Chiwetel Ejiofer, Dirty Pretty Things Lee Shoquist, ReelMovieCritic.com
The Dirty, Pretty, Grand Business of Acting, featuring Chiwetel Ejiofer
Chiwetel Ejiofer, the celebrated young British actor standing front and center of Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, stunning urban story of illegal aliens involved in some dangerous business on the streets of an unforgiving London, greets me with an energy and youthfulness all but erased from his magnetic movie performance.
He strikes me as about ten years younger and much more hip that Okwe, the Nigerian doctor living “underground” as a life-hardened immigrant about to be changed by seedy exploitation, murder and love. Indeed, watching his steely reserve and carefully calibrated reactions to the extremes of human behavior he witnesses in the film, is one of the great pleasures of recent movie acting in certainly the most compelling adult film that sparkles through a most underwhelming summer movie season.
Today he looks as if he could be the vigorous and excited younger brother of his movie character. Joining me for a brief chat to discuss the film, I'm most interested in digging in to that screen persona and reconciling the performance with the actor, the approach and method with what's onscreen.
LS: Let's get the basics out of the way here. Tell me about Dirty Pretty Things. Why were you attracted to this picture and to working with Stephen Frears?
CE: Well, Stephen Frears is a brilliant filmmaker, so it wasn't really a question of that. I love his movies.
LS: Growing up in England, you must have seen his movies before you thought you'd become an actor much less work with him.
CE: Oh, yes. It's weird, because there was something always kind of otherworldly about Stephen Frears and his films. So I'd watched his movies, but there was something… I don't know, maybe because he'd worked with people who became incredibly famous…
LS: Daniel Day-Lewis…
CE: …Gary Oldman. Alfred Molina. John Malkovich. But it was a different world. You know, you love the movies you don't feel like you're ever going to work with “this person.” It's likely that you'll work with someone that may even be more famous. I was very lucky to work with Spielberg, for example - not that I'd ever thought I'd work with him.
But I would have thought that it would have been more possible to work with somebody like Steven Spielberg if you did a really great audition or something, before I would work with somebody like Stephen Frears, whom I just felt I'd have to have some very different kind of quality in order to work with him.
And that's what's kind of interesting about the role of Okwe - the character gave me the opportunity to come up with something that was interesting enough to be part of a Stephen Frears film. Okwe's so different from me, and that just gave me that opportunity, so it just worked in that sense.
LS: I would imagine the subject matter of the film is fairly close to your heart, in terms of your background and family.
CE: Yeah, absolutely. But not just because of my family, but also because it's something that I think is very important - the treatment and the struggles of populations of people who emigrate to the countries of the West and are given a very difficult road, for no reason. It doesn't seem like there's any reason for it. Everybody knows that the people that do come over to a country most of the time do work that other people don't want to do…
LS: …and pretty much run the cities.
CE: Yes, exactly. And they're very good people; they're very good for the economy and so on. So it seems extraordinary to treat them generally and in the media with any degree of contempt. It just seems completely ridiculous.
LS: One of the things about Dirty Pretty Things that really works is that for once these people emerge in the forefront of a story. As a matter of fact, for a period of time I lived with two undocumented Mexican nationals here in the U.S., so I was very familiar with and sensitized to the struggles of getting every day, basic things done that we all take for granted. And the movie has the guts to put them in the forefront as opposed to on the periphery.
CE: Yes, absolutely. That was exactly the point of the film is that it sort of focuses on these people and then brings them out. And it's a way of saying, “Look. If you do look, then you don't know what you might find. You might find these extraordinary people.” You know? And that's the thing - the society that we live in is much richer than most of the society realizes. And it's a shame that happens to be the case. But it is.
LS: Let's talk about your onscreen relationship with Audrey Tautou. And not so much in regards to the characters in the film, but let's focus more on the acting. I think by the final scene of the movie, particularly with you throughout the entire film, there's a remarkable level of restraint and reserve and composure. And in that final powerful scene in the airport, I'm curious as to what was going on in that moment, and if you could dig into the acting of that scene, and maybe that relationship throughout the film.
CE: Yes. Well, it was very interesting. I think one of the most important things was that we were playing against the blossoming romance in a conventional sense. There were no lingering side looks; nothing to give that away. It was just a growing affection, which is what I think is accurate and is what would come out of that relationship.
LS: It seems to come out of a need between them, and there's nothing superfluous. It's as if they need each other just to survive.
CE: Sure. Yeah. They didn't have to fall in love, even if they needed each other. But out of the need becomes a mutual dependence. And out of that dependency becomes this other thing that sort of catches them by surprise actually - the depth of feeling that they have for each other. They realize that they're going to have to separate, and then they also realize this whole thing has been going on.
So it was quite fascinating to me because that is a part of life, and a kind of relationship that exists all the time. They could be work colleagues or whatever, as certain circumstances bring people together, and at the end of that circumstance, after all the laughs have been had and all that, the realization that actually you're not going to see this person the next day - that's really bad. And you suddenly realize you actually have a much further depth of feeling and so on. So we kind of really played against any kind of notion that they were aware of what they were doing. And we just sort of worked on the same page, and we let it catch up with us.
LS: You performance is full of looks, internal thought process, evaluations of what's happening in a scene, and it's unusual because particularly in mainstream movies, actors are often encourage to behave more flamboyantly or extroverted, to telegraph their emotions, probably more so like Sergi Lopez does in your film.
CE: Yes, sure.
LS: So when you're giving a performance like this one, that's in large part very cerebral, how is it to perform in that manner, versus in a more flamboyant way? What is easier? What is the difference in approach?
CE: I think there's a risk factor in playing a part like this, that's internalized, in that people just won't know what the hell you're doing, or that they're just not going to get it or not feel it for whatever reason, and so you want to fill in the silences. But I think that this script felt like there was so much room and depth to the film that it kind of allowed moments. It allowed the moment of Senay touching Okwe's chest to listen to his heart, and him being completely kind of confused and thrown by that. And it sort of holds on the screen for an impossibly long time, as he goes through this kind of process and he leaves.
There aren't a lot of scripts in this moment that can kind of facilitate that kind of moment, but this film does and can. And that's the nature of the writing. I think it was just a question of allowing those moments to land. Every script goes around two or three moments where an audience is allowed in to the movie. And that's true of this one. But some of those moments there's no dialogue, and that quite telling about the sophistication of the writing.
LS: Another thing that very strong about this film is that it's a very non-sentimental take on a human issue.
CE: Yes, the film is an entertaining film and doesn't exist outside of that. There's no car chases or anything like that. It's an entertainment; it's a thriller. There's dark comedy, bit of romance, and the story chooses to represent social realism. But it's not didactic.
LS: It's not an issue film.
CE: Right, it is not. But the issues are very clear, and it really is just a film about the cities we live in.
LS: What do you look for in a director?
CE: I guess you know when a director is really helping you because you discover other things. A good director fires your imagination to push further, to illuminate, to bring out qualities and factors of a character. Those are the things that I think the best directors are able to do. And that's when the whole process becomes very thrilling, when you feel that you're working at the highest level of your mind, and you can.
LS: You once said that a film is an ensemble, and nothing will work if the ensemble effort is there. Explain that sort of family relationship that emerges when people come together to make a film, and how that's created.
CE: Yes. Well, in a film like Dirty Pretty Things, which combines all of these archetypal relationships - the villain, the love interest, the friend, the acquaintance, the hooker with the heart of gold, the work colleague - that creates, with a very small core cast, an ensemble feel to the piece. And once everyone gets introduced and you know what everyone is about, to make it work everyone needs to be on the same page, pushing to lift the scenes over and off the page, and of course with the director. When they work that way it becomes very exiting. And I felt that with this company. Every day, going in to work with every person, was thrilling and exciting. Everybody was working with an absolute height and desire to really lift the piece off the page and get right out there to people.
LS: Do you think that to be a really good actor and create a three-dimensional character, do you need to have a deep understanding of human behavior and motivation? Or does performing exist in a different realm, where you focus more on artifice and that it's a heightened sense of communicating? Because it seems with most modern actors who focus on realism, you really have to understand human behavior very well to bring it across.
CE: It just depends, and mainly on the part itself. Some characters need to be more bombastic. Some need to be more of an archetype. Some just need to be more real. And when you approach parts that are more “real people,” yes, you definitely do need to work out what the problem is, what people are going through, and feeling. Now whether you portray that exactly as one would behave is kind of up to you.
But it seems that the majority of the time, you perform it as one would behave in this world, and the film world is very different to the world we live in. So you have to relate that to the actual environment of the movie, which makes people's reactions different - more heightened - in some ways, and makes things more important. So I think that both things are true - that it does have to be more heightened, but it has to be real of the world you create.
LS: Chiwetel, thanks for spending the time today to chat about Dirty Pretty Things, and much good luck with the film.
CE: Thank you.
Lee Shoquist © 2003
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