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
