From the Archives: Tim Roth
"I've got a 15 year old and he's not impressed. If I'm not in Star Wars, I'm not cool. Ewan [McGregor] is a friend of mine. When I heard he was doing it, I bumped into his agent in London. I said, 'Go up behind him on the set and give him a really hard slap on the head and say it's from Tim. . .for having a light saber.' And he did. I saw Ewan after and he said, 'I was sitting there, quite quietly, and then Waack!' Because I was cool for a little while with my 15 year old's friends. Worn off."- Tim Roth
"What do you want to talk about?" Tim Roth asks the small group of reporters who have gathered at New York's Essex House to interview him. This is not the Tim Roth one would expect. He's almost a cheery, cheeky chappie when he should be venomously detached. This is the actor, after all, whose career-defining roles (Meantime, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Rob Roy, Little Odessa) have had him bathed in blood and violence.
Yet here he sits: coolly smoking his Marlboro Lights, in pulled-on jeans and grey T-shirt, the tattoos on his right arm displayed, his fingers surprisingly delicate, his heavily hooded eyes big and blue. His soft accent is South London, he's given to laughing at his own jokes and anecdotes and his sentences are full of long pauses in between words. You wait without impatience because what he has to say is usually interesting or self-deprecating or both. Also, because despite his casual, unfussy manner, there is a coiled center like a silent rattlesnake. In short, Roth's the kind of mate you could share a pint and maybe a few bruises with in a pub.
Part of Roth's ease may stem from his return to acting. After a two-year hiatus, necessitated by his directorial debut The War Zone, Roth returns to the big screen in Giuseppe Tornatore's Legend of 1900. "I was very nervous about would they want me back," he confides, "because it cools off very quickly. But work's coming in." Indeed, he's slated to do several films with the legendary German director Werner Herzog.
Roth is a kindler, gentler man now and he wants his films to reflect that. "If a script is a bit Pulp Fiction, I just bin it," he says. His role in Legend of 1900 does find him on unfamiliar territory - he plays 1900, born and raised on a ship which he never leaves. A brilliant pianist, he could have parlayed his talent into a tremendous career on land but 1900 chooses to remain where he is, a big fish in a small pond, a place where he is godlike and everything is infinite. The film's centerpiece has 1900 and Jelly Roll Morton (Clarence Williams III) facing off at the piano. The film is lyrical and buoyant; Roth radiates boyish sweetness with nary a trace of menace.
"It was a very naïve, very gentle, very sweet, very angelic, and it made a change. Not a gun in sight," he remarks of his latest endeavor. "For me, it was a chance to be in an old movie: put-your-feet-up, Sunday-afternoon, have-a-glass-of-wine, fun thing. It's kind of the antidote to a lot of the stuff I'd been doing over the years. Time for a change. It's sweet, it just washes over you, it's a gentle film."
Roth, who accepted the role based on a bad translation ("I mean, really bad but it still came through - its gentleness and its romance.") of the Alessandro Baricco novella, endured five months of "learning how to fake it, and I hate the piano. I mean, I never wanted to see another one again. I loved doing it when we shot it - suddenly you come alive. But that was a challenge. It bored me and frustrated me, but I enjoyed it."
Shooting in Odessa, Russia aboard the "Lessjzavodsk" proved more of a hardship. The ship -- ten years retired, motorless, 154 meters long and 19.43 meters wide - could only be reached by tugboat. "So you would get the ship to go around to be in alignment with the sun where you needed to be and then that take would go wrong, then you'd have to come all the way around again. Hours. Then you don't know if you can get off the boat because if [the waters were] too rough, the steps weren't connected to the land, and you might be there all night." Roth pauses. "It was. . .not pleasant at times."
Like many actors, Roth fell into acting by accident. "I was 17 and I auditioned for a play as a joke and it backfired - I got the part," he laughs. "I had to perform a musical of Dracula in front of all the school bullies. As soon as I got the first laugh and got that attention, I thought, Oh I like this." He pauses. "I loved it, the attention. I was very small. I mean, I'm quite small now but I was tiny. Late developer, tiny, with big fat cheeks. Couldn't get laid for nothing, wouldn't even get a looking. Then I signed on the dole and called myself an actor and I got laid," he laughs. "I recommend it to anybody."
Roth, the son of a junior teacher mother and a Fleet Street journalist father (who reportedly changed his given surname of Smith to a Jewish handle to sympathize with Holocaust victims), dropped out of the Camberwell School of Art where he'd been studying sculpture and got himself to Glasgow at the Citizens' Theatre. He ended up in London again, selling advertising over the phone to make ends meet and acting at the Oval House youth theater.
A flat tire got him discovered. As he was fixing his bicycle tire, someone approached him to audition for a television film. It was Made in Britain, he played a Nazi skinhead and was directed by Alan Clarke who recommended him to Mike Leigh. Leigh cast him as the lead in Meantime which led to The Hit, directed by Stephen Frears. Roth had already appeared as Guildenstern to Gary Oldman's Rosencrantz in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and as Van Gogh in Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo before he took Oldman's lead and moved to Los Angeles.
"The only thing that was important for me was getting employed," he explains. "Literally, at that time in Britain, we were all fighting over one radio play, all of us. Gary Oldman was the first one who took the leap and then made it acceptable for us to arrive. For some of us, it's worked. For some, it really didn't but it was worth a shot." A pause. "It was a scary time."
Two years after Oldman's directorial debut Nil By Mouth comes Roth's The War Zone, adapted from Alexander Stuart's novel about incest. Both films star Ray Winstone. "As soon as I announced I was looking for stuff to direct, that was the first thing that came through. It was never a question of 'Should I?' It was a question of 'How the hell do I do this?'"
Roth's primary concern were his young actors, Lara Belmont and Freddie Cunliffe. "I knew where they were going to have to go and I've been directed so badly at times and it feels awful. I knew that they would have to go to hell and back and I had to be ready. If they were going to ask me a question, I'd better give the right answer. That was what scared me. Technically, I didn't have any problem. Great technicians." He pauses. "The compositions, I loved it. The vinegar bottle on the bottom right hand of the frame. . ." He smiles and pauses again. "Eighteen hour conversations about wallpaper. Didn't have a problem with that," he laughs. "Any creaky wheels, any dodgy actors did not get invited. Any moaners on the set were fired. They were warned and there were two of them."
Ah, there's the quiet menace that has frightened and filled his onscreen adversaries with dread. When asked to explain his facility with this particular sort of psyche, Roth replies, "I was bullied when I was a kid. Severely at school. My turn now. It came very easily." A pause. "Which is a bit disturbing." A laugh. "In retrospect. But it did and I would be quite frightening to people, and I'm really not. But I can go there." Roth pauses. "And I don't really like to, to be honest. I don't find it an enjoyable experience...threatening people."
