| Brad Dourif took some time out of his busy schedule at DragonCon to meet with intrepid reporters Amy Pace (a/k/a “Shadow”) and Maria Foss (a/k/a “Marea”). Here is a transcript of their joint interview, held at the Walk of Fame Room on Sunday, August 31, 2003.
Marea:
You made a career out of playing character roles, sometimes they’re
villains, and yet an actor needs to find some common ground with
the character he’s playing. So how do you get yourself into the
place where you feel sympathetic or empathic toward a villain character?
Someone who’s hard to like? Brad Dourif: Well,
we’re all villains…everybody. You know every nation walks on the
bones of some other nation that got wiped out, and that’s why
we’re here. We’re a pretty frightening, terrible beast, really.
You spend your life as an actor, you have to use yourself, so
I know pretty thoroughly by this time that I’m pretty much of
a scoundrel anyway.
Marea: Some would
say that if you can say that about yourself, you must not be one.
Brad Dourif: I
know that Gandhi said that about himself, and he wasn’t one, but
I definitely have not always behaved the way I should, but we’re
not going to get specific.
Shadow: So, it’s been
in all the articles over the past couple years concerning LOTR
about the immense level of camaraderie between the cast and between
the fellow actors, and you’ve been in so many other projects and
so many other roles, did you find that it was any different? Was
this group closer together than others you’ve worked with?
Brad Dourif: Sure.
The feeling was that this was the biggest small movie that anyone’s
ever made. There’s a certain leveling that occurs anyway when
the camera’s there. I mean, you’re only as good as you are right
now, when the camera’s rolling, and there’s really no point in
being a star in New Zealand. For whom are you going to put this
act on? Normally on a big shoot the departments are very divided,
and this wasn’t that feeling, everybody went out and drank—I don’t
drink so I didn’t—but most everybody went out and got smashed
with everybody else.
Marea: That includes…
Brad Dourif: Extras,
crew, electricians, grips…it didn’t matter. If you were ready,
and you wanted to party, you were there.
Shadow: Mixed group, that’s
great.
Marea: Were you
at all surprised at how popular this LOTR story became with the
public? It’s a pretty popular book, but it’s brought in people
that haven’t even read the books and had no interest in fantasy.
Brad Dourif: I
have a godchild named Arwen, and I’m an old hippie, so it was
required reading. I didn’t live up to my assignment, but most
everybody read them back then and loved them. The books were amazingly
popular. When I came here about two years ago, I was handed poems
in Elvish. The fan base of this thing is deep and serious. I think
people were, when the first movie came out, not shocked but relieved
because they have two more movies. The minimum investment was
275 million dollars for the whole thing and that’s a quarter of
a billion dollars. If it didn’t take off, we were in very deep
trouble.
Marea: I heard
that you were potentially bankrupting New Line…
Shadow: That New Line
was going to go under if the film didn’t succeed.
Brad Dourif: These
are rumors, but you have to remember, I was part of “Heaven’s
Gate”, and United Artists did go under because of “Heaven’s Gate”,
so I was a part of bringing a studio down.
Marea: I remember
reading of you speaking very eloquently at some other place about
the archetypes and the mythological base of the stories, and I
remember thinking that it was nice to know where was someone in
the production that thought of things in those terms. Twenty years
from now, when this is all just a distant memory, what do you
think the lasting value of this project is going to be?
Brad Dourif: The
lasting value of the project is going to be in the extended versions
of the DVDs. Viggo [Mortensen] said that and I think he’s really
right. I think ultimately what will be remembered is the DVDs.
Marea: But the
idea, the concept behind this movie, what do you really think
is the message?
Brad Dourif: The
message is the same as the book, there’s no difference. The message
is a war between good and evil that was primarily up to the individual.
Even a small person makes a huge difference. I’m a romantic. I
tend to believe that my conduct on set is far more important than
how well the project fares. The way people behave can do more
for the role that whatever you accomplish in the movie.
Shadow: So, this is a
little lighter question. If you weren’t playing Grima in LOTR,
is there another character that you could see yourself playing,
or that you would have liked to have played?
Brad Dourif: First
of all, Grima’s one of the best characters in the movie, bar none,
because he’s complex, and there are not complex characters in
this, that’s the difficulty with the books…they’re descriptive,
action kind of things, but the characters are really relatively
flat.
Marea: We discuss
this in fan fiction all the time.
Brad Dourif: That’s
one of the major problems in a lot of books that are very descriptive…really
when you get down to the nitty-gritty, the characters are not
that well defined. You don’t really know who they are. So the
answer to your question would have to be: Gollum.
Shadow: That’s about as
complex as you’re going to get.
Marea: And it seems
to offer the same sort of light and dark.
Brad Dourif: I
don’t know if I could do it as well as Andy Serkis, because he
brought something that was not there which is a kind of comedy
to the character…just a certain lightness that I thought was really
brilliant. And that cat voice he does, which is very cool. It’s
actually from a cat.
Marea: He said
he was inspired by listening to his cat cough up hairballs.
Brad Dourif: The
voice [demonstrates a sort of wailing sound] was very hard to
do and he figured out how to do it, and it was the perfect basis
for Gollum’s voice.
Marea: You talked
about how we’re all villains, but is there a difference between
being a villain and being evil?
Brad Dourif: My
theory of evil is – first of all - that there is no such thing.
It doesn’t exist. People do horrific things. We can be really,
really cruel…beyond what we see in movies. Real life people are
actually much meaner. So, I don’t believe in evil. I find it that
there’s a certain political-ness to the idea of evil, which really
is a couple thousand years old in the modern sense, and that’s
that a human being becomes aligned with the devil and they cease
to be seen as a human being.
We’re seeing that now in the
kind of language…Al Qaeda language…and on our own side, the language.
They’re cowards and they’re evil…we’re cowards and we’re evil,
and it makes it easier to kill. That’s the political thing of
evil. The books are not about that, this is a mythical force,
they don’t exist, it’s not real but it’s up to the individual,
and really you see that some individual has to pull some kind
of trick otherwise we’re all doomed, and he faces evil when he
does that--or she—and has to overcome it in themselves in some
kind of way or attempt to.
Marea: That’s a
good description of Frodo’s journey.
Brad Dourif: It’s
a good description of everyone’s, including Wormtongue’s. It’s
just that Wormtongue…you know when you’re in front of a white
wizard, and he’s got your number, which he did…it’s very hard
to resist that.
Marea: Tolkien
made the point in these books, about the universality of evil,
because evil isn’t only Them, evil can be you, evil can be me,
you see this in the comparison of Gollum to Frodo. The movie makes
this point I think even better than Tolkien’s words do, and what
brings this out is the visuals that they use. I’ve heard a lot
of commentary about it. It seems like it’s a big point, and your
character has that arc, as do some of the others.
Brad Dourif: He’s
fallen. He’s made his choice. I don’t think he intended to make
it, but he made it.
Shadow: And he was in
a position where I don’t think he had a lot of choices, as you
said, standing in front of that white wizard who’s got your number,
you don’t have a lot of options.
Brad Dourif: It’s
pretty scary, but he did have options. I mean he really could
have resisted. He didn’t.
Shadow: While we’re on
story questions, this one I’m sure you’ve probably gotten before.
Who do you consider to be the true hero of the story?
Brad Dourif: Frodo.
Shadow: Thank you.
Marea: You realize
that that’s not necessarily the answer that’s most commonly given.
Brad Dourif: Who
do they think?
Shadow: I like to hear
Frodo and Sam. I am a Frodo fan, so when people say Sam’s the
true hero and Frodo just went along for the ride and whined I
get really…upset.
Brad Dourif: No,
no, no, no he carries the Ring.
Shadow: Absolutely, and
in my opinion no one else could have done that, but he needed
Sam, I don’t think he could have done it alone.
Brad Dourif: No…and
Sam is heroic. In the Two Towers, Sam saves the day. There’s no
question about it. And his speech was really…Sean nailed that.
Marea: I think
he had some doubts about it, I think I remember reading that,
“I do a speech that George Bush could have given, and it sounded
really corny”. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but he was surprised
at how effective it was in the movie. He just wasn’t sure initially.
Brad Dourif: Well,
you don’t. That’s the big risk of doing films, you don’t feel
what’s come before. You’re just out there naked with that scene.
I could see where he’d do that speech and think, “ugh”.
But, it’s a naïve speech, it’s
a speech made by an innocent, and that’s who he is. In the face
of all that he went through, he’s this innocent and it’s kind
of touching. We’re really reassured and amazed and really happy
that somebody could still be an innocent just then.
Shadow: It seems like
it’s growth. You see him grow as he’s coming to those revelations.
Brad Dourif: He’s
just very strong, with very much to risk, whereas Frodo’s much
more subtle, far more subtle, and he understands much more, and
in a much deeper sense what’s at stake.
Marea: And yet there’s the argument
that Frodo failed. He didn’t do what he was supposed to do.
Brad Dourif: You
mean in the end?
Marea and Shadow: Yes.
Brad Dourif: Yeah,
he did do what he was supposed to do, he went as far as he could
go, and it turned out to be far enough.
Marea: I remember
reading an Elijah Wood interview, and the interviewer made that
point but said, “in the end he just gave in, right, he just decided
to take the Ring” and I think EJW set him straight, he said, “no,
that’s not what happened at the end”, and I don’t think he was
even really supposed to talk about it yet.
Brad Dourif: I
don’t know that because I didn’t see it, so I don’t know what
happened, but I can understand. I would not… I do not accept that
interpretation of what happens. I think that’s a wrong interpretation.
He got there, which was an extraordinary thing, he loses his life
because he gets there, he sacrifices himself. He’s just not able
to withstand it.
Marea: And I think
Tolkien is saying that’s okay.
Brad Dourif: Tolkien
says it turns out to be enough.
Marea: Shadow?
Shadow: I’m sorry, I’m
just agreeing.
Brad Dourif: She’s
rooting for Frodo, so you’re busy going, “yeah”.
Shadow: Yeah, pretty much.
I’m basically of the opinion that Frodo did everything that he
could do…he was the one to do this job, and if he ended up claiming
it in the end there was no one that wasn’t going to. He completed
his quest – what he needed to do, and if he couldn’t do it then…no
one was going to go any further than he went.
Marea: Just barely
enough. And in the end, it’s that dark and light character Gollum
that is necessary to finally complete the quest. Would you say
that Wormtongue was necessary to have at any point? Was he also
part of that pattern of the myth?
Brad Dourif: Now
we’re playing God. It’s like the garden of Eden. God is, like,
bored, you know? At the beginning, all anybody in the garden can
do is say that this is this, and this is that… and there’s no
meaning to anything. There’s just this guy and this girl who aren’t
even interested in sex walking around this garden, and God’s bored,
so what does he do? He says… and this in the best sense of the
word bored… and he says, “See this apple? DON’T eat the apple.”
Shadow: Which is the best
approach.
Brad Dourif: Which
is the best approach. Spiritually, it’s not right to judge. There
is no religion that doesn’t say this. And there really is a reason
for that. Life’s difficult, and I don’t like what people do to
each other all the time, and I’m offended by it at times. I have
some concept of justice, but it’s not an ultimate thing, it really
isn’t ultimate. Yeah, you’re right, who knows if he [Wormtongue]
was necessary.
Marea: I often
wondered about that, because …how can this character who, you
know, was a good man once, do what he did? Of course the book’s
a bit different from the movie… but at some point in “The Two
Towers” I think it was Gandalf said to let Wormtongue go and treat
him with respect, for he was good man once. And I thought that
was another place where Tolkien was playing with that idea of
not judging.
Brad Dourif: He
[Wormtongue] always held a secret hatred and fear, and he was
really never honest with himself enough to know about that. And
if he had done nothing about it, and no one got hurt, then I think
he would have been very forgivable, and kind of sad, but we’re
all responsible for what we don’t know about ourselves. You’re
responsible for your unconscious.
Shadow: I think I’ve always
seen him as a tragic character, because he did make the choice,
but you also definitely feel for him. As I said I think of it
as…he did have options, but one option was a large, looming option
as opposed to choosing good. The evil was a much more visible
choice to make, so I always considered him to be a very tragic
character. You feel sympathy for him.
Brad Dourif: You
know, life is hard. Life is very, very, very tough, and it’s hard
to be happy.
Marea: You seem
to have, as many actors I’m sure do, created a backstory, so to
understand your character thoroughly.
Brad Dourif: No,
not thoroughly. I don’t do that because you work from your unconscious,
and your unconscious has to be open. What you do when you give
yourself a backstory is you give yourself things that open doors.
You don’t close doors. You don’t make explicitly detailed backstories.
It’s not going to help you. Life… it’s about meaning, it’s not
about knowing.
Marea: This production
is renowned for the detail of scenery and costuming and props.
Are those some of the doors that you use to help to know your
character?
Brad Dourif: It’s
inspiring. Everywhere you look somebody did something beautiful
and you can’t beat that.
Marea: Do you feel
more like Wormtongue when you wear that cloak?
Brad Dourif: Of
course. Besides that, it gives me difficulty in just going from
point A to point B.
Marea: My family
and I saw the cloak at the Two Towers exhibit in Toronto and we
wondered, how can the man wear that and still get around the set?
Brad Dourif: Oh
you should have heard Christopher Lee…
Marea: I know he
was tripping over his skirts.
Brad Dourif: He
really was. At one point I was struggling, and this was his line
when we were working, (BD puts on his best English accent) “Oh
this gown IS a menace!” He said it just like that, and I was like,
how English can you get?
Marea: But for
you it wasn’t a menace it was an aid.
Brad Dourif: It
was a pain in the ass…
Shadow: Even if it did
help you to get in character…
Marea: The exhibit
also had a vial, “Wormtongue’s Vial”, and then it had Wormtongue’s
hanky, and we’ve seen the hanky. The vial, what was that all about?
Brad Dourif: You
haven’t seen it yet.
Marea: Is it something
in the extended edition?
Brad Dourif: No.
Marea: Is it something
special we’re supposed to find out in ROTK?
Brad Dourif: Yes.
Shadow: So we narrowed
that down…
Marea: So you can’t
talk about it?
Brad Dourif: That’s
correct.
Marea: It’s interesting
that they put it in the Two Towers exhibit.
Shadow: And the dagger
was there, too, correct?
Brad Dourif: The
dagger you’ve seen, I’ve carried the dagger.
Marea: We know
you had dialogue training, was there any other specialized training
that you needed for you character?
Brad Dourif: Not
for mine. Everybody else did. They all got horse lessons, sword
lessons, canoe lessons…
Marea: They didn’t
make you learn how to fall, that was entirely your stunt double?
Brad Dourif: That’s
stunt work. There’s no way…not at gunpoint would I try that. So
I said, “go ahead, I’d much rather have you shoot me here than
have to go through going down the stairs.”
Marea: I remember
the first time that I saw you I thought, “I didn’t think they’d
throw him down the stairs”. I had hoped that it wasn’t you!
Brad Dourif: Absolutely.
No, I would not survive that. I don’t know how the character survived
that. I thought it was a bit…much. But I’m sure I’m wrong. I think
the movie needs all that, but I really thought that there was
no way he was going to survive it.
Marea: Not without
broken bones.
Shadow: Not to just get
up and run away.
Marea: Must have
been a pretty tough guy…
Brad Dourif: Oh,
yeah.
Shadow: I know we kind
of beat around this question in your hour presentation yesterday,
but we were still interested in did you have a favorite line or
phrase…anyone’s. I know you talked a lot about Eowyn yesterday,
or, a line from the book, something that you really like or has
a lot of meaning for you?
Brad Dourif: A
line, line? I don’t know if I have a favorite Tolkien line. I’ve
always loved the way Gollum talks. If Tolkien had found a way
to make other characters talk that way specifically, he really
would have had something. I mean he REALLY would have had something.
But his eye for detail was on language…and I love my speech…
Shadow: Your speech to
Eowyn is amazing.
Brad Dourif: It’s
really, really beautiful, and it’s actually something that Gandalf
says about her in the books. My favorite scene is certainly the
swamp. It’s haunting, and you really feel that.
Shadow: As done in the
books, or in the movies…or both?
Brad Dourif: As
done in the movie. I mean, it’s something you really have to see.
Those young faces looking up at you, with open eyes from underwater,
its eerie, and the movie really nailed that.
Shadow: I agree.
Shadow: We wanted to ask, what’s
next for you?
Brad Dourif: I’m
doing a TV series for HBO called “Deadwood”. That’s what the moustache
is for.
Shadow: Ah, ok.
Marea: It gives
you a very Victorian look.
Brad Dourif: It’s
1870’s, and it’s American, it’s not Victorian, but I guess it’s
the era…the same time period.
Shadow: Thank you for
your time in meeting with us. We look forward to seeing you as
Wormtongue again in “Return of the King” this December.
Marea: It was a
pleasure meeting you.
Brad
Dourif: You’re welcome.
Note:
a transcript of this interview may also be found at www.west-of-the-moon.net,
along with a wonderful transcription of the DragonCon Q&A
session with Mr. Dourif . 
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