Clive Owen

WINNER 2005 Golden Globes

When we speak of Clive Owen, typically we talk about his quiet. In Croupier (2000), the neo-noir that brought the British journeyman actor international attention (and launched a million ''next James Bond'' rumors), as well as in Gosford Park (2001), Owen has made a fine art of smoldering intensity. ''I'm always interested in what you can express without saying too much,'' Owen says. ''I tend to be one of those actors where every line, I'm questioning, 'Do I have to say that?'''
Owen's economical, introverted approach serves him well in Closer, Mike Nichols' adaptation of the Patrick Marber play, despite a role that seemed to defy his own philosophy. For the lovelorn Larry, psychologically undone by sexual betrayal, words and feeling gush out like blood from a severed artery. And yet Owen's performance is a textbook lesson in control and precision. Intimately familiar with the material (he played the Jude Law role on the London stage), the 40-year-old Owen knows exactly how much to give at any moment, and makes the film's distracting, self-conscious chattiness work for his character. In his most expository scenes — hounding Julia Roberts for intimate details of her infidelity; pounding at Natalie Portman's stripper to surrender her real name — Owen uses his many lines to texture his portrait of a man flailing in a churning sea of misery, and rescues himself, ironically, by sinking to his lowest. ''I don't find going to uncomfortable places to be uncomfortable,'' he told EW last year.
Ask Owen who his acting role models are, and he doesn't hesitate, citing the chameleons: Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Daniel Day-Lewis. In smartly modulating his style to craft a performance in Closer unlike any he has ever given before, Owen has proved himself worthy of his heroes — and thus earned his first Oscar nomination.
From Entertainment Weekly's look at 2005's Oscar Nominees

SIN CITY

Sin City

Clive Owen is trying to explain everything that is cool about Sin City, a $40 million marriage of crime saga and special effects starring Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, and the man who would be King Arthur. But when a woman tarted up in black leather is spitting bloody chunks of flesh on the floor, this can be difficult.
We are inside the Texas filmmaking HQ of movie maverick Robert Rodriguez (Once Upon a Time in Mexico), where on a soundstage that's wall-to-wall greenscreen, Alexander's Rosario Dawson is ravaging the neck of Gilmore Girls' Alexis Bledel. Both play hookers in Sin City, a movie teeming with shady characters. Mobsters, mercenaries, cannibals — you know, the usual underbelly scum. In this scene, Bledel is explaining why she has betrayed their sisterhood of pistol-packing prostitutes, when suddenly Dawson lunges and chomps. . .on a strip of latex slathered in red corn syrup tucked behind Bledel's ear. She rips it away and spits. Lips dripping with cherry goo, Dawson smiles like she just won a pie-eating contest.
Through all of this, Owen, clad in a trench coat and red Converse, has been trying to make several important points in a low whisper.
''Robert is totally outside the Hollywood loop. Does everything his own way. I can't see any other way to do this movie — ''
''You bit me!'' Bledel shrieks.
''Sin City is violent,'' Owen continues, ''but with tremendous wit. It's film noir, bent out of shape — ''
''Arrrrggghh!'' Bledel wobbles and falls.
''Everyone has the same objective,'' Owen goes on, ''to bring Frank Miller's comics to life. Literally.''
Fake flesh splats on the floor.
Owen shakes his head. ''That's wrong. Just wrong.''
Behind a wall of monitors that resembles a workstation at NASA mission control, Rodriguez, wearing his trademark cowboy hat and strumming a guitar, reviews Dawson's chomp. One screen shows the shot in color; another shows the shot converted into stark black and white; yet another shows the shot as drawn in The Big Fat Kill, one of three graphic novels that make up theinterconnected, Pulp Fictionesque triptych of Sin City. Rodriguez's intention is to replicate the comics nearly panel for panel — a gambit as bold as it is commercially risky. But in Sin City, people are always doing crazy things for love. For all its splatter, the film is really mushy — a big, bloody valentine, from one fiercely independent artist to another. So determined is Rodriguez to get this right, he made the comic-book auteur his codirector. ''Looks good,'' says Miller with a nod.
''Good,'' says Dawson. ''Don't want to wimp out on Frank.''
''Sin City is a pretty f---ed-up place,'' Owen concludes, as he wades into the green for the next scene, picking up a prop as he goes. It's a decapitated head.
Bits of flesh and severed noggins, sadistic brutes and femmes fatales — and we haven't even mentioned the Yellow Bastard, who is literally yellow and actually a rapist. Sin City might be a comic-book movie, but you won't find masked marvels patrolling these scuzzy streets. ''I told my mom I was dressed like an S&M superhero,'' says Dawson. ''She was like, 'What's your name?' I said 'Gail.' She said, 'No, your superhero name?' I said, 'No, Mom, I'm not actually a superhero. . .'''
But there is a creative Superman behind Sin City: Frank Miller, who made a pop splash in 1986 with The Dark Knight Returns, a radical reinvention of Batman that certified his genius and proved funnybooks could be seriously good. The karma gods rewarded him with a shot at writing movies, beginning with. . .Robocop 2. His script was wild with ideas — in short, too long — and was severely revamped. He's sanguine now. But at the time, he was bruised. ''When I went back to comics,'' says Miller, ''I threw caution to the wind and did my dream project.''
Out fumed Sin City. Nothing else had ever looked like it: spartan storytelling and smashmouth violence, rendered in jet black and angel white and a periodic gush of color. Since 1991, Miller has produced seven volumes' worth of Sin ''yarns,'' none better than his shock-of-the-new first. Its hero was a hulking killer with a billowing trench coat named Marv, out to avenge the murder of the only woman who dared love his ugly mug. His growling thoughts were pure pulp poetry: . . .and when his eyes go dead the hell I send him to will seem like heaven after what I've done to him. I love you, Goldie. ''The main parameter I had was it had to be fun to draw, because what's fun to draw is fun to look at,'' says Miller, 48, whose sharp-edged avian profile and hard-boiled imagination belie his shy, kinda shlubby demeanor. He likens himself to Dwight, the romantic Everyman of Big Fat Kill.
Yes, Hollywood was interested. Miller resisted, because no one could guarantee utter faithfulness. It had to be his way, or no way. ''I decided Sin City was going to be this rack of books that people enjoyed for what they were, not homogenized, sterilized, given happy endings,'' says Miller. ''I didn't know there was a third way.''
The third way presented itself in 2003 in the form of Robert Rodriguez. The El Mariachi wunderkind was coming off Spy Kids 3-D, which he'd shot digitally on the new green stage at his Austin studios, a private playground financed from the shrewd maximization of his Hollywood opportunities. Rodriguez worked on special effects for Spy Kids 3-D, in addition to his usual workload of directing, producing, photographing, editing, sound mixing, and scoring. He was writing a thriller to follow up his kid flick, but it wasn't moving him. ''Having learned all this s---, I realized I wanted to apply it to something more challenging,'' says Rodriguez, 36, who is also an accomplished chef, has his own rock band, and in his spare time writes and draws bedtime stories for his four boys.
Rodriguez had been a Sin City fan since the beginning. Looking at the books again in 2003, he saw the potential for another Matrix, perhaps, ''one of those visual turning points, where people would see movies in a different way.'' He also recognized a kindred soul in Miller. ''I loved that he did Sin City all himself, just for himself. . . . I was willing to take his baby in my hands, because I wasn't going to drop it. I wanted to make his version. Not mine.''
Things happened quickly, as they often do with Rodriguez. In September 2003, he met Miller in New York and made his pitch. ''I don't want to adapt Sin City,'' said Rodriguez. ''I want to translate it.'' Miller replied, ''Nice choice of words, mister.'' In January 2004, Rodriguez invited Miller to Austin to demonstrate how computer animation could replicate Miller's shadow world. The ''test'' material was Miller's two-character short story ''The Customer Is Always Right,'' with Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton playing the roles. '''Test,''' says Miller. ''That was the stealth name for 'first day of photography.''' (In fact, ''Customer'' serves as Sin City's opening sequence.) ''Coming to Austin finished the deal. Robert knew it would.''
Soon after completing ''Customer,'' Rodriguez and Miller got a $40 million green light from Miramax/Dimension. The plan was to make Marv's tale, plus The Big Fat Kill, in which Owen's Dwight and Dawson's hookers find themselves up crap creek after a fateful encounter with a very bad Benicio Del Toro, and That Yellow Bastard, about a good cop (Willis) with a bad heart who tangles with the titular monster (Nick Stahl) over a lasso-twirling exotic dancer (Jessica Alba). Sold by the ''Customer'' test, Willis was among the first to sign on. ''About a minute into it,'' the actor recalls, ''I said, 'No matter what else I see, I want you to know I'm in.'''
For the seriously screwed-up Marv, Rodriguez wanted Mickey Rourke, who knows his way around screwed-up. ''I've spent most of my life feeling like Marv,'' says the 9 1/2 Weeks star. During his first meeting with Rourke, Miller recalls writing in his notebook: ''Mickey is Marv.'' Such sentiment has its sting. After all, the notorious Rourke is trying to put his past behind him. ''I remember going to my shrink with the graphic novels and saying, 'See how they see me, doc? They still see me that way.'''
On the eve of shooting last March, turbulence: The Directors Guild of America objected to crediting Miller as codirector, a title that the organization grants sparingly. The DGA suggested making Miller a producer. Instead, Rodriguez quit the DGA — a ballsy bit of rebellion that cost him the chance to direct Paramount's big-budget fantasy A Princess of Mars and stalled plans to expand his Austin operation; Rodriguez wanted to use Paramount's largesse to build another soundstage. ''I never liked clubs, anyway,'' he quips. Seriously: ''It was important to me for Frank to be in a recognized position of authority so people respected him,'' says Rodriguez.
''What a mensch, huh?'' says Miller.
''Having the man who created this world on set was invaluable — especially since we couldn't technically see it,'' says Elijah Wood, who plays (brace yourself) a mute cannibal serial killer. Everyone had his greenscreen-is-a-bitch story: Stahl had to wear stinky blue body paint so the animators could later paint him yellow. Some sets were built, like the skanky bar where Alba dances. Otherwise it was greenscreen—canvas for the F/X firms charged with realizing the blighted cityscape, snowy forests, pounding rain, and ravenous killer dog.
One Sin City player did attempt to revolt against the tech tyranny: Quentin Tarantino, whom Rodriguez asked to helm a truly Tarantinoesque passage — a long drive-and-talk between Owen and Del Toro. It was a challenge to the Kill Bill director, designed to settle a debate between them. Digital filmmaking: bliss or blasphemy? At first, Tarantino insisted on a real car. But after one take, the director became bothered by the limited range of camera angles, ditched the wheels, and put the actors on crates. (Not surprisingly, Rodriguez takes great pleasure in telling this story.)
Sin City may be the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever, but there have been some changes. Like the nudity. ''Frank never intended his comics to be a movie,'' says Rodriguez. ''I'd say, 'Do we really want this guy's dork hanging out here?' And Frank would say, 'Oh, yeah. That would be distracting.''' And while the plan always called for selective uses of color, Rodriguez is currently adding more as he wraps the film from home, in his teched-out garage. (He often works in his jammies.) Commercial considerations aren't a factor, insists the director (who has final cut), and it's hard to believe the studio is sweating a lack of color — not with a scene where Del Toro gets dunked in an unflushed toilet, then spits up yellow water. Asked if he's tossing and turning over Sin City's violence, Dimension boss Bob Weinstein points to saving graces like Dawson's outfit: ''I know what I think about when I go to sleep at night.''
Miller himself is dreaming of sequels. ''I want the job,'' says the artist, whose next comics project — a new Batman series, which he's writing — has fanboys foaming. (Miller tells EW he's also working on a timely-as-it-sounds graphic novel tentatively called Holy Terror Batman!)Rodriguez is game for more Sin; he likes the thought of having all of Miller's yarns together on DVD.
Until then, Rodriguez is keeping it clean — and close to home. He just wrapped another 3-D family movie, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, based on an idea of his 7-year-old son, Racer. It will mark a turning point for Rodriguez: His longtime patrons, the Weinstein brothers, are expected to soon leave Disney, and the filmmaker is likely to follow. ''[Working together after Disney] is 100 percent in the cards,'' says Bob Weinstein. ''We're lifers.'' In fact, Rodriguez says Sin City was a clarifying experience. ''I couldn't have done Sin City with anyone else. What we have is really hard to build anywhere else.'' The Weinsteins certainly want to keep him happy. After nearly losing him to Princess of Mars, they promised he could make a big-budget opus with them, whenever he's ready. It might be a while. Rodriguez wants to follow Shark Boy with yet another family film made with his wife and sons. ''Like a giant home movie. That's where I started with El Mariachi,'' he says. ''Sometimes I think I'll grow up and do a really serious movie. But I'm already 36. I don't think there's much hope!''
Entertainment Weekly 02/18/2005

The Bourne Identity

Entertainment Weekly's 2001 IT LIST

Clive Owen

AGE 35
WHY HIM? The smoldering and smooth handed dealer from 1998's ''Croupier'' is now playing the Hire, an unflappable driver who takes on dangerous passengers in a series of online only five minute films sponsored by BMW. The British actor admits he was ''wary of doing commercials'' -- until he got a load of the directors, including Ang Lee (''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon''), John Frankenheimer (''Ronin''), and Guy Ritchie (''Snatch''), who even coaxed a cameo out of wife Madonna.
UNLIKELY INSPIRATION ''David Bowie -- much more than any actor I've ever come across.''
DREAM COLLABORATOR ''A few years ago I would have said director Krzysztof Kieslowski ('Decalogue'), but he's not around now.''
TV SHOW THAT CHANGED HIS LIFE Britain's cult classic ''The Prisoner'' (1967), a harbinger of today's alternate reality dramas.
GADGET HE CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT PowerBook G3 laptop
IF HE WEREN'T ACTING, HE'D... Be lost. ''It scares me to think of the Clive Owen who didn't get into acting.''
NEXT He'll play a convicted prisoner turned, yes, award winning gardener in ''Greenfingers''; a villain tailing Matt Damon in ''The Bourne Identity''; and a valet with attitude in Robert Altman's ''Gosford Park.''

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