Jude Law talks about ‘Sleuth,’ ‘Alfie’ and Caine

Posted by Luciana in Interview on 11 2nd, 2007 | no responses

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tattle has written enough about Jude Law over the past few years that it was nice to meet him finally in September at the Park Hyatt Hotel during the Toronto International Film Festival.

In Toronto for “Sleuth”, Law showed up for his interview in sneakers, torn jeans and a gray thermal undershirt. His hair had not seen a comb - and on the “Sleuth” red carpet he had cleaned up so good.

He also seemed to be the only celebrity we’d talked with who had a large man stand in the back of the room - just in case a journalist pounced on him.

That said, the tabloid fave, who has been keeping a lower profile since the end of the Sienna Miller nonsense, came across as a thoughtful actor and producer, committed to his work and career.

Law, just like co-star Michael Caine and director Kenneth Branagh before him, stressed that this new version of “Sleuth” (Caine played Law’s role in the original, opposite Laurence Olivier) was absolutely, positively, not a remake.

So, Jude, how did your new “Sleuth” come about?

“I have a company called Riff Raff Films,” he said, “and we have sort of brainstorm [sessions] where we talk about ideas.

“This was about five years ago, and someone mentioned that at the core of the original was a sort of timeless story - two men fight over a woman we never meet - and it reminded me of [playwright/screenwriter Harold] Pinter. It was really just when he agreed to do it that it started to become important.

“We worked together for about two-and-a-half years and then he stopped writing. He said, ‘I will write and then I will stop.’ When he stops, he doesn’t write again. You can’t ask him for rewrites.”

And your goal . . . ?

“It was an attempt to reinvestigate that timeless scenario: What is it that drives men to fight and lose sight of the object that they’re perhaps fighting over?”

Why did you choose Kenneth Branagh to direct?

“I’ll tell you what it was,” Law said. “I needed someone who I knew wouldn’t be intimidated by the lack of direction on the page because Harold just writes verse really. And I needed someone who could embrace the theatricality of it, which I kind of liked, like a Fellini or a Bergman. And it had to be someone also who was going to be unintimidated by the fact that it was a performance-driven piece.

“I’d never met Ken but he just loved that we got to fill in all the gaps. He loved the space that Harold had left for us to interpret. And he loved the fact that we only had four weeks to shoot it (Caine said the original took 16 weeks to shoot). He was motivated by that. He said let’s embrace that and rehearse it like a play and then I’ll capture it . . . On top of that, he’s probably a better actor than both me and Michael and he understands the process.”

What about Caine coming back to play the Olivier role?

“There was something very satisfying and also apt about Michael returning,” Law said. “There’s a sort of weird, cyclical quirk to the story and it kind of added to that.”

With “Sleuth” and “Alfie” before it, this makes two Michael Caine roles for you . . .

“There’s no strategy to becoming the new Michael Caine,” Law replied. “I wouldn’t dare. I’m Jude. Michael Caine is Michael Caine and no one does it better.

“With ‘Alfie’ . . . I feel now looking back at doing the two, I probably made a bit of a mistake and had people thinking, ‘Oh, God, Jude, doesn’t he do Michael Caine movies?’ I feel like I do a bit more than that, but I’ve written a good story there, haven’t I?

‘Alfie’ was just a sort of challenge, really. When they asked me I was quite scared by it, and then I was sort of intrigued as to why I was scared and thought, go and confront it, go do it. Take the challenge and see what happens.

“Alfie” didn’t really click the second time around. Did you talk with Michael about that?

“We talked about it a little bit,” Law said, “because he knew I wasn’t very happy with it. My take when I was in the middle of making it was that this should be a woman. That’s how you modernize ‘Alfie.’ It was a film of its time, and the moral landscape is so different it just didn’t hold up.”