West Ways Magazine (Excerpt)

August 2002

West Ways Magazine Team have Stars in their Eyes

The Westways Resource Centre was recently visited by none other than Ralph Fiennes (star of the Oscar winning film The English Patient) who was doing some research for a new film role where he plays a character recently released from a secure unit. The team have kindly allowed us to print an extract of the interview with Ralph that appeared in full in the August Edition of West Life (Westways residents magazine.)

After a discussion in which members of the group shared their experiences with Ralph about the triggers of schizophrenia, feelings of paranoia, having delusional ideas and hearing voices, we went on to interview him from a list of questions we had prepared the week before (these are just a selection from the full article).

How much do you earn for a film?
I am not going to give an exact figure... I generally prefer to do films that I am interested in which tend to be low-budget films. I get well paid by most people's standards but for this film they are having difficulty financing it and all the actors have to take a cut in their salary to be able to finance the film.

Do you know that H J Eysynck said that mass media rules the world?
I know that Rupert Murdoch owns 20th Century Fox!

If you are not going to make lots of money on this film why are you making it?
I am interested in what makes people tick. As an actor generally I am interested in the workings of human beings, whether they have psychiatric problems or not.

What do you think about mental health, paranoid schizophrenia?
That's why I am here, to find out. It is quite hard. What I do think is that everyone can get depressed with severe mood changes, it has even happened to me and my instinct is that extreme versions of those experiences can develop into paranoia and anxiety and can distort a situation and make it worse than it is. I used my own experiences as a starting point to try and imagine what it must be like.

El Stepho Zone