FACE OF TERROR
Pike digs deep to portray ’70s hijacker in ‘7 Days in Entebbe’
BERLIN — Rosamund Pike hoped to play a real-life 1970s German terrorist as authentically as possible for tomorrow's “7 Days in Entebbe.” German anarchist Brigitte Kuhlmann and fellow German radical Wilfred Bose (Daniel Bruhl, “The Alienist”) aligned with Palestinian terrorists to hijack an Air France jet out of Tel Aviv in 1976.
Once they landed in Entebbe, Uganda, the 100 Israeli passengers aboard were held as hostages to be executed.
When Pike, 39, met director Jose Padilha (“Narcos”) about the role, she acknowledged, “Right now I can't deliver a perfect German accent, but I can do it if you give me a dialogue coach.”
He did and Bruhl, her GermanSpanish co-star, decreed mission accomplished: “She has a perfect Frankfurt accent.”
Pike, who most recently played a traumatized American pioneer opposite Christian Bale in “Hostiles,” soon had another issue: Namely, who was Brigitte?
“It was hard to find a lot of information,” Pike said. “The `infamous act' came on this occasion and after — they were no longer around.
“So there's a surprising deficit of information. I looked her up and there were two odd pictures. One was probably the passport photo for her fake Panamanian passport, which she used for this operation.
“Then an ex-boyfriend who lives in Bolivia released a picture on Facebook: `Lovely Birgitta. Killed 40 years ago and always in our hearts.' It was a different image, a younger woman, and how do I make the gap?”
From reading hostages' recollections, Padilha discovered Brigitte was truly scary. “Over 60 percent of the hostages would say she was silent and very Nazi-like separating the Israeli hostages. And she was high on speed. Some of the hostages felt she was losing it.”
While including popping pills and snarling commands and applying her weapons training for her role, Pike also discovered her director liked improvising.
“Jose used handheld cameras and so we filmed not knowing where you're looking at. Sometimes he would get a look in his eye and say, `Rosamund! Go get a gun while they're arguing.'
“We filmed in Malta, and when they brought this Air Bus from India, it was the biggest plane Malta had ever seen. While it was being painted with the Air France logo, they discovered the steps that come up to the airplane were too small.
“Another director might say `I can't work like this!' Jose would find a virtue in the unexpected.”