El Pais Onegin Interview

Septemeber 1999

RALPH FIENNES-ACTOR

"What's Romantic is a Man Who's Heart is Dead"
By ELSA FERNANDEZ-SANTOS, San Sebasti‡n
Translated by Veronica

Yesterday, Ralph Fiennes in San Sebastian. (J. Uriarte).

Onegin, the Martha Fiennes movie starring her brother Ralph, closed the 47th edition of the San Sebastian festival yesterday. Based on the Alexander Pushkin novel, the movie narrates the stormy love affair of a cynical Russian aristocrat and a beautiful, young provincial girl whom he rejects at first.

"There is nothing more romantic than a man with a dead heart", says Fiennes, for whom Onegin's love "is not generous, it's desesperate".

"Onegin is one of those romantic antiheroes I'm really interested in. One of those heroes that Byron crystalized. He's disaffected (unaffected?), hard-hearted, and even somewhat perverse. Onegin's approach to life is negative, his roots are like based on Milton's Paradise Lost; he can be angel or devil. He's a lost soul that contemplates life from a cynical distance, and he is not happy in this world. It's aboput a conceited man that watches himself. He's complex, strange and isolated. A challenge for an actor."

Ralph Fiennes speaks very slowly, underlines every idea with many re-iterations, stops constantly, loses his gaze on a window, a piece of furniture, without losing his string of thought. Someone close to the actor comments that his apparent over-sensitivity is not faked. He's not shy, he's very fragile, they observe.

The eldest of seven children of photographer Mark Fiennes and writer Jennifer Lash (an excentric woman that, as Fiennes explains, taught them values beyond discipline and study). Fiennes believes that being an actor is not an intellectual exercise.

Fiennes shields himself with other's theories to speak of his own ideas on interpretation: "In his play Real or False, David Mamet says that an actor must guide himself by the words of his character. He doesn't consider acting to be an intellectual or rational exercise, but rather something intuitive, based on instinct. Acting has a lot to do with experimenting, it's something that comes from nowhere, from the actor's own imagination. For me, interpretation has also a lot to do with capturing a moment in the present. I'm very interested in those directors that keep the first take, that seek the emotion of the first contact with the character and appreciate spontaneity. The actor must live in doubt of what will his work turn out like."

Ralph Fiennes doesn't consider himself very versatile, and that's why he believes that all his characters have something in common. From the Nazi, Amon Goeth from Schindler's List, to his Quiz Show's Charles Van Doren, running through Count Almasy from The English Patient. "My character in Schindler's List opened for me the doors of a world I didn't know: Hollywood. After that movie and Quiz Show I got the feeling that Hollywood treated me as if I existed because they had discovered me. It didn't matter that I had years of theatre or other work behind me. From that moment on I was illuminated by their spotlights".

Fiennes lives in London ("I like New York and Los Angeles, but for me they're just work places") because he feels European, and he's studying Russian because he's "fascinated" by the culture and the people of that country. "I would have liked for Onegin to have been shot entirely in Saint Petersburg, but we couldn't do it. What you can see of the city is exciting. It's avenues and houses are of an impossible beauty. I like the atmosphere of the city, it's very special. Just as I like Moscow, where I played Chejov two years ago. It was very interesting. I know that Russia is a country with serious problems, that life there is very hard, but the people there have a special attraction to me. They move me, I like them. I feel close to them, close to their strong yet ironic spirit. Their hard vision of the future attracts me very much."

For Fiennes, it is not Tatiana (the young lady who declares her love for him who he rejects with cruel politeness) who breaks his cynical gaze, but the poet Lensky, who he kills in a duel. "Onegin is not in love with Tatiana, but he's intrigued by her. He's curious. Onegin is empty, he's a man tired of pleasure, he suffers of boredom and melancoly. Lensky is the idealist poet, while he's the cynic who mocks his friend's vitality."

Onegin kills his poet friend in a duel (Pushkin died the same way), and this event turns him against himself. One night, when he returns to Saint Petersburg, years later, he finds Tatiana (played by the American Liv Tyler) has married a cousin of his and is now a princess. Now it is he who pursues her and begs for her love because "he finds once more the best part of himself in her."

Fiennes assures that for the coming months he won't be shooting any movies because he'll be in the London stages performing Richard II and Coriolanus: "I don't prefer theatre over film. I'd be lying if I said that. I'm equally interested in both media." Although he's been the executive producer for the movie, and his sister the director, he explains that the character hasn't turned him into a lone-wolf. "I like to be directed, to be told what to do and to be given ideas. I want a director to give me support, to show me a way. I see actors as small children, needing attention and protection."