Paul Giamatti

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Though people by and large still don't know him by name despite being an Academy Award nominated actor, Paul Giamatti has accomplished a great deal in his lengthy career. He has played various roles in a wide variety of films from Private Parts to to Man On The Moon, to the Planet Of The Apes remake to Big Fat Liar to Sideways to Cinderella Man -- the last of which brought him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

Along with his considerable talent, Giamatti has never been shy about always pursuing the roles that he feels are best for him. And that hasn't changed with his latest role as he plays the brutal hitman Mr. Hertz in the new action/thriller film Shoot 'Em Up, co-starring Clive Owen and Monica Bellucci.

When we talked with the actor, Giamatti first discusses how he first reacted to Michael Davis when he was approached with the writer/director's script.

'He's insane. He's a weird guy,' Paul recalls, 'It was really trashy and vulgar pulpy kind of thing, but at least he seems to really be going for it in a real way, so yeah, my agent was like, I don't know what this is. Lactating whores, you're raping a dead body in the back of a car, you want to read this' And I'm like, yeah, and she's like, really' And I read it and went I don't know what this is either, but it was kind of intriguing. It was off-putting definitely, but when I met him and realized it had to be funny, I thought, well, it could be interesting.

The most unique thing discovered was Davis's unique approach to proposing the film to him which was an animation reel that showed in detail how he planned to film all the action scenes. It was this one-of-a-kind approach, Paul says, that convinced him to play Mr. Hertz.

'He's an animator and he animated all the stuff,' Giamatti notes, 'Because, what was interesting was that the script was all dialogue and the action stuff was not even described really. It would just say Hertz, you know, kills some guys on a stairwell and that would be it.'

So I really didn't know what the hell to make of the thing,' he continues, 'And when I met him, he showed me all these animated things and I was like, oh, I see what it's going to be like. There's these weird action sequences, they have this weird sort of logic to them. They're like these funny little contraptions. They're really odd. So he did really sell me on it, but I thought it was pretty interesting in the first place.'

It was this one-of-a-kind approach, Paul says, that convinced him to play Mr. Hertz.

'He really seemed like he was going to know what he was doing and how he wanted it,' said Giamatti,'He didn't really seem like he was screwing around at all, so he didn't come across as any kind of knucklehead that he didn't know what he was doing.'

The 40 year-old actor explained to us in the simplest and most concise way possible for us what the character of Mr. Hertz is like in Shoot 'Em Up.

'He's bright, this bright, hard-working guy, loves his job, good team leader kind of guy. It was meant to be that kind of thing. That he's just doing a job that he loves, you know. He just loves it. He loves killing.

He claims that one particular enjoyment of playing an assassin was getting to learn how to use and operate various guns.

'Yeah, we did some of that, you know,' Paul recounts, 'Clive just shoots eighteen different weapons or something in this. But we did some and I enjoyed the sniper rifle quite a bit. It was a very comfortable weapon for me, but these guys hand you a gun, you point, and shoot. You know, they didn't let me shoot any live ammo. I'm disappointed, but they were fine, the guns were fine. I wasn't crazy about them to begin with, but they were fun, they were good.'

In regards to the aforementioned detailed animated stunts that sold him on doing the film, we asked Giamatti what it was like actually filming the stunts.

'It was insane,' he claims, 'They were all stuntmen, all these guys running around. I didn't have that many stunts to do actually. I just get punched a couple of times and shot a couple of times, which was great. Clive had all the stunts to do and he did a lot of them himself, 'cause I think Michael likes the idea of seeing the actor doing it and not some guy with a wig, 'cause he's like repelling down the thing. He didn't like it, but for me, it was fine. I got to watch him do the stunts and take a shot at him now and then, so it was easy.'

As an actor who is known for making a surprise impact in many of his roles, we asked him how much full-bodied performing he could do as Hertz.

'Because of the nature of the thing, it was so tightly controlled, this kind of movie. Especially since these action scenes are such,' Paul explains, 'There really wasn't a whole lot of room to play around with it, but within what I could do, I could play around with it. There wasn't a whole lot of ad-libbing or improvising or stuff like that, because he had it so timed out in his head and it has to work a certain way, which was kind of nice in a way because you knew what you were supposed to do.'

'Clearly, there was times when I was watching this and I'm like, whoa, man!' he adds, 'I was a little too far. I just'ehhh. I didn't really know and he didn't really put much of a bar on it. Sometimes I think he probably pulled me back, but I just figured this was how I was supposed to be. You know, I figured I had license to do as many goofy, over-the-top things as I could, so I took advantage of it.'

Giamatti also told us how he hopes people will respond to Shoot 'Em Up.

'Hopefully, it's funny than anything else, 'cause it was the idea,' he believes, 'It's crazy and he had the whole thing edited in his head, every second of that movie was edited in his head entirely. He could draw it out really fast for you, but he was able to change it if he needed to, because he'd know it so well. But I don't think it changed much from what he had in his head. I don't know, it was weird, but he was an animator and editor, I think, for a while. I sure as hell couldn't do it.'

And finally, we asked what was next on the horizon for on the highly unpredictable character actor's to-do-list.

'I just played John Adams, the second President of the United States in this miniseries for HBO, all about him,' Paul mentions. 'I did a cartoon called El Superbeasto, which is a Rob Zombie thing. His idea was to kind of do this kind of Fritz The Cat things with a lot of sex and drug jokes in a cartoon again. It's kind of a dirty cartoon." And he also might be doing a prequel to Bubba Ho-Tep. "It's called Bubba Nosferatu And The Curse Of The She-Vampires. I would play Colonel Tom Parker.' Oh, okay, Paul. Sounds like your very conventional career will continue.