Mcgregor revels in making the ordinary remarkable
TORONTO — Ewan Mcgregor sits in a large lounging chair facing the Toronto skyline and conjures the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock. “It feels a bit like Rear Window,” he says, offering his smart, somewhat boyish, smirk.
Yes, and I’m Grace Kelly. At least for the next 15 minutes, because, as Mcgregor talks about his latest project opposite Emily Blunt, the ghost of Jimmy Stewart seems to land on his shoulder.
“I love Jimmy Stewart,” says Mcgregor. “I grew up watching films from the ’ 40s and ’ 50s, and I love watching his films. They are my favourite. I adore him.”
Mcgregor says it was Stewart’s ability to seem ordinary that made him so remarkable, and it’s a talent he worked at himself while he was shooting Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, director Lasse Hallström’s latest feature that opens in select cinemas Friday.
In the film, Mcgregor plays a character Stewart could have owned: a modest, mild- mannered fisheries scientist who ends up working with a Yemeni sheik in the hopes of introducing salmon to the droughtafflicted Arab nation.
Based on the book by Paul Torday, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is part satire, part romance, but also part meditation on the nature of faith.
Mcgregor plays Dr. Alfred Jones, the uptight science guy whose world is turned upside down by the sheik ( Amr Waked) and his beautiful and spunky assistant, Harriet, played by Emily Blunt.
Dr. Fred is certain the fish species will never survive in the hot, arid environment, but eventually, he comes to believe in the project against all odds — with a little help from the ever- optimistic sheik, and his bright- eyed assistant.
Hallström says the movie is a metaphor for the larger human experience, as it follows the life cycle of the feisty fish species that insists on swimming against the current in order to keep life going.
“[ Dr. Fred] has this idea of creating something good, and it’s misunderstood,” says Hallström. “The need for faith; we need to have faith in something. That’s what makes us move forward: some kind of faith.”
Hallström says even the act of fishing is a demonstration of faith, because you can be there for hours with a line and a fly, with nothing but a latent belief that a fish will eventually bite.
“It’s a movie about the importance of believing that the dream is possible,” he says. “After all, that is sort of the premise for hope and love.”
Hallström says he had to really absorb the message of the movie in a personal way, because every step along the way brought a new challenge. One of the biggest snags was weather. After the crew built a large set for the Yemeni pisci-culture project, giant storms in the Atlas Mountains washed the work away in a matter of minutes, threatening the entire shoot.
“The set was destroyed,” says Hallström. And even though the veteran director of such films as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and My Life as a Dog had seen tough times before, he wasn’t expecting such a continuous string of challenges. He came close to throwing in the towel, but he realized he’s in the business of making dreams come true.
“Society is cynical,” he says. “But cinema loves dreamers.”
Hallström never surrendered, and you can feel the persistence of vision behind every single frame of this charming yarn that swims in shallow water, but finds a deep message.
“The film dreams that impossible dream that East and West could unite,” says Hallström. “It’s a great dream to have. If hope dies, it’s not a good thing; you have to dream to move forward.”
Mcgregor says everyone on the set felt the same pulse of optimism on the project, but, as an actor, the job is always the same, regardless of scale, budget or message.
“Our job is, very simply, to inhabit someone else for a little bit,” he says. “And if you are working with good people and a director who gives you space to let it happen, you can feel like you are in someone else’s shoes for a while.”
Ultimately, Mcgregor says this is a good thing, because it forces an actor to find empathy in places the average soul might not.
“Most of the time, I’m interested in real people in a real situation,” he says. On the surface, Fred might seem a little too much of a caricature to register as real, but Mcgregor worked hard to flesh out his fishy personality.
He gave him “the most uptight” accent in Scotland — apparently a Morningside accent, generally associated with Edinburgh. “It’s really not a sexy accent at all,” says Mcgregor.
He also worked hard to build a boring backstory that included a marriage without passion and a deep interest in cold- blooded animals.
“Safe is what you know,” says Mcgregor. “And I don’t like the feeling of acting in a safe way.”
The actor points to recent forays with Mike Mills on Beginners and Roman Polanski on Ghost Writer as pure examples of walking into the unknown. “You begin to feel like a different actor,” says Mcgregor.
Right now, he’s still feeling a little Jimmy Stewart as he sits in the chair peering on to Toronto’s Front Street, because he’s ever the perfect gentleman. He says he’s never used his celebrity as a doorbell, not even when he ended up on the same plane as his co- star Blunt.
Before they started working together, neither one of the stars felt comfortable enough to introduce themselves. “I saw Emily on the plane and I said to my wife, ‘ I think that’s Emily Blunt up there,’ and when I told Emily that story, she said she’d done the exact same thing to her husband John [ Krasinski].”
Mcgregor smiles. “She’s lovely. We had great fun together ... and if you get on well with people, magic comes out of it.”
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal this weekend, with other cities to be announced.