Ben Whishaw Interview, Perfume Story of a Murderer

BW: Yeah, to a degree I think that’s true. I think he’s aiming for one thing and it’s something that totally and utterly obsesses him, but then he doesn’t quite achieve what he wanted because he realizes that the perfume… people have fallen in love with the perfume and not him. So in a way he is kind of a victim of his own obsessive tunnel vision.

Q: Because basically at the very end we see that the perfume makes people behave in ways that they don’t know what they are doing and when he first…the first time he kills the girl, he didn’t intend to kill her, so that’s why I thought perhaps it’s that perfume from the very beginning that has blinded him and he will keep killing because he is not thinking.

BW: Well I think that’s absolutely right. Yeah. He’s in an obsessive frame of mind and he’s not… It’s something that completely overwhelms him and consumes him so he’s not … He doesn’t stop to think about the moral implications of what he’s doing or anything like that. It’s entirely a gut compulsion.

Q: What was the biggest challenge for you as an actor transforming for this role?

BW: I think it was two things really. One, not having any dialogue really to speak of and also this problem of making somebody who is, on the surface, not a sympathetic character, to try and make him… well, if not sympathetic, at least to some degree understandable, a character that an audience can feel like they recognize something of themselves in. So those two things were sort of the things we were always struggling with. Without words, how do you express all the stuff that’s going on inside this character?

Q: It says in the notes that I guess the best comparison of your character’s relationship with Dustin’s was the Mozart-Salieri kind of conflict. Can you talk a little bit about working with Dustin and what it was like to work with someone like that?

BW: Well it was amazing because he’s always been a bit of a hero of mine anyway so it was awesome and nerve wracking and terrifying and wonderful, you know. It was a real old mixture, but it’s true that there is this sort of parallel between the characters’ relationship and mine and Dustin’s kind of relationship in that Dustin is a legendary Hollywood actor and I’m a sort of nobody so it was a kind of … I think we consciously allowed that to inform the tension between the characters in the scene. But he was wonderfully generous. I mean we shot the scenes with Baldini in the first two weeks of the shoot so we hadn’t actually… It was my first sort of steps into the character so I was very, very nervous and everybody at that point was feeling the pressure of what we were doing, and Dustin is incredible at kind of dispelling all of that tension and putting everyone at ease and keeping the atmosphere very light on set. So it was a wonderful way to start really.

Q: So you were learning from the master the same way that your character is learning from the master?

BW: Exactly.

Q: You mentioned… you said that you were a nobody before this movie but this movie has been a huge hit already in Europe, a monster hit actually. Have you perceived anything changing in Europe when you going to promote the movie, were people starting to recognize you where they would never recognize you before?

BW: I haven’t really felt it because when I did the publicity and the openings, nobody had really seen the film so I haven’t actually felt any change yet really but the film hasn’t opened in England yet either so I don’t know. Maybe things will change. I have no idea.

Q: So are you expecting people to act in awe of you?

BW: (laughs) I hope so. Yeah.

Q: How weird was that (referring to one of the final scenes of the film)? You were there with all the extras doing the biggest sex scene in the history of cinema probably. How weird was that moment?

BW: Well it started off being quite awkward, I guess, because it is a kind of an extremely strange situation to find yourself in and you don’t quite know where to let your eyes rest, you know. You don’t know where to look. But after awhile, I guess because the extras were so open about it and embraced what they were doing so totally, that actually it came to be really quite beautiful. I mean I think everyone felt that – even people in the crew as well. We were really quite touched by the whole thing because I think Tom really wanted it not to be something embarrassing or vulgar or cheap or whatever but to be beautiful, to be kind of an expression of human love and that is for me what it became. It was really, really touching.

Q: Where did you film that and how many people were there?

BW: Where did we film it?

Q: That scene.

BW: We filmed it in a place called Le Poble Espanol which is in Barcelona and it took us 7 days I think to shoot the scene and we had 24 hours of footage (laughs).

Q: Was it chilly?

BW: (laughs) No, I think it was pretty good actually. It was at the beginning of September and we were quite lucky. (laughs) They were quite lucky. What did you ask? Sorry.

Q: How many people?

BW: How many people? 750. So there has been a bit of CGI tinkering to fill up the square but it was 750 naked people making love.

Q: Barcelona is a good place to invite people to run naked.

BW: Absolutely. They really, really wanted to do it. You didn’t have to coerce them too hard.

Q: Did Tom kind of surround you with scents during the filming just to kind of … you know, he seems to be so meticulous about so many things? Were you surrounded by the scents that you were conveying?

BW: No, not at all really because the scents that the film is really concerned with are human smells. I mean they’re the things that the character is trying to collect, that he’s obsessive about, and I guess that’s more effective to imagine those things than actually fill the air with them because it’s a more powerful kind of something to relate to if it’s something that is personal, something in your imagination.

Q: It said something about he had ordered in all these tons of fish and meat and all that stuff.

BW: Well that is true for the scenes in the market and in the streets. They were quite smelly because Tom wanted everything to be very, very real and very detailed so that’s true, but he didn’t pump perfumes into the air. No.

Q: You were pretty grimy for like the first third of the movie in your scenes. Were you going home every night and just taking an hour shower to get it off you?

BW: Yeah, yeah, get it all off, yeah. [I was] just absolutely filthy.

Q: You’ve done a lot of theater work?

BW: Uh huh.

Q: Are you going back to the theater now? I saw that in the [production] notes. Are you going to try to balance the two – theater and film?

BW: Hopefully. Since finishing, I’ve done mainly theater. I’ve done theater all year so… I just finished a play last month so I think I’d like to do a film next ideally, but I don’t know what that would be. Yeah, a balance for me would be ideal, I guess, but you know you take whatever comes your way really.

Q: Have you had any calls from Hollywood already?

BW: Well I have an agent here who sends me stuff so yeah, I’ll probably meet some people tomorrow. I’ve got a day off. So, yeah, [I’ve got] a few possibilities.

Q: Have you gotten any reaction directly or indirectly from Keith Richards about “Stoned”?

BW: (laughs) No, no.

Q: For that one, did you just study a lot of the early footage of the Stones and stuff and just kind of watch his moves and things like that?

BW: Yeah, I mean you try to. It was hard with that film because they don’t … the Stones themselves don’t really carry any kind of strong weight in that kind of story so it always felt like…ah, anyway it’s another shoot… it was a slightly frustrating experience because it’s not a story about Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. It’s a story about Brian Jones so you had to just… It was more about understanding what you were contributing to this. It’s more of a character study of Brian Jones really, I suppose.

Q: Had you read the book before being cast for this movie?

BW: I hadn’t really before, no. No, I’d heard of it and I’d been given it to read but I hadn’t gotten ‘round to it, but I knew of it. It’s quite big in England, quite a popular book.

Q: Had you read the book before your audition?

BW: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, before I met Tom.

Q: You know, Stanley Kubrick said that this book was unfilmable. What did you think when you read it?

BW: I’m not sure that anything is really unfilmable. I mean it’s a challenge certainly and that was apparent from the off, but I just felt it would be a wonderful opportunity. It is a challenge, you know. You kind of think well it’s tricky. This is something tricky to attempt but probably worth… You know, you see the possibility of failure but worth attempting.

Q: Can you talk about Tom Tykwer, the director?

BW: Yeah, he’s …. I had a wonderful time working with him. He’s really a very, very sensitive and intelligent and kind of obsessive person, and I always felt that because of the way Tom was tackling this character and the representation of this character in the film, that in a way Tom had to become the character as much as me. It always felt like there was a kind of mirroring going on, you know, because Tom is obsessed with this idea that the film should be subjective and take an audience into a subject world view. So everything that Tom was doing with the camera and the music and every other element was to sort of amplify for the audience this character’s emotions so I felt very connected to him and I felt we were certainly as time went on I felt that we were very in sync and in tune in our minds and stuff. It was a really special kind of experience.

Q: Did you guys do a lot of rehearsals? And also does he do a lot of storyboards? Did you know what was going to be happening before you got there or was he very improv on the set?

BW: No, we did a lot of rehearsal. We probably did about a month all in all of kind of preparation together and we did an awful lot of rehearsing with Dustin as well on those scenes, but Tom’s great at sort of being extremely prepared but then also being willing to let all the preparation go if something else arises on set so he’s a really good mixture of preparation and spontaneity, but certainly it was important to me to sort of have a little, as far as possible, have a little rehearsal process like you’d have in theater because the character is such a strange one. You know, you can’t just turn up and do it. There has to be a sort of a time to explore and I felt there had to be a time to explore and see what was… find out what was wrong as much as what was right, you know. So it was really lucky that we had the time to do that I think.

Q: What attracted you to the project? I mean I know it was challenging but as an actor, what made you want to be this character?

BW: I felt that I had a real kind of … It sounds a strange thing to say but I felt like I had a real… I had a feeling that I’m the only person that understands what this character is about. I felt like a real personal kind of connection with it in a sense. You know, that’s the sort of thing you always look for is some kind of area where you and the person you’re playing meet and that was really obvious to me with this character strange as that may sound. So that was something I felt very strongly and I suppose like I was saying, it’s just the kind of … anything that feels like a real reach or something that is risky is always appealing I guess.

Q: Did you have any influences in your mind of other literary characters while you were doing this character, you know, because it’s kind of existential?

BW: Oh yeah.

Q: There’s kind of shades of other …

BW: Yeah, I’m … I think Tom was much more conscious of those things like the kind of echoes of other literary characters such as Frankenstein, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dracula, all those kinds…

Q: Even The Stranger.

BW: Yeah, exactly, even The Stranger I think is very much like that. So they were all there in our minds definitely. I don’t think, and probably maybe on some unconscious level they were influencing us, but I think again for Tom what’s always important is that he’s true to what the story is saying to him and how it kind of resonates inside him on a personal level so it’s always about… You know, I think Tom couldn’t do a film by numbers or couldn’t just make a kind of by numbers adaptation of the book. It has to sort of go through his personality so I think that was kind of the biggest influence on me really - Tom’s interpretation.

Q: You talked earlier about this character and doing a character when there were certain emotions without speaking but it’s also for the viewer in a sense to sympathize with this character also because it’s for those reasons that you can sympathize with some of the other characters we brought up [such as] Frankenstein, Quasimoto, or the one in The Stranger. That would also be a challenge as well and also a challenge for myself as the viewer.

BW: Yeah, exactly. It’s sort of a tricky area this issue of sympathy for a character because sometimes if you try and make a character very sympathetic, you achieve the opposite. If you try too hard to ingratiate a character to an audience, it can be offputting. So although it was something we were always talking about, it sort of at the same time you just have to try and understand that person and why that person behaves in that way and then hope that people will feel some kind of …

Q: You gave us a why at the beginning but then once you went through it kind of lost that why because first we do see the first murder and then it moves on to what he is doing so I thought that was very interesting…kind of a trick almost.

BW: Yeah, yeah.

Q: It’s not very clear in the movie or the book but do you think he has any guilt or sorrow for killing those people beyond the first girl? You know he’s obviously obsessed with getting the first perfume but does he have any guilt for what he’s doing?

BW: I don’t think it is clear in the book either or it’s not really something that Patrick Suskind discusses. But I think the fact that the character at the end decides to essentially commit suicide by pouring the perfume over him, I think you could read that as some kind of acknowledgement of the fact that what he’s done has transgressed some kind of human boundary that you don’t overstep. I think he’s essentially a character without very much moral thinking, you know. I don’t think that part of him has evolved very far.

Q: He doesn’t really have the capacity. It’s interesting the contrast between the sensitivity to smell and beauty of things and this total dark side.

BW: I think that’s absolutely one of the things I really like is that on one level he’s very, very sensitive and on another completely…he’s just a void, you know, he’s a complete abyss. There’s nothing going on at all. I think it really speaks to the world that we live in somehow. We’ve often talked about him as being a bit like a terrorist, you know. He has this kind of…he has this obsessive compulsiveness going on and this acute sensitivity and the same kind of isolation and sort of disenfranchised thing happening as well. And that tunnel vision and that kind of inability to see what it is you’re actually doing.

Q: That’s why it was very difficult for him to make that transition from becoming this beautiful creature to this kind of like void killer which was interesting.

BW: Uh huh.

Q: Why did you decide to become an actor?

BW: I don’t remember really when I made that decision but I’ve been acting since I was 14.

Q: But how did this start for you? The whole thing I mean.

BW: I don’t know really. I’d just always done it. Since I was very young, I’d always done plays at school and with local theater groups in the village I grew up in. Yeah, for some reason it was just something I always wanted to do.

Q: Were your parents involved in the arts in any way?

BW: No, not in any way at all. I have no idea where it comes from really.

Q: Are you someone who can watch yourself on screen?

BW: No. (laughs)

Q: What do you do when you see the movie?

BW: I run out of the door and go smoke outside. (laughs)

Q: You haven’t seen it?

BW: No, I have watched it once but actually with this, I’d wanted to see it just because it had been so important to me but usually I find it kind of absolutely excruciating so I don’t put myself through it.

Q: What are you more proud of: this movie or being the youngest Hamlet?

BW: Well it’s hard to say but I think with a part like Hamlet you always… I mean with most parts actors feel like they’ve failed in some way but particularly that part, you never feel like you’ve got anywhere close to achieving it so I think when I look back on that, I feel frustrated because it was only a four month run and you could do it for the rest of your life. So in a way it’s an unsatisfying experience whereas this felt very fulfilling. I really got a lot out of it.

Q: There were a lot of elements of Shakespeare in this character.

BW: Yeah, yeah, there are. It’s true.

Q: Another thing I thought was interesting was the language, that we were in Paris but everyone was speaking a different language. That was another device that he often used people from different nationalities.

BW: Absolutely. That’s very true. He goes all over the world and they all speak English.

Q: I liked that though. I thought that was a great choice.

BW: Yeah.

Q: Was Kevin Spacey a master to you also? Did you have that same kind of relationship that you had with [Dustin Hoffman]?

BW: I didn’t… I only met him because we did the play about six months before he took over. He was in the building and I bumped into him and he was very kind and very supportive but he didn’t have anything to do with the production himself. It was just before his regime started.

Q: Would you play a part without using an accent or using an American accent? Would that be something you’d find challenging?

BW: Yeah, I mean I just did this film… I did a part in this film with Todd Haynes, that Todd Haynes has directed -- they finished it now – which is about Bob Dylan and I did a sort of some kind of American accent in that. So yeah, I would be. I mean think I’d like to explore that more.

Q: In the Todd Haynes movie, which storyline are you in? Which other actors are you working with?

BW: I’m entirely by myself again. I play a version of Bob Dylan but it’s a kind of cross between Bob Dylan and Arthur Rimbaud, this French 19^th century poet that was such an influence on him. So I’m being interrogated by someone off screen and it’s intercut throughout the film.

Q: And talking about interrogation, how was it doing that scene with Alan Rickman [inaudible 25:56]? There’s another master that you’re working with.

BW: Yeah, he’s wonderful. Really that scene was all about surviving the dunking in the water really and there was not much else I could think about.

Q: Did they really hang you up?

BW: Yeah, I was upside down for about 3 hours. I like work like that. That’s part of the fun of filming. But I love Alan. I think he’s absolutely a tremendous actor really. There’s always something kind of strange and dark going on behind his eyes and inside him which I find completely compelling. That was wonderful. We went to the same college so I sort of knew – not at the same time obviously – but I knew him because he’s still quite active at the college for fundraising and stuff. He’s a very nice man.

Q: Did the crew do any gags with you like forgetting you were tied up or was it …?

BW: (laughs) Uh no, it was all very… I mean I really could have suffered quite badly but everything is so health and safety crazy in the world now. There was somebody standing by to unleash me at any given moment.

Q: Did you say how you got into acting? You said you started when you were 13 but when did you start getting into film?

BW: I did some small British films when I was in my teens, late teens, and then I decided.... I’d always had this idea that I really wanted to do theater for some reason. That was what I felt that I was passionate about so I took three years off and went and trained at RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and so I graduated just over four years ago.

Q: Did you have a chance to see Spain while you were filming there?

BW: A bit, yeah. Where are you from?

Q: I’m from Argentina but I’m familiar with Spain.

BW: No, I absolutely loved it. We were in Barcelona, then we were in Girona, and then we were in Figueres. Yeah, I saw quite a lot of the place and it was a staggeringly beautiful experience. Really, really gorgeous.

Q: I recognized Girona. That’s the scene with the girl where you almost catch her. Was that filmed there, when she’s trying to … Alan Rickman is coming after her?

BW: Yes, you’re absolutely correct. It’s in Girona.

Q: And in Juderia, right?

BW: Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Q: Beautiful.

BW: Yeah.

Q: When you’re doing theater work which you do quite often, do you still have that nervousness when you’re getting on stage? Is that still there?

BW: Yeah. I mean definitely. Again, that’s part of the thrill of it, isn’t it, that feeling of being alive? You feel like you can make yourself feel physically ill just before you go on but then you overcome it and it’s absolutely… It goes to your head. It’s like a drug and there is something strangely addictive about that kind of hit from being on stage. But yes, so the nerves never go away but I think it’s an essential part of the experience for me.

Q: And what happens when you forget a line or something? What do you go through?

BW: Well, again, that is quite a nice thrill, that moment of not knowing what the hell you’re going to say or what the hell you’re going to do because somehow you deal with it, somehow you move on and that’s what’s thrilling is that it’s live and you have a thousand people’s attention on you so it’s an incredibly powerful [experience]. It’s Grenouille on the scaffold. It’s quite an exciting place to be. I’ve never been freaked out by forgetting a line. It’s always quite exciting. There’s a little thrill about it (laughs) unless you fuck up ‘To be or not to be’ which is stuff you can’t repent … might as well just walk off stage. Yeah.

Q: Thank you very much.

BW: Thank you.