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
