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No, his weariness registers in his shoulders, which seem ready to collapse at any moment. When asked a question, he takes time to consider it, struggling to formulate responses through a murk of exhaustion.
Can't blame the fella. Fiennes, 36, is publicizing two films here at the Toronto International Film Festival. One is Onegin, a tragic period romance directed by his sister Martha Fiennes. The other is Sunshine, a three-hour historical drama in which Fiennes plays three separate roles. Publicizing one film is hard enough. Publicizing two is clearly murder.
"I'm sometimes struggling to find the right words to answer some of the questions," Fiennes admits.
And the questions about Sunshine tend to be serious ones, befitting the subject matter. Sunshine is about three generations of Hungarian Jews living in the first half of the 20th century. The family's fortunes involve not just desperate romantic travails, but historical ones. In the film's middle section, Fiennes plays Adam Sors, a one-time national fencing champion who meets a brutal, ignominious fate in a makeshift concentration camp.
Ironically, Fiennes first gained attention as a screen star playing the vile concentration camp commandant Amon Goethe in Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List. The role won the then-unknown Fiennes a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. (He later got a Best Actor nomination in 1996 for The English Patient.)
"I couldn't help but think of some of the scenes in Schindler's List, particularly when I was doing the (concentration camp) scene in this film, Sunshine," he says. After finishing the scene in which Adam Sors meets his end, Fiennes lingered in the desolate field set after the extras and crew departed.
"There was no one there, just a child and a dog playing, and I thought it was so odd," he says. "All over the world, there must be these terrible places and when time moves on and these terrible things are forgotten, a child comes and plays football and chases a dog. It must happen in Kosovo now.
"I find that it makes the horror of it more closer," he says. "It's the banality of the surroundings. Going to Aushwitz, which I went to twice when I was in Poland (to make Schindler's List) ... it was like a chicken farm. Those huts looked like an industrial estate.
"It's very hard always to get your head around it, even having been in the two films that have dealt with this brutality," he says. "It defeats me.
"When we talk about the Holocaust and we use adjectives that suggest the extreme nature of the genocide, but I'm always reminded of the matter-of-fact, day-to-day practicality of it, which is so close to everyday life of all of us."
At least Fiennes went into Sunshine with a fundamental understanding of the character of Adam Sors. He had far more difficulty understanding Adam's son, Ivan, who emerges from the concentration camp experience to join the Communist party.
"Adam was quite straightforward to me, but Ivan was difficult," he says. "I think because he is the most confused person and when he comes into the film after the Second World War, the film doesn't show what he's been through.
"Ivan was also the most difficult because I had no understanding of what a Communist regime would be like. He joins with the Soviet Communist secret police, and what sort of mentality do you have to have to do that? I found that quite hard."
Thankfully, an end to Fiennes's hardship is at hand. Subsequent to the interview, Fiennes returned to London, where he'll be spending a year on the London stage performing good old Shakespeare.
No doubt, it will seem like a vacation.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 7, 2000
EL STEPHO