The Infernal Machine is that the way the project is structured — it felt like a really great way to shoot a movie during the pandemic that doesn’t feel like you’re watching a bunch of characters in their apartments on Zoom.
I mean, by that point, I had done a film in Bulgaria just before that with Liam Neesom. Even what we’re shooting now we have restrictions on set — everyone’s still wearing masks, people are isolated in different groups. We’re all being tested all the time. And that has obviously been going on now for, as we know, two or three years.
It’s been getting a bit softer as it’s gone on. When I did Mare of Easttown, my first day was the day that everything shut down, on the 12th of March 2020, whatever it was. So we all went away for six months, but it was only six months before I then went back to America, and we shot the rest of Mare of Easttown then.
There were obviously super strict pandemic restrictions going on then — people in gowns, and there was the green zone and the red zone and the yellow zone and people couldn’t cross from one zone to another. It was really quite full on, and I was only there for a week. So anything post-Mare of Easttown has felt a lot easier.
But I suppose in a way to answer your question, yes, we were fairly isolated out there doing The Infernal Machine, but at the same time, it also felt pretty normal. Certainly by that point, we’re just going, “Okay, we all just have to wear masks. Don’t hover about in big groups together, please don’t go out socializing on the weekends—” Which I don’t do anyway when I work. So it kind of felt normal-ish — certainly more normal than, as you say, making a movie where everyone’s in their bedrooms on calls. [Laughs]
Why don’t you go out and socialize on the weekends?
Because I’m busy, I’ve got my head in the script. I just don’t have any interest. I love working and I love indulging in the world of the work and you know, I’ve got plenty of time to socialize. I don’t socialize very often anyway, to be honest. I’m a bit antisocial.
So when I’m on a film, I really enjoy the weekends, when I can spend time with the script again each weekend, really focusing on what we’ve got coming up in the following week. I love feeling prepared and I really hate feeling unprepared. So, you know, I’ll occasionally [go out] if the film production says we might be having a dinner on Saturday night, but I’m not looking to go out and socialize. I just would rather be organized. A film shoot, as you know, is only really five weeks or at the most four months, if it’s a big Marvel-type thing. So it’s pretty easy to ignore the rest of the world while you’re focusing on the job at hand.
Has that always been your process? Or when you were younger, did you try to have more of a social life outside of the work?
No, I was even more anxious about it when I was younger. I’m actually getting better now. I can say yes to the producers when they do ask me to go out to dinner — in the past I’ve said, “No, no, no, don’t even ask me.” [Laughs] I was really quite angsty about it. Whereas now I realize that it’s healthy for me to actually maintain an exterior life.
It’s even the same on set. When we’d done Memento, for example, I was so in my own little world that I couldn’t even really talk to anybody on set. I could talk to Chris, but I couldn’t just get into a bit of a social chat at the water cooler machine — I just had to sort of not talk to anybody. And what I realized over time was that that just becomes exhausting and it doesn’t necessarily aid the work. I was really focused on what I was able to do, but I realized over time that I could trust myself and I could have a chat to someone at the water cooler and I could still get back into character when it was time. So, you know, I’m getting better at it.
At a certain point in the process, do you feel like you have to put the script aside and just trust your instincts?
Well, I’m always trying to trust my instinct anyway, but no, absolutely not. The script is the script, it’s what enables me to trust my instincts. The script is the thing that woke up the world in my head anyway. And so, you know, I can’t drift away from it. If I drift away from it, then I’m all at sea.
The Infernal Machine (Paramount Pictures)
So this is not the first time you’ve played a writer or an artist on screen. Do you feel like you approach those kinds of roles differently?
Well, I always find it really hard to describe how I approach a role, because it has to just be something that has just organically occurred when I’ve read the script, as far as what I see and what I feel and whether I believe that world and believe that story and whether I believe I can fit into it —or whether I, Guy, can immerse myself into it in a way that completely honors what it is that I felt when I read it.
Some jobs, the really good ones like [Infernal Machine], for example — as soon as I read it, I could almost go on set the next day and start shooting. I go, “Oh wow, I’ve got it. Yes, I can see it.” And obviously there is work to be done — we talk about where the character’s from and what work I might have to do with voice, et cetera. So there are things that have to be put in place.
But I find the best ones, like this and Memento and things like that, I don’t even feel like I’m approaching it. I’m just overwhelmed by this sort of wonderful narrative and these great characters. So when all the pieces come together like that, it’s wonderful. It’s really exciting. And I don’t feel like there’s any work going on. I just feel like I’m just playing in this, but honoring it and being really focused and mature about it. But I don’t feel like I’m having to work hard, per se.
I’ve been on other jobs before where I go, well, it’s an interesting character and I really would love to play this character, but I don’t quite get the story. Or, the other way around, where I go, I love the story, the story’s fascinating, but I just can’t work out how I’m going to fit into it. And that takes some cobbling together and more discussions with the director until I can start to see an image, see a picture of how I might be in it.
But whether I’m playing someone who’s existed before or someone who hasn’t, or whether I’m playing a politician or I’m playing an artist on some level, those things don’t matter. What matters is just finding the truth of those people, finding what feels to be the truth. And that’s a complicated thing and a complex thing, obviously, because characters are sometimes aware of their own truths and sometimes they’re hiding their own truths and variations in between.
So yeah, it just sort of depends. It’s wonderful. I mean, something like this, I love playing characters that are facing a dilemma, you know, because we’re all out here in the world just trying to live our lives. And I’m always fascinated and envious of people who seem to just cruise through their life without any sensitivity to what’s going on around them or without any… I’m not necessarily envious of it. I’m just fascinated, I suppose.
But characters who are facing a dilemma, particularly if they’ve caused that dilemma themselves, and then they’re dealing with regret and wishing they could have done something different — all that stuff’s great stuff to play and it’s great stuff to play on camera because you can get really intimate on camera. I love working in the theater as well, but there’s something great about film and television these days where you can really get into the nitty gritty of what’s going on, just these little hints and signs of psychological fragility.
So as much as we love film because of the big explosions and the big, massive worlds that you can create, I’m the opposite. I like all the small stuff.
The Infernal Machine is available for rent or purchase on VOD services now.
Guy Pearce Saves All His Movie Scripts, and Other Insights Into His Process
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