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"... Arianne found this jacket, which reminded us dried bone and had a sense of royalty that went along with the name Prince. We found almost the exact identical jacket in I think it was in a Gene Autry movie, and we just cut it slightly differently up front to make room for the guns. The biggest thing I could hang on to was this pair of paints, which were kind of rust-orange, because I had a pair of outlaw pants that same color when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I’ve been rehearsing playing outlaws since I was four. This is just make-believe on a much larger scale.”
For real life gangsters, there is undoubtedly a good deal of playacting involved, replete with costumes (shiny suits, gold chains), props (guns and cigars) and pre-scripted slang. There is also a vicious cycle of glamorization, with gangsters copying media portrayals in films ranging from 1983’s “Scarface” to 1931’s “Public Enemy” and vice versa. The influence of the media can be even be seen in the Old West milieu of Warner Bros.’ “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” in which Ford (Casey Affleck) is depicted as having devoured dime novels about James as a boy, which spurred dreams of one day riding with the notorious outlaw.
“I think that there are some obvious and valid parallels to modern day celebrity youth culture,” Affleck observes, “but really the overlap is in that this is a story about answered prayers. He was 19-years old, he wanted to be famous like Jesse James was, like probably a lot of kids (today), teenagers or younger, reading comic books who want to be a super hero, they want to be a gunslinger, they want to be an astronaut. Robert Ford thought that he was capable of being an outlaw, which I guess he was. What happens when Jesse dies is his life becomes something that he can’t control and what he had hoped for is not exactly as he imagined it would be. Now, I guess that that could be true for tales of fame, but that was never anything that we talked about on the set.”
Ford could be seen as a case where playacting became too real, which is a potential risk whether one is a music fans adopting the clothes and mannerisms of their favorite gangsta rapper or an actor taking his role as a made man with him off-set into Little Italy.
Viggo Mortensen is not an actor who stays in character when the cameras stop rolling, but he is always eager to immerse in research for a part, both for the good of the film and his own personal pleasure. For his role as Russian mobster Nikolai in “Eastern Promises,” his preparatory process included developing a personal backstory for the character from birth until page one of the script (as he does for every film), traveling to Moscow, St. Petersburg and the character’s native region in the Ural Mountains of Siberia, studying the people and their culture, and learning his lines in Russian and Ukrainian as well as English to perfect his accent.
One of the keys to the character of Nikolai and the film’s plot is the collection of old school Russian tattoos that cover his body, from his ankles to his hands, serving as a sort of criminal résumé. Unfortunately, the temporary tattoos created by makeup designer Stephan Dupuis (with input from Mortensen) proved to be a little too authentic for some Russian expats.
“The tattoos would last a couple of days, even washing, and the ones on the hands you would always see when I was walking around the streets in London,” Mortensen says. “One time I was sitting in this pub having a beer after work and I heard a man and a woman speaking in Russian. All of a sudden, they stopped talking and I looked and saw the woman was looking at my hands, freaking out. So I just got out of there. On the one hand, it was good that they looked real to them, but on the other hand I thought, that’s a little strange. And there was another incident sort of like that. Then I started washing them off – at least the hands.”
For real life gangsters, there is undoubtedly a good deal of playacting involved, replete with costumes (shiny suits, gold chains), props (guns and cigars) and pre-scripted slang. There is also a vicious cycle of glamorization, with gangsters copying media portrayals in films ranging from 1983’s “Scarface” to 1931’s “Public Enemy” and vice versa. The influence of the media can be even be seen in the Old West milieu of Warner Bros.’ “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” in which Ford (Casey Affleck) is depicted as having devoured dime novels about James as a boy, which spurred dreams of one day riding with the notorious outlaw.
“I think that there are some obvious and valid parallels to modern day celebrity youth culture,” Affleck observes, “but really the overlap is in that this is a story about answered prayers. He was 19-years old, he wanted to be famous like Jesse James was, like probably a lot of kids (today), teenagers or younger, reading comic books who want to be a super hero, they want to be a gunslinger, they want to be an astronaut. Robert Ford thought that he was capable of being an outlaw, which I guess he was. What happens when Jesse dies is his life becomes something that he can’t control and what he had hoped for is not exactly as he imagined it would be. Now, I guess that that could be true for tales of fame, but that was never anything that we talked about on the set.”
Ford could be seen as a case where playacting became too real, which is a potential risk whether one is a music fans adopting the clothes and mannerisms of their favorite gangsta rapper or an actor taking his role as a made man with him off-set into Little Italy.
Viggo Mortensen is not an actor who stays in character when the cameras stop rolling, but he is always eager to immerse in research for a part, both for the good of the film and his own personal pleasure. For his role as Russian mobster Nikolai in “Eastern Promises,” his preparatory process included developing a personal backstory for the character from birth until page one of the script (as he does for every film), traveling to Moscow, St. Petersburg and the character’s native region in the Ural Mountains of Siberia, studying the people and their culture, and learning his lines in Russian and Ukrainian as well as English to perfect his accent.
One of the keys to the character of Nikolai and the film’s plot is the collection of old school Russian tattoos that cover his body, from his ankles to his hands, serving as a sort of criminal résumé. Unfortunately, the temporary tattoos created by makeup designer Stephan Dupuis (with input from Mortensen) proved to be a little too authentic for some Russian expats.
“The tattoos would last a couple of days, even washing, and the ones on the hands you would always see when I was walking around the streets in London,” Mortensen says. “One time I was sitting in this pub having a beer after work and I heard a man and a woman speaking in Russian. All of a sudden, they stopped talking and I looked and saw the woman was looking at my hands, freaking out. So I just got out of there. On the one hand, it was good that they looked real to them, but on the other hand I thought, that’s a little strange. And there was another incident sort of like that. Then I started washing them off – at least the hands.”