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Watching the Detectives wraps up + Cillian feature in The Age
12 August 2006 at 10:55 PM | by Melty_Girl
[Note: This was originally published by cillianONLINE, which has been inactive since September 2006.]
Barring reshoots, Watching the Detectives is leaving the New York metro area. MovieWeb.com reports that principal photography has been completed.
In other news, Breakfast on Pluto was just released Down Under, so reviews have been popping up lately. It may have been a bit Northern Hemicentric of me, but I haven't been blogging about these reviews, simply because I think most Cillian fans have read oodles of Pluto reviews by now. But Melbourne's Sunday The Age is running a cool feature story on Cillian. Stephanie Bunbury interviewed him in Berlin, where he shared his usual down-to-earth perspective on the bright lights:
"If you can leave behind one film that people consider art, then I'm happy. Just one." He is ambitious, he says, but not about specific targets. "I don't have a plan. It's about quality of life as well. There is much more to my life then just being an actor, you know. Because this is all a bit crazy. It's not real life, is it?" He waves his hand, brushing away both the Berlin hotel where we are speaking and the whole gilded nonsense of the movies. "Great, but not real life. You just have to insist on that."
Bunbury also got some interesting quotes from Cillian that speak to the difference between transvestites and transgendered women:
Kitten, according to Murphy, was the most difficult role he has played. Damien, his character in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, could be a 1917 version of Murphy himself: quiet, focused, strong-minded. Kitten Braden, on the other hand, is all artifice. Murphy... researched for the role exhaustively. He was about to represent a character whose way of life was a closed book to him. He knew that he would have to transform his every gesture to do it.
"Out of respect for that community, if you are going to portray a member of that community, you need to see what their lives are like," he says. "But I learned more from looking at women, to be honest, because I wanted the character to be feminine, not camp or queenie. She's not doing it for anybody else but herself: it is a form of self-expression. Therefore, it must be organic. There isn't an on and off. She is like that all the time."
The transvestite impulse remains a mystery to him. But that doesn't matter. Ultimately, he says, he doesn't have to share any specific experience of the characters he plays. "All I have to do is understand how the mind works and to not judge. Because everyone can understand pain and the need to feel love. That is a kind of universal need, you know. I come from a close family. To not have a family must be a terrible thing; to not feel secure and feel loved."
But Murphy also came to understand something of the pleasure of dressing as a woman. "It's very nice to look pretty. No matter we tell each other we aren't, everyone's vain. So it's quite nice to look nice. And you get into that—all the products, the grooming, the plucking and shaving. All that stuff becomes part of a routine and it's not unpleasant at all."
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