IT’S ALL AN ACT!
Chiwetel and Anne use old Godfather trick to cheat on learning lines and film faster
MARLON Brando famously taped pages from his scripts to walls, ceilings and even his co-stars during filming so that he wouldn’t have to learn his lines.
And nearly 50 years after he used the trick in his masterpiece, The Godfather, British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway are using the same ruse for their latest film.
London-born Ejiofor, 43, who received an Oscar nomination for his role in 12 Years A Slave, revealed that they taped pages to their clothes or held them in front of their faces while the other was on camera.
The film, Locked Down, which was devised and shot during the pandemic, follows a disillusioned couple who plan to steal a diamond from Harrods after struggling to find work during lockdown.
Ejiofor said the nature of filming during Covid meant that they had just over two weeks to shoot the entire film with nearly 200 pages of dialogue to get through. ‘The script came back at about 190 pages odd – it was 18 days to shoot so we were just rattling through reams and reams of the story and the dialogue,’ he said on the Graham Norton Show.
‘I knew from the beginning, if you’ve got that number of pages, you’re thinking there’s no way of really learning all this so we’re just going to have to come up with a couple of tricks to get through it.’
He said that he’d seen a photo showing how Brando, during the filming of The Godfather, stuck pages of his lines on to costars such as Robert Duvall. Ejiofor decided to follow suit for Locked Down.
‘Of all the genius things of Marlon Brando, actually looking like he’s not reading lines is the greatest skill,’ he said. Brando died aged 80 in 2004 due to heart failure.
Locked Down, directed by The Bourne Identity filmmaker Doug Liman and written by Peaky Blinders and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? co-creator Steven Knight, was filmed using strict Covid-19 protocols during September and October last year.
They were able to film inside Harrods and used the people who were working there as extras.
Locked Down, which includes cameos from Sir Ben Kingsley, Ben Stiller, Stephen Merchant and Mark Gatiss, is available to rent on Amazon Prime.