Ewan McGregor
Roman Polanski's latest filmThe Ghost Writer is a political thriller inspired by the Robert Harris novel The Ghost. The suspenseful tale centers on a best-selling pop culture writer (Ewan McGregor) who is brought in to work on the autobiography of an ex-British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) after the previous ghost writer died under mysterious circumstances. The Ghost, as we come to know him, immediately suspects something is fishy, and as he spends time at the politico's Cape Cod beach home, he begins to unravel dark secrets from the past. And when the former PM is accused of war crimes back in England, the heat gets turned up even more.
Fandango caught up with McGregor and Brosnan in New York this week to discuss this paranoid, tightly wound thriller and the opportunity to work with one of cinema's most famed directors.
How did working with Roman Polanski compare with preconceptions that you may have had of him?
Pierce Brosnan: I knew of this turbulent, brilliant life of a director, and I was totally enthralled and intrigued by the opportunity to play in this film…the experience of it was very satisfying. You have to be on your game with Polanski. He is all-encompassing on the set. It's his house, and he has his finger on every aspect of the production -- the costumes, the sets, almost the weather.
Ewan McGregor: I didn't know an awful lot about him as a director. I knew a lot of his films. I was very familiar with his Macbeth film, Rosemary's Baby, Tess and Chinatown. When I knew I was going to work with him I got as many of his films as I could, so I got a really good sense of his film language. One thing I'd heard about them as it that he is really very fussy with props and set dressing. And he is like that. If there's a bookshelf [in a scene], he'll spend 20 minutes organizing the books in the right order even if it might be slightly out of focus. Details are really important to him and what we see in the frame itself.
Pierce, you met Roman while you were promoting Mamma Mia. How did that come about?
Pierce Brosnan: [After Mamma Mia] the last thing at the end of the spectrum was Polanski. They asked about meeting with me, and I said sure. I have no ego about going out to meet with people, so I hopped on the train and met with Mr. Polanski, and the first question [I asked] was, "Am I playing Tony Blair?" I had read the book and the screenplay. He said, "No, you're not playing Tony Blair." However, all roads, indications, emblems and stories seem to point to one man only, so I looked at a film of Tony Blair and his performance of Tony Blair being prime minister and his persona. I left that alone and went back to the text and the story of [my character] Adam Lang, and where his story starts as a young man from Oxford who's a great actor with an eye for the girls. He's a rock star, he's a populist and he's an actor playing a prime minister. I'm an actor playing an actor playing a prime minister.
Is your character meant to be a Blair/Clinton composite, particularly with Kim Cattrall as his assistant and the running?
Pierce Brosnan: I don't know. I can't really answer that. The constant running can be said of Polanski. It could be said of Bush or Clinton. All I could do is go back to the text, to the story that Harris put on the page, and then make mild comparisons to the time that we live in.
Ewan, you have a love scene in this film. You're naked yet again…[you] don't seem to be fazed by that.
Ewan McGregor: I don't know what to tell you other than I take my dressing gown off and you see my arse for a second or something. I'm literally getting into bed, but the fact that it's called a nude scene is incredible. I didn't even think about it at the time. I didn't even think about it when I watched the film. It didn't even cross my mind, but I've always had to answer questions about naked scenes because I've been naked in some of the films I'm in. They reflect life, and in life people are naked.
Many actors don't always do a lot of press for certain films, depending upon how they prioritize them. Even though you're doing a lot of press for it, The Ghost Writer doesn't seem to need your support as much because it has got a lot going for it.
Ewan McGregor: I've been talking about [it] for days and days and days. I hope it makes some impact, otherwise I'll wonder what I'm doing. It's part of the business -- you have to stand by them. But you can do it in degrees, and The Ghost Writer is a good film for me. Roman isn't able to go out and promote the film, and I'm not sure he would anyway. He strikes me as someone who doesn't do a great deal of publicity, but I'm sure he would've been at the premiere in Berlin and probably would've been involved in the press conference. And because he's not, I think we're doing more than our fair share of it to help open the film.
Pierce, can you talk about your chemistry with Olivia Williams on screen?
Pierce Brosnan: When I was trying to figure out the why of my playing this character, this ex-British Prime Minister, with all of the ingredients of which I've spoken, I came to it through her character really, this Lady Macbeth type character. If you look at Polanski's work and look at the Macbeth he did, which was quite brilliant, and you look at the subterfuge of his life and his cinematic art, I then got some kind of hook on this character of mine through the prism of her character and the manipulation of her character. She's a formidable woman in the life of this man who is this kind of a hollow man, who has the façade of his being pulled asunder. He asks her flatly and dejectedly, "What should I do?" It's kind of a terrible sentence for a man, a man who has a façade of power to go out there and give some Churchill-like battle cry to the people. Olivia is a laser in this movie.
This is a thriller that ends up saying a lot more about where we've been the last ten years. Can you talk about that?
Ewan McGregor: It's just become more and more current as we've gotten closer and closer to the film coming out. It's like British politics is trying very hard to mimic our movie. It's been suggested that the CIA are running our publicity campaign, which is also possibly true. [laughs]…Two weeks ago Tony Blair sat in front of the committee and had to talk about his decision in taking Britain into that war. It seems to be that these things that Robert Harris was writing about at the time were as obvious as then as they are now, but the surprising thing might be that it's taken so long for them to come out in the public eye.
That being said, if our film states that politicians and even those that hold the highest power in politics, and the British government and the American government, have to be accountable for the decision-making and aren't above the law, then I'm very proud of that and happy to in be a film that has that message. I think it's right. I think it's right that Blair has to sit there, and I don't know what will become of the information that he gave. I don't know if it'll do any good or not for the people who've lost their family members in the war and the innocent people who have died in the war. But it's still right that it should happen, and we'll never see Bush sitting in front of a committee and having to answer for his decision-making. I'm sure we'll never see that, which is a shame.
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