柯林大叔得獎希望渺茫（笑）、奧斯卡應該也差不多是這樣的結局，因為即使是頒獎典禮、也是個要吃飯的單位。。。身為一個流行文化及藝術殿堂交集的頒獎典禮，罔顧賣埠而只求絕對表現的評審單位。過了幾年、基本上也只能關門回家吃自己（笑）
SO...參與這場饗宴的人、幸與不幸都已經排好名次，但某種程度來說，能夠榜上有名的眾家明星，應該都能屬於幸運的那一群，只是程度不同而已XD
這次的PRESS大多偏好喬治克隆尼奪獎，這幾年沒看喬治大叔的戲、原來演技也精進到成為奧斯卡大熱門，改天應該來補補課、尤其這個題材實在有趣....
但金球獎之前，看著各家媒體與訪談的讚譽，還是很令人欣喜低。。。XD
TOM 跟 COLIN我還是很難兜在一起，他們兩個似乎是同年紀，
看著他們當初接觸到真正工作的情景，演員與導演之間的關係、蠻能感同身受低（笑）
有時候、對這些早已訓練成精的演員來說，越是強勢的導演、工作起來越難開心，所謂的磨、不代表給一堆意見，而是把時間拉長、把演員慣有的習慣或對熟悉表達方式的改變，每個演員不同的時期都有他無窮的潛力，這也是我容易關注到知名度不高演員的原因，在他們身上都可以看到一絲清新的表演方式，少了一些成名代價，這些演員能夠瞬間散發出來的驚喜、有時候遠高於知名演員XD
TOM對COLIN義大利淵源的幽默也是一絕XDDDD
Tom Ford and Colin Firth join forces for A Single Man
A Single Man stars Colin Firth and sees fashion designer Ford turn his hand to directing - with spectacular results
Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man concerns George, a gay, English, 52-year-old professor in California, who is bereft after the death of his lover. As he ponders the possibility of suicide, he starts to see the world afresh, transforming this into a story of beginnings as well as endings. It is fitting, then, that the men who have been instrumental in reimagining Isherwood’s book for cinema should find in the process their own kind of rebirth.
Not that either wants for success. The 49-year-old Colin Firth, who plays George, is cherished for the poignant and humorous understatement he brought to hits such as Mamma Mia! and the Bridget Jones films, although his versatility is demonstrated well in less familiar works such as Where the Truth Lies, in which he played an unsavoury singer, and the Falklands drama Tumbledown. His performance in A Single Man is one of stunning range: he brings to life George’s merry-cum-melancholy friendship with a colourful English divorcée, Charley (Julianne Moore), his cautious fascination with a campus dreamboat (Nicholas Hoult) and the contentment of life with his late lover (Matthew Goode). Firth took home the best actor prize from last year’s Venice film festival; the forthcoming Oscars will surely be a laughing stock if his name is not among the nominees.
While Firth is at the top of his game, the 48-year-old designer Tom Ford is jumping disciplines. This colossus of fashion brought Gucci to its current prominence (he joined the company in 1990 and began his decade-long tenure as its creative director in 1994). Ford, who now presides over his own eponymous fashion house, had long had his antennae out for the ideal film project. The confidence he exhibits in A Single Man, which he directed and co-wrote, makes it clear he found it: every detail is right, from the lush score and the 1960s costumes and architecture to the vision of a sun-baked Los Angeles, watched over by Janet Leigh from a vast Psycho billboard.
Actor and director joined me in a London hotel room to pick over the details of their collaboration. Firth came dressed for comfort in jeans, trainers and a baggy grey sweatshirt. Ford, on the other hand, wore a charcoal suit, a grey tie and glinting cuff links. With his short hair like black ash, and a beard trimmed so close, it could have been pencilled on, he exuded wealth. (One splash of his cologne would probably cost more than the entire hotel.) What became apparent during our conversation was that the men enjoy an easy rapport and harbour a genuine love for the film they have made together.
Related Links
A Single Man: a stunning Venice debut
Ryan Gilbey: Colin, did you receive your prize at Venice with typical British embarrassment?
Colin Firth: Actually, I didn’t at all. I had a particular connection with Italy anyway, as my wife [Livia Giuggioli, a producer] is Italian, so that added to the joy, the charm, of the moment. It didn’t just feel like any old gong, put it that way. My wife’s family took me on trust 15 years ago, so for them it was a special moment. I’d shown up as this very, very dodgy commodity, attached to their darling daughter. When we got together, she told them, “I’ve got this English chap now” — one strike against me. “He’s an actor” — hmmm, oh, dear. “He’s nearly 10 years older” — oh, boy. “And he’s got a kid with someone else.” I had a mountain to climb to win everyone over. So to be standing there with the award — well, everyone in Italy knows what that award means. And I had enough of the local lingo to express how I felt; there’s no other non-English-speaking country in the world where I could have done that.
Was Colin your first choice for the part, Tom?
Tom Ford: Absolutely. But when we were first supposed to be shooting, he was tied up making Dorian Gray. I remember talking to him at the Mamma Mia! premiere. It was so frustrating, because I’d had to cast another actor, and here I was, talking to my first choice. I got in the car afterwards with Richard [Buckley], my partner of 23 years, and I just said, “F***, f***, f***. Goddammit.” Then our shoot got pushed back, Colin became available and things magically came together.
If you swear enough, you often get what you want.
Firth: You can swear them into place, that’s right. I remember Tom staring at me at the premiere.
Ford: I think you thought I was flirting.
Firth: [Laughing] It wasn’t that kind of stare, it was much more enigmatic. What was great was that Tom had this personal and complex story he wanted told, and to have him put that whole thing in my hands was a chastening responsibility. It’s the sort of thing that makes you think, “Okay, I’m going to have to raise my game for this.”
Ford: I knew the perception from the outside world would be that I was a risk.
Firth: But Tom’s not got a record of screwing things up.
If you’re successful at what you do, and you’re gainfully employed, the risk can be that any sense of the unexpected flies out of the window and the whole thing becomes a treadmill. It shouldn’t be like that. The privilege of having
a profile, of getting to work as we do, shouldn’t be allowed to be squandered. And this came at a moment when I absolutely needed something bracing and refreshing. For it to be Tom excited me. The script wasn’t ordinary, either.
Related Links
A Single Man: a stunning Venice debut
In what way?
Firth: It was clearly highly intelligent. There was an emotional potential that wasn’t explicit, which was exciting to me, because I’m there to fill in the gaps. I remember early in the shoot, I was glancing through another script I’d received. A perfectly good script, but it just felt — ordinary. That’s when I realised, “This one’s going to be special.”
Tom, it’s interesting that Colin mentions the “gaps”. Some of the most powerful moments, I felt, simply involved him staring into space.
Ford: Yes. There are so many points in the film where George is internalised; we needed to see on his face, in his eyes, what he’s feeling and thinking. Colin is amazing at that. It was often hard to say “Cut”.
What are you thinking in those moments, Colin? Are you thinking George’s thoughts?
Firth: [Thoughtful] Yes. I mean, as much as that’s humanly possible. If someone shouts “Fire!”, then I’m out of the building. But as much as that subjectivity is possible, absolutely. And I think the relationship between actor and director is critical here. If you work with the wrong director and you’re my sort of actor — well, you’d miss it, really. I don’t enjoy highly demonstrative stuff, and for me to be thinking George’s thoughts, and for Tom to be able to read it, meant that the relationship was working. I felt quite quickly that Tom wasn’t cutting when I expected him to cut. So I could sense someone on the other end. I knew it was getting through.
How did that feel?
Firth: It was kind of galvanising, motivating, inspiring. It made me think, “Right, there’s more to go for now. I can see the world in a certain way, and he can see what I’m seeing.” Also, I’m feeding off what Tom’s set up. The eloquence of the design, costumes and locations was so helpful. And we had that house, which told me a lot of the story. It’s a cosy wooden structure surrounded by trees, but it’s also glass, so it’s exposing. I walk on set and I see where the camera is. It’s outside, looking into the house, and it’s just going to be me at that table with a coffee, and the phone will be ringing. That, for me, is already resonating: I know it’s not going to be a scene about a happy guy setting off for a party.
Ford: George is destroyed inside, so he’s holding himself together, clinging to these physical things — the house, the clothes. He probably had his suits made on Savile Row. So we had those made, and we had the name “George Falconer” sewn inside. You never see the inside of the suit, but it’s all there. I think those things are incredibly important to an actor. Yes, it’s a beautifully cut suit, but it’s brown tweed because he’s a professor.
Firth: That’s the sort of thing I was driving at. The suit told me who George was. There’s nothing like unspoken communication in any collaboration. And on this, thankfully, there were no executives in the background. There was no machinery behind it. What happens when there’s a lot of money at stake is that the producers get involved. They won’t come to you, but they’ll speak to the director. I’ve had that. Absurdly — and I’m not normally the one to bring this up voluntarily — when I was playing Darcy [in Pride and Prejudice], some executives were alarmed that I wasn’t brooding enough. But we’d been shooting the later stages first, when Darcy sort of lightens up. I knew we still had to shoot episodes one to four, in which I was going to do nothing but smoulder and look out of windows. It was ridiculous. I mean, I’d read the damn thing.
Tom, I liked the way George’s situation is mirrored in the other people in his life. Everyone’s at a crossroads here, aren’t they?
Ford: Yes, all the characters are going through change. Charley, for instance, can’t see her future, just as George can’t imagine his. That’s why they’re drawn to each other. They’re book ends of the same character. A lot of women I know today, they play by the rules, they do what’s expected of them, then they end up stranded, like Charley. Men have this well-publicised midlife crisis — leaves his wife, buys a fast car, dates a blonde — but nobody addresses what happens to women in our culture.
Related Links
A Single Man: a stunning Venice debut
There’s clearly great affection in the film for all the characters. It has been said that a director looking through the camera at an actor can feel something like love. Did you find that, Tom?
Ford: Of course. You have to have a crush on every single one of your actors. But they’re also portraying a character — which, in this case, I wrote — so I had a crush on the characters anyway. I said to Colin, “I have such a crush on you.” Now, I have a crush on Colin in real life. Who doesn’t? But that’s not the crush I was talking about. I had a crush on Colin as George. I felt the same way about Julianne. You need to love your characters.
Were you conscious of avoiding the archetypal portrait of the gay man as victim?
Ford: I never wanted him to feel like a victim. Besides, it’s not a gay story, he just happens to be gay.
Firth: It was very little in my mind. I could almost say that, while we were filming, I’d forgotten that “gay” was one of the epithets you could apply to this character. It’s about solitude. And if you change the love interest to a woman, you could still make the same film. The moment when he’s asked not to come to his lover’s funeral — that could be any secret or inappropriate lover.
Ford: It could be an English actor with an Italian family.
Firth: [Laughing] Well, quite. There was a whole big fold that was closed to me until I got hitched and was wearing the ring. There are other things aside from being gay that can isolate you. George makes a big speech about fear, and he identifies that as an invisible threat in society. He’s right. Fear is a useful commodity. Get enough fear out there and you can do what you like — set up a Guantanamo Bay, invade any country.
Ford: You can feel the fear every time you open a fashion magazine. You look at the models and the clothes, and you feel you're a disaster, or you’re not up-to-date enough.
But don’t you perpetuate that fear, Tom, by working in the fashion industry?
Ford: Of course, and that’s something I’ve had to deal with and justify. I think if you keep it in perspective and realise that, yes, we may have a soul and an essence that are not of this world, but we still feel things and touch things, then you can allow yourself to enjoy those things. They add value to the physical side of your life. But you’re right. I don’t know how to justify it. I get an enormous amount of pleasure from visual things. I come into a room like this and I immediately want to rearrange the furniture. That’s what the film is about for me — getting lost in the physical world and losing touch with the spiritual, which is certainly something I’ve experienced.
Firth: What’s strange, to me, is that George has haunted me since I stopped doing the film. I feel he’s around somewhere. I have this slightly irrational thing that happens when you fall for a fictional character — I keep thinking I’m going to run into him somewhere. I want to check in on him, wherever he is, and make sure he’s okay.
A Single Man is released on February 12
身為一個演員，而且是一個透過某部作品才得到極大掌聲的演員，
感謝導演絕對是一件完全必要的行為，這部片子、COLIN得到的掌聲遠遠超過TOM....
許多評論也毫不掩飾他們對COLIN的尊崇、順便再踩TOM兩腳...
但所有演員應該都很清楚，如果不是導演的風格與獨特性，一個演員不可能能夠散發出極佳表演，有時候、導演與演員、反而是彼此牽制的力量，如同一堆爛片。而這個菜鳥導演，或許、他在導演的位置上作到還不夠精準，但反而能夠在作品激發上、與演員達成良好默契與信任，某種程度來說，我幾乎可以理解COLIN對TOM的推崇來自於他無法指導的不作為、但是、在美學與對藝術理解的直覺功力下，TOM卻把空間完全留給演員去自由發揮，極力發揮他們深沈的、表面無法探求的內化過程，藝術的美一向共通。。。誰說不是XD
Firth holds forth
Shortly after filming a pivotal scene in his new film, “A Single Man,” British actor Colin Firth learned a painful lesson. In the scene, Firth’s character, the gay college professor George Falconer, receives a late-night phone call. The voice on the other end of the line says that George’s longtime lover, Jim, has died in a car accident.
And George, for reasons particular to the bigotry of American society in 1962, is not invited to the funeral. In that instant, George’s heart sinks, tears begin to well and the world seems to collapse around him.
On the very day the scene was shot, Firth said in a recent phone interview from his home in London, voters in California narrowly passed Proposition 8, a resolution that prohibits same-sex marriage. It was a crushing defeat for gay rights supporters, which had the unexpected effect of lending this highly stylized period film a sense of modern urgency and relevance.
Indeed, since the film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in September, it has been steadily gathering accolades from critics and audiences the world over. Firth’s performance, a nuanced balance of confidence and vulnerability at which the actor excels, is the subject of mounting Oscar buzz. The film opened locally on Friday.
“It would be very easy to consign that to the follies of the early ‘60s,” Firth said of the jarring scene, “if it hadn’t been for the fact that a law got passed in what we perceived to be an extremely progressive state in the United States, which was one of the most retrograde and bigoted pieces of legislation you could imagine.”
Firth considers the film an important statement against the stigma that surrounds gay relationships to this day.
“There are forces which I think are extremely negative and inhumane out there,” Firth said of the interest groups behind the passage of Proposition 8. “Having said that, I think a film like this can overcome it. I think it overcomes it by being unassumingly frank about homosexuality as being perfectly mainstream in the world in which this is framed.”
In addition to Firth’s performance, the film has grabbed the attention of critics and moviegoers for being the surprisingly assured directorial debut of fashion designer Tom Ford.
In 2004, Ford left Gucci, the Italian fashion house he transformed into a multibillion-dollar enterprise, and turned his attention to filmmaking. He decided to make “A Single Man” after rereading the slim 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood upon which the film is based. After years of scrutinizing Firth’s screen performances, Ford approached the debonair actor about taking on the role. The pitch came out of left field, Firth said, but the unusual nature of the project immediately intrigued him.
“This didn’t speak of a vanity project or the fashion world or the catwalk. This was about a lonely gay college professor in 1962,” Firth said. “I thought, ‘This is not what I’m expecting in any way.’ I didn’t expect to hear from Tom Ford, for a start. I didn’t expect Tom Ford to be making a movie. I didn’t expect him to approach me if he were to make a movie, and I didn’t expect him to do something which sounded so personal.
“I’m lucky enough to have consistently been employed, so I’m usually not afraid of being out of work,” Firth said. “But I might sometimes be afraid of getting bored.”
Firth praised Ford’s approach as a director, which he said was as meticulous as his polished public persona would imply, but also allowed the film’s principal cast — Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode, Nicholas Hoult and Firth — plenty of freedom.
“You can see perfect composition. You can see the perfect judgment when he introduces a music cue, if you’re paying attention, you can. You can see little, tiny, almost inconspicuous jump-cuts. You can see his control of the editing,” Firth said. “But at the same time, you see an awful lot of free space, a lot of shots that just play out, where actors are just left to do what they do, where natural light is allowed to just exist, where he’s not using insecure, cheap narrative effects to try to kind of wrap things up. He’s allowing it to be what it is.”
Firth revealed a perplexing modesty about his looks — and those of the other actors in the film — in saying that Ford “didn’t pick people who looked like the cover of fashion magazines.”
“I’m not saying he picked unattractive people. . . I mean, he made us all look the best we could possibly look, but we are not, you know, designer models, none of us,” Firth said. “I can look pretty bloody awful, I can tell you. It was Tom’s talent that kind of flattered me and all of us.”
Firth’s legion of fans, whom he has consistently charmed and disarmed with his particularly British brand of well-mannered masculinity for nearly 30 years, might disagree. Firth’s appeal as a leading man was cemented in the BBC television miniseries “Pride and Prejudice” and continued in such popular successes as “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Love, Actually” and “Mamma Mia.”
But Firth’s gifts, as he is out to prove in “A Single Man,” have long extended far beyond the realm of the feel-good chick flick. His first screen appearance, opposite Rupert Everett in the 1984 adaptation of Julian Mitchell’s “Another Country,” marked the debut of a serious actor with serious aspirations. Since that debut, Firth has resisted typecasting by appearing in films as diverse as “Apartment Zero,” “The English Patient,” “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” in which he played the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.
The opportunity to play George provided a new challenge for Firth, who will turn 50 in September, but, he suggested, it had far more to do with the character’s journey of loss and redemption than with his sexuality. “You don’t have to be gay to be gay [on film],” Firth said. “This is just a mainstream thing. This is just love.”
Colin Firth proud of 'Single Man'
Colin Firth is George in Tom Ford's "A Single Man."After four changes in the time of the phone call and three disconnects, Colin Firth's distinctive voice finally crackled over the line.
He apologized, in advance, for any inarticulate moments to come. It had been a long day, and he had just come off the set of "The King's Speech" in London, where it was 11:30 p.m. and he was now doing phone interviews with reporters in the States.
But you could hear him rally as he said, "I'm very happy to be talking to you," and proceeded to be gracious, insightful and articulate about his profession and the movie "A Single Man."
It earned him the Best Actor honor at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, nominations for a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award and -- just maybe -- his first chance at an Oscar.
"I thought, this is not in the stars, the Academy Awards. I love their existence, but they're things that happen to other people, and that may still be the case. I'm busy with my day job right now. I'm on a film set, I've been on a film set since the beginning of October. I'm completely immersed in it."
But he is interested in the fate of "A Single Man," the Tom Ford film set in 1962 Los Angeles and now playing at the Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill.
Firth plays a gay 52-year-old college professor struggling to find the will to live -- or die -- after his partner (Matthew Goode) is killed miles away in a car accident.
"I love the film. I'm devoted to it enough to do whatever I can for it. You know it depends entirely on this kind of buzz; it was a tiny film, it was a 21-day shoot, it had a tiny budget and it doesn't have a studio behind it or a big promotional machine," he said.
"It obviously has been bought up for distribution now and there is some buzz accumulating about it. ... It's not going to be pushed by a huge amount of money; it's going to be pushed by word of mouth and film festivals and people saying nice things about it and people relaying their personal responses."
A friend told Firth it left him speechless, and he would have to send him a letter with his thoughts. Firth moved the crew to tears during a scene in which his character, George Falconer, receives the call informing him that his partner of 16 years is dead.
It's a heartbreaking moment in which we witness the emotions wash over and slice through George. Firth credits its power to Ford, the fashion designer and former creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent turned first-time director.
"It's a piece of exquisitely brilliant directing because I think Tom Ford understood something which a lot of very experienced directors don't understand -- I mean, some do, but too many don't -- which is the power of letting an actor have complete freedom."
Nothing in the script said George puts down the phone and the audience watches what happens next. Ford and Firth filled in that gap.
"When I looked at the scene, it worried me a little because one of the hardest things for an actor to do is to start a scene in one emotional state and be completely transformed in front of a rolling camera into another."
George answers the phone as a happy man, thinks he's talking to Goode's character and then realizes it's not just someone else but the bearer of terrible news. "He has to process that news, and by the end of the phone call, he realizes what he's just been told is the end of his world."
Firth initially thought the tears would come later, but it didn't work out that way.
"Tom didn't say cut. ... He wasn't going to say cut until he wasn't interested anymore, and as long as he stayed interested, I stayed interested and I just stayed involved and he actually allowed a whole magazine of film to roll out."
He guesses that could have been 10 minutes. When Firth went into the next room to see how it went, crew members huddled around the monitor were sharing tissues and dabbing at their eyes.
"I thought, I guess something worked, and then Tom said, 'Do you feel like doing that again?' So I went back to happy and the same thing happened again, he rolled out the magazine again," and then they repeated the exercise a third time.
Although it might seem like a gamble for an actor with 25 years of experience to appear in a first-time director's movie, Firth didn't see it that way.
"Tom will tell you I was his first choice -- I'd like to believe that's true," he said. "I think the first conversation I had with my agent was he said people are taking this very, very seriously and you should be flattered that he's interested in you because he's very picky ....
"However much people might watch this movie and think they see Tom's fashion history in it, this is not an obvious marriage of sensibilities. This is about a lonely, suicidal college professor in 1962, this is not about the catwalk or the fashion industry," and that appealed to Firth's sense of adventure.
Its portrait of what a man might make of possibly his last day on Earth is poignant, he suggests. Correctly.
The 49-year-old Brit, whose reputation as a thinking woman's heartthrob was cemented with such projects as "Pride and Prejudice," "Bridget Jones's Diary" and "Love Actually," had read the Christopher Isherwood novel that inspired the movie.
He also was familiar with Isherwood's other writings but, on the subject of preparation, said ruefully, "I think most people don't need to read about grief, I mean, if we haven't experienced it, we're going to. ...
"You are either going to die before all your loved ones or you're going to lose some of them first, there's no getting around it," he said. "I don't think there's a person alive -- an adult alive -- who hasn't experienced loss of one kind or another."
The movie has reminded Firth what it means to be part of a project that is real and personal, although he clarified, "I don't think there's anything wrong with cheap entertainment, by the way. I think it's perfectly legitimate to lift people's spirits or give them a bit of Christmas escapism or help them indulge in a bit of silliness."
"A Christmas Carol" in 3-D or "Mamma Mia!" anyone?
"I think it's all appropriate but when you realize you've stepped into territory which connects with people in a way that is too painful for them to speak about it, it's very sobering."
Director Ford had kept "Single Man," shot in late 2008, under wraps until the Venice Film Festival in September 2009.
"He didn't show it to distributors, he didn't show it around. The very, very, very few people he did show it to got excited about it, and a kind of underground ripple seemed to grow."
In Venice, Ford and Firth were greeted by applause at a press conference ("I mean, I'm not used to applause at a press conference") and a standing ovation after the premiere. The next night, Firth received the Coppa Volpi for best actor.
"It was the first time I'd even been to the Venice Film Festival and to come away with that, was to me as good as it could get in a way," said Firth, who is married to the former Livia Giuggioli and speaks Italian.
"It wasn't the result of a campaign, I wasn't surrounded by rivals and there was no bitterness or anything kind of hanging on, it was just pure in that way. I was also able to give an acceptance speech in the only language in the world, apart from my own, that I'd be able to do that.
"It was an incredible moment."
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10017/1028357-60.stm#ixzz0csleIfzK
NEW movie...
Colin說他年紀越大、接的角色越好、越有趣～～～
I agree....XD
很多習慣好萊塢演法的觀眾大概都會認為Colin的木頭表情比他家窗櫺還硬XD 但偏偏我實在很吃平靜表情下的複雜心思與細微轉念之間的那套。。。XDDD
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