Michael Fassbender (10 page)

Andrea gave Michael the concept of
Fish Tank
and told him the role she wanted him to play but not a full synopsis or even what would happen at the end because she did not want her cast to know the whole story. Michael had seen and enjoyed
Red Road
and he accepted the role without having read the script. They were to be given their lines in sections only a few days before filming them.

Andrea had not seen or even heard of
Hunger
when she first thought of Michael for the role. She remembered him from the Irvine Welsh film,
Wedding Belles
, in which she considered him to be ‘very charismatic’, and made the decision to approach him without meeting him. ‘He felt right and I trust my instincts that way. I don’t like to question myself when it feels right, so I just went for it,’ she was to explain.

In the summer of 2008 Michael began working on the film. The story revolved around the life of a volatile 15-year-old girl named Mia, living on a council estate in Essex with her single mother, Joanne, and foul-mouthed younger sister, Tyler. Mia is a loner who has been excluded from school and ostracised by her friends. Her only source of escape is hip-hop dance, which she practises alone.

One hot summer’s day her mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), brings home her boyfriend Connor, played by Michael, who appears to be a charming and handsome Irishman. He encourages Mia in her dancing and persuades her to send a video tape to a local club that is looking for dancers. One evening after drinking together, the pair have sex while Joanne is asleep upstairs. He tells her to keep it secret. When Michael splits with Joanne and returns to his own home, Mia tracks him down and discovers he is married with a daughter. Later, at the dance auditions, she discovers they are looking for erotic dancers so she walks away.

Andrea was keen to cast as many non-actors as possible – including the part of Mia. ‘I wanted someone who would give me trouble for real. I wanted a girl who would not have to act, could just be herself,’ she explained. She spotted 17-year-old Katie Jarvis at Tilbury train station in Essex, arguing with her boyfriend. When Andrea approached her, Katie didn’t believe she was wanted for a film and refused to hand over her telephone number. But eventually she was
persuaded. ‘She came from where we were going to film and felt very real,’ said Andrea.

The role of Connor was also originally to be played by a non-actor. Andrea had her eye on a man she used to see in her local park emptying the bins, who she thought would be perfect for the part. ‘But then I began to think it would be interesting to have someone with experience mixed in with Katie’s innocence, as that would echo the relationship in the film and could work well,’ she explained.

For an actor who likes to prepare fully and work on a character’s background story for all his roles, Michael found Andrea’s working procedure – in which she fed the scripts to the cast in piecemeal fashion – to be a challenge, but one he was willing to face. ‘Not having a script is kind of worrying and most of the time you wouldn’t commit to something under those circumstances, but I’d seen
Red Road
and I really respected Andrea and wanted to work with her,’ he said. ‘I find her storytelling very interesting because it’s in the grey area. She deals with human beings who have flaws and have good qualities and negative qualities and are basically just trying to figure their way through life.’

Michael liked the fact that Andrea was non-judgemental of her characters and their actions and decisions. ‘There’s no clear right or wrong. Connor does cross the line but, on the flipside, he is the catalyst for Mia to become her own person. He is the only one who inspires her with confidence
to follow her dreams. And that she’s not destined for shit. And so it’s again playing with that ambiguity.’

Andrea, he thought, shared with Quentin Tarantino and Steve McQueen a passion and perfectionist quality when it came to film-making. ‘There’s a level of commitment that they bring and they expect everybody else to bring that with them when they come to work. And they’re very clear communicators of what they’re looking for. Therefore, it becomes very easy to trust them and give yourself up to them, to push you beyond your safety net and your safety zone.’

For her part, Andrea admired Michael for giving up his usual working procedure and for having faith in her and the movie, which was shot over just six weeks in Essex. ‘It was brave of him to do this film really because I didn’t show him or anyone in the film the script beforehand so he didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. I wanted to shoot in order, so that the story would reveal itself to everyone as we went along.’

Although feeling out of his comfort zone, Michael got to enjoy this unusual way of working. He enjoyed the element of improvisation and found it challenging and rewarding. ‘We didn’t rehearse, talk much about anything, we just worked on every day as it came,’ he recalled. ‘I usually like to digest the script and let it rot and then play with it when it comes to the day of filming, so in this instance I tried to be as loose and relaxed as possible. That was the main note I gave myself. Andrea is very quick and
off the cuff, and works with whatever happens that day to organically feed her story and creates a very comfortable space for the actors to work in.’

Kierston Wareing was more used to such a flexible working practice. She had made her feature-film debut in Ken Loach’s
It’s a Free World
, in which she starred as Angie who, after being fired from her 30th job for bad behaviour, sets up an unregistered recruitment agency with her flatmate, Rose, which they run from their kitchen. ‘I love Andrea’s way of shooting – that’s how I worked with Ken Loach, so it was great to have the opportunity to do it again,’ she said. ‘In some ways I think it was good, not telling us the story in advance, because you try and put the story together in your head yourself and bit by bit I was slowly working it out.’

Kierston appreciated what she considered to be Michael’s humility. ‘Michael is so down to earth and lovely and normal. There wasn’t a barrier in terms of his film experience versus anyone else’s,’ she said.

Young Katie, who had never acted before, also found him friendly and supportive. ‘He gave me advice about certain things and was really helpful,’ she said. ‘It felt a bit weird acting some scenes with him but, because I knew what he was like off camera, it made it much easier.’

The filming experience was also made easier for Michael because of the bond he made with his co-stars. ‘It was great working with Kierston,’ he recalled. ‘She’s very
no-nonsense
and when I first saw her I thought she looked like
Brigitte Bardot. She’s got this very interesting quality to her – she’s got this sultry, sexy rawness to her and she’s very free and easy to work with. I watched
It’s a Free World
while we were working and saw how talented she is. She’s also fun.’

Michael thought that Andrea’s working method also brought out the best in Katie, tapping into her natural behaviour. ‘Katie is a very expressive person and very easy to play with as she’s not really acting. In Andrea’s hands you can get a very powerful performance in that way as it’s very raw, it comes from the gut, it hasn’t been overthought, it’s very intuitive.’

In an interview with
Under the Radar
magazine, Michael talked about the excitement of staying flexible and open during filming and not adhering too strictly to what you have planned in your head. ‘Say you’re breaking up with somebody. It doesn’t always have to be tears and screaming. It can also be funny moments and understanding or whatever,’ he explained. ‘It’s just kinda freeing yourself up and being relaxed to allow whatever comes in on the day, to not try and block things. In your rehearsal period and your preparation, you have an idea of where it’s going to go but that doesn’t mean, on the day, it goes that way. Something might happen to you that day. You might get some bad news. To allow it to seep into what you’re doing, I think, is all right, because different things happen in people’s lives for real that will colour your interpretation or your reaction to something. So, I
think just keeping it alive and being relaxed is the most important thing.’

Finally, it was during the filming of
Fish Tank
that Michael heard, to his amazement, that his agent had arranged for him to audition for one of his teenage heroes, who was due to shoot a blockbuster World War II movie starring one of Hollywood’s biggest names.

M
ichael had assumed that Quentin Tarantino had seen him in
Hunger
but, in fact, he had yet to see the movie. But Michael’s agent had been pestering the director to see Michael for a role in his new, oddly spelt movie,
Inglourious Basterds.

Hollywood A-lister Brad Pitt had the lead role of Aldo, leader of a fearsome band of Jewish fighters, known as The Basterds, who exact their revenge on the Nazis in France, spreading fear by killing and scalping them. Michael was sent the script and was told there were two roles that required actors who could speak English and German fluently. One was the sinister but smiling Nazi Colonel Hans Landa and the other was British officer, Lt. Archie
Hicox, who goes on an undercover mission in
Nazi-occupied
France. Michael was told to prepare for both roles but, because he was working on
Fish Tank
, he didn’t have time to learn both so he focused on Landa. He spent a day rehearsing an audition piece before flying out to Berlin, where the film was being shot, to meet Tarantino.

He was nervous, particularly because Tarantino plays all the other parts when auditioning actors. Things were to get ever hairier when he arrived. ‘Quentin and I chatted for a bit, then he said, “OK, let’s take a look at Hicox,”’ Michael told the
Sunday Times
. ‘I was like, “What about Landa?” And he goes, “Well, I cast my Landa on Tuesday.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, I’m sure, man.” Then there was a pause and he goes, “Look, man, any guy that gets cast as Heathcliff is not fucking German enough to play my Landa, all right?” And I thought, “I’m not going to argue with Quentin Tarantino about who he wants to cast, that’s for sure.”’

So Michael took a deep breath and began reading for Hicox but, after he was done, Quentin told him that he was sounding like Michael Caine and that he wasn’t looking for that. So Michael had another go, this time giving it his best English stiff upper lip. The director thanked him and Michael left, feeling despondent. ‘I thought I’d made a balls of the audition, to be honest, and I was totally depressed when I left.’ But to his amazement, a week later he was offered the part.

Only then did Quentin tell him that he was looking for
‘a young George Sanders’. Michael was not familiar with the urbane English actor with the rich, cultured English accent. He had co-starred with the likes of Bette Davis and Laurence Olivier during the 1940s and 1950s in
All About Eve
and
Rebecca
, and was the voice of the
imperious-sounding
tiger Shere Khan in Walt Disney’s
Jungle Book
. He was usually cast as a cad or villain – often both – but he had also played the heroic Simon Templar, aka The Saint, in several movies.

Quentin sent Michael several DVDs of his movies to watch, including those of
The Saint
, and he finally understood what the director was looking for. ‘That’s where I got most of my inspiration, trying to concentrate on the clipped way he spoke and the rhythms and the colours of it. And that physicality – the way he carried himself and held a cigarette or a glass of whisky. Everything was like a sort of foreplay. I really wanted to encapsulate that. And I found some humour in the character.’

Michael may not have thought highly of his original audition with Quentin but Lawrence Bender, who had produced
Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction
and
Jackie Brown
for the director, and was producing
Inglorious Basterds
, certainly did. ‘There were a lot of people being considered for that role,’ he recalled, ‘including some big actors. But he [Michael] was a powerhouse. He just knocked us out. It’s such a wonderful thing to watch an actor take control of the room.’ Quentin was pleased that he had not only
found a fine actor in Michael but that he also spoke excellent German.

Meanwhile,
Hunger
received its London premiere on 19 October as part of the London Film Festival at the Leicester Square Odeon. A rather tired-looking Michael arrived, along with the cast and director, and the film received rapturous applause. The critics’ reviews were effusive. The
Independent
called
Hunger
‘a stunning, uniquely powerful film’ and the
Daily Telegraph
praised Steve McQueen for a ‘sensational feature debut, fearless and uncompromising, bolder than any film to come out of the UK in a long time’.

Michael’s own reviews were the kind that he might have dreamed of as a struggling actor. ‘Michael Fassbender gives an extraordinary performance as Bobby Sands in a gruelling picture of immense power and beauty,’ said the
Daily Express
. ‘At its centre,
Hunger
features an extraordinary performance by the young German-Irish actor Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands,’ agreed the
Observer
. ‘An icily brilliant and superbly acted film,’ said the
Guardian
, adding, ‘Fassbender gives another ferociously convincing performance.’

The Times
singled out the Fassbender/Cunningham scene as a ‘breathtaking centrepiece of a film that is both politically controversial and philosophically sublime.’ Its critic said that the two actors had provided ‘a master class in screen acting from two very different performers’.

All the reviews were immensely satisfying to the team and a great relief but Michael was still nervous about what he considered the most daunting prospect of all – the movie’s premiere in Belfast the following day. Despite rumours that there would be a protest outside the Movie House cinema where the film was to be screened, in the event there were none and the film received a warm reception from most of the audience. But it did not please everyone. Some unionists thought it biased towards the republicans but Michael was pleased when a security guard took him aside at the after-show party to express his surprise that the film was such a human story. ‘That’s your average punter who’s going to go and see the film, and when somebody like that says it, I was like, “OK, the message is pretty clear,”’ Michael said later.

Feeling that the screening had gone as well as he could have hoped and having relaxed at the after-show party, a relieved Michael invited his family – parents, aunts, uncles, cousins who were in attendance – back to his hotel for a celebration drink. This went on until 5am and, when he awoke a few hours later, it was to face an interview with the
Guardian
. Cradling a Bloody Mary, he told the paper, ‘Everybody I spoke to here, every family, has some connection with The Troubles one way or another and it’s still an open wound. I mean, I’ve seen so many films about The Troubles that I’ve found insulting.’

But as he had hoped,
Hunger
’s message was pretty clear. The
Irish Times
said, ‘This haunting, boldly
unconventional film plays on in the mind well after it’s over, as we ponder what we have seen and the issues it raises.’ The
Belfast Telegraph
described it as a ‘harrowing, brilliant film’ and said of Michael, ‘Few actors get a defining role so early in their film career but Michael Fassbender has done just that with his powerful performance as the IRA prisoner Bobby Sands.’

Above all, Michael was enjoying the experience of taking on challenging roles that would push him and excite him. But, influenced by another childhood hero, John Cazale, he was interested in emotionally complex characters rather than heroic lead roles. When asked by
Anthem
magazine whether he was attracted to controversial ones, having played Bobby Sands in
Hunger
and the predatory Connor in
Fish Tank
, he replied, ‘It’s definitely important for me to keep challenging myself and take risks. That’s the most exciting thing about my job. I just want to learn as much as I can. I definitely like to do things that scare me a little bit but I don’t necessarily seek them out.’

Michael enjoyed his experience with Steve McQueen so much that he was eager to work with him in the future. ‘I said to Steve, “If you ever want to work together again and I’m around, here’s my card!”’ Towards the end of the year he and Steve met again when they were among those invited to a function at the Houses of Parliament in celebration of Film Four, who had made
Hunger
. Over dinner, Steve told him the
premise of a new film he was planning about a sex addict. Michael was surprised because Steve had earlier suggested that his next project might be a love story. But the more Steve talked about it, the more Michael began to think it was a subject ripe for a movie. ‘It seemed obvious to me after he had mentioned it,’ he recalled, ‘because the media at the time was taking a look at sexual addiction because of some celebrity element, but the film world hadn’t really tackled it. And knowing Steve, I knew it was going to be pretty uncompromising.’

The idea had, in fact, come from playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan, who had written the Channel 4 TV movie
Sex Traffic
. Intrigued by
Hunger
, Abi sought out a meeting with Steve McQueen and the pair met in a café. Each of them only had an hour to spare but they ended up talking for three and a half. ‘We had a discussion that started off about the Internet, then it went on to pornography, then we got on to sex addiction,’ Steve recalled. ‘Abi’s amazing. It was a situation where she immediately felt like a friend I’d known for a long, long time. The second time we met, in a restaurant, we’d written the first twenty minutes of the script by the end of the conversation.’

Michael felt intuitively that whatever movie Steve was planning he needed to be in it. ‘Things changed for me after
Hunger
and to have the opportunity at that time to do something like that with somebody like him… it felt like we’d sort of formed a union then. So whatever it
was, I was going to be involved with him if he wanted to have me.’

In the meantime, Michael had to prepare for
Inglourious Basterds
. His character, Hicox, goes undercover as a German officer as part of a mission to assassinate the leaders of the Third Reich and, although Michael can chat in German, his diction needed working on. So, to avoid speaking German with an English accent, he worked with a vocal coach to prepare for the role.

Filming got underway on 9 October but Michael, who only had a couple of scenes in the film, was not required until a few weeks later. The production team arranged his flight tickets to Berlin but Michael declined, saying he would make his own way there. The senior production crew were startled to discover that this meant travelling across Europe on his beloved motorbike, a Triumph Speed Triple. Worried that one of their key actors might injure himself on such a powerful machine, they forbade him to ride it until filming was over.

Perhaps it was his Catholic upbringing but Michael felt that he needed to confess to Quentin about something from his past. During a quiet moment in Berlin, he took the opportunity to admit that when he was 18 he had not only put on a production of
Reservoir
Dogs
in a Killarney nightclub, but that he had directed and starred in it as Mr Pink, without asking permission for the copyright. To his relief, the director wasn’t concerned when Michael pointed
out that the profit went to a good cause and that none of those involved in the production made any personal financial gain. ‘He was happy once I assured him that the proceeds went to charity,’ Michael told the
Irish Times
. Michael has since re-told this story in several broadcast interviews and does a decent impression of the director’s fast and breathless voice with the line, ‘Well, as long as nobody made any money out of it.’

Inglourious Basterds
was shot almost entirely in sequence, beginning with a tense and powerful scene in which Landa visits the French farmer Lapadite’s house. Landa is seemingly all charm and manners but there is a chilling undercurrent that ultimately leads to Lapadite betraying the Jews he is hiding under his floorboards, in order to save his own family.

The dialogue and the thrilling, scary sense of foreboding was Quentin Tarantino at his best and was replicated an hour into the film in a scene between the undercover Hicox and another Nazi officer, Major Hellstrom, in a French bistro. Hellstrom overhears Hicox talking and is suspicious of his accent. He swaggers over to join him and his co-conspirators at the table, sharing a drink and playing a pub game. But, as with Landa, there is a menace about him that is not far from the surface and again the tension mounts in a game of cat-and-mouse, developing into a Mexican stand-off with both men aiming pistols under the table at each other’s crotches.

Michael was fascinated by the way that Quentin would
sometimes close his eyes during the filming of a scene with a lot of dialogue so as to concentrate on the rhythm of the language ‘like a piece of music’. He was also impressed by Quentin’s almost encyclopaedic knowledge and casual references to even the most unknown of movies and TV shows. ‘You could mention the most obscure Egyptian film from like nineteen-fucking-
thirty-three
, and he’ll have seen it, and he’ll tell you scenes of the film that he liked or didn’t like. It’s just astounding,’ he recalled.

The two amused themselves when not filming by quizzing each other on film and television. Michael eventually stumped his opponent with a question going back to his childhood love of American TV shows. ‘I got him when I asked what the names of the two Dobermanns on the 1980s series
Magnum, P.I
[were],’ he recalled. ‘They were Apollo and Zeus. I was pretty pleased with myself.’

As for his fellow cast members, Michael admitted to the
Belfast Telegraph
that he had convinced himself he would dislike Brad Pitt but that they ended up forming a strong bond. ‘I really wanted to hate him but he’s a nice guy and very encouraging. The fame doesn’t affect him. He just comes and does his work. He’s a real person and very focused.’

Working with such luminaries did make Michael nervous though. As he told Irish TV chat-show host Ryan Tubridy, ‘It’s just mad to be standing on set with Brad Pitt there doing his stuff and Quentin in the corner. I’m kind of
like, “Hang on a second. I’m from Killarney!” But then you get over it and off you go.’