I often get asked about my favourite actor, my favourite movie star, and I always have the same answer: Actors and movie stars are very different creatures.
For instance, Will Smith and Jennifer Aniston are great movie stars. They sell the products they are inserted into with gusto and (just) enough believability to make two hours fly by without snapping the clips on an audience's disbelief suspenders. But they are not actors. They are always Will Smith or Jennifer Aniston.
Actors, however, are unreliable - they become new people with each role. Perversely, they suffer for their mutability, because it is difficult to turn them into Happy Meal toys, into recognizable (and reusable) products. Campbell Scott is one such actor. He will never be a movie star, but he will work, and do great work, in everything from series television to blockbuster romantic comedies, until he drops.
Since his big break in Bernardo Bertolucci's under-appreciated The Sheltering Sky, opposite powerhouses Debra Winger and John Malkovich, Scott has participated in dozens of films (most notably the cult flick Big Night, which he co-directed with Stanley Tucci, and the critically acclaimed Saint Ralph, in which he played Father George Hibbert) and many, many more high-profile television roles. Still, one rather doubts he gets mobbed at the grocery store. How would fans recognize him? He's never the same man twice.
And in his latest film, the bittersweet biker flick/road trip/mortality meditation One Week, Scott appears for just one half-lit moment, even though he is present from beginning to end as the film's narrator. Fans will have to settle for his polished-oak voice as it guides them through the film's beguiling twists and turns. Try putting that on a lunchbox.
What was the process for doing the narration? Did you record the script without seeing the film, while watching the film, or after the film was completed?
Well, you know, I have never done anything like this before, narrating a fiction film - I've done commercials, audio books and a documentary or two - but this is highly different because you're sort of a character in the movie. But you don't want to overpower the movie or overshadow it, or underplay it, and voiceover is tricky to begin with, because you don't want to tell people what they're already seeing. All of those were concerns of mine.
I did not see the movie, actually. The director told me a little bit about it, and when I came to Toronto to do it, and it was done pretty quickly, in a day, the movie was edited but not finished. I didn't even watch it before we started. It was really creative, because I was learning about it as I went. And it was fun. If I was really going to ruin a scene by having the wrong tone, the director jumped in, but otherwise he left me alone, told me to underplay it, be as chill as I could be.
Not having a full sense of the film must have caused some anxiety, especially about setting the right tone.
You're right. The only thing that stopped me from being really anxious was that I trusted the director and it's not that I didn't understand what was going on, and a lot of the times I was given two choices, to play it one way or another. When you've got a voiceover, you can forget how influential it can be - so part of my job was to provide the director with choices. And, I love to argue with him! I mean it in a constructive way. Usually, my choice is less strong anyway!
And you do have the most buttery voice.
Ha! Now, when you say "buttery," do you mean all fat and greasy and cholesterol-filled?
No, in the European way - warm and nurturing and creamy.
Ha! I don't know about this. I don't cultivate it, but I have done, in the last five years, honestly, a lot of this sort of work. It's kind of what's paying my mortgage. But ... yeah, I probably play it up a bit. It's like a character I use. I just finished doing an audio book of Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, which was endless.
The whole book? It's 500 pages long.
The whole damned thing. Dude, it went on and on. It's a great book, but. ...
A great book with four-page sex scenes!
My God! I know! I did Tropic of Cancer too, and I was like, What's he gonna write after that?
I have to admit, I expected One Week, a film about a young man who finds out he has a 10-per-cent chance to live, to be one very long dirge. But it's weirdly cheerful.
That's the way Michael [McGowan, the director]is. I don't know if that's a Canadian thing or not. He does not have a bitter view of the world. However, he is not at all coy or sentimental. It's a very realistic view of the world. Part of that tone is really him. We always went against what people might think or expect in the situations. There was always a dry humour, without taking the seriousness away. Plus, the film is kind of a love letter to Canada.
The lead character finds out he is going to die, and decides to ride a motorbike to Tofino. I have to say, if I had a week to live, British Columbia would not be my first destination choice.
That sounds very personal.
Never mind. Where would you go?
Good Lord. Would one need to go anywhere?
Particulars
BORN
July 19, 1961, New York
QUITE A PEDIGREE
Scott is the son of Oscar-winning actor George C. Scott ( Patton) and Canadian actress Colleen Dewhurst of Anne of Green Gables fame. She co-starred with her son in the weepy 1991 Julia Roberts vehicle Dying Young.
A GUY'S GOTTA WORK
Be sure to catch Scott in the 2006 straight-to-DVD movie Final Days of Planet Earth, in which he plays the only man who can stop Daryl Hannah's evil alien-insect queen from destroying the human race. Tee hee!
Massimo Commanducci