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For starters, he cites a scene that he's not even in as one pivotal to his character, Oscar Hopkins. The 13-year-old Oscar, played by James Tingey, gets his first taste of Christmas pudding, which his puritanical minister condemns as "the fruit of Satan"; father hits son; Oscar cannot believe that his father was right to do so.
Fiennes explains, "The tasting of the Christmas pudding for me is symbolic of any kind of earthly experience that is sensually gratifying. Oscar does this bargain with God: 'If he was wrong to strike me, then give me a sign.' And his father comes up with blood out of his leg. Oscar believes he's seen a sign which says 'You are allowed to eat Christmas pudding. You are allowed to gamble.'
"But immediately this sets him on a path of contradictions, because I think he feels that there's a point where these things are good and valid and wonderful to experience, and then there's a point where they're sort of destructive and negative. I felt I understood that contradiction quite clearly, and I don't think Oscar ever quite resolves it."
Oscar and Lucinda presented Fiennes with a dilemma of his own. When he first encountered the project in 1992, he was a well- respected stage actor in his native England, with starring roles as Heathcliff in the British-filmed remake of Wuthering Heights and explorer T.E. Lawrence in the BBC's A Dangerous Man to his credit.
"As soon as I read Oscar, I said to Robin Dalton, the producer, 'This is something I'd really love to do.' But then I did Schindler's List."
Fiennes' role as Nazi commandant Amon Goeth won him a BAFTA Award, an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actor and massive attention from both the public at large and the filmmaking community.
"I think some films come at you and they make very clear signals," Fiennes says. "Just the *way* they come at you -- who's involved, the quality of the writing, and you think 'This is what I have to do.'
"With the success of Schindler's List, it was a time when a lot of opportunities were presented to me, on a level which I'd never expected, things that I'd never thought would have come my way. Suddenly there were these new horizons for me, other things were being chucked at me. And that's very heady.
"You have to be very astute and listen to your heart, to listen to what's really right. I put my enthusiasm for Oscar and Lucinda kind of to one side for a bit, but I never let it go. I burned hot and cold over it, because I had other things I wanted to do, and for a moment Gillian looked somewhere else. It was like a long seduction."
In the interim, Fiennes starred on film in the fact-based '50s drama Quiz Show, the dazzling and underrated romantic science- fiction thriller Strange Days and last year's Best Picture Academy Award winner The English Patient, which earned Fiennes a Best Actor nomination. He also played the title role in Hamlet in a London production that transferred to Broadway, where Fiennes won a Tony.
"Eventually, Gillian's timetable and mine and Robin's all came into sync," Fiennes says. The results have been happy.
"I love Oscar, he's a wonderful creation. He's someone full of a love of life. He's totally open all the time to whatever's going on to come at him and what's consistent is, I don't think he ever manipulates or uses other people for selfish ends. He's fraught with contradictions, longing to experience earthly life and at the same time being very caught up in feelings of guilt.
"I think the memory of his father and his father's religion, which is a radical form of Church of England, with very tough ways of behaving, that's the thing that causes Oscar deep, deep upset. It's all connected with the sense of betraying his father, having left his father.
Oscar grows up to be an Anglican clergyman, practicing a different brand of Christianity from his stern parent. He develops an intense passion for gambling, which puts him in a perpetual state of turmoil that causes him to embark on a journey to Australia, despite his intense phobia of water.
On the ocean voyage from England to the Antipodes, he meets Lucinda (played by Cate Blanchett), an heiress who proves to be a great kindred spirit when the conversation turns to betting.
"When he's all excited on the boat," Fiennes elaborates, "talking [to Lucinda] about, 'God is not going to look unkindly on anyone wagering money on a dumb animal crossing a line,' all these things, actually, he almost takes back. In a way, I think it's a tragic story of someone whose religious background causes him deep unhappiness, because he's never able to fully get it out of his system.
"He can see that the cakes and life and being in love, all these things are not wrong, but he's been so told that they are, and just because of happenstance, because of coincidence, things around him are showing him that they *are* wrong."
Fiennes can relate Oscar's reactions to some of his own experiences, especially when Oscar finds he and Lucinda have crucial common ground.
"I know what it's like to be very excited about something. I didn't do a lot of research into being afraid of water -- I could *imagine* what that's like, but what I *did* feel very close to was the sense of complete *thrill* when you meet someone who shares a common interest. 'I mustn't tell someone how thrilled I am about this, because it'll be a bit embarrassing.'
"When I get like that, if it's about certain plays or poems or things that I love, suddenly, all the things that you keep in because you think they're not very cool to talk about, I felt the same sense Oscar does when he recognizes that she has this same passion, she knows all these games, she goes to all these dives to sneak in, and that feeling: 'And yes, yes, this is the most fantastic thing -- and I know it, too!"
Fiennes also empathizes with another of Oscar's personality traits.
"Guilt is something I'm no stranger to," he laughs. "I feel guilty at the slightest things sometimes, if I've ignored someone or if I haven't returned a letter. I can go from small things like that through really really major issues in one's life."
Perhaps the most visually arresting sequence in Oscar and Lucinda is the sight of a glass church floating down a river. The structure has been designed by Lucinda and Oscar, believing he will win her love through this action (as he doesn't realize she already adores him), offers to convey the church to a remote parish in the Australian outback.
"Oscar is most alive, I think, when he leaves Sydney with the expedition, before [his escorts] start to bully him. That moment is his great achievement.
"And I loved doing that scene where he's in the bar and there's an aboriginal woman being used [by the escorts] as a prostitute and he suddenly stands his ground -- his sense of what is right and wrong is very, very clear."
Fiennes says of the glass church itself, "That was fantastic. It looks quite simple, but the barges on which the church is resting are very high-tech valves of machinery that allowed the boat to half sink and half lift up. They had to find the right length of river with the right depth, and they had to take it all up there and move the parts to New South Wales.
"But when it was there and assembled and when we were all on it, it was extraordinary. I got a real buzz from those sequences, because it was very beautiful, this floating glass chapel. In a way, it was one of the reasons to make the film."
Although it's doubtful that Fiennes will ever lack for film offers, it seems equally unlikely he will turn his back on stage acting. Earlier this year, he starred in a London production of Chekhov's Ivanov for Equity scale. On the differences between film and stage acting: "They're completely different things."
"I mean, I think nothing that makes an actor tick in front of a camera is similar to what makes them tick in front of an audience. I think that your whole use of your body, your voice, your whole sense of it being an ongoing, three- hour process in front of an audience is very different.
"It's much more naked in a way. No one can yell, 'Cut!', you can't be looped, you can't change the angle or put lots of music underneath. Once it's set, it's there, and it's you that night, with all the things that you carry inside yourself, and all the other people with the things they're carrying inside themselves and the chemistry of the company changes from night to night and it can be one of the most exhilarating things. Ivanov was a true ensemble piece, and that was fantastic.
"I never want to stop doing theatre. I feel that's my own. Before I went into film, I had done a large body of theatre work, mostly classical. And that's kind of my roots, really. And so I don't want to let that go. One of the reasons I thought I wanted to be an actor is because I love Shakespeare and I love dramatic language.
"When I was very young, I would see plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company and I just got a *high* out of seeing some of those actors using that kind of language. I said, 'That's what I want to do, I love it.'
I went to Alan Howard play Richard II and I was right up in the gods [balcony seats] and he had this long, dense soliloquy and completely gripped me. I think particularly with Shakespeare, he opens up so much about humankind at all levels that it's continually revealing to audiences all the time -- he *is* our most modern playwright, and that was the kind of kick-start for me into being an actor.
"I don't have a scheme about what I want to do in the theatre and how I set it against the next film. I don't seem to get offered new plays or contemporary plays. I'd *like* to do a new play. Maybe I'm already considered too much of a quote, 'classical actor.' I hope not, but then, I don't care if I am, because I love those plays and they continually speak to audiences."
Fiennes has recently wrapped shooting as the umbrella- wielding secret agent John Steed in the big-screen version of The Avengers, due out in the spring.
"I like The Avengers because it's slightly absurd and slightly surreal, has its tongue firmly in its cheek and it's, I hope, a little silly, in the right sense. It's not a dead serious spy thriller. I had a great time."
Next up for Fiennes is double-duty as actor and executive producer on a film adaption of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, to be directed by Martha Fiennes, the performer's sister.
"She's an experienced commercials director, so she's no stranger to creating a vision and working under pressure. And we are very similar in our approach to this. Having her around isn't bad at all."
Fiennes is at first reluctant to offer tips to rising young actors.
"I wouldn't presume to give advice." He reflects. "I think people who really want to act, if they're passionate enough about it, they'll do it. And if they're doing it for the wrong reasons, then life will soon tell them that they are.
"I think if they're doing it just for fame or just for essentially 'look at me, here I am,' that will limit you in the end, because [it will limit] your ability to be open to other kinds of characters and other actors that you're working *with* and what they can give you.
"And I think the theatre is a great place to be exposed to audiences every night and what happens when a production *doesn't* function very well and how you have to sustain it for a period of time.
"Of course, all I'm saying is off my own experience, which is being in repertory companies, having to be in plays over a stretch of time and not always happily, having to keep on going and work with other people all the time. I feel that was invaluable. It gives you a sort of stamina, if you like.
"And I would say, if you can get a lot of theatre experience, it'll stand you in good stead."
Fiennes researched Oscar's avocation by taking an outing to the track. "I don't gamble, but I like the occasional flutter [bet]. Oscar goes to the Derby Day horse races. I'd never been and I went to Derby Day for the first time -- that was my first experience of horse racing. And I won 160 pounds on an outsider, which made my day. Then I put it into two other race meetings and made all these really stupid bets and lost it all. But I enjoyed it.
"The moment of gambling for Oscar, that moment of not knowing when the card's going to come down and tell you whether you've won or not won, and the horse crosses the line -- I mean, you lose control and you're going," his voice ascends into a shout, 'Yeah, *yeah*, *YEAH*!' This comes out of Oscar, this whole other life is pouring out of him and then suddenly events remind him of his father.
"As Oscar says to Lucinda, 'I've never gambled to make myself rich and comfortable, it's just the love of doing it and I've given all the money away. It's just there's something in gambling that's life-affirming.'
"I mean, when I shouted just now, that was my memory of that moment when we're waiting for the horse to cross the line and the whole of the crowd just surges toward the winning post. It's an amazing feeling and that's when I really understood Oscar, when I thought, '*That's* what it is. That early taste of Christmas pudding -- *mmm*! It's so good!"
Is this how Fiennes feels about acting? He smiles. "Yeah, sometimes.
On a good day."
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 14, 1998
EL STEPHO