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Features
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From Deadwood to Dead Journalist
While his HBO series is intended for the dads and granddads, 63-year-old Lancashire native Ian McShane is making sure to leave room on the big screen for the grandkids.
Tuesday, August 1, 2006 at 4:30 PM
By Daniel Robert Epstein
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Jeffrey Mayer/Wireimage.com
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A lot of reasons these days to be smiling
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When it comes to the HBO series Deadwood, actor Ian McShane is used to getting the script for the next episode only a day or two before shooting is set to begin, via e-mail from producer David Milch. So the idea of having to work on a Woody Allen film with the benefit of only the pages of dialogue involving his character, Strombel, was in many ways a piece of cake.
“Actually, Woody asked me if I'd like to read the rest of the script for Scoop, and I said no,” McShane reveals during a recent interview with FilmStew. “In fact, when I see the film, I'd like to see only the scenes I'm in.”
Like most actors who’ve had the chance to work on a Woody Allen project, McShane can recount a brief but memorable audition experience with the 70-year-old filmmaker. In his case, it lasted all of 90 seconds.
“He looked me over and just liked what he saw, and that was it,” the actor recalls. “The next day, I was going to back to London, but then the script arrived with a nice deprecating note saying, ‘You might not want to do this, but I'd like you to do it.’ I said yes and six weeks later, we're in England doing the movie.”
”What you associate with Woody Allen is the rather nebbish-y Brooklyn kind of guy, but that's not him at all,” McShane continues. “He's very self-deprecating, quiet, charming; he lives his own life. The way he directs, you don't know he's there. He plans the scene ahead with the cameraman, and he just expects you to know your lines. There's very little directing.”
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Jon Funiss/Wireimage.com
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The hardest working man in Manhattan show business
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“There were a lot of English character actors there, and they were expecting a director who was going to give some magical direction, when in fact it's a very simple process. We finished by mid-afternoon most days, so we could go back and have cucumber sandwiches and tea.”
McShane doubts Allen has ever seen an episode of Deadwood, where, he reports, on-set improvising is strictly forbidden. In the case of Scoop, the actor felt no need to embellish upon the written word either, even though he was encouraged to do so by Allen. He simply reached back to some localized, fifth estate inspiration.
“There was a wonderful English reporter who I’ve known on and off, named Ross Benson,” McShane explains. “He died a year and a half ago, but he'd done everything. He'd been in three wars: Vietnam, World War I and World War II. He was like that hard-drinking, been-everywhere type, and I modeled my look slightly after that.”
Chances are Benson, during his career in the reporting trenches, resorted more than a few times to colorful language. And as Deadwood gets ready to wrap itself up by means of a couple of two-hour movies instead of a fourth season, Al Swearengen’s fondness for swearing continues to be the occasional topic of conversation. For example, older generation western actors such as James Garner and Robert Duvall have made no bones about their disapproval of this HBO flavoring.
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Michael Sullivan/Wireimage.com
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Deadwood creator Milch
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“I don't know if it is the actual way they talked,” McShane confesses. “Milch says it is, but Milch is a force of nature. I'm sure they didn't speak the way they did in Gunsmoke, either, but as Jon Voight said, ‘If you're going to print the truth or the myth, you print the myth. It's much better.”
“I think it's a combination of being a style choice as well as a reality,” he adds. “I don't think they swore probably as much as we do, but on the other hand, it's very much a part of the landscape of the program and it's very deliberate. The swear words are not put in willy-nilly. If you put one of those words in the wrong place, you really are f*cked, because there’s a rhythm.”
Recently, McShane has begun inhabiting the part of another frontier scoundrel, albeit one whose genealogy encompasses the likes of Danny Kaye, Boris Karloff as well as countrymen Bob Hoskins and Tim Curry. “It'll be something my grandkids can see, for once,” says McShane with a smile of his voiceover part as Captain Hook in next year’s Shrek the Third. “I've done three days of voice recording now.”
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Jeffrey Mayer/Wireimage.com
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We Are Marshall director McG
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“On the first day, you don't meet anybody else,” he says. “You do all your lines on your own. But there are all these animators, these 17 nerds looking at you when you record. Also, [DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey] Katzenberg asked me to do a voice for Kung Fu Panda, with Dustin Hoffman and Jack Black. I play the bad evil snow leopard or whatever. I’m, also going to be a sad Russian giant in Henry Selick’s Coraline.”
On the live action side of things, McShane has just completed the drama We Are Marshall, starring Matthew McConaughey and directed by McG. The actor plays one of the biggest boosters of the Marshall University football team in West Virginia, whose glory days are suddenly undone by a tragic plane crash.
Overall, McShane does not expect to find too many more roles or projects as rich as Al Swearengen and Deadwood. But such is the life of an actor, he says; you must enjoy those rare opportunities if and when they come along.
“Deadwood’s acclaim is due to David Milch,” the 63-year-old Lancashire native insists. “There's nobody like David, just like there's nobody like Woody Allen. It takes 15 days to shoot an episode of Deadwood and that was one of the contentious reasons why the show was abruptly halted. It is a very expensive show to do.”
“I think the two, two-hour movies are going to be good,” McShane predicts. “Because the way the series is structured, literally every episode is one day in Deadwood. So two hours gives whoever directs the time and space to do a movie. You can tell more in a fluid two-hour movie than you can in a one-hour TV episode.”
“In real life, Deadwood burned down twice. I think David will have it burn down. Deadwood itself is another character in the show. Milch is trying to tell how civilization came to this part of the West in this extraordinary time, and how American capitalism began.”
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