Ewan McGregor Interview, The Ghost Writer

MoviesOnline sat down with award-winning Scottish actor Ewan McGregor to talk about his new movie, The Ghost Writer, a taut, suspenseful thriller from the Oscar-winning director of The Pianist. The film also stars Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Kim Catrall.

A gifted author hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of a controversial former British Prime Minister becomes a hunted man when he uncovers explosive secrets about the past. The Ghost (McGregor) senses something’s not right from the minute he gets the lucrative assignment to complete Adam Lang’s (Brosnan) autobiography. For starters, the previous ghostwriter, a longtime aide to the ex-Prime Minister, is dead – an apparent suicide victim. As Lang becomes engulfed in a scandal over his administration’s harsh counterterrorism tactics, The Ghost digs into the charismatic politician’s past, discovering clues that he may be hiding something far more shocking than the current allegations against him.

Ewan McGregor delivers a strong central performance in The Ghost Writer. He talked to us about his collaboration with legendary director Roman Polanski, what it was like to work opposite Pierce Brosnan, and the possibility of being involved in a sequel to Trainspotting. We really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to say:

Q: Thanks for coming out and talking to us.

McGregor: It’s my great pleasure. In many ways, it’s all I live for.

Q: Could it be that and also playing penniless writers with heart?

McGregor: Yeah, I know – another writer. I think the thing is that writers like to write about the writing, you know? They like the world to know it’s a really difficult and exciting profession. Don’t you all? So you’re always writing about yourselves in a way. But it’s true I’ve played a few journalists and writers and people that sit at keyboards.

Q: Can you talk about your collaboration with Roman Polanski and what that process was like?

McGregor: I only spoke to Roman on the telephone before we started, before I met him in Germany, because he was in Switzerland at the time and I think I was shooting Men Who Stare At Goats in New Mexico and Puerto Rico, and I was unable to get to Europe, so we didn’t actually meet before I turned up to start. I was doing costume fittings when he came in, and he’s an iconic man and a legendary director, so for an actor it was quite nerve-wracking to meet him. I was excited to meet him and he was very hostly. He’s kind of like a host before you get on set, because there’s two kind of different men, I think, in there (laughs). When you’re off set, he’s making you coffee and making sure everyone’s alright, and then when you start working, be it on the text or actually on the set, he’s very direct. His direction is not guarded or sugarcoated in any way – he’s really quite brusque, almost, with his direction. But the direction is always very interesting and it’s not a coincidence that he’s considered to be a great filmmaker, because he is a great filmmaker.

Q: How do you deal with it when the direction can be critical?

McGregor: You just have to listen to him and more often than, no, all of the time, he seems to be right. It’s kind of annoying, but when you try it, it seems to be like oh yeah, he’s right. But I went through a process with him because we’re quite sensitive, actors, and when we try something out, if it’s not considered to be good or right, and Polanski wouldn’t worry about telling you that it was wrong, then it can hurt your feelings. I have to say I realized very quickly that he was like that with everybody. He directed the props guy and the painter and the set dresser in exactly the same way. In fact, all of our camera crew was Polish, and they were in between setups or whatever, and he was often hanging out with them and you could hear them telling jokes in Polish. They were his buddies and he was almost the toughest with them, when he was directing where the camera should be or whatever, and so I realized it’s not a personal thing. It’s just absolutely about his manner about how he directs.

Q: Can you talk about the sort of meta-movie aspect of this, which is that this guy obviously understands storytelling convention well enough to mimic it, but he sort of succumbs to or becomes complicit in these mystery tropes, such as falling for the femme fatale or following these clues even though he seems to know what they mean when he’s investigating them?

McGregor: I don’t know what your question is, sorry. I liked what you said (laughs).

Q: Just the idea that this guy is a writer who understands what storytelling is, and yet he is becoming a part of a story that you would assume he knows where it’s going.

McGregor: Oh yeah. Ah, I see what you mean; I thought you were talking about Polanski, sorry. Yeah, well I think the writer in him draws him into it in the first place. What I liked about him as a character very much was his unimpressedness. He seems unimpressed by everything, really – people and certainly politicians and politics. I liked playing that – that was fun to play, but I thought he was a good ghost writer. When I spoke to Robert Harris in Berlin recently, he was talking about the idea that there’s an inherent failure about being a ghost writer in the first place, and that you’re selling your wares without your name on it. You’re writing without putting your name to something, and there’s a kind of failed aspect about him, which I thought was quite interesting, and it made sense to me about The Ghost as well. And I think at first, Robert had the initial idea of writing a book about a ghost writer, about somebody whose job it is to ask questions, and what happens when that character feels that his subject, his client, isn’t telling him the truth. I think that was the very kernel, the seed of his idea in the first place, just that, and then he kind of wrote his story around that idea. I think it’s The Ghost’s desire to find out what the truth is, to discover why he’s being lied to; that draws him into the plot, if you like. And then as he discovers more and more, it’s more about kind of survival – he feels like his life’s in danger and therefore he can’t help but carry on finding things out in order to survive, I guess. Not very successfully, it would seem, at the end of the movie.

Q: At the same time, he seems to know what he’s getting into. When Olivia Williams’ character comes into his room, he says it’s a bad idea to sleep with her, but he does it anyway.

McGregor: Yeah, because he’s a single toe-rag – you know, he’s not a, you know, he’s that kind of guy, I suppose.

Q: Did you develop a back story for the character, or did you take your cues from the script?

McGregor: I read the script first, but there’s not a great deal of information about him in the script or the book, to be honest, The Ghost. But I think that’s purposefully done on the part of Robert Harris, and then on the part of Harris and Polanski when they wrote the script. He’s called The Ghost and there’s a ghostly quality to him in that he’s amongst all of these people, but we don’t know very much about him. I didn’t feel like I needed much more than what was on the page in the script, because they wrote him really clearly, I felt. I played him exactly as I read him when I first read the script. I didn’t feel like I needed much more. I mean, the kind of things that I thought about [were] we knew that there’s the ghostwriting side and we know that he’s written some best sellers about kind of cheesy celebrities – a magician and a pop or rock star or something. And then we knew in the book that he also went to Cambridge, which is where Lang, the ex-British Prime Minister went to University. So normally or stereotypically, a British actor would probably play someone that went to Cambridge with a standard English accent, like Olivia’s English accent. It’s beautiful when she speaks it, but when I use it I find it makes me feel posh. I find it difficult. It makes me feel kind of upper-class in a sense, that accent. I liked the idea that The Ghost was already out of his depth because he was writing the memoirs of the ex-British Prime Minister and he was someone who was used to writing memoirs of celebrities and magicians and pop stars. So he’s already kind of out of his depth, and I wanted him to be socially out of his class as well, if you like, because we’re obsessed with it in Britain. We can’t seem to get away with it (laughs). So I mainly thought about that, and there’s a critic who’s on the television. He writes I think for The Guardian. I forget his name. And there’s a real highbrow kind of intellectual critic show on BBC 2 in Britain late at night when no one’s watching, and there’s these three guys. There’s this guy who sounds a bit like The Ghost, or The Ghost sounds a bit like him, and he’s an intellectual but he’s got a quite strong London accent, and then there’s an Irishman, and there’s a woman, and the three of them are extraordinarily intellectuals. They battle it out intellectually talking about plays and TV programs and movies on BBC 2 and I liked that. This guy’s clearly a very educated man, but he has quite a London-sounding accent, so I borrowed that and I used that as an idea for The Ghost.

Q: Would the political nature of the film be a hurdle it has to overcome with audiences, or do you think people like to see politicians held accountable?

McGregor: I think they should be; well, I can’t imagine anybody who thinks that they shouldn’t be accountable. It would be an odd position to hold. But I don’t know that it’s a hurdle. I mean, I don’t read reviews, but I haven’t heard of any criticism for the film’s politics. It’s a fictitious story, [but] it’s very very close to events as they are unfolding right now in Great Britain with our ex-British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and it was definitely written with him in mind, I would say. Robert Harris would probably tell you that it was loosely written roundabout Tony Blair. But I think it’s fairly obvious that it’s making a comment about him, and current events get closer to our storyline in the film as days go by, in quite a spooky way – rendition flights and the British forces having been involved potentially in interrogating or torturing prisoners on behalf of the United States of America, which would be considered illegal. All of these themes in our film are certainly things that have transpired or thought to maybe have happened in British politics, but I don’t think it would be a hurdle. If the character was called Tony Blair and Pierce was asked to do an impersonation of Tony Blair and we were pretending it was more of a factual account, then we would be in trouble and so would the film, probably. But it was never our intention to do that. It makes comments about politics and politicians and the fact that they in our film become accountable in that he’s charged with war crimes and will have to face the panel or the jury or whatever they’re called at The Hague.

Q: Can you talk about working with Pierce Brosnan and how you two developed your on-screen relationship, since it’s key to the film?

McGregor: Yeah, it’s great. Pierce is an actor I’ve always watched, and there’s a handful of actors you wonder if one day you might work with, and Pierce was always one of those. I’ve always enjoyed watching him. My experience in The Ghost [Writer] was kind of a unique one in that I was there from the beginning to the end, and I was always there – I was always on set. I became kind of like one of the crew, really, and then other actors would come in and out. But for the first week or so, I was mainly on my own. I just did all the stuff with The Ghost on his own, and then I think Olivia came out and we did the stuff on the beach. And then when Pierce arrived, we were up in a place called Peenemunde in the northeast up near North Poland and we had really bad weather problems in that we had really good weather and we needed really bad weather. So we were supposed to start doing some stuff on the set in the house, which everyone’s very disappointed to find out isn’t a real house. But because we had bad weather, we had weather cover, which was the scene on the airplane in the private jet, which is really a big, long scene, it’s a seven-page scene, and it’s the end of Pierce’s story. It’s this big moment, this big scene, and there’s a confrontation between The Ghost and the ex-British Prime Minister just before he’s shot in the airport. So it’s like the end of a story, and Roman phoned up Pierce, who I think had just arrived in Germany, and said, “We’re thinking of maybe starting with that. Is that okay?” I mean, I’ve heard him talk about this, so he said, “Yes, of course, that’s fine,” but then you suddenly find yourself in that little jet set – that’s quite fun to say, “jet set,” when it really means something – but he’s on the jet set and having to wade through seven pages of dialogue with me and be directed by Polanski for the first time, which was something I’d become very accustomed to. But I was in the position where I was able to watch everybody else’s reactions to him as they came in – you know, when Olivia arrived or when Tom Wilkinson arrived. Whenever the actors came in, I would be able to say “Okay,” and I’d watch them as Polanski tore them to shreds (laughs). No, he didn’t tear them to shreds.

Q: Can you talk about the ending and what it means to you? Why do you think he reveals that he knows what’s going on?

McGregor: I think because he’s discovered it and he can’t help but let her know. I think it’s just that kind of gut reaction. He obviously is going to … I don’t know what his intention is after that – whether he’s going to go off and reveal it. I suppose so. It’s a slightly defiant moment at the end where he goes ‘fuck you’ to her and wants her to know that he knows. I don’t think it matters one way or the other. They were on to him anyway and I think probably that’s why he’s been invited to the book launch which could cast doubt on whether Amelia Bly is in fact involved in it as well because he comes as her plus 1. Whether they were bringing him there to do him in or not, I don’t know. But the nice thing is that it wasn’t in the script, nor was it in the book. At the end of the script, The Ghost leaves the party, the book launch, and walks off into the crowd and she runs out of the door after him and can’t see him. He’s gone because he’s a ghost and he disappears into the crowd in London, in the London street, and we don’t know what happens to him and we don’t know if he’s going to reveal her. But, Polanski, one day on set, you know we’d been shooting for some weeks when he came up to me and he went, “I have an idea for the end” and he described this ending  to me and I thought it was amazing. It is an amazing…it’s a beautiful shot. It’s a very clever shot. It’s one shot. I don’t think the camera moves. If it does, it just follows me out the door and then it’s static. It’s a beautiful piece of storytelling. It’s classic filmmaking. It’s classic Polanski. You can imagine other directors having 50 shots in that sequence and he just pans the camera and leaves us to imagine what’s going on off camera, which is great.

Q: Will we be seeing you in any more musicals any time soon?

McGregor: Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t been offered one for a little while, but you never know.

Q: Danny Boyle talked about doing a Trainspotting sequel with the guys in their 40s. Does that sound good to you?

McGregor: It doesn’t sound great to me because I didn’t hugely love the book. The sequel to Trainspotting, the novel, is a book called Porno and I didn’t think it was as amazing. The novel Trainspotting is quite an amazing book.

Q: But the sequel to the movie doesn’t have to be Porno.

McGregor: It would be. No, no, I think that’s what they’re talking about.