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"It's to do with the physical presence of the audience," Fiennes says. "It's to do with the time and space. They're there, in that moment, witnessing a moment that's never going to happen again in that way."
Contrary to reports that he's difficult and diffident, Fiennes is chatty and relaxed, his polished English accent soft but clear as a bell over an unusually good phone line.
He loves theatre, has ever since he started out. "You can't kid anyone. You're out there on the stage and there's no editing, there's no soundtrack, you can't change a camera angle. You're just relying on telling the story and your ability to take the audience with you. You're very exposed. You're really exposed out there." He pauses a beat. "I find it thrilling."
For the past year, Fiennes has been doing back-to-back Shakespeare as the leads in Richard II and Coriolanus. It's been a long haul, earning him strong reviews, including a Variety rave. This meant not doing films for a while, which was fine with him.
"I took the best part of a year off. You can't do those plays for much less than that because those parts are so big and there's so many things you can go on discovering in them. I think you have to play them for a minimum of three months."
His career shot out of the gate in 1993 with his role in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. He played Amon Goeth, an SS officer who delighted in shooting Jews like game from his balcony. Fiennes got an Oscar nomination, great reviews and a white-water rush of offers.
Intent on maintaining his stage work, Fiennes says he's been as choosy as can be when picking films. He's the first to admit he's not perfect - yes, he read those reviews for The Avengers - but has built an impressive filmography in a relatively short span: Schindler's List, The English Patient, Quiz Show, Oscar and Lucinda, Onegin, End of the Affair and the turn-of-the-millennium thriller Strange Days.
He looks for a creative stretch with each film role. Most recently, Istvan Szabo's Sunshine offered Fiennes a corker - the chance to play three roles in one film. Charting three generations of the Hungarian Sonnenschein family, Fiennes plays a member of each generation: Ignatz, a judge; his son, Adam, an Olympic fencer and Holocaust victim; and his son, Ivan, a communist and political activist.
"The idea of playing three men, of course, that's the challenge," Fiennes says briskly.
"When (Szabo) started to describe to me in detail the nature of these three men and what drove their emotional life, their inner life, the way he talked really excited me.
"On a technical level I was stretched, just having to hold in my head, as it were, these three different men. But I think what stretched me the most was the world of Hungarian Jewish life at the turn of the century and throughout the greater part of the last century. The whole world I was going into was a world that was completely alien to me. I really felt I had to get to know the background in detail, especially for the last part, the communist period of the film. I bombarded Istvan with questions! I really had a huge education in that area."
It's an impressive, marathon performance, one that's already generating Oscar buzz.
He's been nominated twice before: best supporting actor for Schindler's List and best actor for The English Patient. Is Oscar important?
"I think there's a bit of me that does think that," Fiennes confesses. "It's a good feeling, but it doesn't occupy a large part of my thinking day. But it's always a good feeling if your fellow actors, even if they come backstage, say 'I was really moved by what you did'. It means a lot to hear this from the people who are most critical of what you do."
Life after Schindler's List was heady for Fiennes. Primarily a stage actor with a lot of Shakespeare under his codpiece, he suddenly found himself on another planet.
"It was what any actor would dream about," he recalls with vivid enthusiasm. "You have a great part, the film's a success and suddenly everyone wants to meet you. Yet, at the same time, it was really mad. I can see it happening to other people. The film comes out and suddenly everyone's raving. It's like a rhythm that continues, especially in Hollywood."
"It was a great time. You're feted and celebrated, but it does seem really unreal and, of course, it goes away after a bit and the film passes into history. I feel very lucky that I had that break, and especially on that film. It was a brilliant part to play."
The Ralph Fiennes we see today - the one who picks his film roles carefully, whose heart is still very much in the theatre - is the result of him defiantly keeping his head when success gave him the chance to lose it.
But what about the Ralph Fiennes that could have been?
You know, the one who took the acclaim for his performance in Schindler's List and used it as his ticket to ride the American star system. The one who turned his back on theatre to go for the big money, the top billing, the house in LA.
It's fun to play games with Fiennes. Several times throughout the interview he mentions how "imagination is an actor's greatest tool".
So using that tool, can he paint a portrait of what that alternative version of Ralph Fiennes is like, the one who went Hollywood after the acclaim of Schindler's? He takes up the challenge with relish, and an almost audible smirk.
"I'd probably be spending my time between New York and Los Angeles, mostly in Los Angeles, worried continuously that no one will want to cast me." He chuckles. "And I'm probably spending too much money on things like cars and houses and clothes and swimming pools. And being part of a game of who's in and who's out.
"I think Hollywood's a bit like a Renaissance court, where artists are employed by princes to create sculptures or paintings. In this place, studios employ actors and writers to create scripts and films, and the actors they employ give them prestige, and I think you get into a certain game of 'Are you in?' and 'Are they going to pay you enough money?'.
"In the end you're just led by your ego, I suppose. I can't pretend that I don't have as big an ego as the next person.
The danger is that, in the end, the size of your pay cheque is a vanity thing, isn't it? And it takes you further and further away from why (you got into it)."
Fiennes is on a roll.
"I wanted to be an actor because I loved watching stories and being moved and being taken into another world and being transported and coming away from something a little bit changed," he says emphatically. "I think you can lose your innocence completely when you're part of that world of making movies. I think it can be very dangerous if you don't know that it's happening, because people are very charming and people stroke you and flatter you.
"You only have to (laughs) adjust your antennae a little, and you're believing it all! And it's dangerous."
But don't get him wrong ...
"America is a wonderful country. It's fantastic and they're an amazing people and it can be very seductive. Thank God you do meet people working in the industry there who have their feet on the ground, who are very realistic and do have a sense of proportion."
Charles van Doren, the character Fiennes played in Robert Redford's Quiz Show, has a special resonance for him. In the film, van Doren, a well-educated, highly respected academic, sacrificed his reputation for TV fame and money.
"Yeah, I think the Charles van Doren story is very salutary; it's about kidding yourself that it's all right. The thing about Charles van Doren is that he kids himself that it's OK to take the money, and I think that's very dangerous. I'm aware of it every day!" He chuckles. "Sometimes I just think that the whole film business is bullshit. I just find that it's so full of people positioning themselves in certain ways and manipulating situations, and you can get caught up in it. Then suddenly you see a great movie and you're very moved, and you think, 'Well, it's worth it if this happens'.
"With Charles van Doren, he's got all the brains, he's a talented man and he kids himself. In a way, his greatest betrayal is to himself, not to the American people."
The next question is interrupted as Fiennes cuts in with a closing thought. "It, again, goes back to this idea of being true to who you are."
In Sunshine, Fiennes plays a victim of the Holocaust. In Schindler's, he was inside the skin of a murderous Nazi. Did that make shooting the powerful concentration camp scene in Sunshine unusually intense?
Fiennes purposefully mulls over the question, then verbally works through his response.
"When I read that scene I did think to myself, 'Yes, this is now the other side of that coin'. Those scenes in Schindler's List were very, very strong meat - shooting people from the balcony. I did think to myself, 'This is odd, isn't it? Here I am being on this film dealing with the same subject matter, and yet I'm directly on the other side'.
That seems to be what fate intended; it seemed to have a sort of symmetry to it. "I definitely remembered thinking about Schindler's List when I was shooting those scenes, and ..." He pauses as he strikes a fresh thought. "It's funny. I just remember when you are confronted with recreating those sorts of scenes like we did in Schindler's List and again in Sunshine ... you know, what do you start to imagine? As an actor your imagination is your greatest tool, so you're thinking, 'Well, what was this like? What would it be like to be in this situation?'."
He pauses again, searching for words.
"In a funny way your brain is numbed. I find it really hard to ... it's so unspeakable that any words seem really inadequate."
A longer pause this time.
"On those days we just broke it down very technically. Istvan was very clinical in the way he directed, because, I suppose, the content of it was so upsetting and distressing. It's funny. I remember, again, on Schindler's List certain scenes that were very distressing. I remember Steven being just very, very clinical and very direct.
"So there's no time to indulge in grief or emotions. You feel, somehow, in a way, that you're just serving something else, that you can't begin to know or to assume knowledge about that. You just have to recreate it with as much integrity as possible and then just leave it out there for people to react to."
A final pause.
"I'm not making much sense. It's really just very hard to talk about."
One of the things about Sunshine that appealed to Fiennes was Szabo's preoccupation with "the issues of the integrity of the individual, both in Mephisto and Colonel Redl".
"Both those characters are people who compromise themselves one way or another. I think they are the same ideas he deals with in Sunshine. When I read Sunshine, it blew me away. It was like I had finished reading some extraordinary, long novel."
The theme of personal integrity is a big draw for Fiennes.
"I certainly think that there are more than two sides to every person, and I think that the best roles (reflect that). Going back to the Shakespeare, you can go on discovering the different sides to the character, like Coriolanus and Richard II, continuously, and that's what makes them such compelling characters.
"I don't necessarily consciously sit down with a script and say, 'I hope this is a complex character' (laughs). The way I judge a script is simply as I react to it as a story. I imagine who's going to direct it. I don't really break it down in an intellectual sense. I just go by gut instinct.
"Just as we're talking, I think, on reflection, I do certainly like the feel that in the world around me I see people who are multi-faceted. Everyone's hiding things, everyone'strying to project an image of what they want you to think they're like, and I think that's what the best parts are capturing. They demand that the actor shows different levels."
Having said that, and on a mildly critical note, Fiennes does seem to have cornered the market playing the doomed romantic. He did it in The English Patient, End of the Affair, Oscar and Lucinda and Onegin. There's even a dash of it in Sunshine.
Is this a statistically unlikely coincidence, or is there something about that archetype he genuinely finds attractive?
"I think there must be something in those kinds of characters that does attract me," he says after a little umming. "It's funny, because I haven't thought of it like that, but maybe - I don't know - maybe there's something about things not turning out well that I quite like!" He laughs.
Indeed, he and his sister, Martha, who directed him in Onegin, fought successfully to keep the original ending. "I think it's one of the reasons I loved Onegin. We were always determined to keep the ending of it like it is, that he doesn't get the girl. It seems to me that life is more like that. Things move on and things don't always work out well."
Like The Avengers?
"Well, I think every actor has to have their baptism of fire in a major flop!" Fiennes quips. "I think it's very good for the soul. You hurt. I had a great time making it, but when it's clear that it's going down like that, then you can do nothing. You just sit back, let everyone say what they have to say, and then you know that in two weeks it'll all be over."
Yes, there is a transience to the medium, is there not?
"There is, definitely."
In some quarters, Ralph Fiennes is considered quite an attractive sort of guy. There are, indeed, websites devoted to him that border on being cybershrines. Is he aware of them?
"Yeah, I am," he says with a chuckle. "I don't have a computer yet, but I'm
aware of them." How does he react to such adoration? "Well, I haven't read
them, Jim, for a long, long time. It's part of my Charles van Doren
Protection Scheme!"
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 20, 2001
EL STEPHO