Ottawa Citizen Sunshine Article

December 17, 1999

Matinee idol of another age Ralph Fiennes seems forever to be playing characters from the Second World War. In Sunshine, he plays three generations of Jewish men in a Holocaust family epic.
By Jay Stone

TORONTO - The room is quiet: just the clicking of a camera. The publicity person has gone off to fetch a cup of tea. Other reporters are waiting outside, lined up for their turn with the star. And the star is thinking about his answer to a trick question: how does he enjoy this business of discussing Ralph Fiennes?

Ralph Fiennes is visibly uncomfortable with the idea. "I don't really enjoy talking about the work, but I suppose I accept it," he says finally, idly doodling on a piece of hotel notepaper and staring off into the middle distance. "I want people to see the film. I want it to be written about positively and interestingly. I think it helps by going and talking about it ... "

His voice trails off, a precise and uncertain instrument that deepens at the start of an answer and fades into a kind of self-conscious introspection at the end. He is an ethereal presence, far handsomer in person than on screen, with eyes of such a piercing pale blue that you can't look at them too long without being hopelessly distracted. He seems to understand their power: he looks away often, as removed as his movie roles often seem to make him.

He's wearing khaki pants, sandals, and a big, dark shirt over a tighter red shirt -- an outfit of no particular era -- and his doodles have the casual authority of the former art student he is (Chelsea College of Art before he dropped out and headed for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London). There's the phrase "pessimistic view" ( I had asked him about the tone of his new film, Sunshine, which delineates the sad history of the 20th century as seen through the experience of a Jewish family in Hungary), the word "Neville" (for co-star John Neville, with whom he shared laughs on the set, proof that all was not glum in the making of Sunshine), and what looks like a section of fencing with a guard tower, perhaps part of the Nazi prison camp where one memorable scene in Sunshine is set.

Nazi prison camps, along with other images of the Second World War, seem to follow Fiennes. He's a matinee idol out of another age, forever playing characters from an earlier time, often the war years. "It's a coincidence," Fiennes says. "I've responded to scripts and directors ... all the films you mentioned are more than just Second World War movies, I hope."

The films -- Schindler's List, in which he played a Nazi death camp commandant, and The English Patient, in which he is a dashing flyer brought to Earth by flak and by love -- are much more than that, we agree. Just as Sunshine, a family epic that opens Christmas Day, is more than the prison camp scene.

In the movie, Fiennes has three roles -- as a grandfather, father and son of the fictional Sonnenschein family, which makes a fortune on a cure-all tonic and loses much in the Holocaust and during the Communist occupation of Hungary. Fiennes' performance won him a European film award as best actor; he is also nominated for a Canadian Genie award.

At three hours, Sunshine is not an easy film to find an audience for, one of the reasons that Fiennes has agreed to do the publicity interviews that brought him to the Toronto film festival.

"I think the climate now is very difficult for films like Sunshine. They say, 'What's its audience, what's its audience?' And the market machinery that accompanies it is very untrusting in a film that's got a lot to say or demands that an audience gives over its attention and spirit to a film. The marketing machinery wants to label things and feel confident they've got it wrapped up.

"Films are made by human beings, they're like human beings, and they can't package everything. You can't say it's kind of like Something About Mary, it's kind of like The Piano. The vocabulary they have is very limited, I've come to realize that the people who make the film have got to do everything they can to expose it so an audience can make up their mind."

Doing press interviews is something Fiennes is going to have to get used to. At 36 (he turns 37 on Wednesday), Fiennes is one of the premier English-speaking actors in the world, a veteran of the English stage, including two seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He's been nominated for two Best Actor Oscars.

He was born in Suffolk, the eldest son of explorer Sir Randolph Fiennes. His brother Joseph and sister Martha are also in showbusiness, the former an actor (Shakespeare In Love) and the latter the director of Onegin, which also stars Ralph and which he was also promoting at the Toronto festival. Other of the six Fiennes siblings include Magnus, a musician, and Sophie, a producer.

Ralph says he tries to alternate his work these days between stage and film, and he says he is struck more and more by the differences between the two forms. Istvan Szabo (Mephisto), the director and co-writer of Sunshine, is a filmmaker who exemplifies those differences: he doesn't believe in rehearsal, for one thing. Szabo is interested in the effect of the cinematic close-up to convey emotions, which he wants to dawn on a face for the first time when it is filmed.

"The audience sees the expression coming into the face and it's completely fresh," Fiennes quotes Szabo as theorizing. "And when I heard that I said, 'That's fantastic, that's really wanting to get a completely truthful moment in someone's life.'

"To do that, you don't want to rehearse, or the innocence of it is gone."

It also reflects Fiennes' approach to screen acting, which concentrates on technique more than inner conflict. He was asked how he prepared for the prison camp scene in Sunshine, in which he is plays a prisoner who is stripped naked, beaten, and sprayed with water so that he will freeze to death.

"I want to actually technically get it right. In a way, the actual moment of performing, of acting... has been germinating inside you, so however you're going to play a moment, say a line, react to someone else's line, that isn't a problem, that sort of takes care of itself. What is difficult in films is if you do that and the camera hasn't caught it or you thought the camera was in a certain place.

"You see, what I'm saying is that all my focus is knowing technically that, I come here, that man comes forward, this is where I should stand, this is the mark I've been given. So I absolutely know, I've got that really down. So that relaxes you, when you know that, when you absolutely know the camera is going to get what you're doing."

Despite the theme of the Second World War that runs through his filmography, Fiennes says that he is searching in scripts simply for "writing that I believe, dialogue that makes sense, characters who make sense, things that don't seem cliched or a rehashing of something else that I've seen."

He says he would like to do something more contemporary -- maybe a comedy of some sort, maybe even a romantic comedy -- but he'll next be seen in something a little more familiar, a little more down Ralph Fiennes alley. In January, he appears as the star of The End of the Affair, based on the Graham Greene novel about the unhappy relationship between a writer and a married woman. Fiennes plays the writer. The story is set during the Second World War.