Ewan McGregor really connected with role,
As he makes his directorial debut, actor reveals his personal connection to American Pastoral
“Where to now?” an eager Ewan McGregor asks his publicist. After quickly kissing hello his wife of 21 years, Eve Mavrakis, his small entourage sets off down the hallway of the Ritz Carlton, headed toward their next stop on the American Pastoral promo tour.
The Scottish star of Trainspotting, Moulin Rouge! and the Star Wars prequel trilogy has just finished two hours of interviews for the film, which he not only stars in but directs. And yet he sounds like a man on a safari or sailing through the Greek islands, less business trip and more trip of a lifetime.
In many ways that’s exactly what TIFF was for McGregor. He’d begged his agent for years to find him a project to direct. He’d signed on to play the lead in American Pastoral, a drama adapted from Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a picture-perfect American family in the ’60s torn apart by the era’s seismic cultural shifts.
As directors came and went, it looked like the project would collapse. Until McGregor fought to direct the film himself.
Only now, with the film on the verge of its Oct. 21 opening, has he begun to suspect his stubbornness to let go of the project might have been because of how the story resonated with him personally. The central relationship is between a charming football quarterback turned captain of industry, who is nicknamed the Swede, and his daughter (Dakota Fanning), whose extremist politics tear their family apart. McGregor, himself the father of four daughters, suspects the story spoke to his own parental anxieties.
“When I first read the movie, my eldest daughter, Clara, was probably about 14 or 15,” he said earlier that day in a hotel suite, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans with a blue pinstripe jacket thrown over top. “I was contemplating my eldest daughter going to college and leaving the home and not waking up in our house anymore every day.
“I suppose I must have been considering what that must be like, because maybe that is why I was so attached to this script. It deals with a similar subject in very different ways. The loss of your daughter, if you like.
“Now with the film being released she’s finishing her third year at NYU. It can’t be a coincidence. It must be why I was so dedicated to this.”
McGregor speaks of the experience as bittersweet. “It’s as hard to let them go as it is wonderful to see them become an adult,” he says.
Like actor-directors before him, such as Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood, McGregor exercised restraint in shaping his cast’s performances. It could be a habit from his 23-year career in front of the camera, where the unwritten actor code is to not critique each other’s performances.
“There are actors that do,” he says slyly. “If you’re getting a note from the other actor, it’s because it’s not working for them. You think, well what about me?”
McGregor instead directed his cast in the most actorly way possible. “I never had to give acting notes,” he says.
“I was in the scenes with all the actors. I was able to direct from inside the scene, which worked very well I thought.”
Jennifer Connelly, embodying domestic perfection as the Swede’s beauty-queen wife Dawn, attests that McGregor created a set where it felt safe to go to the dark places she visits in the film. “He creates a very supportive environment with everyone that he works with,” she says. “He’s very interested to hear what people want to contribute and listens openly to everyone’s ideas.”
The realization that he had achieved his dream of adding “director” to his filmography was driven home at the TIFF premiere last week, when he introduced his cast onstage at the Princess of Wales theatre. “For 23 years, I’ve been getting introduced by directors onstage,” he says. “And last night, it was the other way around.”
“For 23 years, I’ve been getting introduced by directors onstage. And last night, it was the other way around.”
EWAN MCGREGOR AFTER THE AMERICAN PASTORAL PREMIERE