Jamie Bell On ‘Donnybrook,’ ‘Rocketman’ & Not Overcooking A Performance [Interview]

Often little movies come and go with great performances with established actors that get seriously overlooked.  A textbook case of this is Tim Sutton’s “Donnybrook”, starring Jamie Bell, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last September and just hit theaters in New York and Los Angeles this weekend.

Adapted from Frank Bill‘s novel, it follows a young impoverished father (Bell) who is desperate to raise the funds to get his wife (Dara Tiller) into a drug rehab center.  His best shot is a Donnybrook, a local illegal cage fight where the last standing participant gets a huge cash sum.  His journey becomes complicated by the fractured relationship between his wife’s dealer, Chainsaw (Frank Grillo), and Chainsaw’s increasingly desperate sister, Delia (Margaret Quailey).   It’s a dark, stylized drama, but the work from Bell, Grillo and Quailey (as well as some very young child actors) is quite impressive.

Bell, who will also star as Bernie Taupin in Dexter Fletcher’s “Rocketman” later this year, jumped on the phone last week to discuss Sutton’s thriller, his craft, Lars Von Trier, David Fincher and the Elton John fantasy biopic.

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The Playlist: Let’s talk about “Donnybrook.”  I finally caught it, and it’s a really impressive directorial effort by Tim. The performances are incredible, but it is a dark movie. When you read the script what appealed to you about it? 

There’s a nobleness that the character has, I think, overall, that was kind of overarching. And I’m a relatively young father, and that always shouts to me very loudly when I read material [like this] cause I take fatherhood very seriously. And I think parenting is difficult, and certainly under the circumstances of “Donnybrook” where this woman has an intense drug addiction and these two children are not his own, and yet he’s the kind of breadwinner and the only way he knows how to make money is through physical violence, which puts his life on the line. There’s just something about that expression of parenthood that I thought was so extreme, and the desperation in it felt very noble, even though, morally, you could say his compass doesn’t always point north. I think something about trying to educate this young man, and what it means to be a man, and the idea that nothing comes for free, there’s no such thing as a free lunch except in a mousetrap, maybe. That the world will always expect something of you, and it will take from you, and you have to fight back. I just thought it was a kind of interesting analogy. I also think that Tim’s writing has some kind of magic to it. I mean, he writes very eloquently, very economically, and he manages to find beauty in the brutality. I knew it would be quite good visually.

It certainly is.

David Ungaro is a really good DP and I was very kind of forthright with Tim that we have to find someone amazing to shoot the movie otherwise it just doesn’t work. So a combo of all those things. Tim also just feels like a bit of a rebel. He wants to make a movie that shocks people and divides people. I think he’s certainly managed to do that.

I saw that you and Tim are going to work on another film together.  Is the fact he bucks trends one of the reasons why?

I think he has a unique voice. His voice is very distinct, clearly, but I think he has much more of a European sensibility when it comes to his films. I think he’s always trying to hone that more and more and be allowed to express that more loudly. I think certain distributors or producers always get a little nervous when you start to go into a little [more of an] artistic direction versus a commercial direction. But he certainly has all those leanings, and I appreciate that, cause those are my type of movies. So this will be kind of an extension of that and going further into that world. And I adore working with him. The amount of freedom that he gives you is out of control. I’ve never felt I’ve had more authorship over a character and a performance then he managed to give me.

In what sense?  He wouldn’t give specific direction?

I felt that he would step in when he needed to, but for example, there were scenes where we would do the scene, we’d run the scene a couple times, and then I kind of knew that the tone sometimes that he was looking for might not necessarily be reflected in his dialogue or whatever. I think you can only take writing so far before a performer has to take over and own everything and invent, and he was very willing to allow us to invent. He was also like, “I’m never gonna do any coverage.” So like, “I’m never gonna come in and set a close-up,” or “I’m never gonna come in and do an over the shoulder to cover Margaret and come back on you.” He never wanted to do any of that, and I, as an actor, really admire that, because it makes my job a lot easier. I think the conventional way of covering scenes becomes so exhaustive for an actor. Suddenly all spontaneity is lost, is gone, completely. I think a scene should be shot wide, and kept wide, and held in ones for as much as possible, and do few takes. That’s the way I think I work best, and that’s the way he clearly wanted to capture it as well.

So you don’t get nervous that there might not be another shot or angle in case you weren’t happy with an earlier take?

I do, so long as the take is long. It’s very similar to Lars von Trier, right? Lars von Trier roams about and he doesn’t give you anything, zero, like nothing at all. The prop people will tell you where your bits and pieces are, but then the camera’s just rolling, and the only thing he’ll say is, “Just go back to the beginning. Start again.” And some of his takes will last for 20 minutes. The thing for an actor is, within that 20 minutes, you felt like you really got to sit and explore and breathe and be relaxed. I think there’s something about the conventional way of filmmaking which is, “O.K., action. Cut.” And that was 30 seconds that you got to be in that moment. You always sense that the continuity person is pressing that button on the stopwatch and coming up to you and saying, “You know what, that was actually bordering on one minute 30 seconds. We might need to speed it up a bit.” And that’s just not what life is. It’s very difficult to really put yourself in the moment unless someone gives you the space. Actors are usually the last people to get the space and we get it for a very short amount of time.  And we’re told when to stop, exactly. So, I think there’s something in the idea of letting it breathe and then also not overcooking it. By take 10 you’ve started to exhaust some things, and you’ve lost some immediacy, I think.

Does that mean a director who wants to do 20 or 30 takes is your worst nightmare? 

My wife worked with Fincher, my sister-in-law worked with [David] Fincher and my best friend worked with Fincher. They all consider him, obviously, one of the greatest filmmakers they’ve ever worked with. To me, I mean, I love Fincher, but I don’t think I’d be able to do that. Just technically speaking, I don’t think I would. With Fincher, we’ve all seen those kinds of video analyses of his work and how he does it. There’s clearly something about motion meets action meets behavior. It’s like a mathematical equation that all has to be kind of perfect. Like Jonathan Groff is a friend of mine, and he does that “Mindhunter” show. I wonder what that’s like. I have no idea. But it sounds very difficult, and I would be very nervous about that.

Let’s get back to “Donnybrook” for a moment. The film obviously climaxes with the Donnybrook itself and this cage fight featuring multiple people that is somewhat intense.  Was it choreographed? How was it planned out?

Very, fortunately, I think Tim picked a DP who has really good artistic integrity but then also had literally come fresh off a fight movie. He’d done “A Prayer Before Dawn” which is a film that I really admired and thought, again, had that really beautiful brutality to it. So we needed him, and he was never nervous about it. The Donnybrook was all shot in one night. That was the last day of filming. So every single fight, every moment in that sequence is all in one day’s filming, which is just insane. But also we had a very trusting stunt coordinator, who employed these people who were MMA fighters and were actually legit professional fighters, and just said, “Run some combos. I’m not gonna give you exact moves or instruction. Just make sure you guys are making eye contact before you throw fists or knees, and be ready to get out of the way.” It was very kind of messy, in that sense. I really dislike fighting scenes. I really don’t like doing them. They’re horrible, they’re physically exhausting. You have to do them a bunch of times. They’re the last thing that is interesting about anything to me. So, it was kind of a little bit chaotic in there, but that’s what Tim wanted. He wanted a sense of lawlessness. He always said that if, when that gunshot goes off, if we don’t descend into chaos, then the whole movie kind of dies and falls apart. So hopefully that kind of sense of anarchy and chaos comes through. But, you know, this is a tiny movie. It was shot in one day. [Quentin] Tarantino would take, you know, two weeks to shoot that sequence.

But there’s a very emotional moment sort of at the climax of the fight that’s integral to your character’s storyline. Was that something where Tim said, “O.K., we’re gonna get to this point, and shoot it like this to give it that dramatic arc,” or did that just happen on set spontaneously?

No, it just happened. There are a couple little beats in there, you see this beef with Frank where he tells me what he’s done. That kind of came out of nowhere, and I felt relatively unprepared for that. And then, I knew it was coming. I knew that that moment had to be shot that day. I knew that we had to because we were shooting in Ohio. I knew, to get out of Ohio, which I was desperate to do because I was flying backward and forwards. I’ve never been more disrupted on a movie shoot.  I was flying in and out because I had a movie that year that I was promoting and pressing and everything. It was a nightmare.  I knew that we were going to shoot that scene that night before I left.  I was so nervous about that scene anyway, but there was nothing special about it. Tim didn’t even talk to me beforehand, there was no kind of special conversation. And I look at that moment go, “I still didn’t quite get it properly.” It would’ve been ideal if we could’ve come back to that and done it another night. It’s a tough apex moment that’s quite operatic. A lot of the movie operates on a very realistic tone, especially for me. That was something that I really wanted to drive. I didn’t want it to feel like performance; I wanted it to feel like almost a documentary, in a way. But that is very heightened. So I don’t know. I don’t know how to fucking do that stuff. I just swung for the fences.

I wanted to ask about “Rocketman” and playing Bernie Taupin. You did an interview at the BAFTAs where you talked about meeting him. What was that experience like?

Yeah, sure. So, when “Billy Elliot” premiered in Cannes back a hundred years ago or whatever it is, I met Elton John for the first time after that screening and he was weeping. He was just blubbing and was so moved and that film really meant the world to him. I think predominantly because of the relationship between Billy and his father. I think the relationship between his own father was quite difficult and turbulent. So that was kind of my first point of contact, and then flash forward through the decades, Elton John writes the “Billy Elliot” musical, he’s kind of somehow cosmically tethered to me forever. And then I just received the script. Lee Hall has written the script, he also wrote “Billy Elliot,” so that kind of feels apropos. And I read it, and I loved how ambitious it was and how different it was. It felt kind of anarchic again. I couldn’t actually believe that Paramount was gonna go down this rabbit hole with this kind of a film and I wanted to be a part of it. I then met Bernie, went up to Santa Barbara to see him. He actually wrote a memoir of his childhood, which was, for me, incredibly useful. You know, their relationship has endured. It’s endured through many decades, and their work stands for itself. They can still look at each other in the eye, and they both love each other still and Elton always calls him out at concerts and stuff. I hope the film remains as anarchic a film as what we shot, that’s my hope. Because there’s no other way of telling an Elton John film without having that kind of ride, you know? So, we’ll see. We’ll see. But it was really fun to do. Really fun.

“Donnybrook” is now playing in limited release.  “Rocketman” opens nationwide on May 31.