A Most Wanted Man: Anton Corbijn on Philip Seymour Hoffman's 'Brando quality'
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Version 0 of 1. “Decisions are made very quickly, people are bad or they are good.” Anton Corbijn takes a sip of lukewarm tea. We are sitting in a cafe in east Berlin, with a view overlooking the route of the old wall. The noise in the room almost drowns him out as he speaks, slowly and with great deliberation, in his accented English. “I’m not sure how far people see past their initial suspicions about others, how deep they want to investigate. But since 9/11, it seems it’s okay to make judements very quickly about people, because there’s more of an imminent danger to us. Since that event, the world has polarised at quite a fast speed.” With this he gives his teapot a considered swirl. As events in the Middle East and Ukraine continue to escalate, most people will have a sense of what Corbijn is talking about. The mistrust of the other, the ease with which communities, entire peoples, become perceived as one homogenous whole. It’s an uncertain, dangerous moment for the world, but one that has proven timely for Corbijn, the 59-year-old photographer turned film director whose latest thriller, an adaptation of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man, deals with these precise themes. Upon its release in the United States, the film was met with a fervent critical reception even if, as Corbijn notes more than once, Americans found the action to be a little ponderous. “I think Europeans are associated with a slow pace of life...” he says with a wry smile. The story begins with the arrival of a fugitive in Hamburg. Pulling himself out from the depths of the city’s docks, he is dirty, bedraggled and hollow eyed. But he is soon the object of attention not just of local financier Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe) but the world’s intelligence agencies. His name is Issa Karpov, a Chechen fighter and, more importantly for the spies, a suspected jihadist. But why is he in the city and what should be done with him? At the heart of the spider’s web is the local bureau chief of intelligence, Günther Bachmann. Overweight and permanently smoking, with his shoulders slumped and eyes downcast, Günther is a loner, obsessed with his work, but with barely an ally to call upon. He is, of course, the hero of the piece, and in his portrayal of the downtrodden spymaster, Philip Seymour Hoffman gives his last great performance.Hoffman’s death earlier this year in New York from a heroin overdose left A Most Wanted Man and his supporting act in the Hunger Games franchise as his last on-screen roles. Corbijn first met him in the same city in 2012, where he was photographing the actor for Vogue. “It was a weird, weird day,” he recalls. “I was going to meet Philip to talk about the film but I was also asked by Vogue to shoot him for an article about Death Of A Salesman and the people who ran his schedule put both events on the same day. They didn’t realise it was the same person doing both, but of course Philip and I did. There was a lull in proceedings and he invited me into his room to talk about the project. He was sitting there in his underpants. It was clear he was very comfortable sitting like that. We talked and then went back to the shoot. But later we were driving together to another location and he didn’t say a single word to me. I was worried it had gone horribly wrong. It was a very surreal start to our relationship.” Corbijn says he didn’t quite realise how good an actor Hoffman was until he worked with him. “He is better than you think you are going to be able to see. He becomes the character so totally that he inhabits the person, with every waking movement, with everything. If you see him work, there’s a Brando quality to it almost. He plays this guy who doesn’t treat himself very well, so from where we’re standing now it’s a very difficult spectacle to watch. I’ve since watched through all of his films again and you just can’t fault him anywhere; it’s unbelievable. It’s a very massive loss.” Corbijn is obviously grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Hoffman, but the actor also benefitted from collaborating with a director who takes a more, you might say, European approach to capturing his leading man. Throughout A Most Wanted Man, Corbijn’s camera lingers on Hoffman’s rumbled, pallid features. The viewer is invited to study Günther Bachmann again and again, usually through a fog of cigarette smoke, as he wrestles silently with his problems; those we know of and those we don’t. “I like to linger,” says Corbijn, who switched to a handheld camera for this film in order to get as close to his actors as possible during scenes. “Observing is just a nice thing. There’s a tendency I’ve noticed in films these days that they cut very quickly to what they want you to see, whether it’s a hand movement or something on the face. It becomes so obvious what they want you to feel. I think the sense of observing something yourself in a film is so wonderful, so it’s not out of laziness that I don’t cut so much... it’s that I like the observation aspect.” That aspect is how Corbijn made his name. From the 1970s, when he hitched himself to rising Dutch pop star Herman Brood, to the 1990s when he caught Michael Stipe emerging glistening from dark water like an indie Colonel Kurtz, or Kurt Cobain in bug-eyed shades and deadpan pose, he was the court photographer at the kingdom of rock’n’roll. His black-and-white images of Joy Division didn’t just define the image of the band but a whole style of minimal, nihilistic cool. Corbijn says the monochrome was a result of necessity: “The only customers for your photos were music magazines because Joy Division had had no hits. And they only printed in black and white.” But when he came to launch his film career with 2007’s Control, a biopic of Ian Curtis, he returned to that same style. The film that emerged was a dramatic study of the life of a doomed talent that also had the composition and intensity of portraiture. Sam Riley, who played Curtis in the film, became a poster boy in his own right. Next up, however, came The American, which by all accounts was less of a triumph, with that word “slow” used again by critics, while George Clooney, as the titular yank, ploughed a familiar furrow of middle-aged angst. “I think I would have liked to have pushed George Clooney further, with my experience now,” says Corbijn. “He was a producer and I’m very grateful he took the risk of working with me because I’m inexperienced, but I think it was a place he was comfortable to go into. It could have been darker. Having said that, I still liked the film and I still liked watching George Clooney in it; it was a different kind of film from that which people are making. For good and bad... It was an observation, taking it back to the 70s a bit more.” For A Most Wanted Man, the observation remains, as does a very deliberately limited colour palette. “The setting for me was always autumn in terms of colours,” he explains. “That is because I feel this story has a melancholic quality to it and a sense of change... to something even worse. It’s a great metaphor for society because I think that’s where we, mankind, find ourselves at the moment. If you look at the ecological state of the Earth, how we treat it and the small conflicts that blow up massively, I think the consequences may be quite severe. Perhaps people have thought this before, during the second world war for example; hopefully I’m a pessimist. It’s not that I’m without hope, you have to have hope, you have to be optimistic. But I base my opinion on the evidence of the current moment.” Next up for Corbijn is Life, a tale about the bond between James Dean (Dane Dehaan) and the photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson). It is, he says, a brighter film than his previous work, with Dean’s own untimely demise left outside the scope of the story. “The two main kids are very young and there’s a lot energy in the story, so it was like working on Control again. But my interest really came about because it’s a story about a photographer and the relationship with the person he photographs.” After he finishes a second pot of tea, Corbijn takes me in his bullet grey Land Rover on a tour of his favourite East Berlin neighbourhoods. We head round by the “people’s theatre” of the Volksbühne, and its massive banner reading “fuck off” in Germanic script, up through Schönhauser Allee towards the gentrified district of Prenzlauer Berg. He loves the architecture, a postwar style that is functional and muted. He remembers a time he fell asleep in one such block (in actress Christiane F’s flat, no less) waiting for the German post-punkers Einstürzende Neubauten (they finally showed up at dawn the next morning). “I don’t photograph 18-year-old bands any more because I’ve done that,” he says, dropping me off by the Zionskirche church. “Where’s the challenge? I still love photography very much. It’s a very simple artform, like going out with a pen and a notebook. It gives me a peace of mind film doesn’t, but that’s the excitement. I’m very grateful that I’ve been given the opportunities to go on a new adventure.” And with that the engine purrs and Corbijn heads back to his studio. A Most Wanted Man is in cinemas nationwide on Fri |