Brendan Gleeson

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Brendan Gleeson & Don Cheadle Interview For ‘The Guard’

By kishor212 on | From flicksandbits.com

‘The Guard’ is a hilarious, fish out of water tale of murder, blackmail, drug trafficking and rural police corruption. Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is a small-town cop with a confrontational personality, a subversive sense of humour, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes, and absolutely no interest whatsoever in the international cocaine-smuggling ring that has brought FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) to his door. However, despite the fact that Boyle seems more interested in mocking and undermining Everett than in actively working to solve the case, he finds that circumstances keep pulling him back into the thick of it.

First his tiresomely enthusiastic new partner McBride disappears, then his favourite hooker attempts to blackmail him into turning a blind eye, and finally the drug-traffickers themselves try to buy him off as they have every other member of the local police force. These events unwittingly offend Boyle’s murky moral code. He realises that he needs to take matters into his own hands, and the only person he can trust is Everett. And so the scene is set for an explosive finale. Directed and written by John Michael McDonagh, ‘The Guard’ is out now in the US, it opens in UK cinemas August 10th.

The character you play, he certainly has a strong sense of justice, what stood out about him for you?

Don Cheadle: I love that he gets over there and he sort of gets the piss taken out of him, he’s knocked down a couple pegs. It’s funny to see that he gets over there and he doesn’t know who the people are, he doesn’t know much about them, he isn’t very interested at all, he’s just trying to follow his case. Then he runs into somebody who he cannot get around, not only who he cannot get around, but actually someone who has more information than anyone over there – and he knows it better than my character knows it. So there’s an affinity on that level. But they’re completely opposite, antithetical to one another.

Brendan, you’ve played a number of real-life individuals, Winston Churchill, Michael Collins. How does that differ from playing a fictional character?

Brendan Gleeson: There’s two ways of looking at it, obviously you can embrace something in a fiction, it’s all yours – it’s the writers, the directors and it’s yours. On the other hand if you take something like Churchill and Collins, because their lives have been so extraordinary, you can suspend disbelief immediately. It has happened, so you suspend disbelief, so the most remarkable things that happen in history – they say truth is stranger than fiction – it liberates the character from any suspicion that this couldn’t happen.

Don, you’ve worked with so many ensemble casts, the Ocean movies, Boogie Nights, Iron Man 2. This film has a very intimate feel to it, a lot of two person scenes. Do you enjoy that kind of more intimate filmmaking?

Don Cheadle: I enjoy it all. The difference between something like this and something like Oceans, where you have all the bells and whistles, all the amenities, trailers, whatever else you need at the tip of your fingers. This is a movie where everyone is there because they love the script. They love the story. They wanna see this come off. That kind of reminds you why you do this – lets just put this show in the barn kind of thing (laughs). People are there because they really believe in the material. That feels like a family, you’re all in the trenches together to make this thing.

You are both so great in this together. Did you have a lot of rehearsal time to get that chemistry right?

Brendan Gleeson: We had one meeting in LA, that we managed to get together with John. The three of us sat in a room and read the script, had a laugh about it, talked about it and chucked stuff back and forth. But that was it really. I just knew from the beginning, he’s such a great actor, such a great contributor to any work. We both knew that there wasn’t going to be some sort of competition on set, any of that dumb stuff that can happen (laughs). Where people try to create their own spaces, this was something we had to co-inhabit. So we went at it from the beginning, he arrived over and the weather was apocalyptic, basically that was the enemy (laughs).

Don Cheadle: We did hang out every-time after we wrapped. No matter what time it was we’d go to the pub, get a pint, hang out, get to know each other. Every weekend I’d golf so I saw a lot of Irish golf courses which is great. I really wanna go back and do that. Brendan was a great host while I was over there. It was a lot of fun, we hit off right away. We were really embraced by the community as well.

Is it more freeing to work with a director that wrote his own material like how John did with ‘The Guard?’

Don Cheadle: It can be a double edged sword, sometimes you run into people who have written their material that are directing it that don’t want a syllable changed, they want every inflection exactly as they’ve written it down. John was not that way about the material, he was very open to it flowing and breathing – but really there wasn’t that much improv necessary, the script was there. The characters were fully realised, the story was taut, it was a complete piece from the very beginning. I knew if we just showed up and did what…kind of the Bible dictated we’d have a good shot.

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