Peter Dinklage comedy, Zelenskyy take Berlin film fest spotlight
BERLIN >> An American comedy opened Berlin’s 73rd International Film Festival Thursday but in this time of war, division and disease, its message of love was overshadowed by Sean Penn introducing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who spoke via a remote hook-up.
Anne Hathaway who produced and stars in Rebecca Miller’s opening night entry, “She Came to Me” alongside Marisa Tomei and Peter Dinklage, expressed her “gratitude to the film festival for including a hero for our times and for giving us all the opportunity to amplify the message of Ukraine which is the desire for peace.
“I am sure,” she added at a pre-red carpet press conference, “there are many, many who do desire peace within the current conflict situation.”
Miller hopes her film is, “An ambassador of goodwill across many nations. I do sometimes think about filmmaking as a patriotic act which shows different aspects of our country. To show different faces of our culture and how we think is important.
“One of the ways we can perhaps have a more peaceful world,” she said, “is having our art talk to each other across nations.”
Dinklage, in a scene-stealing role in “She Came to Me,” plays an emotionally blocked composer whose marriage to Hathaway becomes completely complicated with Marisa Tomei’s tugboat captain.
“Rebecca brought this to me at the perfect point in my life. Because actors sit around waiting for jobs to come, the question is, What inspires you? What inspires me,” said the “Game of Thrones” star, “is the written word. I’m at that point in my life where I couldn’t have played this 20 years ago.
“I’m 53 and I wonder if I want to be an actor for the next 30 years. When you hit 50 as an actor, there’s a fork in the road and you either wait for inspiration or you seek it out.”
What Dinklage didn’t do when he came to “You Came to Me” was try for laughs. “I don’t think my character understands that he’s in anything funny. So he really played it like a Bergman film,” he said of the dour, celebrated Swede Ingmar Bergman.
Think of what happens
to him. “He’s a very serious character who is falling into water” — from a tugboat — “and then composing in his head. Underwater. That’s inherently
funny but definitely as an actor if you play it sometimes as a drama, it’ll be even funnier.”