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"It's terrible," he laments yesterday at the Toronto film festival about the commercial side of the business. "It's the vocabulary that is being used now (to market films). Is it art house? Is it commercial? Is it kind of like The English Patient, art house goes mainstream?' That's limiting.
"You can't just be a film with an individual voice with an individual vision. Yet I don't believe audiences are what the marketing people say about them."
He means stupid or limited, unwilling to be challenged. He thinks real people do want to watch big movies.
Which is why the Suffolk-born actor, nominated for an Oscar for The English Patient, stunning as the monstrous Nazi in Schindler's List, sensuous opposite Cate Blanchett in Oscar And Lucinda, is in Toronto. He has two major, challenging films here.
Fiennes plays three roles in Hungarian director Istvan Szabo's Euro-Canadian co-production Sunshine, which played as a gala Monday night. It is a century-long epic about a Hungarian Jewish family tormented by prejudice.
Fiennes also stars with Liv Tyler in Saturday's official closing-night gala, the British film Onegin, directed by his sister Martha Fiennes and featuring music by their brother Magnus Fiennes. It is based on Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin's famous narrative poem Yevgeny Onegin.
Yet the actor looks around in the movie marketplace and sees nothing like Sunshine, which was co-produced by Toronto's movie mogul Robert Lantos, or Onegin, which Fiennes developed himself as executive producer.
"It never used to be the case, did it? There used to be such enormously dense and extraordinary European films made. So I think it's really courageous of Robert to produce that kind of film here in a climate in which it is terrifying and frightening in the market. It never used to be that way."
When he watched Sunshine at Roy Thomson Hall, Fiennes was reminded why he loves complex films.
"I can't bear to think that digital video will replace film. Sitting there last night, that screen was so rich in whatever it is happening with that celluloid that affects us so."
Fiennes says he has become more conscious of trying to do work that feeds his soul and offers more of a banquet of ideas to audiences. The alternative is a steady diet of fast food.
"It's the instant gratification of the fast meal. It's very cheap. It comes quickly and it tastes okay -- the McDonald's hamburgers of movies. They have a kind of very brief, tenuous satisfaction."
So he is trying to avoid doing them (although he never mentions his own failed romp, The Avengers).
"I've been lucky. I've done movies for directors who really want the actors to act, and the stories are all about relationships and frailties and duplicity and complications and they are films that explore all the uncertainty of being human.
"I love that. That gives me more of a sense of purpose than doing
McDonald's movies. Although I have to say, I have bought tickets for them.
I think it's dangerous to be culturally elitist or snobbish. I just don't
think I'd be very good in them."
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on September 27, 1999
EL STEPHO