CraveOnline: How did you go about creating a look for Abel? He looks like a lot of Italian men I know. The coat, the slicked back hair… is that affectation? Is he trying to blend in?
Oscar Isaac: I think it’s less about blending in… There’s something interesting that J.C. told me about. He was watching a documentary about Henry Ford, and there was this amazing thing, this actual thing, there was film of it I guess, which is where we get the idea of a “melting pot.” Which is a huge pot where people would come, and they would dress in their Sunday finest from wherever they were from – lederhosen or whatever you were wearing from your little village – and you walk up to this thing and jumped down into this huge thing, and then you come out with a suit. And you’re now an American. You have your business suit, and you leave the other thing behind.
So I definitely think that Abel subscribes to this idea. It’s the myth of the self-made man, that you can reinvent yourself completely on your own accord, devoid of anything else around you, and you build yourself up into the thing you’re going to be. The thing is, we know that’s a myth because nothing exists in a void. You build yourself on the backs of others, and sometimes the system is set up that way. But he definitely is someone who operates within the system.
Were you prepared to do as much cardio as you do in this film?
[Laughs.] Yeah. Yeah, that was pretty wild. And again, the interesting thing being the look, something that J.C. did say early on was that the suits are suits of armor. It’s not about fashion. It’s not affectation. It’s not about vanity. And I remember at first there was an inconsistency in my brain between who I felt this person was and seemingly frivolous spending. I thought, “Why do they need matching Mercedes? Why should he have the finest suits?” Why all this, until he said that. “Oh, okay, everything is about the presentation. Everything is a calculation.” So if it’s suits of armor, suddenly that affected the way I stood, the way I walk into a room, the way that he would square himself off. He was much more like a knight than anything else, than Saturday Night Fever. [Laughs.]
So yeah, that was an interesting thing. So there was a mix of that, but I didn’t want to lose the passion either, or the sensuality of the person. So listened to a lot of Marvin Gaye. That was Abel’s jam. Abel’s jam was Marvin Gaye, all the way. So Abel was a mix between Emperor Hadrian, Marvin Gaye and like, my grandpa. [Laughs.]
“No matter how much you train you’re still going to fuck up.”
What was the grandpa part?
I think, in a way, he was like the archetypal grandfather. I don’t know. There’s something about him that’s like when you imagine your grandfather when he was young. There’s something about the collectedness, the formality of a time that’s gone. I don’t know, something about that. Because my grandfather was a very kind-hearted man. I had two different grandfathers that were vastly different. One, he owned a garage, like a mechanic’s garage in Guatemala, but he was quiet and I’m sure with people he didn’t know he was a bit formal. So there’s something about that in there.
But yeah, and then the running. What I liked about that is you get the sense that he’s running away from something, or he’s running to something. He’s preparing for something. And then when we did the chase scene, it was frozen ground, and I did it over and over again, and I was just wearing these moccasins. It was really starting to bother me. So I said, “Hey J.C., I need to put the tennis shoes on, man. We gotta keep doing this… I don’t know, I don’t want to mess myself up.” He’s like, “Okay, but we see your feet in the shot, so can you just do one more with it?” I’m like, “Okay. Of course that’s the one where I face plant, like, so hard. So hard, face plant! If you see, my hands don’t even come up to stop the fall. It’s like… [mimes falling].
It’s in the film!
Right, yeah, it’s in the film! And I get up and all of us stayed with it. The focus puller lost me and finds me again, and the car starts to go again. So all of us were in synch. But then of course right after he was like, “I’m sorry!” Of course it was the one take after I asked for the shoes, but what was great was that – whether or not it would have happened without the shoes – it’s a great thing to have in the movie, because no matter how much you train you’re still going to fuck up. [Laughs.] Shit’s going to go wrong, you know?
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
