ScreenWize

You might remember Jim Caviezel from the extraordinarily sensitive performance he gave as Private Witt in Terrence Malick’s war movie The Thin Red Line. Witt is a character connected to the world in a different way than others, a pacifist in a brutal combat, and a man who ultimately sacrifices himself for his platoon. Or you may remember Caviezel as Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Or the wrongly convicted Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo. Caviezel seems to have gained a reputation for playing troubled and complex characters, men who carry a soulful introspection.

Caviezel is back in Australia (The Thin Red Line was filmed in Queensland) helping to promote his latest film Déjà Vu, and has a very practical memory about working with director Malick, and co-stars Sean Penn and Nick Nolte in The Thin Red Line. “At the time I was new and just trying hard to remember my lines,” he says modestly. “It was only afterwards that I saw what an amazing film it was, and understood the performance that Terrence had managed to get out of me.”

Ten years on, he accepts that he’s likely to be cast in similar roles. “When you start in the business, you take a role and try and do your best, and - if you do it well - then you get asked to do a similar thing again and so on.” There’s a significant urgency in his voice, as if he wants to pass on something important. “You have to believe me that if you’re a dramatic actor, you’ll never get asked to do comedy. That’s the way the business is. “

Yet Caviezel isn’t complaining. With a growing reputation as a “dramatic actor”, Caviezel says he’s now lucky enough to be able to look for good material. “I’ve never been the kind of actor who’s prepared to do anything to become famous.” He tells a story of something Nick Nolte once said to him that made an impact. “He said that fame is like a red balloon that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, but it’s just full of hot air waiting for someone to burst it.”

So what is Caviezel doing in Déjà Vu, a movie produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Tony Scott, two men famous for their commercial instincts and big action block-busters like Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State and Top Gun? Caviezel admits he’s not particularly attracted to action films. “Usually they just put in a bunch of explosions or get you to strip down and jump off a building to compensate for a poor story, but in Déjà Vu, there was something in the script that really stuck out.”

Déjà Vu does start with a massive explosion: a New Orleans’ ferry is blown up with hundreds of people on board. Denzil Washington plays Agent Doug Carlin, an expert in terrorism, sent in to find out what happened. In the course of his investigation, Carlin discovers that scientists have found anomalies in our understanding of space and time that offer a way not only of solving the bombing mystery, but also of changing the event itself.

Opposite Denzil Washington’s Agent Carlin is Caviezel, playing a suspected terrorist. The two men meet most dramatically in an interrogation scene, one that Caviezel says convinced him to do the film. “This was the place in the story where you become really strongly aware of the presence of my character. There’s this beautiful darkness about him that’s almost sexual,” says Caviezel, his soft voice taking on a conspiratorially dramatic edge. Caviezel declares that, in order to get the right tone to his character in Déjà Vu, he studied a number of different people. “There’s the suicide bombers and mafia types, then there’s Timothy McVeigh or Charles Manson. These people can be very attractive because their evil is a kind of power that comes out of them that’s seductive.” But despite the attraction of these kinds of men, there’s no doubt in Caviezel’s mind that they are evil. “These guys are willing to exchange their lives for their views on humanity. They believe that they have a destiny, and when you’re confronted by this, it strikes a chord of fear that rocks you to your very being.”

Also, as part of the preparation for the role, Caviezel met with real life agents who have dealt with these kinds of people face to face. “I came to understand that they knew they may have to give their own lives to stop the evil. That’s the rules of this game. It’s this dynamic between good and evil that creates a really special opportunity for me as an actor to be something very different. That’s why I liked the script so much.”

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon