Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. There are two schools of thought when it comes to newcomer Jim Sturgess. You can be in the Capone camp who thinks he’s a black-hole of charisma or you can be with the rest of us that think there’s something special going on with this guy. I really dug his work in ACROSS THE UNIVERSE and I like him in 21, but he hasn’t found his break-out role yet. I feel it’s coming, but all the stars haven’t aligned yet. We started the interview and Kraken asked if it was okay to get some pics for the interview. Sturgess said sure and then put his finger up his nose and said…
Jim Sturgess: If you are going to get one, then you make it good!
Quint: Make it something of legend. So I really dug what you did in ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, by the way.
Jim Sturgess: Oh good, man. Thank you!
Quint: That is a fairly divisive movies.
Jim Sturgess: Yeah and that was the exciting thing about. I mean we kind of knew that going into the film anyway and it wasn’t a shock to us that as many people hated it as loved it. Julie (Taymor)’s take on that is that well… I think she likes it when people don’t like her movies, you know? (laughs) As long as there’s a good balance between people who really like it and people who don’t.
Quint: Yeah and there’s a saying… something like “If you loved it or hated it, what’s important is it made you feel strongly one way or the other.” She definitely strikes me as that kind of filmmaker, too.
Jim Sturgess: Definitely yeah and when all of these bad reviews came out, she was like “don’t worry; at least we made an interesting film.”
Quint: That’s cool. With this one, were you a gambler beforehand?
Jim Sturgess: No.
Quint: Not at all?
Jim Sturgess: Not at all. I mean not at all!
Quint: Never played poker or anything?
Jim Sturgess: No, not really and when you come from England, the only real kind of gambling that you do is, you know, you bet on the horses or you put some money on the dogs or there’s a machine in a pub or something like that, but that is honestly as far into gambling as I kind of got. We just don’t have a place like Vegas anywhere near England, so yeah it was just a whole new world for me in every way possible.
Quint: Have you since? I know you spent a lot of time in a casino. Robert [Luketic] was just telling me that, in between shots, boom operators would be throwing down bets.
Jim Sturgess: Yeah, and I hope Rob told you that he was doing the exact same thing!
Quint: Oh no, he left that part out.
Jim Sturgess: He didn’t say that? Oh right… He was one of the worst actually and the two producers, Dana [Brunetti] and Mike De Luca… they were outrageous man! Unbelievable! (laughs)
Quint: So, did you join in with any of that?
Jim Sturgess: Yeah, of course! It was part of it. That was the deal with the film that our “research” was just to indulge in Vegas life as much as humanly possible. Unfortunately, they didn’t give us any sort of money to play with. We had to use our own money.
Quint: And you’d have to get pretty into this stuff. Because Louisiana is such a big film place now, there’s all of the river boat gambling and I’ve been to a couple of those sets and the people are like “Can I get my per diem? Great!” and then they walk two feet to the thing and…
Jim Sturgess: And it’s gone! It’s too easy to do and it was kind of good, but I made a rule that I would only play blackjack.
Quint: Oh yeah?
Jim Sturgess: Mainly for Jeff’s [Ma] benefit, because that is the only game he can’t play, so I thought I would fill in where he couldn’t stand, so yeah it was…
Quint: Did they know who he was when you went in there?
Jim Sturgess: Jeff?
Quint: Yeah.
Jim Sturgess: Yeah, he can’t play blackjack, I mean when he sits down, people are very aware that he is in the room. That’s my mate and when I read that in a book and then when I actually went to Vegas, it all happened so fast and how easy it is to just be anonymous there… I couldn’t believe it; he caused such a stir in Vegas that he was on this facial recognition system… Have you met Jeff yet?
Quint: Not yet. He’s coming up right after you though.
Jim Sturgess: Right and he’s just such a laid back and easy going guy that you wouldn’t believe that he would create all of this fuss.
Quint: That’s nuts. I used to be a big blackjack player. That was my game and I just lost so much so quickly that now I’m poker. I like playing poker, because I feel like I have control over it and it’s not like we’re playing odds there.
Jim Sturgess: We got to learn a kind of basic strategy to blackjack, so we kind of know when you hit, when you double down, when you split and all of the kinds of things like that, but yeah as far as the card counting goes… there’s just no way.
Quint: It takes a special kind of brain I guess. What’s funny about the movie and probably my favorite scene is the scene where you first sit down and then you actually see the process of counting in your character’s head, where he’s adding up the numbers as they come out and reading the signals and everything…
Jim Sturgess: I think Rob did a great job. As far as that, blackjack isn’t a very interesting game, but the way he filmed it was just amazing.
Quint: It’s funny, because right after poker hit really big, there were these “Ultimate Black Jack” tournaments that were on TV and so they were trying to play up the suspense with that “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” type music and the person bringing out the card… It felt so forced and…
Jim Sturgess: When we were filming, there would be extreme close ups of doing that (he pushes his pointer and middle finger across the table like he’s pushing cards away) and they would be like “do it again” and it’d be like “what are we doing?” Rob was always saying “Just trust me. It’ll make sense when you see the film” and it totally did. It really gets you inside the head of a player, I think, and you feel the tension when a card goes over.
Quint: Yeah and it helps give an insight, without being so mathematical that the audiences can’t keep up with it.
Jim Sturgess: Did you understand the theory of card counting before the film? Did you understand how to count cards, theoretically?
Quint: Not really, no. I had heard about it, but I had never… I had heard that face cards were ten and that stuff, but I never really paid that much attention to it, just because I knew that with the shoes now that it’s kind of impossible to even try to do, although I have eyeballed, at the old strip in Vegas, eyeballed those single deck tables…
Jim Sturgess: Yeah.
Quint: It was like “Oh, maybe I should try to get an idea of what’s going on.” How many films had you done before this?
Jim Sturgess: This is my third film.
Quint: So, have you ever worked with anybody like Kevin Spacey before?
Jim Sturgess: No, not really. I had just done THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL beforehand, so I worked with Natalie [Portman] and Scarlett [Johansson] and Eric [Bana]. They were big time for me.
Quint: Natalie is absolutely adorable.
Jim Sturgess: Yeah. And we became good friends, too. I mean we had to play real brotherly-sisterly type of relationship, which kept going, so I see her every time I’m in New York and we became really good friends, but yeah that was my first experience of like “Wow, these are serious Hollywood actors.” I didn’t know Evan Rachel Wood before I started ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, but I did get out that film THIRTEEN before I started and I don’t know if you have ever seen that.
Quint: THIRTEEN?
Jim Sturgess: Yeah.
Quint: I don’t think so… Oh yeah I know that one, with the tongue poster.
Jim Sturgess: I was just like “I hope she’s not like that in real life…” and she wasn’t, but again working with Kevin [Spacey], for me he’s someone I’ve definitely watched most of my life and he has played some pretty unpleasant characters as well, so I just didn’t know which way he was going to go. I just didn’t know who he was going to be as a person.
Quint: He also seems to be very sharp, too, so it’s like one of “those” people. I’ve had some of those… They set me up to interview John Cleese once and I was just like “I’m going to fumble and sounds like an idiot. I can’t talk to that guy, because he is going to have zero tolerance for me being a dumbass…” I can only imagine what it might be like actually working with someone like Spacey.
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Jim Sturgess: He was cool, though. The minute he found out I had the part, he phoned me up and was kind of like this number showed up on my phone that I didn’t know and I was like “Hello? Who’s this?” and he goes “It’s Kevin Spacey…” It’s like “Holy shit!”
Quint: “It’s Keyser Soze!”
Jim Sturgess: “It’s Keyser Soze!” I think I called him Kev like straight away and it was like “Oh no… he’s just going to hate me,” but then he invited me down to the old Vic Theater in London and we had lunch and went to go see his play and then we hung out a bit after that, so it was nice because I kind of knew him… I felt like I knew him a little bit before we started the project and once you get a few cocktails down him, he’s fine. He’s good for a laugh.
Quint: And then you have enough blackmail material, so he won’t step out of line later.
Jim Sturgess: Exactly. (laughs)
Quint: So what about your group? The main chemistry that has to work in this group… the main chemistry is the entire group and then you have the individual chemistries in between, like how you worked with Kate.
Jim Sturgess: It was a good deal. It was such a young cast, which you know sometimes you can find yourself in a film where you are the only young person there, so it was… and everyone was such a character… Josh Gad, the guy who plays Miles… Aaron Yoo plays Choi… Jacob (Pitts)… Everyone was just such extreme… you don’t get people like that in England, so it was just a blast. We literally hung out and very quickly got on as a group of friends, just because there are so many ridiculous things to do in Vegas. You know, we went out and got drunk and hung out and got up to mischief and then the next day, we were just talking hysterically about all of the shit that had happened the night before and that just instantly created a bond.
Quint: Yeah, Vegas is all about stories.
Jim Sturgess: Yeah, they amount of drunken weddings I saw was unbelievable. You would just watch these people just throw their lives away in more ways than one, one losing a lot of money and then going off to get married and you’re like “That’s a good start! Best of luck with that.”
[Both Laugh]
Quint: So did they do all of the Vegas stuff first?
Jim Sturgess: Yeah we did, which was great.
Quint: That’s how you were really able to get to know everyone.
Jim Sturgess: Yeah and it was good, because the energy was high and everyone was really enthusiastic and I could have worked like that for a bit, but a month and a half in Vegas… I don’t recommend that to anybody.
Quint: I spent two weeks there for a film festival and no matter how much water I drank or no matter how many showers I took, my skin way dry and my lips were continually cracked… You can’t keep yourself hydrated.
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Jim Sturgess: I really thought there was a point when we were filming that I was slowly going insane. I remember looking at Kate [Bosworth] and I was like “I have to get out of here.” My eyes were literally buzzing it was so bad and the audio of the room is like [makes weird noises of dloy machines going off] all fucking day, six days a week… no, seven days a week.
You can’t escape it and because we were filming in the casinos all day and then of course we would go out gambling, because that’s all there is to do in the evening. I was just like “I have got to get out of here man,” so Boston is the perfect remedy for that. I remember there was this one night on a weekend and we all went out and we partied and just got up to whatever you get up to in Vegas and then the next day we were on set pretty much filming exactly what we had done the night before as part of the film, so it was like “I have got to get out of here, man… This is too much.”
Quint: Too much “life imitating art.”
Jim Sturgess: Yeah, it sort of started to blur into one.
Quint: So what do you have next? Do you have anything in the works?
Jim Sturgess: Yeah, I just finished doing a film in Belfast and it is set in the 1980’s and the political troubles that went on there with Sir Ben Kingsley.
Quint: Have you seen THE WACKNESS, yet?
Jim Sturgess: No I haven’t.
Quint: It’s so good.
Jim Sturgess: I hear it’s pretty good, right?
Quint: It’s playing tomorrow night. I don’t know how long you guys are going to be in town.
Jim Sturgess: Oh I want to see it, because Aaron Yoo is in that!
Quint: He’s got a really small part.
Jim Sturgess: I went to see him in New York when he was filming it.
Quint: It’s a great movie.
Jim Sturgess: Ben.. “Sir” Ben was telling me all about that, but yeah it was a really intense film to make over in Belfast. I had never been there before and telling this very politically weighted story about the troubles that happened there amongst the people that it happened to was an amazing experience. It was very intense.
Quint: Do you know what you are doing for summer projects?
Jim Sturgess: Yeah, I’m shooting a film called HEARTLESS in London, which is a bizarre… very hard film to describe, but it’s all set about in London about a boy’s madness in a sort of time of violence. That’s the only way I can really describe it.
Quint: That’s cool… and he’s heartless.
Jim Sturgess: And he’s heartless, yeah.
Quint: He has no heart.
Jim Sturgess: He has no heart. (laughs)
Quint: Cool. Are there any particular genres that you would like to attempt that you haven’t done yet?
Jim Sturgess: I don’t reallyt think about it in genre form, so if the story is not good then that’s kind of enough. I supposed I’ve done the “musical” and the “period” and the “Vegas” movies now.
Quint: Thanks so much for talking to me. It was good meeting you.
Jim Sturgess: So, you are meeting Jeff now, right?
Quint: Yeah.
Jim Sturgess: Don’t believe a word he says!
And that rounds out my 21 interviews… Still have a good 6 or so other interviews in the pipe-line, so keep an eye peeled… plus I have 3 different big visits to share. They’ll all hit next week.
Stay tuned!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
