Tim Roth credits director Francis Ford Coppola with helping him care about acting again. “I was really bored, but I think that’s an age thing," said Roth during the Los Angeles press junket for Youth Without Youth. "I was done with it. I found that directing is a much more interesting job, but it doesn’t pay, unless you want to do action movies or whatever. So I think I had reached the point where I had enough.” When Coppola approached Roth with the idea of starring in Youth Without Youth, Roth couldn’t resist the challenge.
Roth stars as linguistics professor Dominic Matei, an elderly man whose life dramatically changes after he’s struck by lightning. Rather than killing him, the electrical shock does miraculous things to his body. Dominic’s youth is restored and his ability to learn is increased a hundred fold. To prepare for the part, Roth had to pick up many different languages. “It’s more just mimicry, really,” explained Roth. “I would try and pin down exactly what he wanted me to say. ‘How much of a piece of poetry?’ Then we would go and get someone who spoke that language, not somebody who is genuinely a teacher, but somebody who is normal. They would come in and they would phonetically go over what I had to do. I would just try and get as close as I could to how it sounded. It was a lot. I think initially it was about 15 or so [languages], then with the new language, the invented language on top of that, it was pretty tricky. But it’s okay; it was good. It’s just a fascination with language.”
Director Coppola revealed one of his reasons behind casting Roth in the lead role was because the actor had amassed an impressive body of work but had never been in the spotlight. “I never pay attention to stuff like that, and I mean that in all honesty,” said Roth when told of Coppola’s comments. “I have a very strict set of rules of what I think of being an actor, which I think are how you should behave. One of them is that I never read the news, never, good or bad news, nothing. Right now I very rarely see films that I’m in. I never look at entertainment magazines, and I don’t every see a photograph of myself unless it’s purely by chance. I stay away from it all and that helps a lot. So, really what you are concentrating on is the experience of making the film, the experience of working with that director or those actors, if it’s good or it’s bad. Then what they do to a film, because it really is a director’s medium, is entirely up to them.”
Roth’s filmography includes more than his fair share of villainous supporting roles. Coppola's Youth Without Youth provides the actor with not only the chance to play a decent man, but also the responsibility of carrying the film. Asked about that added weight on his shoulders, Roth replied, “It’s different. I felt in talking Francis at the very beginning, it felt to me like an old movie. One of the films I kept in mind was Goodbye, Mr. Chips. And quite a lot of the Alec Guinness movies, early Alec Guinness, The Man in the White Suit, things like that. I never really worried about working every day. I just worried getting this very gentle, very gentle, mild mannered guy, kind of right. I don’t know if he works. I don’t know yet because I haven’t seen it, but really my job was just to get through each day that Francis wanted me to get through.”
Roth’s character Dominic begins to see and converse with his doppelganger following the lightning strike and his subsequent revitalization. Roth plays both characters, a task which at times was a bit confusing. “It messed around with me a lot,” admitted Roth. “Sometimes it would be, ‘Okay, what are we going to do first?’ And [Coppola] would read off the lines of Dominic and I would play the doppelganger. Then we would do another round where someone else would read. Then he said do them all at the same time. You would have to switch from character to character. That was the stuff that always interested me. Then I would say, ‘Who am I?’ and he would say, ‘Well, who do you think that you are?’ Is he just a crazy man? Is all of this just a dream? Is all of this unreal or is it something just going on in his mind? That element of it, that layer of it, for me was very interesting.”
Roth’s still not sure exactly how to interpret that aspect of Coppola’s film. “I don’t know if it’s the same guy or not. I really don’t. I like to think that Dominic is a mad person,” laughed Roth. “But I don’t know if it’s true. That is why, especially with this, what is fun about it and what can be fun about acting, is that it’s truly for the director that you did it. It’s for them to get it to you guys, and to the audience.”
Even his character’s age in the film is still at question in Roth’s mind. “I don’t know if he is young or if he’s old, I quite often say it. I don’t know if he is in the film as 100 years old, but we did him as 100 years old at one point. Dreams of a young man, or dreams of an old man, I’m not quite sure what they were. That was discussion that flew around the set quite often. That was also the fun of the choice, really.”
After completing work on Youth Without Youth, Roth tackled the dramatic film Funny Games with Naomi Watts and then transitioned into a film he did just for his boys – The Incredible Hulk. “I appear on set [and] all I’m asking is, ‘Okay, this has got to be a cool shot for my kids, right?’ ‘Am I going to look cool in this?’ It’s truly about that for me, purely about that. We have done some very cool things. I think it’s going to be fun, I think.”
Still, Roth says his kids are treating him with suspicion. “ ‘So, are you going to be cool then? Is it?’ I could be ridiculed when I walk into school to drop them off. You never know…”
