{"id":3668,"date":"2012-07-19T12:49:30","date_gmt":"2012-07-19T18:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3668"},"modified":"2012-07-19T12:49:30","modified_gmt":"2012-07-19T18:49:30","slug":"christoph-waltz-has-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3668","title":{"rendered":"Christoph Waltz Has Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

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One poor journalist gets things started by asking Christoph Waltz if he can talk about his character.<\/p>\n

Christoph Waltz: No. Definitely no. You know, I don\u2019t talk about the characters that I play. Years ago, I was a little timid about it and I kind of squirmed when I was asked, \u201cCould you tell us something about your character.\u201d Now with a little self-confidence that comes with the grey beard, I just flatly refuse. I find it incredibly counterproductive to what I do – not to what you do, that I completely understand – to explain, because I want you to see what it is that you see. I strongly believe that what I do for a living is for you to see and to watch. But when I\u2019m an audience too, when we go to the movies or to the theater, we don\u2019t go because we want that version, but because we want to recognize what we have to do with that version. So meaning if you really want to distill it down to the bare essence, I claim that when we go to the movies we go to see ourselves. Now, if I sort of push in and say, \u201cNo, no, you cannot see what you see. You have to see what I tell you.\u201d Why would I do it? I can spare myself the bother of doing it, of going to New Orleans for weeks in the summer and sweat and work and fall of horses and stuff like that. We could just meet and I tell you, which would be a nice digital age performance, but either or. So I just flatly refuse to explain my characters.<\/p>\n

We dare to ask how he came up with the long hair and beard look.<\/p>\n

I can tell you very quickly. It grew.<\/p>\n

Christoph Waltz talks somewhat frankly about his special relationship with Tarantino.<\/p>\n

Quentin and I sort of formed a friendship and an understanding on that basis and a common artistic interest. So I\u2019m interested in what he writes. I\u2019m interested in what Richard Ford writes. I\u2019m interested in what Jonathan Franzen writes. When a new book comes out or becomes accessible in whatever form, I get it and I read it. Same thing with Quentin. Lucky for me, we have a friendship so we meet occasionally and he tells me what he\u2019s thinking about. Other little things that he writes, I read. He started writing some theoretical stuff about movies and spaghetti westerns and historical [issues], so I do what a friend would do, follow his friend\u2019s thoughts. In this case, I wasn\u2019t involved at all but I was invited to observe the creation of this thing. So I did because it was fantastically interesting to actually see the thing evolve and change and develop from an idea into a full blown fleshed out character and story, because that\u2019s really what the whole thing is, is a story.<\/p>\n

Someone asked Christoph Waltz about working with Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington.<\/p>\n

Why the two of them? Why not two others?<\/p>\n

The reporter saves the follow-up by saying she likes Jamie and Kerry. (We also would have taken, \u201cBecause they are also here at Comic Con.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Okay. Kerry unfortunately didn\u2019t have as much as I wanted her to have with me, scenes. But we had this one scene that I was a little bit afraid of because of the German, when we speak German and even though Kerry\u2019s German really miraculously came together very quickly, I felt I don’t know, it\u2019s not enough, there should be some form of understanding. But I made it a habit not to go to Quentin and say, \u201cIt\u2019s not enough.\u201d I made it a habit to say, \u201cWell, maybe my thoughts are not enough.\u201d Usually that\u2019s why it\u2019s called an actor. You work it out through action and not so much at home through thinking. So when we finally got to shooting the scene and rehearsing it, that\u2019s really Quentin\u2019s genius. When you do it, all of a sudden it starts to bloom. These little Chinese magic gardens that are just a few paper strips that you put together and you sprinkle water on it and then all of a sudden magically they turn into this wonderful little [flowers.] That\u2019s what I\u2019m referring to in that scene.<\/p>\n

With Jamie, with Jamie it was different because we met very early on, in probably June last year, months before we started to shoot. And so we could meet again and just get acquainted because that was a special relationship that we had to portray there in the story, which doesn\u2019t mean that you have to have that, the analog relationship in reality, but it helps and why not? He\u2019s such a great guy that it was instructive inasmuch as I know nothing about this whole black\/white thing because I couldn\u2019t care less. But that\u2019s because I grew up in a culture where you can afford not to care less. Now being here in America where it really is an issue, I was a little flabbergasted that it is an issue because for me it isn\u2019t. Jamie could kind of introduce me to, first of all, that thing at all and second, you know, to a specific perspective that I on my own wouldn\u2019t have had.<\/p>\n

Christoph Waltz is asked how Django Unchained might challenge American audiences\u2019 perceptions of race.<\/p>\n

I have no idea. Really just because I can\u2019t gauge the extent in this society. I can guess at it but I have no concrete way of really, really judging the extent. So in a way, I decided consciously to stay with an admittedly comfortable position to say I don’t know because I don\u2019t care. And I don\u2019t care not in an unsympathetic and detached way. For me it is within my scope of thinking, it doesn\u2019t exist as an issue and I like it that way.<\/p>\n

Christoph Waltz is asked what westerns mean to him.<\/p>\n

Again, different from what it\u2019d be in this country because the spaghetti western is closer to me than the real western, geographically speaking. Because of course, look, we all knew, I grew up in the European west on the west side of the Iron Curtain. Even though the Iron Curtain was very close to where I grew up, it was still the west side so we were exposed to all of the Marshall Plan and post Marshall Plan contents. So I was never a great western fan. In a way I preferred the spaghetti western to the original. Maybe, but that\u2019s a speculation, because a certain distance and that it kind of in a way ties into what I mean by the race question. Maybe a certain distance to the actual core of the thing is a good way to get a perspective and get a different, I hesitate to say objective because it isn\u2019t, and that kind of brings us around to the beginning. Objective is impossible. We do it to your subjective.<\/p>\n