Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush talks about "Quills," playing a great pervert and what's so funny about sadism.
Nov 30, 2000 | To quote Doug Wright's screenplay, the first aural and visual impressions you get of the Marquis de Sade in "Quills" are a "reptilian" eye and a voice at once "mellifluous" and "low." His hand sports an amber ring containing "an arachnid trapped in stone." Yet from the get-go, Australian actor Geoffrey Rush imbues this ominous figure with a nihilistic joie de vivre that's both infectious and unsettling. It's crucial to the complexities of Philip Kaufman's exuberant, rending tragicomedy that the man who prances through the intersection of pleasure and pain remains a life force and an art force. Rush comes through with flying colors -- albeit ones ranging from gore-red to dung-brown. He gives Sade an anarchic erotic glee that's inseparable from his theatrical imagination and volcanic urge to write. It's fitting that Rush used as a major source book Francine du Plessix Gray's biography "At Home With the Marquis de Sade: A Life," which emphasizes Sade's seductive dance with surrogates for his distant mother, while Kaufman relied more on Neil Schaeffer's "The Marquis de Sade: A Life," which pivots on the Marquis' vain attempt to find a moral and intellectual authority to substitute for an absent father. Thanks to Rush and Kaufman (and, of course, Doug Wright), "Quills" has a quivering blend of yin and yang.
With a kind of anti-noblesse oblige, Rush's Sade uses his superior wit to ensnare everyone who surrounds him at the Charenton insane asylum into fatal or near-fatal flirtations with his perverse worldview. That includes the liberal Abbé de Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), who tries to run Charenton as a City of God, and Madeleine Leclerc (Kate Winslet), the innocent laundress who helps Sade smuggle out his writing.
Ironically, he doesn't need to spin his twisted wonders on his enemy, physician Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), who answers Napoleon's call to squelch the writer's blasphemous and profane work. Royer-Collard, a righteous hypocrite, is already a more dangerous sadist than Sade is.
Kaufman has referred to the four leads as a quartet, and they are matched brilliantly. Caine brings subtle notes of savvy to his Machiavellian doctor. Phoenix has never been sharper or more commanding, while Winslet is gutsy, intuitive, alluring; together they're unsentimental heartbreakers. Yet Rush registers as their fellow player and also as their mad conductor, whipping them and the audience into unpredictable crescendos of laughter, snorts, gasps and tears.
Amid general acclaim, some critics have voiced surprise at Rush's wholehearted submission to the script's combination of depraved vaudeville, Grand Guignol and even grander tragedy. But you can see elements of Sade's shrewdness, furtiveness and unpredictable genius in the body of film work Rush has built from his shattered concert pianist in "Shine" and his master spy in "Elizabeth" to more lowdown parts like the ruthless thrill-park impresario in "House on Haunted Hill" and the mad scientist named Casanova Frankenstein in "Mystery Men." I think Rush was at his best as theater-owner Philip Henslowe in "Shakespeare in Love." It allowed him to wed his appetites for high and low culture -- he says he loved being a character dressed in a suit that made him look like a stink bug, who ordered no less than William Shakespeare to cut to the chase, with prose. "Quills" permits him to vent the same iconoclastic impulse on a riskier stage -- while demonstrating the heartbreaking human sacrifice exacted by the need to create art.
I interviewed Rush two weeks ago, on the morning of the movie's premiere in director Kaufman's home city, San Francisco.
I first saw the movie with eight people spread out across a large screening room; everyone was laughing to themselves but nobody could hear anybody else. It turned out everybody loved the movie and thought it was hilarious.
It kicks up with a bigger crowd; you get big surprise laughs. You know when audiences go "Whooaaa!" and then think, "We all just did that together and we didn't think we were going to" -- especially with a film that's presumably going to be about sadism. I think they're delighted to discover that it's about sadism in many different forms -- including the ways a society can be sadistic. At the beginning, when you see rough hands on a delicate young woman's neck who is breathing heavily, you think, "Oh, hang on, we're watching something in a kind of 'porn-ish' genre." When they find out what's really happening, people go "Ohhh!" It's scarier than the end of the "Jurassic Park" ride at the Universal tour; it's like the kind of nightmare where you're falling, falling, falling. Within the first two minutes of the film Philip Kaufman is already messing with your mind. I love that.
Phil and his team shot all the location stuff -- they managed to find French-style architecture in the environment of Oxford, England -- before I even got on the film. I felt like the bridegroom that showed up extremely late. But Phil was in such glee, so wired up and excited -- "We have the camera, here's the guillotine blade, let's put the neck of the audience on the block" -- I thought it was just brilliant.
Did Phil see you play the character of Casanova Frankenstein in "Mystery Men"? Casanova Frankenstein wouldn't be a bad nickname for the Marquis de Sade.
[Laughter] Well, curiously enough, that film got cut so badly that Lena Olin [the star of Kaufman's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"] was edited out of the movie. We had four big scenes together which would've given you an idea of why he was called "Casanova Frankenstein" -- high-comedy love scenes that were also suitably cheesy, to fit the comic book form. What appealed to me about the script of "Mystery Men" was this great oxymoron of a name. The moment you say, "I'm playing Casanova Frankenstein," you think "I can see two big dimensions in this character, just for starters." [Laughter] But -- no regrets, you know. It was an absolutely wonderful experience.
In your major movie roles, you've often played characters who are obsessed, like Javert in "Les Miserables." In fact, Javert and "Shine's" David Helfgott and now Sade, lurk around prisons or asylums or, for that matter, theaters, and have twisted relations with authority. From the outside, this body of work has an oddball coherence to it.
But in my head I think, well, I've played a theater owner in the mercantile world of the Elizabethan theater ["Shakespeare in Love"]; I've played a cop, which is very unlike me, in "Les Miserables"; and I've played a libertine who happens to be in an asylum. What makes them coherent for me is that the story being told in all of them is allowed to emerge out of small isolated environments.
