Orlando Bloom

Interview By: Michael Dance

MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Everybody knows Orlando Bloom from the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean trilogies. Starring in those might be enough for some actors, but in his downtime, he’s also managed to work with the likes of Cameron Crowe (Elizabethtown) and Ridley Scott – twice (Black Hawk Down and Kingdom of Heaven). You’d think he might like a break every now and again.

Then again, maybe not. Now you can see him in the independent movie Haven, directed by newcomer Frank E. Flowers, who was only twenty-four when the film was shot. Oh, and Bloom is producing the movie as well. “The nature of an independent film like this, which I haven’t really worked on before, was that it was like, we’re here to make a movie, and we have this much time, and for me it was like two and a half, three weeks of shooting,” Bloom says. “There wasn’t a lot of scuba diving going on.”

How did he get involved in the project? “It was the timing of it all. Frankie and me were connected by my manager…she put us together. I had seen Frankie’s short, called Swallow, a twenty minute short, which was a very emotionally impacting movie, fantastic, and I really like it. I read the script, and initially there really wasn’t anything I could do in it. The character I was originally being asked to play I wasn’t interested in. So I said I liked the script, and I thought the character of Shy, which was originally written as a young Caymanian boy, was cool, because of what happens to him.”

Bloom soon became impressed by his future director’s versatility. “Frankie said well, give me 24 hours and I’ll tweak the script, so he tweaked the script in 24 hours, and I’ll tell you, he completely rewrote that character.” He stops in

order to clarify himself. “But not in order to create a star vehicle for an Orlando Bloom movie. Because I still think the movie holds very firm as an ensemble film.”

An ensemble film it is, with other leading roles going to the likes of Bill Paxton, Stephen Dillane, and Zoe Saldana as Andrea, Bloom’s love interest. Bloom found that producing his first film allowed him to discover a lot about making a film that, as an actor, one never notices. “It’s funny, when you see Andrea kick the side of that mini, in the movie, that little improvised moment cost us ten grand. As a producer, you know, somebody tells you that, and you go: what??” He laughs about it now. “As an actor you show up to work, you put your makeup on, you don’t think about things like that. That means people aren’t going to eat lunch tomorrow.”

In the movie, Bloom’s character, Shy, begins a romance with Andrea that wreaks havoc in their area. The entire movie takes place in the Cayman Islands, where director Flowers grew up. “It’s set in the Cayman Islands, but it’s a universal topic…it really does try to tackle the youth cultures issues of sex, drugs, violence, peer pressure, race, class, you know. It’s got all of those running through it, and it’s a very honest movie…that’s what I really admired about the writing.”

For someone so tuned into the world of blockbusters, Bloom can only rave about doing a smaller film. “The first time we sat and first talked about doing Haven, Amores Perros and City of God and movies like that were floating about, and I was really excited by those movies, and I felt like they were the movies that were really tweaking me.”

“I kind of fell into the big movie industry, fortunately, in many ways, but I sort of did it the

other way around, I did these big movies and stuff, and I really want to make these [independent] sort of movies. I’d really like to pepper these movies throughout my career, and I want to do some theater too, for that matter.” One gets the idea that getting thrust into stardom straight out of drama school was a bit overwhelming. “My career sort of took this marching pace that meant that I was running to the beat of a drum that I wasn’t quite sure where the noise was coming from.” He mentions that in the future, he’d love to work with directors he admired when he was younger, such as Jim Jarmusch and Jim Sheridan.

At the same time, however, he’s also quick to defend all types of movies, big and small. When someone asks if he considered his image in doing an independent film, Bloom seems downright nonchalant about it. “I haven’t thought about it in terms of my image, but I do really love the little movies. When I go to see movies, I see all movies. Sometimes you want to go watch a blockbuster… other times you want to go [see] a character-driven story.” He puts it another way: “Nobody was there for the money, that’s for damn sure… when there’s no money, when you’re just there because you love the work, there’s something very fulfilling about that.”

At one point Bloom mentions that he took a break from filming the third Pirates movie to come in and do the interview. Apparently the man never stops working. When someone asks if he’s exhausted, Bloom simply shrugs. “I’m all right.” Then: “A little.”