Michael Fassbender is on the cover of GQ!

Michael Fassbender in his first ever cover in a major American magazine and it is on GQ Magazine for June 2012!

Below are some highlights from the interview:

He has a ping-pong table in his apartment, one that’s seen action:

In the middle of the room is a mini Ping-Pong table, borrowed from his British agent, who lives nearby. “Now that it’s here,” says Fassbender, “it’s not going. This table has been the best contribution for fun I’ve had in a long time. This table has seen some action…” He pauses, laughs. “That sounds wrong.”

But has it? I say, gently pushing.

“Just the paddles,” he deflects, and of course he then realizes that this sounds wrong, too, in exactly the same way.

On all the attention his penis got after ‘Shame’ came out: 

“It’s fun to a point,” he says of these situations he has been facing, “and after a certain point you worry that it kind of detracts from the movie. But there’s nothing I can do. I just have to laugh it off. I can. Pretty much. Because I take my work seriously but I can’t take myself too seriously. I’m in such a crazy privileged position—shit, this is the pinnacle of the dream when I was 17…. Nobody wants to hear really how difficult it is.”

On not being nominated for an Oscar for ‘Shame’, and the peeing scene that left everyone talking:

“I know,” he says. Usually for movie pissing the liquid you see is actually coming from a hidden tube, but he was nude. For the first two takes, he wasn’t able to do anything, but he announced on-set before the third that it would happen, and it did. “Actually pretty proud,” he says. And then he laughs and says—more blurts out, really—”That peeing cost me an Oscar.”

He is not entirely serious. Nor will he endorse Steve McQueen’s slightly broader stated view: “In America they’re too scared of sex, that’s why he wasn’t nominated.” “I don’t know—I don’t think so,” says Fassbender. “Steve is a passionate man. There’s not much filtering with Steve, and I love him for that.” But he’s starkly honest in acknowledging that there was a concerted campaign to get him nominated—”They promised me paradise!” he blares—and how his expectations were raised.

“At the beginning people [say], ‘You’re going to be going to the Oscars,’ and you’re like, ‘Whatever, doesn’t matter, don’t think so.’ But after a while it does penetrate. After a while you’re like, ‘Anyway, so I’m going to the Oscars…’ ” He laughs. “And you start to believe it. And I did. I thought I was going. And then I found out I wasn’t and I was upset. I was very upset by it. The first reaction was ‘What the fuck…?’ ” He sounds frustrated that he had let himself get sucked in. “It’s a vanity thing. It does become important to you. And it shouldn’t.” On reflection, he decided that he had learned something about misplaced priorities. “A good little lesson.”

On dating his ‘Shame’ costar, Nicole Beharie :

During an earlier stop in New York, he was photographed walking the streets of SoHo hand in hand with his Shame co-star Nicole Beharie. Fassbender has tended to keep quiet about his romantic life, though not long ago he briefly reflected on the discovery that his new fame comes with “a buffet of choice.” After the photos of Beharie and him appeared, the global gossip media anointed her as his girlfriend.

In this instance their assumptions are accurate. “I’m seeing Nicole, we’re trying to see each other as often as possible,” he acknowledges. “That’s kind of difficult when she lives [in New York] and I live in England.” He says they got together during the film’s promotion. “Nothing happened while we were filming. We started talking more on the promotion thing. So, yeah, it just sort of unfolded like that.” Presumably that’s why he’s now back in New York for a couple of days, though he doesn’t say so.

Charlize Theron (who stars with him in ‘Prometheus’) opens up about Michael:

“The bottom line is, Michael Fassbender is probably the most talented actor that I’ve ever been around, and I think the most talented actor of this time right now…. I cannot talk about Shame because I sound like a fucking freak, but it’s a film that stayed with me for three weeks. His performance haunted me. I watched it twice, and when I look at the nuance, the delicacy, the tenderness, there was nothing heavy-handed about him. He knows what the balance is. He knows real life, he doesn’t know pretend life…. The bottom line is that he should have an Oscar on his mantel right now.”

 

Michael Fassbender is on the cover of Esquire UK!

Michael Fassbender is hot on the June cover of Esquire UK, promoting his new movie, ‘Prometheus’!

Below are some highlights from the interview:

On his love of socialising: “I like to go out. I wouldn’t say I don’t enjoy a drink. As I say, I’m a sociable person.”

On his love of dancing: “I like to dance. Ha! You know, I enjoy myself when I go out. When we were in Berlin and I went out with my parents, we were out till three in the morning, we were all out dancing.”

On his secret hangover cure: “I still listen to Slayer, man! I just put them on the other day, still listen to Metallica. AC/DC brilliant…If you’re a little bit hungover, put on AC/DC, it’s like there’s no room for [the hangover] any more, the anxiety’s all gone.”

On now having to consider his behaviour since becoming famous: “The thing is I don’t like to filter my behaviour, but I have a feeling that might be the case now…I don’t want to be in the newspapers. I just want to keep what I do on screen and that’s it.”

On being seduced by the trappings of fame: “It would be wrong of me to say that I don’t get seduced by certain things. That things don’t become tempting.”

On his temptations: “Well, you know, sort of, money! How much money does one need? Let’s start with that, that’s a pretty good one. Greed, things like that. Vanity, believing the hype. You have to keep an eye on those things.”

On keeping grounded: “There’s another side of me that’s very simple. I keep my lifestyle pretty simple and my possessions are pretty simple.”

On his self-imposed hiatus: “You have to see it clearly as looking after yourself. There is the danger of burning out here and getting lost and just becoming uninterested.”

On his next challenge as a scriptwriter: “The next thing is to develop, make your own stories with writers, gather a pool of creative people and develop stuff. So it’s not the fact that I’m waiting for someone else to hire me or I’m waiting for a really good script to arrive, I’m actually trying to make that script.”

 

In Discovering ‘Prometheus’, Seekers Land Inhospitable Terrain!

Ridley Scott’s upcoming sci-fi action movie Prometheus 3D brings explorers and scientists to an inhospitable, barren environment. With a strange and vast alien structure, Scott assures the audience that it looks like nothing that has been seen before in science fiction.

“What if you could meet God but God turned out to be the Devil?” So asks Prometheus Executive Producer Michael Ellenberg of the themes at the heart of Ridley Scott’s first return to science fiction since his seminal work on “Alien” and “Blade Runner.”

At the core of Scott’s story are the eternal questions of human existence: Who are we and where do we come from? As Michael Fassbender who plays the android David in the movie summarises: “It’s basically about trying to find out if there was intervention in the birth of civilisation on planet Earth by other beings, which we come to know as Engineers, and whether they had a master plan in mind for us.

For director Ridley Scott, the themes of Prometheus are a reaction to an abundance of post-apocalyptic cinema. Prometheus isn’t necessarily about looking forward, at what we might become, but it’s about looking back, at where we might have come from.

Shot in Iceland, “Prometheus” production designer Arthur Max reveals that Morocco was the first choice of location for the movie. “We were planning to shoot in Morocco,” shares Max. “But with all the geopolitical turmoil in North Africa, we weren’t able to do so. So we had to rethink.” The change means a very different aesthetic to the look of the planet – Morocco’s deserts have been replaced by the cold, icy rock of the Iceland location.

In addition to shooting on location in Iceland, the production took over the 007-Stage at Pinewood Studios, just outside London. At 374ft long, it is the largest soundstage in Europe and boasts more than 59,000 sq ft of usable space. For Prometheus, it wasn’t big enough by half.

The production started on the backlot behind the stage, constructing the Prometheus’s cargo bay and a small replica of the planet surface. This spilled onto an extension built to house more of an alien pyramid mound interior set, before finally connecting, and filling, the main space inside 007-Stage.

In the end, the production added 150ft to the stage’s length. “I knew, looking from end to end, it was never going to be big enough for this set,” says Scott. “I hate working with green screen. I like the actors to have their proscenium and see what they’re doing; see the arena they’re in. It’s partly that. To do that blue screen thing and say, ‘the monster’s coming down the corridor!’ It’s really boring.”

“The scale meant we could do a nice, big exploration scene in there,” explains Max. “We’ve got a 250ft network of tunnelling in there, 150ft of chambers and 25ft high doors.”

For Michael Fassbender, Scott’s attention to detail in the set design of the planet surface was second to none. “Have you gone into 007-Stage yet?” he exclaims with disbelief. “You have to see the space colon, as I call it!”

The practicality of the set makes his job easier as an actor, he explains. “What’s great is Ridley will do something on a piece of fishing line if it works, and stick a bit of green screen up in the corner. He knows technology but what’s great about him is he’s very primal. Even the technology in the film, you’re like, ‘That’s totally feasible.’”

Arthur Max says he and Ridley Scott have learnt, over many years of working together on films like GLADIATOR, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, and BLACK HAWK DOWN, that sometimes it’s better to achieve something practically than with CGI. “I think balance is the key in how much you build,” he says. “You have to get a convincing base, and when you speak to the visual effects department, they’ll tell you that they want enough reference material to work from. It’s especially tough on this, because almost every shot has a visual component and everything has to be constructed from scratch. You can’t go to a back lot and you can’t go to a prop house.”

The centerpiece of the alien set at Pinewood was a 32ft tall monolithic head, which can be glimpsed in posters for the film. This was built practically by Arthur Max’s team. “The idea there is that it’s part of the culture of the Engineers,” says Max of the race of aliens at the heart of the story. “This race of interplanetary visitors who have given us upgrades – mentally and physically – over the millennium.”

Max summarizes the key challenge of envisioning the alien environment: “The people who inhabit this planet, called the Engineers, and their technology, is beyond anything we’re able to know or understand, but it has to be visually interesting. That’s, I think, the hardest challenge, too, because we have to compete with the most iconic science fiction creature ever. Trying to come up with something that’s going to rival that is the real trick.”

“Prometheus 3D” lands very soon on June 7 in theaters nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

Meet Shaw, Leader of the Expedition in ‘Prometheus’!

There has been a lot of speculation that Prometheus is a prequel to Scott’s highly acclaimed earlier film, Alien. The director wants to keep the story under wraps so that audiences view the film without preconceived ideas.

But he has admitted that there are links. In “Prometheus,” the mission is funded by Peter Wayland (Guy Pearce), the ageing head of a huge corporation. The action takes place 30 years before the story told in Alien.

Leading the Prometheus expedition is the character of Elizabeth Shaw, played by Noomi Rapace. From director Ridley Scott, who delivered the likes of “Thelma & Louise” and “Alien,” we can immediately expect a strong character to inhabit Shaw’s spacesuit. And at the hands of Rapace, best known for her work in the tremendously-popular Swedish Millenium series, she comes alive as a new action heroine for the 21st Century.

Many characters evolve before actors are cast to play them, but not so Shaw, who was developed and refined in close collaboration with Rapace. Says Ridley Scott: “I find most of my inspiration from low-budget movies now. If we aren’t watching movies, we close ourselves down. And there’s a great output, suddenly, of Scandinavian films. More than a year ago I saw “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” because I’d heard it was successful. I was absolutely taken by it. Noomi was this very special little punk actress who I thought was definitely the real thing. Then I heard that she was in town in Hollywood, and I just called up her agent and said I’d like to meet her. She walked in and was a very elegant woman. I suddenly realised that I was dealing with a real actress, who can literally change her spots.”

Scott says that the approach to Shaw was intentionally very different from the approach to Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, in ALIEN. “We were determined to come in from a different direction because Sigourney was a kind of non-specific junior officer in ALIEN,” he explains. “What was she doing onboard? You think she’s going to die in the first act. Whereas Shaw, in this one, is a scientist that comes from the direction of, not just pure science, but actually of faith. Therefore she believes the foothold of everything is bound in the idea that we were created by something. Otherwise we’re such an accident of biology. We’re mathematically impossible, unless there was something pushing it around.”

Rapace says Shaw is more feminine than Ripley. “She’s a scientist, an archeologist. I think that Ripley was way harder from the start, because she was alone. Shaw starts this journey to get with Holloway, and she loves him. They’re a team and they’re doing this together.”

Logan Marshall-Green plays Holloway. “They are a team,” he agrees. “If she’s the brains, he’s the legs. I wouldn’t go so far to say muscle but he’s the legs. He’s the one who leaps before he looks and sometimes it hurts them as a team but a lot of the times it’s helped them. He takes a lot of chances and so far so good. This mission is one of the chances.”

It’s an attraction of opposites, he says. “As much as we’re a team, we actually differ in our philosophies as to exactly what we want or we believe. She’s the believer. I’m the scientist. I’m the skeptic. For lack of a better phrase, we complete each other. I think its what’s drawn the characters together romantically as well. It’s just this kind of respect – full respect – but my skepticism matched with her beliefs, her faith.”

Executive Producer Michael Ellenberg summarises: “These two are brilliant expert archeologists and anthropologists and they identify a series of connections on Earth that seem to suggest there may be not just life on other planets, but that life on Earth might have had something to do with this other life, and that maybe they’re our creators.”

Rapace reveals that Shaw goes on a journey as the film progresses. “In the middle of the movie, something happens and she becomes harder and she becomes more like a warrior,” she shares. “She has to cut off some emotional ties to be able to survive. I think she goes from being quite innocent and full of hope and belief and going into something that is a bit darker. I think that all Ridley’s women are quite tough or they can stand up for themselves and they’re quite good at fighting back.”

Costume designer Janty Yates confirms that Rapace had a big hand in her character’s costume decisions. “She always wants to be in a flight suit,” Yates laughs. “On the first day of shooting, we put her through so many different looks and so many very, very spacey looks, very, very modern looks, very French looks, very Japanese looks, all sorts, to try and get her to look timeless. And then she just said, ‘Ridley, can I wear this?’ He went, ‘Yes, alright!’”

For Rapace, building Shaw meant building a backstory. “She lost her father when she was quite young,” she shares. “He was a missionary and a Christian. I think if something dramatic like that happens in an early age, it’s like you have two options. I think you can lose faith and you can go quite dark and you can start to think that everything is a punishment in a way. The other way, because she was a loved kid and he gave her the gift of belief and faith, is that she can just hold onto that and there’s a purpose with everything.”

Marshall-Green says he’s had fun working with Rapace. “I rate my experience with working with actors on their work ethic,” he says. “Nobody has a better work ethic than Noomi. We got kind of thrown in to it together. We had to really show a history of being romantically and professionally linked. And I think she and I both had our eyes on the exact same prize, and hopefully it shows.”

The relationship between the two characters is, he reveals, absolutely integral to the film’s themes. But rather than create it explicitly, he and Rapace have tried to imply it by infusing it with idiosyncratic detail. “Did she just feed him a frozen space raspberry?” he laughs. “Yes, she did!”

But bringing out the character’s physicality also took a lot of training of Rapace’s part. “When I did “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” I did a lot of martial arts,” she remembers. “I was doing kickboxing and tae bo because I wanted to be aggressive. This has been different because now I’ve been doing more running to be able to go on for a long time instead of having quick energy. I was thinking I want to be like an animal. I’ve been trying to train my body to make my body work for long so I can do long sessions.”

Embark on man’s bravest mission to a beginning that leads to an end in “PROMETHEUS 3D” when it opens June 7 in cinemas nationwide!

Michael Fassbender Plays an Engineered Android in ‘Prometheus’!

Michael Fassbender in the following Q&A shares his take on humanity, working with Ridley Scott and Prometheus’ weighty themes.

One of the fastest-rising stars in the business, the 34 year-old German-born, Irish-raised Fassbender has wowed multiplex and arthouse audiences alike over the past couple of years with searing, indelible turns in the likes of “Hunger,” “X-Men: First Class,” “Inglourious Basterds” and “Shame,” which saw him reunite with Steve McQueen. A passionate, instinctive actor, who better than Fassbender to breathe humanity into David’s cold hard exterior in the highly anticipated sci-fi adventure “Prometheus (3D)”?

From Ian Holm’s duplicitous Ash to Lance Henriksen’s dependable Bishop, androids have played a huge part in the Alien franchise. So it’s not a huge surprise to find that Prometheus also has an artificial humanoid on board its eponymous spaceship, in the blond-haired guise of Michael Fassbender’s David.

The character of David represents Prometheus’ “company man.” An androgynous android with personality defects, David is the eyes and ears of the Weyland Corporation that funds the Prometheus mission.

Fassbender in the following q&a shares his take on humanity, working with Ridley Scott and Prometheus’ weighty themes.

Q: Who is Dav-eed?

A: He’s the robot. Or humanoid. Or android. Or whatever you want to call it. He’s like a butler. The first thing I wanted to do with him was to make him ambiguous. Should he be having emotions? I wanted to keep it ambiguous and have a lot of fun with it and enjoy it. I don’t know if that’s an easy description, but there’s so much comedy in him, actually, that I wanted to try to explore that as much as I could.

Q: Comedy? Even in an intense film like this?

A: Think Buster Keaton. Yesterday I kept banging my head off the screen on the ship and tripped over something else, and it was like a Buster Keaton moment! I also like the idea of treating him as a child, in certain respects. He’s been on this ship for two and a half years before everybody comes out of cryo-stasis.

Q: What does he do in that time?

A: He studies things, he watches films. There’s various things he soaks up. He’s been studying what Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) have come up with through their findings and research and the language that he thinks they [the Engineers] would speak, he’s been practicing that.

Q: Is David dangerous?

A: I think he knows his limits. He’ll know his limits when he gets there. Limit doesn’t exist for him. He will go until the point when he can’t go any further, physically. He doesn’t think about people’s suffering that much. He has an empathy and he’s developed that. But he’s more curious, like a child burning ants with a magnifying glass. There’s a cruelty there for sure, but it’s almost before a child comprehends cruelty. He does things for an end result.

But I don’t think he has any real moral compass. There’s something about him. He’s quite chuffed with himself. He’s very full of himself and he thinks he has most of the answers. In human company, he feels far superior.

Q: It is a film about creators and their relationship with their creations.

A: It’s about how the human beings are desperate in various ways to face this knowledge and get the answers to their questions, and not getting the answers to their questions. He’s never really been accepted and I think he does want to be accepted, very much so. But they always have that differential – we made you because we could. What’s interesting about him is that I do think this thing has been designed to behave like a human, but on a superior level, but it’s interesting that human personality traits start to bleed into the robot.

Q: Can you talk about the big ideas that are being tackled here?

A: What is the purpose of us being here? That’s the underlying question of the human race. That is why people are searching for heaven and for God, or Gods, as it was before. Why? There must be some purpose for us to be here, right? And that’s being explored in the film.

Q: Were you aware of the Prometheus myth?

A: I was. I do enjoy the greek classics and ancient history. The liver getting pecked away every night is a nasty affair, really.

Q: How does that tie in to the film?

A: Perhaps the fact that we keep going round in a circle, maybe that’s it. It’s a cyclical thing. There’s no resolution to the end of it, perhaps. It’s an ongoing quest.

Watch more of David in “Prometheus (3D)” when it opens June 7 in theaters nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

Prometheus 3D explores the origins of life on Earth

There has been a lot of speculation that Prometheus is a prequel to Ridley Scott’s highly acclaimed earlier film, Alien (1979). The director wants to keep the story under wraps so that audiences view the film without preconceived ideas.

But he has admitted that there are links.  In Prometheus, the mission is funded by Peter Wayland (Guy Pearce), the ageing head of a huge corporation.  The action takes place 30 years before the story told in Alien.

 

Leading the Prometheus expedition is the character of Elizabeth Shaw, played by Noomi Rapace. From director Ridley Scott, who delivered the likes of Thelma & Louise andAlien, we can immediately expect a strong character to inhabit Shaw’s spacesuit. And at the hands of Rapace, best known for her work in the tremendously-popular Swedish Millenium series, she comes alive as a new action heroine for the 21st century.

 

Many characters evolve before actors are cast to play them, but not so Shaw, who was developed and refined in close collaboration with Rapace. Says Ridley Scott: “I find most of my inspiration from low-budget movies now. If we aren’t watching movies, we close ourselves down. And there’s a great output, suddenly, of Scandinavian films. More than a year ago I saw The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, because I’d heard it was successful. I was absolutely taken by it. Noomi was this very special little punk actress who I thought was definitely the real thing. Then I heard that she was in town in Hollywood, and I just called up her agent and said I’d like to meet her. She walked in and was a very elegant woman. I suddenly realized that I was dealing with a real actress, who can literally change her spots.”

 

Scott says that the approach to Shaw was intentionally very different from the approach to Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, in Alien. “We were determined to come in from a different direction because Sigourney was a kind of non-specific junior officer in Alien,” he explains. “What was she doing onboard? You think she’s going to die in the first act. Whereas Shaw, in this one, is a scientist that comes from the direction of, not just pure science, but actually of faith. Therefore she believes the foothold of everything is bound in the idea that we were created by something. Otherwise we’re such an accident of biology. We’re mathematically impossible, unless there was something pushing it around.”

 

Rapace says Shaw is more feminine than Ripley. “She’s a scientist, an archeologist. I think that Ripley was way harder from the start, because she was alone. Shaw starts this journey to get with Holloway, and she loves him. They’re a team and they’re doing this together.”

 

Logan Marshall-Green plays Holloway. “They are a team,” he agrees. “If she’s the brains, he’s the legs. I wouldn’t go so far to say muscle but he’s the legs. He’s the one who leaps before he looks and sometimes it hurts them as a team but a lot of the times it’s helped them.  He takes a lot of chances and so far so good.  This mission is one of the chances.”

 

It’s an attraction of opposites, he says. “As much as we’re a team, we actually differ in our philosophies as to exactly what we want or we believe. She’s the believer. I’m the scientist. I’m the skeptic. For lack of a better phrase, we complete each other. I think its what’s drawn the characters together romantically as well.  It’s just this kind of respect–full respect–but my skepticism matched with her beliefs, her faith.”

 

Executive Producer Michael Ellenberg summarizes: “These two are brilliant expert archeologists and anthropologists and they identify a series of connections on Earth that seem to suggest there may be not just life on other planets, but that life on Earth might have had something to do with this other life, and that maybe they’re our creators.”

 

Rapace reveals that Shaw goes on a journey as the film progresses. “In the middle of the movie, something happens and she becomes harder and she becomes more like a warrior,” she  shares. “She has to cut off some emotional ties to be able to survive. I think she goes from being quite innocent and full of hope and belief and going into something that is a bit darker. I think that all Ridley’s women are quite tough or they can stand up for themselves and they’re quite good at fighting back.”

 

Costume designer Janty Yates confirms that Rapace had a big hand in her character’s costume decisions. “She always wants to be in a flight suit,” Yates laughs. “On the first day of shooting, we put her through so many different looks and so many very, very spacey looks, very, very modern looks, very French looks, very Japanese looks, all sorts, to try and get her to look timeless. And then she just said, ‘Ridley, can I wear this?’  He went, ‘Yes, alright!’”

 

For Rapace, building Shaw meant building a backstory. “She lost her father when she was quite young,” she shares. “He was a missionary and a Christian. I think if something dramatic like that happens in an early age, it’s like you have two options.  I think you can lose faith and you can go quite dark and you can start to think that everything is a punishment in a way. The other way, because she was a loved kid and he gave her the gift of belief and faith, is that she can just hold onto that and there’s a purpose with everything.”

 

Marshall-Green says he’s had fun working with Rapace. “I rate my experience with working with actors on their work ethic,” he says. “Nobody has a better work ethic than Noomi. We got kind of thrown in to it together. We had to really show a history of being romantically and professionally linked. And I think she and I both had our eyes on the exact same prize, and hopefully it shows.”

The relationship between the two characters is, he reveals, absolutely integral to the film’s themes. But rather than create it explicitly, he and Rapace have tried to imply it by infusing it with idiosyncratic detail. “Did she just feed him a frozen space raspberry?” he laughs. “Yes, she did!”

 

But bringing out the character’s physicality also took a lot of training of Rapace’s part. “When I did The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I did a lot of martial arts,” she remembers. “I was doing kickboxing and tae bo because I wanted to be aggressive. This has been different because now I’ve been doing more running to be able to go on for a long time instead of having quick energy. I was thinking I want to be like an animal. I’ve been trying to train my body to make my body work for long so I can do long sessions.”

Embark on man’s bravest mission to a beginning that leads to an end in Prometheus 3D when it opensJune 7 in cinemas nationwide.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...