BACK TO (neo-)
Karl Puschmann talks to Clive Owen about masculinity, making it as an actor and why stepping into Humphrey Bogart’s shoes was ‘dangerous’
In Clive Owen’s house is a framed original movie poster. It’s not of any of the award-winning or arthouse films he’s starred in. Instead, it bears the excitable legend, “He’s a killer, when he hates!” and features a serious man pointing a serious pistol at the viewer. Near the bottom of the poster, a woman in a sultry red dress lazes suggestively. Separating the pair is the name of the film: The Maltese Falcon.
Owen was at home when he took a phone call from his agent about a potential new project a couple of years back. Also on the call were the award-winning screenwriter/ director Scott Frank, creator of Netflix’s chess thriller The Queen’s Gambit, and screenwriter/producer Tom Fontana. The pair enthusiastically pitched their idea for a new crimethriller series titled Monsieur Spade. They explained to Owen how they planned to bring back Sam Spade, the iconic detective that was so memorably portrayed by the legendary Humphrey Bogart in 1941’s neo-noir classic, The Maltese Falcon.
When they finished talking Owen looked up at his poster and, in a line worthy of Spade himself, said, “You’ve come to the right guy” before snapping a photo of it and texting it over to them. He was all in. For Owen, it was as close to a dream come true as you can get. Best known to Kiwis for his roles in movies like Children of Men, Closer (with Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Natalie Portman) and TV series The Knick, he says he’d long been a fan of The Maltese Falcon. He first saw it in a cinema back in the 80s when he was still harbouring dreams of one day appearing on the silver screen himself.
“When I was at drama school, there were a lot of brilliant rep cinemas in London that were forever screening old movies,” he says, referencing the repertory style of movie theatre that favours classics and notable films over current-day releases. “That’s where I started to go and discover all these great, classic movies.”
The new project also offered him a second swing at the Bogart bat after striking out on his first attempt. “A number of years ago, a studio got the rights for me to do [Raymond] Chandler’s Marlowe,” he says, referring to the famed author’s hardboiled character Phillip Marlowe whom Bogart portrayed in the 1946 film The Big Sleep.
“But we never really got a script that lived up to it,” he says, the disappointment still apparent in his voice. “That project just sort of drifted away. So it was lovely to get this come my way. I was thrilled.”
Critics have been equally thrilled. The first episode of Monsieur Spade screened on Tuesday night and is already being celebrated as the first essential series of 2024.
The show picks up 20 years after the events of the Falcon, to follow an older, yet no less gritty, Spade who is enjoying a peaceful retirement in a picturesque village in the south of France. Of course, someone living their best life wouldn’t make for the most thrilling television experience, so after a horrendous crime takes place in his adopted hometown, Spade is pulled back into action.
“We wanted to reinvent him. He’s older, and living in a very different environment. He’s a fish out of water,” Owen smiles, clearly chuffed by the idea. “We’re playing around with all the tropes people are used to with Sam Spade. He’s this older guy who’s got to give up smoking and is trying to live a quiet life. But I also wanted to channel that 1940s vibe. That’s the origins of the guy. Even if he’s mellowing and changing and getting older, there’s still that sense of where the guy came from.”
It’s funny that Owen specifically mentions smoking as an integral component of the character. For a good chunk of the first episode, Spade is shown constantly lighting up and puffing down cigs like they’re going out of fashion. This was the one aspect of the character he had trepidations about.
“I’m an ex-smoker, so you know, the minute you start ... I was smoking herbals to tell the truth because it would be too dangerous to be smoking,”
‘There’s a strength and an advantage in just knowing what you want to do.’
— Clive Owen
he says. “It’s frightening how quickly all the habits come back and how familiar it feels. But even with the herbals, if you’re doing a scene for a long period of the day, you end up smoking quite a few of them, and they still take their toll. But yeah, it’s a little dangerous, I have to be honest.”
As for following in the footsteps of Bogart, one of the 20th century’s most influential and important actors, well, that didn’t cause nearly as much concern with Owen calling it a welcome challenge.
“I embraced the history of it and also the fact that they wanted to do a fresh take on it. It wasn’t something that I felt intimidated by,” he shrugs.
One of the most appealing and enjoyable aspects of those early neo-noir films is the rat-a-tat dialogue and the snappy cadence and rhythm of the conversations. When the dialogue’s firing it feels more like a dance or fencing match between the characters rather than a mere exchange of words.
Pleasingly, this aspect of the genre is alive and well in Monsieur Spade, with Owen getting ample opportunities to verbally joust with those around him.
“It’s a joy to play” he enthuses. “It’s the speed of thought that’s so enjoyable in those in those films. People say something, somebody tops it, somebody tops that ... it’s so whip-smart.”
He says an unexpected side-effect was that after a long day on set his brain would be stuck in Sam Spade mode long after the cameras stopped rolling.
“Those rhythms sink in because you’re doing it every day,” he says before chuckling, “But to be honest with you, Scott’s a better writer than I am an improviser, so it worked best when I had his dialogue to play with.”
Then he sighs and says, “You know, we’ve lost the art of great dialogue. The writing was really, really strong in those movies.”
As were the men, who were the unquestioned stars. These days, 80 years on, those classic blackand-white films like The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep present a romanticised version of masculinity. The cool tough guy who’s never without a quip, is not to be messed with and always gets the broad. Characters like Spade are the epitome of the trope “women want to be with him and men want to be him”. They’re also something of an outdated construct in this day and age.
“We definitely wanted to play with all that, the idea of what was considered cool and natural at that time and how that’s changed,” Owen says. “But you also have to ask the question of why these characters stand the test of time and why is Spade still an iconic character that everybody knows. Ultimately, it’s not to do with being macho, it’s to do with having a moral compass.
“You know, he’s a character that is a tough guy with wisecracks but ultimately, he feels drawn to do the right thing. If something’s wrong, or something’s bad, or somebody’s bad, he has the strong moral compass of ‘I’ve got to get involved and do the right thing’. I think that stands up even today. And that’s why characters like that sustain us.”
It’s a great insight into why people are drawn to the character. But it makes me wonder if today’s young men are lacking the sort of role models that display that type of moral compass. Sure, Spade smokes and drinks and gets into fisticuffs but he also does the right thing when it counts. Okay yes, he kills when he hates but the only people he hates are the bad guys.
But, in cinema especially, the culture has celebrated the brooding dark anti-hero for so long that the compass has gone skew-whiff and no longer points to true north. Especially in America, where Owen spends so much of his time, where we see the rise of groups like the Proud Boys and the shockingly regular shootings carried out by young men.
I ask Owen if he thinks that the moral compass may have gone a little skew-whiff, but he artfully dodges the question with all the skill of a master politician.
“I just think that with characters like Spade, the joy of watching him in any situation is if he’s confronted with something that he thinks is fundamentally bad, he has to get involved,” he says. “When you meet him he’s trying to live the quiet life. He’s grieving the loss of his wife, but he’s happy to just live this quiet life; however he’s drawn into something. You know, that he’s going to have to get involved and do something. Because that’s who he is. And that, you know, I think, that is attractive.”
Owen has spoken before about how seeing David Bowie on TV when he was a young boy influenced him to become an actor. He’s also talked about how he wasn’t particularly encouraged by those around him in this artistic pursuit, with general hostility or ridicule to the fanciful idea of becoming an actor being the normal response. But he says he never wavered from the path or lost faith in his dream.
“I fell in love with acting. I was lucky in that I did a school play and I was set alight. I knew that was the thing I wanted to do.”
His first role was as the Artful Dodger in a production of Oliver!, which he credits as being where it all started.
“I did pretty well in it. People seemed to like it.” He laughs softly and adds, “I mean, some people would argue I’ve played the same role ever since.
“But it ignited a passion and, however hard it was to follow that through sometimes, there’s a strength and an advantage in just knowing what you want to do,” he says. “I really feel for people who go to college and come out and still aren’t sure where their place is or what they want. If you have that clarity — and I was absolutely decided that this is what I want to do, this is the thing that excites me more than anything — then it can be a help and a strength. It’s not going to be easy, but at least you have a sense of purpose to drive it forward.”
It’s something he’s driven forward for more than three decades now, collecting awards and respect in equal measure. Having been playing the game at the top level for so long, I wonder if the initial rush that he felt all those years ago on stage as a cunning pickpocket has ever been recaptured or if he’s simply chasing the dragon to get that feeling again.
“Every now and again you get a gig that does that to you,” he smiles. “Inside you go, ‘Oh, wow, this is why I do what I do’.
“You come across a piece of material or a job that ignites the things that make you remember where you started and how you developed the passion for it. It’s only every now and again, but I would say that Spade is definitely one of those.”
With their carefree vibe, big sound and reckless endangerment of one another and every room in which they played, The Mint Chicks exploded on to the Auckland rock scene in the early 2000s. They played hard and broke things — eventually including the band — and guitarist/principal songwriter Ruban Nielson moved to Portland, Oregon. There, he anonymously released a weird track under the name Unknown Mortal Orchestra, almost immediately attracted the attention and adulation of many of the music world’s leading musical tastemakers, and now — 12 years later — he and the band are one of this country’s biggest musical success stories.
They are five albums deep into a career where they have played the world’s biggest music festivals and have sold out venues worldwide, including on last year’s hugely successful tour of the United States. They’ve been feted globally and have a string of international hits to their name, including So Good at Being in Trouble, Hunnybee and Multi-love, which between them have generated hundreds of millions of streams. Next month, they’ll be one of the headline acts at Auckland’s Laneway Festival.
None of this seemed very likely when Nielson left school and went to Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland.
He thought he was going to become a visual artist, but, as he gained more experience in the art world, he says, “I realised how much of a rich person’s game it was, and I just didn’t feel very drawn to the part of it that was fancy and financialised and all of that stuff. Regardless of what you made, it would really come down to the opinions of, like, five people. And if you didn’t make it over with those five people, then you didn’t get to play. Or else you would spend your time in obscurity, and then everybody would make a bunch of money off your work after you died.”
He and his brother, Kody, started The Mint Chicks the year before he graduated from Elam and he was immediately intoxicated by the buzz of playing live, by the intensity and immediacy of the audience’s reaction to what he was doing.
“Once you’re able to interact with people that way,” he says, “it’s hard to go back to sitting around painting and trying to guess what people might think of it.”
He now thinks he was probably a bit wild in those days, although he didn’t think that at the time.
He says Anthony Burgess’ novel Clockwork Orange, which he’d read as a kid, was a big influence on both him and The Mint Chicks.
But he says: “The thing that was missing from the movie is at the end of the book ... he feels himself mellowing out, as if the book’s trying to explain that no matter how violent and wild your youth is, there is some point where you might find some peace. That had a big impact on me because I think I was looking forward to the idea that my brain would become more peaceful as I got older and I would become maybe a more useful member of society or something.”
I asked about his mental health. He said: “I’m not on any psychotropics. I’m not medicated professionally for any of the issues I have. And
I think I’m also the typical guy who won’t go to therapy.
“I don’t know what my mind would be like if I didn’t have making music. I think making things is the thing that kind of keeps me this side of losing it. But I also think there’s a lot of reason for me to not lose it as well now: people I care about enough that I can see the point of staying in control. And I’m also grateful that I have the option; it’s not like that choice has been taken away from me by my brain chemistry being a little too out of my control.
“I do feel like as long as I stick to the task, then I can keep myself stable. But, I mean, I am incredibly depressed. I do have these weird ideations about how pointless it is that I’m here and all of that stuff, but art seems to take me out of that, whether it’s making it or enjoying it, like listening to music and meeting other musicians and having conversations. There’s a weird kind of therapy community in that sense. Like when you talk to other musicians, you realise that they use music as part of their selfmedication process. But yeah, I’m sure if I go and do a psych evaluation of some kind, I’m definitely going to get diagnosed with something.
“I just use my family as a gauge. If they’re happy, then that’s how much attention I give it. I suppose if I was making people miserable, then I would have to reassess that. Right now, I just feel like I’m getting through in that respect. But I’m also very lucky. My music career got way beyond my wildest dreams. That probably helps too.”
He’s not a rock star anymore, at least not in the stereotypical sense of the word. He doesn’t give a s*** about all that stuff. He’s a family man, a dad rocker.
He said: “I remember reading this book about Prince and realising there’s a price to pay to be Prince. Prince paid this toll to be that guy. And the toll, I remember thinking, that’s just too high. He never had any children and didn’t really have a life. He spent his whole life in the studio. You forgo an actual life to get a Grammy, a lifetime achievement award or whatever.
“I think about the way that Iggy Pop’s son got dragged along on his rock ’n’ roll nightmare. It’s one thing to be there by yourself, but to take a kid with you? That’s just not what I want to do.”
His family, and particularly his two children, are the most important thing on Earth for him: “It sounds nuts to me now, but it really hadn’t occurred to me then: I thought my job — my actual duty on this Earth — was to create distractions for people.”
I asked if there was a moment when he felt that change taking place.
— Ruban Nielson ‘I don’t know what my mind would be like if I didn’t have making music.’