Early Show Article

Fiennes Adds To Web Of Dark Roles 

In the film, Fiennes plays a schizophrenic man living in a halfway house, trying to piece his life back together after being released from a mental institution.

"You actually see him watching himself a child with his parents and you see him, as it were, witness the unfolding of quite a disturbing circumstance around his mother and his father," explains Fiennes on The Early Show.

The film, he notes, shows how Spider's memories battle with each other. "The audience has to go on the journey of this quite confusing story which is the state of his mind," Fiennes says.

To prepare for the role, Fiennes says he met with people suffering from schizophrenia at a rehabilitation center and in his research found out schizophrenia take a variety of forms.

"I was told by one doctor, you can sort of do what you want," says Fiennes. "I mean, there are people whose faces twitch and spasm, people talking under their breath and mumbling to themselves and there are people apparently normal until when they speak, they start to tell you stuff you think, "What is this?'"

While writer Patrick McGrath chronicled the schizophrenic mind accurately, Fiennes says director David Cronenberg did not want to do a clinical film and so allowed him "imaginatively to run free. That gave me freedom as an actor," he says.

After reading the script Fiennes responded strongly to the character. So what attracts him to dark roles like this?

"I suppose I'm interested in people, there's an ambivalence in people's inner life," he says. In the past, he's played Amon Goeth, the psychopath in "Schindler's List" and the emotionally repressed Laszlo de Almásy in "The English Patient."

"I like the conflict inside people. I think people who are struggling - it's always interesting," Fiennes says.

His last film, however, was a departure from that. In "Maid In Manhattan" with Jennifer Lopez, he says, "I had a great time. I'd like to do more films like that."

As for his private life, Fiennes says he prefers to keep it private.

"People make choices whether they want to make their private life public or not. I live with a great actress, Francesca Annis, and we go out. When we go out, we don't, as it were, campaign to get media attention. I don't think that's what we feel like doing," he says.

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