"As a film actor, you're not really involved in the storytelling process, which is why theatre is more satisfying for me," Kevin Spacey told a packed house at the Irish Film Centre on Monday evening.
The Oscar-winning American actor was participating in the first Irish Times/Film Institute of Ireland public interview with Irish Times Film Correspondent Michael Dwyer, following a preview screening of his latest movie, the action thriller The Negotiator.
In Ireland to play the part of a Dublin gangster in the film Ordinary Decent Criminal, Spacey talked about his acting career for stage and screen. While his most commercially successful roles have been playing ambiguous or amoral characters in films such as The Usual Suspects, Seven and LA Confidential, Spacey insisted that "there seems to be a protocol in the press to pigeonhole me, just because I've played a certain kind of character in three movies. But I've been an actor for 17 years, doing all kinds of work." Of his other roles, he cited one of his most memorable experiences as working on the film version of David Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross, with a distinguished cast including Al Pacino, Alan Arkin and Jack Lemmon. His most treasured theatrical performance was in collaboration with Lemmon, in Jonathan Miller's production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.
He seems to have been continually surprised at which of his films were most successful, having believed that The Usual Suspects would be a critical but not a commercial success, and that Seven was too dark to do well. ("At the test screenings, people were writing death threats to the film-makers on the preview cards."). He had been "astounded" at the success of LA Confidential.
Having made his directorial debut with the independent film Albino Alligator, he said "directing is the best job in the world, but they just don't want us to know that". He plans to direct another feature in about a year's time.
A full schedule over the next few months sees him going straight from Ireland to Los Angeles, when he completes filming here next week, to co-star with Annette Bening in the family drama American Beauty, then going on Broadway with a production of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.
The first thing that attracted him to Ordinary Decent Criminal was the script, and the second was the director, Thaddeus O'Sullivan. "His film Nothing Personal knocked me out." He hasn't seen Brendan Gleeson's portrayal of Martin Cahill in John Boorman's film The General, and insisted that: "This is not a story about Martin Cahill, although we've borrowed a couple of incidents from Cahill's life. I feel if you're doing a fiction you can have a lot more freedom than you would have with biography. This is also about family, and I'm blessed to have the most sexy actress in America, Linda Fiorentino, playing my wife."
An expert mimic, Spacey regaled the audience with convincing imitations of Michael Caine and Clint Eastwood (who directed him in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), and poked fun at Gabriel Byrne's inability to pronounce the name of the mysterious Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, but declined a request to display his own Dublin accent.
