Aggielife
Page 3 • Wednesday, October 14, 1999
Closer at
r of AMERICAN BEAUTY
, , . ( .
PHOTOS COURTESY OF DREAMWORKS PICTURES
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) takes flak from his wife (top) and gets buff (bottom) for his
|tai|hter’s best friend in the new release from DreamWork’s Pictures’ American Beauty.
Kevin Spacey established himself as one of Holly
wood’s most gifted actors with his Oscar-winning role
in 1993’s The Usual Suspects. Known for his ability to
lose himself in a character, Spacey went on to star in
such films as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
and The Negotiator.
8 His new film, American Beauty, has opened to
widespread critical acclaim and box office success
across the country and has many people saying his
name and Academy Award in the same sentence
again. The Battalion participated in an interview with
the actor as he talked about his latest film and the
character he plays, Lester.
a When you take on a character, you al
ways have a different look. How do you
prepare for a character role?
It starts with usually a discussion. Sometimes
you might have a notion of how somebody might
look, just from reading it. Or, in fact, it might be de
scribed by the writer. It usually starts with a discus
sion with the director. How do you see this charac
ter looking? How do you see them dressing? Do they
have a particular walk or way of moving that’s dif
ferent? So I usually try to collaborate with the direc
tor. Then you have other people come on. You have
a production designer who decides how your desk
in your office is going to look and a costume design
er who may bring in a huge rack of stuff. All of
those things go in to make a sort of image and a
picture of what someone will look like. Hopefully
you do it in connection with all the other depart
ments. You’re not showing up in a jacket that,
against that wallpaper, looks like hell.
In this movie, there was this transformation that
Lester had to go through, and we didn’t have the
luxury of shooting in sequence. In the morning, we
created Lester, and we had his kind of pear-shaped,
defeated pasty look with slightly larger costumes
and really white, horrible makeup. I slumped a
great deal. And then in the afternoon. I’d be shoot
ing the later stuff. I had to be in the best shape pos-
| sible during the whole shooting of the movie. We
just sort of created the earlier stuff in the movie
through performance.
a When you were shooting some of the
earlier stuff later in the day, would you
go work out?
It’s embarrassing to admit, but we had a muscle
truck. It was like a roving gym. It was a big moving
van, but they made a gym out of it. I’d go in there
before a particular scene — we had target dates for
particular scenes — so we worked toward the target,
I and the trainer, knowing I had to have a certain
kind of build for that next two weeks. If they needed
me to be a little bloated, he would let me go out and
eat pizza and banana splits and all sorts of stuff.
Since there was never a moment in the screen
play when there was an epiphany, or a sudden
change, we never wanted the audience to see him
change. We wanted there to be an almost seamless
and organic evolution of who he became.
a Mentally, what makes you draw into
this Lester character?
I just think I understood, maybe like most people
do, the feeling of wanting to break out and do new
things. I was on that sort of journey for the last cou
ple of years, and this gave me the opportunity to go
to a new place. 1 think everybody understands the
feeling of wanting to shake it up and try new things.
Who wouldn’t want to tell their boss what they’re
really thinking about them?
a
Lester’s transformation was shaped by
the music of his youth — What kind of
music shaped your youth?
A lot of that music I loved, and Sam (Mendes, di
rector) was very specific about music very early on
about the kind of cuts he was going to try to get.
The first issue in movies is “can you get the rights?”
Will the songwriter or their estate let you use it? We
got very lucky with a lot of cool music. You forget
the ’70s and the trajectory of what that music was
and all the artists. We found something in common.
We say “Wow, that’s the kind of music I would lis
ten to in my garage.” So I listened to a lot of the sim
ilar stuff that Lester listened to. He’s two years older
than me.
see Spacey on Page 5.
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