Born in Canada but raised in New Zealand, actor Daniel Gillies said he had no problem at all adopting an American accent for his starring role in Captivity. "It’s more of a cadence thing than anything," explained Gillies. "Like in the beginning, you sort of start looking at the language and you think it’s just the words, but really it’s the structure of language. When I go back to New Zealand and people listen to my accent, they’re like, ‘You’re such an American now,’ and it’s not the words I’m saying that sound American, it’s the phrasing that’s American.”
Captivity features Elisha Cuthbert as a gorgeous fashion model who is drugged, kidnapped, and then tortured. Gillies plays a fellow kidnap victim who joins with Cuthbert in trying to find a way out of their horrible predicament.
Can you talk about working with director Roland Joffe?
“It was great. He’s a very vulnerable guy. He’s very sort of fragile. I don’t mean to belittle that; I think it’s kind of a special thing. He likes to explore it with you and he conducts himself sort of like another actor in the piece with you, which is really interesting.”
And working with Elisha Cuthbert? What did you discover about working with her?
“I watched how she conducted herself and I watched the phenomenon of somebody who’d been a star since she was kind of a kid and to me, my wife’s the same, but I had never worked with my wife at that point, and it was just really interesting to see that at work. Like, understanding the kinds of things that she might have had dealt with being incredibly famous and gorgeous and very young, and the level of sophistication that she had to reach emotionally in order to be able to deal with those things at such a young age. It’s no wonder that so many of the young actors sort of fall off the rails. They don’t generally tend to focus on being any good. They tend to focus on doing the same trick that people taught them makes them special, which is just a lie.”
Gillies continued, “I mean, she’s great. She was engaged at the time to a guy who she’s no longer engaged to. She was very private, which I respected, partly because she was engaged and partly because the shoot was so demanding of her. We were there for a lot longer than we thought we were going to be so she was under a lot of pressure, to be honest. We signed up for a six week shoot; we were there for two and a half months.”
Why?
“If I’m honest with you, it was the Russian system wasn’t in place to… And I’m not kneeling at the altar of the American system of filmmaking, but it definitely does have its place. It does move with a certain momentum that I don’t think that these folks were quite ready for.”
How did you manage to keep up the energy level for the entire shoot?
“You just kind of do it. And luckily the space is sort of conducive to that because we’re in Russia in a sweatbox in the middle of the night, so there’s not a lot of acting involved. It was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m terrified!’”
How difficult was it working in Russia?
“It was tough. The systems that the Russians had and the systems that the American had were just so vastly different and so they had to integrate and find their feet and start functioning like one engine rather than two. So it was tough.”
Did you get the opportunity to go exploring?
“I did and I got to admit, I wasn’t awed by Moscow’s beauty. It’s primarily a white place, too. You get off, and I guess I’ve always lived in cultures, like in New Zealand, it’s very multicultural. It’s a lot of Asian folks and a lot of Pacific Islanders, and people from all over the world. And then I lived in Australia and Canada and here in the States and L.A.’s terrific, it’s every color, shape, form. You go to Russia and it was just a sea of white people. I was like, ‘That’s fascinating.’ One of the African-American guys who played one of the cops in the movie, when he was there, he was the only black guy around in the city. Women either fell over themselves, like adoring him, or would walk in another direction. I was like, ‘This happens?’ Oh wow, this is just weird.’”
Did you ever think this movie pushed it too far as far as the torture scenes?
“I don’t know what too far is anymore. America has a great love affair with talking about how incredible its freedom of speech is, and yet all I see is the curbing of speech here and the correctness of speech and the isolation of ideas and these subversive elements of media and of actually communicating with one another. Do I think it went too far? I think media should. I think things like this, within certain restrictions, should go as far as you can. But I feel like as soon as cinema was able to go real far… I mean you look at exploitation films from the 70’s and they go as far as this and kind of further than we ever could. It’s actually the more visceral, real, the stuff that frightens me is the more realistic filming stuff. The more hand-held and documentary-like that we get, the more people are trying to capture something that really looks like murder. It’s basically snuff films at that point. That stuff is going to be interesting to call into question. Fortunately, not that many filmmakers are even that good.”
Why do you think there’s an audience for that?
“I don’t know. It’s the same thing, if you look at any literature that’s thousands of years old. Look Biblically, the Christians and the lions, people have always accepted that people should be punished and that we can watch it. There’s a sexual aspect to it, too. Why do you think it’s quite often a female protagonist in the center of these things? There’s some sort of dreamscape here I’m sure Jung and Joseph would have a hell of a lot to say about what these guys, about what is intended. Because there are so many sexual overtones about having this captured beautiful woman within this space. It definitely has those overtones. I don’t know why there is an audience for it. I think there kind of always will be. I’m not particularly drawn to these kinds of films, to be honest.”
