A Conversation with Gérard Rudolf: Episode 3
Welcome to Talking Movies, I’m Spling. We continue our conversation with actor, writer, director, photographer, and poet Gerard Rudolph, who has been working and creating for three decades now.
The very first album that I owned was the soundtrack of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Morricone, yeah. Yeah, Ennio Morricone, you know, that compilation thing, yeah. So, I mean, that’s a film that you really loved.
I want to hear about a film that you absolutely loved, and then I want to hear about one that you absolutely can’t stand.
Off the top of my head, there’s so many movies that I absolutely adore, hundreds of them, but the one that I always come back to is a film by Giuseppe Tornatore. I wonder what happened to him.
The Italian filmmaker who made Cinema Paradiso, etc. I mean, he made a film, oh, I can’t remember, early 2000s perhaps, and it’s called Una Pura Formalità, Pure Formality, and it starred Gerard Depardieu and Roman Polanski. It’s just a fantastic, fantastic film, if you haven’t seen it.
And I think the film that I always come back to that I hate most in the world is Love, Actually. I can’t stand that guy’s movies. I don’t even want to say his name. I don’t know why. It just irks me, that film, from beginning to end, because I don’t think that it has anything to do with my view of what this dream is all about. That seems unfair, but it’s so subjective, obviously.
But I remember seeing that film in London, on Leicester Square, and my girlfriend at the time had a running argument out on the street after that movie, me feeling quite thwarted that I had to pay so much money to sit in that beautiful cinema and watch such a rubbish film, when I could have seen so many other films that night.
Yeah, I think that film specifically, the heartwarming element and the sappiness of it is coming through really strongly. But I think Bill Nighy is the sort of secret weapon to undercut a lot of all of that that’s going on.
Absolutely. I mean, you know, Bill Nighy is due. He’s a genius.
Still, Labia Theatre. What’s your favourite thing about that cinema?
The favourite thing about that cinema is that it is old, that it is an institution, that it is nostalgic. It still smells like the cinemas I remember from when I was a child.
The first time I went there, I was probably about 10 years old with my late brother. I can’t remember what we saw that day. But essentially, it hasn’t changed. And that’s what I like about it. I’m a Taurus. I don’t like things changing too much.
I like familiarity. I like beautiful things in the lobby of the main cinema for me is absolutely beautiful. It’s not overly ornate, like you might have found earlier in the century, because all those cinemas have disappeared from our landscape. But that one still has that feel of the old world. And it’s a little bit crummy. And I love it. Absolutely love it.
It’s a bit out of time, you know?
Yeah, it’s a bug house, you know, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with that term, but that’s what my parents used to call these old decrepit cinemas, bug houses. And I love it.
And that’s where you should go and watch movies. You should watch movies in spaces like that, because the walls are just permeated with cinema.
Can you tell us a little bit about the South African perspective?
Yeah, well, no, I mean, I’ve had maybe two or three projects where we rehearsed maybe for a week or five days before we started shooting.
Kanarie was one of them. I think we rehearsed for a week or 10 days or something before we actually started. But that was just purely to get used to the working method, doing long takes with a camera and stuff like that.
But it is an absolute luxury. And it’s a luxury in the States as well. It’s a luxury in the film industry internationally.
So if you hear, you know, whenever actors, even very well-known actors, Robert Downey Jr., et cetera, talk about rehearsal time, they talk about it with such a sense of being grateful for that time to prepare. In South Africa, it gets rough sometimes. I mean, you know, you get cast on a Sunday and by Friday, you’re in front of the camera having to play a very complex character.
So prep time means a different thing for us, that you really need to get to the crux of something very, very quickly before the cameras roll. And it’s a high pressure situation that you need to deal with immediately. And I feel sometimes it’s detrimental to our depictions of characters sometimes as well.
It could have been so much better. First of all, if we had more time to shoot the film, if we had a little bit more time to prepare. I mean, I had a lovely shoot end of year before last on Devil’s Peak, where we had two cameras rolling on every scene.
We shot maybe two scenes a day. So you could really, really get to the crux of a scene. We’re still shooting fast, but it felt like we could take our time and it made the world of difference. You could correct yourself after a take. You could actually have a discussion with the director, Jozua Malherbe… he’s just a lovely director as well. A very intelligent man and knows exactly what he wants, but he’s so open to actors bringing something. That was a rare one. I had such a good time on that shoot. I didn’t want to leave the set at the end of the day, you know. Which is rare for me.
So just coming into land now. And I just wanted to, before we sign off, where can listeners follow your career or catch up on all things Gerard Rudolf?
You can catch me on Instagram, Gerard.Rudolf, Rudolf with an F. You can catch me on Facebook, where I post all kinds of interesting stuff, film related, art related, and so on and so forth. But my photographs are on Instagram at Gerard.Rudolf.
