GOOD FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS
Spielberg, actor Rylance share a special relationship
CANNES Steven Spielberg has directed Mark Rylance to an Oscar for best supporting actor in Bridge of Spies. He put him in a motion-capture suit to play a big friendly giant in The BFG, based on the children’s story by Roald Dahl. And he has already tapped the veteran stage actor to appear in his next two films: Ready Player One, based on the novel by Ernest Cline; and The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, based on the novel by David I. Kertzer.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that the director also counts Rylance among his close friends.
“I haven’t brought a lot of people into my life from the movies,” Spielberg said at the Cannes Film Festival, where The BFG had its world première at a red-carpet gala screening on May 14.
“I have such respect for Mark, but we have so much fun together as friends, as buddies. I’m casting him in Ready Player One because there’s nobody better to play Halliday than Mark Rylance, if you know the book. To have the friendship and to have the professional working relationship is just a dream come true.”
The soft-spoken Rylance, wearing a jaunty pork pie hat, seemed at first reluctant to talk about the process of acting for Spielberg.
“You just offer up different options, as many options as you can,” he said.
But then true to form, he offered a different answer, calling the motion-capture experience “not unlike being in the rehearsal room of a theatre play. Sometimes there aren’t props … and you just have to use your imagination. There’s no sense of where the audience is, there’s no camera or any need to hit marks. There was just Ruby and I playing.”
Eleven-year-old Ruby Barnhill plays Sophie, a little girl the BFG kidnaps and then befriends.
“Stephen could actually stand as close as he is now,” said Rylance as the director sat to one side.
“I think I remember asking you to stand a little bit further away, because you were laughing so much.”
The 56-year-old Rylance, in addition to the evocative descriptions and line drawings in Dahl’s book, also reached back to his past for inspiration.
“I always try to have a model in reality for any character,” he said. “This one reminded me of a couple of people who worked in my grandfather’s garden in Kent when I was a child, Ruby’s age. But also a very great friend of mine, Mr. Jimmy Gardner, who was a tail gunner during the Second World War, and had an incredible long life and a kindness and love for life.” (Rylance penned an obituary for Gardner in 2010.)
The worse the world gets, the more magic we have to believe in. Because that magic will give us hope.
The cast responded very personally to the 1982 novel.
Spielberg said he had read The BFG to his kids. Rebecca Hall, who has a small role as the Queen’s handmaid and was born in 1982, called it “the first book I read to myself in my quiet voice, in my head.”
And Jemaine Clement, who plays an evil giant, recalled his teacher reading it at school. “I couldn’t read it with my inside voice yet, I guess.”
As to the universality of a British story shot by an American director and making its debut at a French festival, Spielberg noted: “Every movie is an orphan until it’s adopted by someone, and we hope this one finds a lot of homes. The worse the world gets, the more magic we have to believe in. Because that magic will give us hope, and that hope will cause us to be proactive. Hope is everything for me.”