'I don't get enough chances to play comedy'
October 19, 2013
The English actor, best known now for his role in Game of Thrones, admits on the set of horror film Patrick that he's actually quite up for a laugh.
Outside, it's a simmering hot summer's day. Inside, in a gloomy hospital building, Charles Dance is having a moment of quiet anger. He's sardonic, dismissive and utterly contemptuous.
He's at Docklands Studio, on the set of a new Australian film, Patrick. Dance plays Dr Roget, the ruthless head of an experimental clinic that's taking all kinds of liberties in the treatment of its patients.
That quiet anger is all for the camera. After his work for the day is finished, he's genial, expansive and full of stories.
Patrick is the first feature from documentary filmmaker Mark Hartley, who wrote and directed Not Quite Hollywood, an exploration of some of the often disreputable or undervalued genre features made in Australia in the 1970s and '80s.
the first film in a range of ways. The original producer, Antony I. Ginnane, is on board in the same role. Aphrodite Kondos, part of the 1978 wardrobe team, is costume designer.
Dance, who plays Tywin Lannister in the hit TV series Game Of Thrones, knew nothing of the original film, unlike his co-star, Rachel Griffiths, who recalls being terrified when she saw it on TV.
Griffiths, who plays Matron Cassidy, the woman who does Dr Roget's bidding, clearly recalls Julia Blake's performance in the first version. ''She brought so much more than was on the page, and she didn't play it as if she was in a horror movie.''
Dance says briskly that he liked Justin King's remake script, he enjoyed meeting Hartley, and the idea of leaving an English winter to shoot during the Australian summer was very appealing.
But it's a genre movie, he says. ''It's not Dostoyevsky or Chekhov, but it's a pretty good script. It's meant to intrigue and frighten people, and at times to make them laugh. There's a black humour to it.''
His character is convinced that the immobile Patrick is the key to groundbreaking medical research, without ever realising what his patient is really capable of, and he's desperate to make quick progress, before his funding runs out.
On set, Dance gives Hartley several options, as he runs through that withering putdown of the new nurse at the clinic.
''We don't have the budget or time to go with many takes,'' Dance says later, ''but I'll try to do something different every time, if I can.''
Dance's films have included Plenty, directed by Fred Schepisi, in which he starred opposite Meryl Streep, and Alien 3. He's been in Gosford Park and the 2005 TV adaptation of Bleak House and has played Ian Fleming, Eistenstein and D.W. Griffith.
His approach to choosing roles has taken him to some interesting locations. ''If you took a map of the world, and stuck a flag in all the places I've been, there'd be a lot of flags,'' he says.
In the 1990s, he spent four months living on an icebreaker in the Bering Sea for a film called Kabloonak, in which he played the documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, preparing to shoot Nanook Of The North.
''We ran out of winter in Russia,'' he says, ''so we picked it up in Arctic Canada a year later. And in between, I did a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger (Last Action Hero), and a low-budget British film with Stephen Poliakoff (Century).''
In between shooting for Game Of Thrones from May to October, he's open to all kinds of possibilities.
''These days I tend to get offered quite austere, Machiavellian characters, but every now and again something comes along and you think, 'Ah, yes, a leap of faith'
He gets out his iPhone and shows me a picture of his character, Floyd, in a short-lived TV comedy show called Common Ground.
As Floyd, a former rock'n'roll tour manager who has grown old disgracefully, he wears a black singlet and has tattoos.
''I don't get enough chances to play comedy,'' he says, a little wistfully.
In any case, he loves to work. There are things he can talk about, but others he prefers not to go public with. ''I'd love it if somebody had the nerve to remake Death In Venice'', and soon. ''He's a character I'd love to play, before I get too old.''
There's a literary classic he's particularly keen to adapt, but he doesn't want to go public about it, in case someone else gets the idea.
He's directed one feature, Ladies In Lavender (2004), starring Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, for which he also wrote the screenplay.
He tends to read fiction, he says, ''with one eye on it as a film''. He has a few directing projects and options in the air, some he has initiated and others that have been sent to him.
His character's relationship with Matron Cassidy in Patrick changes in the remake, thanks to the urging of co-star Griffiths. When she read the script, Griffiths wasn't keen on the idea of the nurse as ''the unnoticed devotee, burning underneath with love''.
........
after it's about Rachel Griffiths
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/i-dont-get-enough-chances-to-play-comedy-20131017-2voaw.htm
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