MI2 0700 Wow

July 2000
WOW! Cinema
"The Dougray Scott Interview"
by Paul Byrne

TAKING THE HIGH ROAD

He may be in the year's biggest blockbuster, but Dougray Scott isn't interested in becoming a star. All he's interested in is "playing interesting characters in good films".

Having made a fine impression in the otherwise reprehensible Twin Town, Dougray Scott has been slowly moving his way up the Hollywood ladder ever since. Not that the somewhat dashing young Scottish actor is exactly biting at the bit for fame and fortune. After he made his American big-budget breakthrough with Ever After - playing Prince Charming to Drew Barrymore's Cinderella - he turned down offers from the US studios to take part in the low-budget English romantic comedy, This Year's Love. A walk-on part as one of Nicolas Cage's henchmen in John Woo's Face/Off has now led the acclaimed Hong Kong action director to put the 35-year old actor forward as Tom Cruise 's nemesis in Mission: Impossible 2.

PAUL BYRNE: I think we can say that you've pretty much arrived in Hollywood now, playing the baddie in a Tom Cruise movie. Has Hollywood opened up its arms now and welcomed you into its bosoms and its homes?

DOUGRAY SCOTT: "Absolutely, I get invites all the time from all these big producers, saying, 'Come and stay in my house; we love you!'. I have been asked to go and do lots of movies there, which is very flattering, but I don
't always want to do that. I'm very happy staying here. One studio head said to me, 'You really should move over here', and I said, 'Why?'. And he said, 'Well, you'd be closer to all the work and everything'. And I said, 'Well, you're asking me to do the work now, and I don't live here'. And he said, 'Well, I'd be able to see you, have dinner.'. And basically what they want is to justify why so many of them live there. You don't really have to live there in order to make movies. You do feel there's a kind of pull, and as you get more and more well-known with a movie like Mission: Impossible, more and more scripts come in and they offer you loads of money. But at the end of the day, all I'm interested in doing is playing interesting characters in good films. And I'll continue to have that philosophy, otherwise my interest in acting will dry up pretty quickly. So, I'm not going to be swayed or flattered into doing films just for the sake of it."

PB: Woo and Cruise didn't bother with a screen test, which must have been a nice ego boost.

DS: "Yeah, I think they had run out of tape during the auditions, so they couldn't screen test me. Yeah, they'd seen Twin Town, Ever After, they'd seen Regeneration too, and a screen test I'd done for another American film. I think they were looking for someone who was really very versatile, who could be bad as well as charming, and who could bring different aspects to the character. Because that was the whole idea about my character, Ambrose; he was a man of many parts, and had an ability to play other people - i.e. Ethan Hunt - as well as the emotional side of him that we all wanted to introduce, to make him emotional and vulnerable. Someone who was capable of falling unashamedly in love, and being romantic with someone, but could also turn like that, and be lethal and dangerous."

PB: I would imagine it's very difficult in a movie of this scale to have the assurance that you can bring some sort of depth to your character, that you wouldn't end up being just a cardboard baddie.

DS: "Yeah, we discussed that for a long time before we started the movie, and all the things that you said were what we wanted to achieve with it. When we started making the film, during pre-production, the script had hardly been started, but they assured me that this character would be different. And Robert Towne is an extraordinary writer, with a great pedigree, and what you do get with a writer like Robert Towne is that you pick away the layers the more and more you read it, and you have clues as to how deep your character can go. And it's a process of discovery for me. Because they wrote the part for me; it wasn't like they wrote it and then I came along and did it. They had me in mind as they wrote the character, so in some ways, it was right in front of my eyes as to how to play this, because they had an idea of what I could do to make the character exciting and interesting. It took a long time for us to get there, but when we did get there, I felt very happy about the depth and different aspects of the dimensions that he had."

PB: It must have been a trifle hard to keep that sense of depth when you're faced with one of those Scooby-Doo moments where you have to rip off your mask.

DS: "Yeah, that is true [laughs], but I think audiences do accept it. It's part of the whole genre of what Mission: Impossible is all about. You have to pay homage to all that, you have to include all those things in the movie, and pretend that I've been playing Tom Cruise for the last ten minutes. That's actually me in the opening shots as Tom Cruise.."

PB: I was just going to say, you do a very, very good Tom Cruise; the spitting image.

DS: "It went really, really well, yeah. But all that kind of stuff just adds to the whole drama really."

PB: I was reading in an early interview you did recently that you apparently didn't find out that you're father was an amateur stage actor until after you'd become an actor yourself.

DS: "Well, he was in Unity Theatre in Glasgow in the 40s, which was a pretty Socialist theatre company, and with my uncle, they did a lot of productions. I kinda knew he was a bit of an actor, but I just thought it was just bit parts in movies. I didn't know anything about the Unity Theatre until I was about sixteen, and it was a wonderful discovery to make."

PB: I'm sure you're well-used to the comparisons you get to Sean Connery in America, given that you're an actor with a Scottish accent, but you were influenced more by Brando, DeNiro and Pacino, weren't you?

DS: "Yeah, they would have been more my motivation, sure. Not that I'm putting myself up with those guys, because they're phenomenal. I wish. I like Sean Connery, I think he's a great actor, but my inspirations were DeNiro, Pacino, Steiger, Brando, and Alec Guinness in fact. He was an extraordinary chameleon."

PB: One aspect of the shooting of the movie that the media have touched on a lot is your motorbike accident during a stunt, that literally put you out of the picture for six weeks.

DS: "No, I wasn't six weeks out of the picture."

PB: Oh, I'll shoot my researcher then.

DS: "The researcher obviously just got it off whoever started off the rumour, but it's just nonsense. I was out for no time at all, because I wasn't meant to be filming for the next six days, and in actual fact, when I fell off my bike, I got back up again. It was scary when you come off a bike, as anyone will tell you. You ride a bike, the possibilities are, you' re going to come off, and that's what happened to me. The ironic thing was, that was probably one of the easiest shots that I had to do. Someone hadn't scraped some sand off the road, so I pulled my front brake, and I went over like that, rolled off, hurt my ribs, hurt my shoulder, but that was it. There was nothing that was too serious. I got on and did all the filming that I was supposed to do."

PB: You've just finished shooting Tom Stoppard's screen adaptation of Robert Harris's novel, Enigma; any future plans now?

DS: "Yeah, the Robert Harris movie was terrific. Michael Apted was directing. And now I'm going on holiday for two months to concentrate on other things, and then I'll do a film in September. I don't know which one yet, but I'm in a good position to pick and choose right now. Which is nice."