BBC NEWS (UK)

BBC Breakfast with Frost

May 8, 2005

Artistic direction

On Sunday, 8 May, 2005, Sir David Frost interviewed Kevin Spacey


DAVID FROST: Now when the Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey decided to
bring his star status and his personal commitment to one of the most
revered theatres in London, The Old Vic, it was the realisation of a
long held ambition for him.

Not content with making films alone, he was determined to use his
talents to help revive the fortunes of this historic theatre - not just
by giving some remarkable performances recently but by directing new
plays, attracting new audiences and braving the critics. Kevin Spacey
joins me now. Kevin, good to have you with us.

KEVIN SPACEY: Good morning.

DAVID FROST: And was it really, as you said somewhere, a dream of yours
since the age of 13 to run a theatre?

KEVIN SPACEY: It was. When I was around that age my best friend at the
time and I dreamed of building a theatre on a piece of land in
California, and we were going to call it the Trigger Street theatre,
which now happens to be the name of my production company.

And so from as far back as I can remember the idea of being able to have
a kind of workshop, I think after ten years of making films one of the
things that you fall into is travelling to other countries, going to
other places, having kind of a life that you don't really have a home
base and I think a lot of actors - I'm one of them - kind of love the
idea of being in one place, having a home. And for me to have that home
be The Old Vic now for the next, probably, decade, for the foreseeable
future as we build this theatre company, is quite exciting.

DAVID FROST: And in fact that's the thing that people ask and that's
very interesting you say that - for the foreseeable future, decades and
so on and so forth - you are here for the, you are here for the long
run.

KEVIN SPACEY: Oh yeah. I, I mean I've always believed that in order to
start a sort of new theatrical beginning, which is what we've tried to
do here in this first season, you have to take the long view. You have
to look at it in a sense of it might take five years to really build a
company, and know who your actors are, and know who your directors are -
you can't do it instantly, and I think it has to happen in a rather
organic way.

And then the task will be to take the audience that we've built in this
first season, which has been, for our money, quite remarkable. You know
we've had more than a quarter of a million people coming to The Old Vic
this year in just our first three productions, and now we hold for The
Philadelphia Story - the second highest advance ticket sales in the
history of the West End for straight plays.

DAVID FROST: Really.

KEVIN SPACEY: So, we're on to something in terms of reaching out to an
audience, which has been fantastic.

DAVID FROST: In terms of the audiences and so on, the box office and all
of that, it's been terrific, as you say. The critics so far have been a
little bit more mixed.

KEVIN SPACEY: Mm.

DAVID FROST: But you'll, you're going to win them round or ...

KEVIN SPACEY: Well I think, you know, you have to take the view that the
critics have a job to do and they'll do it and I suppose occasionally
they'll be with us or they won't. But to us the most important
relationship to develop is the one with a thousand people every night,
and to see that theatre filled - night after night - with enthusiastic
audiences, many of whom are from the surrounding area of Lambeth who
actually have never been in The Old Vic, we've reached out now with our
educational programme in the last eight months, brought in some 1500
families, most of whom, it's quite remarkable to discover, they live two
blocks away but they've never been in the The Old Vic because it, I
think for them, has been a bit of an island where all those wealthy
people from the other side of the river come and we want to reach out to
that new audience.

Now we have a ticket policy of 100 seats every performance are under
£12 for under-25s, so I think that's also a huge part of why we're
starting to build this audience.

DAVID FROST: And why did you pick, as artistic director, why did you
pick The Philadelphia Story for the next one?

KEVIN SPACEY: Well it's a great play. I mean it's one of the great
American classic plays. Of course people may remember it as a wonderful
film with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

DAVID FROST: Cary Grant.

KEVIN SPACEY: I get to play the Cary Grant part in our production now
which we started previews for on Tuesday night.

I think it's more than just a drawing room comedy, I think it is a play
actually about something and it's hugely amusing and, and very
entertaining and we've got a wonderful cast of some American actors and
some British actors and Jerry Zaks our director from America has done a
fantastic job.

DAVID FROST: And you said once that in fact acting in the theatre not
only makes you a better movie actor but it also makes you a better
person.

KEVIN SPACEY: I think so.

DAVID FROST: How does that happen?

KEVIN SPACEY: I think it's twofold. I think that when you have the
opportunity to experience playing a character night after night, to work
on a different part of it night after night, how you grow as an actor,
what you learn about the play, what you learn about what the writing is
about, the musicality of it, how you learn from an audience, is very
different from the experience of making a film which is little pieces of
moments where you never get the opportunity to play the whole character
when you make a movie.

For me doing theatre is a bit like sports. If you play tennis, it's
always the same rules and you have the same lines on the court, but
you're always working on a different part of your game.

And so for us, those of us who love doing theatre, it's an experience
of, you know, we've just closed National Anthems at the Vic, 12 weeks
and how the play evolved and grew, what we learnt from it, how
extraordinary it was to do it night after night, I love that ritual of
it and it is the, in a sense, the daily ritual of doing a play that I
think gives you a better life. You know - and doing it for two hours a
night, you have, you know the rest of the day.

DAVID FROST: Whereas, whereas the actual procedure of making a movie,
even American Beauty or whatever it was, the actual procedure of doing
it is a bit boring, isn't it?

KEVIN SPACEY: It can be. It's certainly longer hours. You know, you're
up at 5.30 in the morning in make up and, you know, you're lucky in the
course of an average 14 hour shooting day that you might get two or
three minutes of film that will actually end up in the movie on that
particular day.

So it is a, it is strange, you have to sort of keep your wits about you
and always be ready to go at any time, and be open to the discovery of
when that camera rolls of trying to find those moments that, that worked
in the course of the film.

So there's a lot more guess work that goes on in making a movie but when
you get a chance to rehearse a play over five or six weeks, you know I
just had this opportunity now to do double duty almost the closest to
doing repertory theatre I've ever experienced, we're performing one in
the evening and rehearsing another during the daytime.

DAVID FROST: But you've got a movie coming up in the summer - Superman.

KEVIN SPACEY: Yes I'm -

DAVID FROST: But you're, you're not Superman.

KEVIN SPACEY: I am not Superman.

DAVID FROST: You're the baddie.

KEVIN SPACEY: I am the baddie, I am Lex Luthor, which is one of the
great parts, you know, Gene Hackman played in the original films and
it's a wonderful part. It's also giving me an opportunity to take a
little bit of a hiatus from The Philadelphia Story and to work with the
director of The Usual Suspects, Brian Singer, for the first time since
we did that film.
Interview Ends

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Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some
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Artistic direction (BBC News)
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