Pierce Brosnan

Interview By: Stephen Snart
StephenSnart@TheCinemaSource.com

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In Seraphim Falls, the suave and elegant Pierce Brosnan plays against type as Gideon, a post-Civil War general on the run from a posse of bounty hunters. Appearing savage and bewildered with his tasseled hair and paranoid eyes, Brosnan turns in a performance that feels frightfully genuine.

“The man is a survivalist. He’s a field agent of great skill,” says Brosnan of his character. And it’s certainly an apt description since from the opening frame of the film, Gideon is being doggedly pursued and the chase never lets up until the final frame. Shot entirely on location in parts of Oregon and New Mexico, it’s an all-out cat-and-mouse game that requires a great amount of physicality from its performers. While many actors would recoil at the thought of being exclusively in the wild without the luxuries of studio sets and extravagant trailers, Brosnan reveled in the opportunity.

“Every day was a joy to walk onto that ‘stage.’ Santa Fe, New Mexico is powerful land… ancient land. You hear the echoes and footsteps of people who have gone before you. Pueblos there that are thousands of years old. You can pick up shreds of pottery that have been smashed and belong to a different era.”

In the film, the landscape and climate play essential roles in the presentation and as such the viewer is constantly aware of the actors’ interaction with the conditions around them. In a scene where Gideon emerges from the icy McKenzie River and desperately tries to warm himself by a fire, one genuinely believes that Brosnan is freezing cold himself. The forthcoming actor reveals, that’s because he more or less was: “There was no acting required in the sense that I was freezing. They wet me down and I was terribly, terribly cold.” He continues to discuss the experience of filming the rapids sequence in great detail, “The fear

of the river was constant because it was so primordial. This valley we shot in, the McKenzie River, is deep. The hydraulics of those waves, that water was… you felt it in your chest what I was about to do. What could possibly go wrong, it would happen fast. I went in on wires and the next day I went in free flowing.”

Considering the rigorous demands of the shoot, it’s a wonder to find out Brosnan never got sick throughout filming. His secret: “Good whisky. Pinot Noir. Good Irish character,” he says with a slight chuckle. “I don’t know. None of us got sick. The river sequence was done seven days in Oregon after Christmas. But yeah, I didn’t tell my wife about it… She would have been very anxious.”

One of the by-products of playing such tough characters in intense action films like Seraphim Falls, is that fans start to believe the actor behaves in a similar manner in real life. But Brosnan happily reveals, “I don’t even boogie board in real life! We live in Hawaii beside these huge waves and I don’t go near them… The things you do in camera when you’re in character like this, you just don’t do in real life.”

Aside from the opportunity to live dangerously on camera, Brosnan was instantly attracted to the project because of its genre and his co-star. “Liam is a huge reason why I wanted to do this film. I think he’s such a magnificent actor. He has such a dignity and presence like no other on film. He’s a fellow Irishman. And I thought the sweet irony that he’s from the North, I’m from the South… the roles get reversed here. And I thought we would be a good compliment to each other. And we’ve become good friends. I would certainly love to strike out with him again on some sort of cinematic adventure.”

As for the genre, “I was brought up on

a kind of staple of the westerns and I just thought this had an elegance to it. I thought [director] David Von Ancken had a sureness to him that was very erudite and passionate about film. He didn’t seem to be some egotistical flapper. He’s a man as you can see and he’s passionate about his work. He made one other film called Bullet in the Brain that I really enjoyed. It was a twelve-minute haiku of a film. It had the same lyricism as this.”

Ultimately though, Brosnan’s project choices often come down to a gut instinct level, “So much of it is just sensing an intuition. I try not to intellectualize it too much. Does it feel right? Does it make you feel happy? Does it make you feel good? Then go do it.”

On that subject, Brosnan drops a few hints about his upcoming projects. First up, he’s got a thriller co-starring Maria Bello and Gerald Butler, “we made this picture called Butterfly on a Wheel which is about love, passion, vengeance, anger… takes place over a day.” The other project he has completed filming on is tentatively titled Marriage and co-stars Christopher Cooper, Patricia Clarkson and Rachel McAdams, which Brosnan describes as “a delightful drama.”

Perhaps his most high-profile project on the horizon is a sequel to the 1999 hit The Thomas Crown Affair, entitled The Topkapi Affair. Although, he warns that it might still be a long way off. “We gotta get the script right. The script has only come in just four days ago. So it has taken us time to do it, to find the tone of it. We’ve set the bar high. The bar was high to start with in McQueen territory. Thank God we pulled it off and it seems to have fermented well on the shelf.”

Fans of his Golden Globe nominated turn in The Matador might be dismayed to learn he doesn’t have any concrete plans

to star in another comedy as of yet but can still take solace in the wide grin that adorns his face as he assures, “I’m looking!”