An interview with Michael Fassbender

Another piece that ori­gin­ally appeared in the late Nomad Edition, Wide Screen. This one of a slightly older vin­tage, hav­ing been con­duc­ted and run in February of this year in con­junc­tion with the release of Jane Eyre. But we also dis­cuss (a little) Shame, which had just star­ted shoot­ing, A Dangerous Method (from which the above shot derives), and Haywire. I chopped a good deal of my “YOU were in a Soderbergh movie?!!? I was in a Soderbergh movie!!!!” blath­er from the tran­script before put­ting this in for the edit. 

I think that, much-commented on genet­ic gifts aside, Fassbender really has got it. The whole thing. The most impress­ive film lead act­or I’ve seen come along in a dec­ade. So, enjoy. 

The role of the brood­ing, romantic, secret­ive Jane Eyre hero Edward Rochester has been essayed in the past by a ver­it­able hall of fame of great act­ors and/or lead­ing men: Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, George C. Scott and William Hurt, to name but a hand­ful. Now, in a ver­sion of the Charlotte Brontë lit­er­ary clas­sic dir­ec­ted by Sin Nombre helmer Cary Fukunaga and cost­ar­ring Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, The Kids Are All Right) in the title role, the very busy half-Irish, half-German thespi­an Michael Fassbender takes a stab at the role, and the res­ults could very well solid­i­fy Fassbender’s status as both a great act­or and a very viable lead­ing man for American audiences.

Fassbender impressed cinephiles with his turns in the likes of Steve McQueen’s Hunger (play­ing real-life IRA mar­tyr Bobby Sands) and Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and made an impact with lar­ger audi­ences in the far-ranging ensemble of Quentin Tarantino’s crazed and very revisionist-history treat­ment of World War II, Inglourious Basterds. On the eve of the release of Jane Eyre, which opens on March 11, the 33-year-old Fassbender talked about his bur­geon­ing filmo­graphy (one pic­ture not dis­cussed was his upcom­ing entry in the block­buster cat­egory, X‑Men: First Class, in which he por­trays the vil­lain Magneto), his approach to char­ac­ter, and the excit­ing roller-coaster ride that’s been his career over the past few years. 

WIDE SCREEN:  In the films you’ve worked on, there have fre­quently been some very inter­est­ing nar­rat­ive and/or dir­ect­ori­al strategies com­ing in to play. In Steve McQueen’s Hunger, the Bobby Sands char­ac­ter, who you play, really isn’t intro­duced as the lead char­ac­ter until almost a third of the way into the film. When you’re work­ing with someone like McQueen, or the idio­syn­crat­ic French dir­ect­or François Ozon on Angel, or Andrea on Fish Tank, both of whom also take unusu­al choices in their films, do you feel com­ing in that you’re more of a cre­at­ive col­lab­or­at­or, that you’re in on what they’re about, as you’re going through the pro­cess? I know it var­ies with each dir­ect­or, but work­ing on Hunger, for instance, how acutely did you real­ize that the Sands char­ac­ter was going to be oozed into the film, as opposed to being intro­duced in a more con­ven­tion­al way as the sub­ject of the film? 

FASSBENDER: I was aware, because it was it was expli­citly that way in the script, you know! We did­n’t get to meet him till I don’t know what page it was, but it was quite well into the story. And that’s fine. It does­n’t both­er me one way or the oth­er really. I mean, my job kind of entails get­ting the char­ac­ter and learn­ing my lines and hit­ting my marks and all of that. So what sort of style a dir­ect­or wants to shoot it or what sort of way he or she is going to present it, it does­n’t really ; I don’t know that we dis­cussed that.

I was very lucky to work with François. He was the first guy that gave me a lead­ing role in a film when nobody knew who I was then at all. So I just I turned up with the char­ac­ter, did my work on the char­ac­ter, and tried to sort of get inside his head and fig­ure that out. And that’s the sort of con­ver­sa­tions that I would have with him. It’s like he’d be say­ing, “Oh, why don’t you do X?”  And I’d be like, “Oh, well would we do X when we do some­thing like…” — or, you know, “Wouldn’t you do rather, Y?” or — “would­n’t you do some­thing like this?”

But in terms of the style of the film, or what [Ozon] was try­ing to do, that’s kind of not really my depart­ment. So it keeps everything nice and clean if I need to take care of what I need to take care of, and the dir­ect­or does his thing. That’s what I love about film. You said it’s a col­lab­or­at­ive thing.  It’s like, I’ll approach the prop guy, I’ll say, “Oh, I’ve got this light­er, do you think that’s inter­est­ing for the char­ac­ter?” Or cos­tume or hair, make-up, they cre­ate a look for you, and you’re like, “Oh, I did­n’t see it like that myself.” There are all sorts of eyes on the piece, all sorts of input. It’s like, if you read a story and I read a story, you’ll read it one way and I’ll read it a dif­fer­ent way, and we’ll have dif­fer­ent ideas of it. So then when we come togeth­er and try and work on put­ting it across, I might think, “Oh, wow, I did­n’t think of that at all,” or “I did­n’t see that.” And then you put it all togeth­er with lots of people; like the DP’s, and the art depart­ment; the heads of all the depart­ments. That’s what’s inter­est­ing. Does it come togeth­er and does it jell, or not? 

WIDE SCREEN:  With Jane Eyre, it’s, like Angel, anoth­er peri­od piece; Rochester is a char­ac­ter who’s, of course, been played rather fam­ously, in oth­er films. Was that some­thing you were par­tic­u­larly con­scious of, or did you want to ignore the oth­er film ver­sions go back to the lit­er­ary source? 

FASSBENDER:  Well, no, I watched pretty much I think all of them. As much as I sort of could get my hands on. I watched Orson Welles; I’m obvi­ously a big fan of Orson Welles. But, while I thought I’d find some things for the char­ac­ter with what he did, what was going on in the [1943] film played in a very dated way. Very sort of over-dramatic, for the pur­poses of where we wanted to go with the piece.

That was the same feel­ing I had, when at one point I thought I was doing Wuthering Heights, and I watched Laurence Olivier’s ver­sion and again, it was like wow, the par­tic­u­lar approach here just dates big-time. And again, very dra­mat­ic, emphat­ic style. So I did dial it back to what I thought I could bring. I just stud­ied the char­ac­ter as is in the book and the script, and what I found him to be… obvi­ously he’s like this Byronic hero, there’s a little trace of that. But I also thought there’s some­thing quite bipolar about him, and I just did­n’t want him, I don’t know, to fall into total mood­i­ness. I did­n’t want to play him with large brush strokes, I wanted to find all the little fine, strange details about him. 

I think that’s what the dir­ect­or, Cary Fukanaga, had in mind. That’s what inter­ested me as well. Number one, of course, is that my mom and my sis­ter love the story! So I kind of thought, well, it would be nice to see if I can give them a Rochester they like; let’s see what they think of my Rochester, sort of give it a go. So that was attract­ive to me from the beginning.

And then once Cary got on board I thought, well, this is really inter­est­ing now. And then Mia, I was like, oh, even more impressed. I had seen her on In Treatment, and I was blown away. She’s got so much matur­ity and makes really ori­gin­al choices. I don’t feel like she’s ever lying in her per­form­ances.  She’s amaz­ing as Jane. She comes on set and like wow, it’s Jane. And then you see Mia as she her­self is, and she’s totally different.

WIDE SCREEN: You bring a lot of phys­ic­al­ity to cer­tain roles, from the ema­ci­ated hunger-striking pris­on­er in Hunger to the object of desire for both moth­er and daugh­ter in Fish Tank; what did you try to do for that side of Rochester?

FASSBENDER:  I thought that he should have a weight to him. People of that era, I think, were used to rid­ing horses and being in the saddle for hours and work­ing out in the coun­tryside. Obviously they’re landown­ers, so they have to main­tain the land. I really like the idea that he’s a hands-on sort of guy around the land when he’s there, when he’s home. So I just wanted to give him a lot of weight. 

I wanted this feel­ing that he’s got this weight on him, Bertha in the attic. I wanted that with him every­where he goes, this shad­ow sort of hov­er­ing over him. And he had that in his phys­ic­al life as well. But yeah, I did­n’t… it did­n’t require me to put on weight or go the gym or any­thing like that.

WIDE SCREEN:  In Fish Tank, which is just out on DVD in the States, yours is an inter­est­ing role in a lot of ways. Your char­ac­ter is kind of the lust object, for both the cam­era itself and a couple of the female char­ac­ters. Also, your char­ac­ter seems kind of on the ball; he’s got interests, intriguing music­al tastes and so on. And it’s almost as if the view­er can view him as a sur­rog­ate. Then it turns out he’s really not that good of a guy at all.

In a sense the film sort of pulls the rug out from under the view­er. How much of this were you jug­gling as a per­former dur­ing the mak­ing of the film? Because you do keep the char­ac­ter sym­path­et­ic in a cer­tain respect, des­pite the fact that he’s doing bad things.

FASSBENDER:  Yeah. Well I think it’s more inter­est­ing, because it’s just like if you have some­body sit­ting in the audi­ence and they go, wow, that guy’s actu­ally kind of a nor­mal sort of guy. And nor­mal people do things that aren’t so cool. But, you know, this was a case where I nev­er got a script. Andrea did­n’t want to give us a script. But when she gave me the break­down of the story, I knew what was com­ing, I knew how it was going to be, and I knew the reas­on she did­n’t give me a script was because she did­n’t want me to load it with anything. 

So I knew that I just had to play [Connor] like really kind of easy and free and encour­aging and charm­ing. And that’s what’s kind of inter­est­ing, because when the people leave the cinema, they’re like well, it makes them feel… it’s an uncom­fort­able feel­ing because it’s closer to them.  It’s like we all have the cap­ab­il­it­ies of doing all these things, like killing some­body, or tak­ing advant­age of some­body like that. And when you make it very real in embody­ing a per­son that you can relate to and under­stand or say, ‘Oh, I know that guy,’ then I think it makes the whole exper­i­ence more real for people and there­fore they have to ques­tion things, mor­als and prin­ciples. It’s more interesting. 

WIDE SCREEN:  Is that kind of stuff you look for when you’re look­ing for parts?

FASSBENDER:  Um. I think ambi­gu­ity is some­thing that I do like to try and find with­in char­ac­ters, yeah. 

WIDE SCREEN:  In Fish Tank, you worked with Katie Jarvis, who’s brand new, not an very exper­i­enced act­or. And in the upcom­ing Haywire, you worked with Gina Carano, who’s not an exper­i­enced act­or but is well versed in mixed mar­tial arts. What’s it like to work with people who aren’t as well-trained or well-versed in performing?

FASSBENDER: Well, Katie’s amaz­ing. When you see it on the screen, she’s com­pletely vivid and there. It was great work­ing with her because we did an impro­visa­tion and she was game. No fear. She’s not really inter­ested in act­ing. So it gives her that sort of extra sort of some­thing, I sup­pose, that she does­n’t care. I think in the hands of the right dir­ect­or, like Andrea Arnold, who did Fish Tank, or Steven Soderbergh with Haywire, it works.

Anyway I think act­ing, it’s 90 per­cent intu­ition.  Training is good. I think you learn most out there in the field, prac­tic­ally. But I do think, hav­ing had train­ing — I went to drama school — when things go wrong and when you sort of get the fear or lose focus, I do have a struc­ture that I can fall back on. It’s like, “Where am I com­ing from? Where am I going? What do I want from this per­son? How does this per­son make me feel?” There’s a drill that I can go back into that will get me so that I can focus. And that’s a great thing to have.

But with deal­ing with non-actors, it’s always inter­est­ing, because they’re bring­ing some­thing fresh. It’s inter­est­ing when you bring in some­body that has­n’t learned from the same rule book, so they’re just bring­ing whatever they bring from their world into the mix.

WIDE SCREEN: You’ve been work­ing an awful lot, and you have worked and are pre­par­ing to work with some really world-class dir­ect­ors, includ­ing some of the people we’ve talked about, and also Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds , David Cronenberg with the upcom­ing A Dangerous Method, and a Ridley Scott pro­ject com­ing up…

FASSBENDER: It’s been kind of crazy! It’s like I’m in a dream, really. When I real­ized that I wanted to do act­ing, I was 17, and when I was 18, I put on a play of [Quentin Tarantino’s] Reservoir Dogs. So Quentin was a massive influ­ence right at the begin­ning for me. But to be on set, being dir­ec­ted by him and work­ing, and to be in a new scene that was a clas­sic Tarantino Mexican stand-off, in one of his film… it was really just sort of a dream. I could­n’t believe it. And he is everything that you would ima­gine him to be. Full of energy, full of enthu­si­asm, full of inform­a­tion and just — he just lives, sleeps, breathes film. 

And then Cronenberg is like an engin­eer. He’s like a sci­ent­ist. He’s just so pre­cise, so gentle and so easy. His films can be quite dif­fer­ent, but the energy on set is very pleas­ant and bright. He’s just so super bright. And very non-taxing on his act­ors. And sim­il­ar to Steven Soderbergh in that pre­ci­sion and intel­li­gence and pleas­ant­ness; you can see it in both of them, the way they size everything up the minute they walk on to the set. It’s fant­ast­ic to work with people who are so cre­at­ive and have such a grasp of the situ­ation on a film set.