Geoffrey Rush Final Portrait Interview

Final Portrait with Geoffrey Rush

Starring: Geoffrey Rush, Armie Hammer, Clemence Poesy

Director: Stanley Tucci

Writter: Stanley Tucci

Classification: M

Running time: 90 minutes A Final Portrait

 

Adapted from James Lord's memoir -A Giacometti Portrait'

 

In 1964, while on a short trip to Paris, the American writer and art-lover James Lord is asked by his friend, the world-renowned artist Alberto Giacometti, to sit for a portrait. The process, Giacometti assures Lord, will take only a few days. Flattered and intrigued, Lord agrees.

 

So begins not only the story of a touching and offbeat friendship, but, seen through the eyes of Lord, a uniquely revealing insight into the beauty, frustration, profundity and, at times, downright chaos of the artistic process.

FINAL PORTRAIT is a bewitching portrait of a genius, and of a friendship between two men who are utterly different, yet increasingly bonded through a single, ever-evolving act of creativity. It is a film that shines a light on the artistic process itself, by turns exhilarating, exasperating and bewildering, questioning whether the gift of a great artist is a blessing or a curse.

Final Portrait

In Australian cinemas nationally OCTOBER 5, 2017

Trailer

 

Interview with Geoffrey Rush (Alberto Giacometti) for Final Portrait

 

I read the script and I thought it was a bit of a gem. Stanley, very flatteringly, said this has got your name all over it and I want you to do it. It's a very nice, very smart piece of cataloguing of Lord's experience of sitting for a person who at that stage was quite a famous  living icon. He gives a wonderfully insightful analysis of the dilemmas in the creative process.

Armie is almost perfect as Lord - this guy is like the clone. He brings a very natural, very authentic quality to this guy's American energy in this European art world. It's a nice thing to bounce off. Giacometti and Diego's is a very symbiotic relationship and they had a very natural anti authoritarian attitude. The film has a nice sense of natural comedy and that is one of Tony Shalhoub's gifts. He looks for the pure truth of what can make the most benign moment fascinating and amusing, just because of the human frailty revealed or the brotherly connection.

Sylvie Testud brings such fantastic, natural, very French energy to the room and in this particular little slice of their lives together over a period of 18 days; she is fraught with everything she has had to endure about his wayward, eccentric, self obsessed ways. Stanley's script captures the bigger picture of their domestic rapport, around the edges of that obsession.

Stanley is so determined that this doesn't fall into the trap of being the biopic of the great moments of the maestro's work. There are no eureka moments, it's all the shabby and messy bits that go on in a very messy and shabby atelier where he lived and worked for years. Stanley's got a great sense of rhythm, seeing people deal with celebrity and the torturous process of making art. He's very good with the camera - working with Danny Cohen and shooting fast, it's almost guerrilla filmmaking. It feels like fly on the wall kind of camera work - quite artful.

It's refreshing to see somebody who is totally denying what we now know as celebrity culture. In a lot of the interviews that Giacometti does he says: forget about the metaphysical and existential questions, I'm just messing around with some plaster, fiddling around with some clay. I don't know where I'm going, I'm just playing and then somehow it emerges into something.

I think from a contemporary perspective, people would come in with very challenging morality questions. Giacometti knows he has certain manic impulses that allow him to exist and he just pursues them, not in a malevolent or a selfish way, he just does what he needs to do.

Stanley's script draws you into the microscopic banalities of characters that are vividly etched, who have this level of celebrity and academic appraisal, fame and fortune. But their lives stumble along in a pretty ordinary, banal way. There's a fair amount of natural comedy that comes out of that.

 

Final Portrait

In Australian cinemas nationally OCTOBER 5, 2017

Trailer