The British actor reunites with director Bill Condon to play a 93-year-old version of Sherlock Holmes in "Mr. Holmes" (pictured); Chinese authorities have returned the passport of dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who had been unable to leave the country since 2011; the makers of the documentary about crowd-funding, "Capital C," financed their film through a crowd-funding campaign.
Ian McKellen on Gandalf/Dumbledore confusion: 'I will always be the real wizard'
Sherlock Holmes has widely been portrayed as a quick, clever and mostly youthful British detective, recently embodied by Robert Downey Jr and Benedict Cumberbatch. But in the new film, “Mr. Holmes,” the hot shot detective is re-imagined as a 93-year-old whose mind is no longer as a sharp as it once was. Stepping into this version of the famed investigator: Sir Ian McKellen
When McKellen joined us on The Frame, we asked him about reuniting with the director who helped launch his career, his over-the-top British sitcom, and what people always get wrong about him:
Interview Highlights:
Your breakout role was as director James Whale in "Gods and Monsters," directed by Bill Condon who's directing you in "Mr. Holmes." What was it like to be offered your first leading role?
It was overwhelming to be offered the leading part, which suited me down to the ground — he's English, openly gay like me, he'd started off wanting to be an actor, he comes from the same part of the world as I do, and then he ended up in Hollywood directing movies. [laughs] My life seemed to be mirroring his a little bit, and I felt very comfortable in it.
Up to that point, Hollywood had not perhaps treated gay people with the respect they deserved, they were figures of fun. But this put a gay man right at the heart of the movie with all of his failures and treated him as a regular human being.
In the film, "Mr. Holmes," your character makes a point that there are many misconceptions of Sherlock Holmes. Especially since you're writing your biography right now, are there any misconceptions that people have about you?
I think the biggest misconception I could put right is that I did not play Dumbledore in the "Harry Potter" movies.
In fact, two actors did!
That's right, but neither of them was me. I'm often mistaken for Dumbledore. And I think in the most recent posters, they make [Michael] Gambon up to look very much like Gandalf, but of course, I will always be the actor who played the real wizard.
Other misconceptions? Oh, I don't know, really. Do people have any conception about me at all? I hope not really because it's not much fun drawing attention to yourself because, you know, everybody knows they're not as charming as they would like to be. There's not as sensible as they would like to be. They haven't achieved as much as they would like to be. So to draw attention and say, Look at me! Look at me! is not what I really like to do. I much rather say, Look at my movie! Look at my movie!
You picked an odd profession if you're uncomfortable drawing attention to yourself.
Well, no, Laurence Olivier, the great actor of my youth, never gave interviews. Paul Scofield, a man who won the Oscar, I think he gave one interview in his entire career. Maggie Smith of "Downton Abbey," she doesn't give interviews. It's a bit of a bind as budgets for advertising movies gets smaller and smaller. The traditional way of advertising a film, putting a poster up, that's more expensive than getting me sitting in a studio and doing 30 interviews on the trot, which is what I've been doing just now.
One of the things that is true in "Mr. Holmes" is that, through some incredible makeup work and gorgeous costumes, you get to play a version of yourself as an actor that's both younger and older. What did you find the most intriguing and the most terrifying when you looked at yourself as you once were, as well as how you might look down the road?
[laughs] Nature has its way, doesn't it? If you see a young actor all dolled up to be an old one, by the time he's old himself he doesn't really look like the imagined old man that makeup devised. But being a little decrepit, finding it a little bit difficult to get into a chair and almost impossible to get out of one, mind still racing but not as easily controlled as in the past — this is all stuff that I've got to look forward to.
I'm grateful that I still am functioning and my memory's not gone. [laughs] These are daily preoccupations when you get into your 70s, as some friends and contemporaries don't have quite as good a time with it.
You've also been in the British TV comedy series "Vicious," in which you play Freddy Thornhill, a retired actor who's been in a gay relationship for 50 years. Your character's a little snarky, a little miserable and very funny. I guess the show could be described in the U.S. as a modern "Golden Girls," but gayer. What's the delight for you as an actor to play in something so broadly funny? And what's the delight for you as a person to play a character who's openly gay?
[laughs] Some of my friends think that, with "Vicious," we've put television back by 50 years. [laughs] Because it is reminiscent, not just of "Golden Girls," but of sitcoms beyond that, like "I Love Lucy." It's clearly steeped in that tradition.
As for playing an openly gay man, well, yeah! Good for Freddy that he is openly gay and surviving. He doesn't seem to be aware of what's going on, and they don't seem to be aware of Gay Pride parades — they live in the middle of SoHo where Pride happens every year and they never mention it. [laughs] He's not a model, and I hope people don't assume that, because I'm playing him, this is the sort of gay man who I most admire.
I want to come back to "Mr. Holmes." At an earlier point in Sherlock Holmes' career, he makes a particularly important choice that could have gone entirely differently. As an actor, was there ever a moment where you hit that fork in the road? Were you tempted to do something besides acting?
An early hope was that I might be a journalist or a chef, but acting was something different. It was absolutely absorbing, a very intense hobby; I didn't think I was ever going to be a professional actor, but I might be an amateur actor like people I admired at home who did acting in their spare time.
It was only at Cambridge University, when I got a wonderful review for a play, and I sort of slipped into it. It wasn't a lightning flash, but rather that, without knowing it, I'd been preparing to become a professional. I took the plunge and I've never been out of work, thank goodness, so it just sort of happened.
You've played scores of characters, both on screen and on stage. Is there a role that you would cite as being the closest to who you are as a person?
On the whole, of course, it's fun playing characters that are not like yourself, but you're probably going to be unconvincing unless you put a lot of yourself in them — the way you think, the way you feel, maybe the way you walk and talk.
I think the closest I may have got to it was in "Gods and Monsters." I think that James Whale is a version of me, and he has a very nice quote which I certainly concur with: "Making movies is the most wonderful thing in the world. Working with friends, entertaining people...wow." And so say I.
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei gets passport back, plans immediate visit to Germany
This week, the Chinese authorities finally gave dissident artist Ai Weiwei his passport after it was confiscated four years ago.
The government took the document in 2011 when he was detained in the Beijing airport and held for 81 days. He was later charged with tax evasion and was ordered to pay $2.5 million in penalties and back taxes. But even though he couldn’t leave the country, Ai Weiwei continued to produce art, which was mounted by volunteers outside China.
We spoke with the China-based New York Times reporter Austin Ramzy, who spoke with Ai Weiwei this week after his passport was returned:
"He seemed quite happy. It seemed like a burden that he's lived with a long time. The loss of his passport and the ability to travel abroad I think affected him greatly, because he has international stature. He seemed at peace and a certain sense of contentment at having gotten his passport back."
Ai Weiwei is known for his art projects that often criticize the Chinese government. He was — and continues to be — vocal about the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which 90,000 people died, including several thousand children who died in collapsed schools. He also presented a major exhibition on Alcatraz Island that featured complex Lego portraits of political prisoners.
Ai Weiwei also made his passport confiscation an art project. Austin Ramzy says this may have helped convince authorities to return his passport:
"As he often does with things, he comes up with new and innovative ways to raise awareness and to protest things, so he has a bicycle locked outside his studio in Beijing and would put flowers out in the basket of the bicycle every morning and photograph them and put them online. Then other people around the world would take photographs of flowers and tweet them at him... I think maybe they just wanted this headache to go away. He recently had his first and only solo show in China, and it was sort of seen as a relaxing of the restrictions on him. It wasn’t overtly political, the content of the show, so I think maybe that was seen as a signal that the government could live with him, or would have to live with him."
Just days after receiving his passport, Ai Weiwei is already planning to leave China:
"He plans to go to Germany quite quickly. He’s opened a studio in Berlin. His son ,who’s now 6 years old I believe, has been living in Germany with his mother for about a year now. So his first priority is to get to Germany to see his son."
In addition to joining his family in Germany, the artist will also seek a medical exam. He had emergency brain surgery there in 2009, after he was hit in the head by a police officer in the city of Chengdu.
There is still a question of whether or not Chinese authorities will allow him to return to the country once he leaves. But Ramzy says Ai Weiwei was not worried about his ability to return:
"He said that he expected that if they gave him the passport he had the right both to leave the country and to return. But I think it’s still a possibility that shouldn’t be ruled out….You know, there are plenty of dissidents who have left China and not been allowed to return. He’s always been in a different category in the sense that he’s not merely a dissident or solely focused on politics... Not allowing him back would create an entirely new Ai Weiwei story and I’m not sure the authorities want that."
Filmmaker hopes his crowdfunded movie about crowdfunding is inspiring
Over the past few years, and thanks to increasingly visible sites such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter, crowdfunding has gone from an interesting concept to an absolutely viable fundraising tool. But it's still a new phenomenon, one in which the ethics of the whole concept are still being worked out and some truly crazy things can happen.
As crowdfunding continues to grow, it seemed inevitable that someone would examine the meteoric rise of the movement. And what better way to approach crowdfunding than through a crowdfunded documentary? That's what Timon Birkhofer and Jørg M. Kundinger did with their movie, "Capital C."
"Capital C" looks at three creators whose businesses flourished thanks to crowdfunding: Zach Crain hand-knits koozies for water bottles; Jackson Robinson hand-paints playing cards; and Brian Fargo rebuilt a video game that he originally made 20 years ago.
When Birkhofer joined us on The Frame, we asked him about the lessons he and his co-director learned while crowdfunding their own movie, whether it was coincidence that the movie only focused on successful projects, and the message he wanted to send to the viewers of "Capital C."
Interview Highlights:
So, you go through crowdfunding to finance this film. As part of that process, did it change your perceptions or inform your research about the kind of film you wanted to make and how other people were approaching crowdfunding?
Absolutely. Our campaign was running for roughly 60 days and it was a full-time job for me, I was basically not doing anything else. A lot of people, when they go on the campaign sites, they only see the amounts people have raised, particularly after a campaign: Oh, this person reached their goal, this person succeeded their goal.
What they don't know, and what we try to show in the film, is that even if you reach or succeed your goal, it's a lot of hard work. Making something from scratch is a lot of hard work, so funding is only part of the equation. Once you're funded, that's when the real work starts.
One of the things that's true with crowdfunding is that a lot of campaigns don't reach their goal, or they reach their goal and the product never turns out. Were you interested in those kinds of stories, or did you end up having really good luck?
We didn't know what we would get into when we started filming our subjects, but one of the most important things to us was to show that crowdfunding is still relatively new, especially in the mainstream. A lot of people that work in entertainment or tech know what it is, but the average person still might not.
So it was important for us not to scare people away from a new idea that can change so much in any aspect of life, and we wanted to inspire people. When we screened at film festivals, we'd get so many reactions afterwards like, Oh my god, now we'll go home and start working on the book we never finished, or that album I never finished. And that was our biggest goal — to inspire others to make something.
Generally, crowdfunding gets to bypass "the man," the person who is handing out the money, whether it's a corporation or an individual who can say yes or no. You have hundreds, if not thousands of donors, so in some ways the crowd becomes "the man" and there's some accountability to a lot of different people. That's something you experienced in crowdfunding, right?
Oh yeah, totally. In the movie, Brian [Fargo] says something like, "Now I have 60,000 bosses." We didn't have quite that many — we had roughly 600 — but throughout the entire three-year production, we met about half of our supporters in person.
The difference between this and working for a single boss or investor is that, as long as you keep them updated and in the loop about everything, they tend to be really forgiving. They might have their 9-to-5 job, but they always want to be part of this, so the journey's part of the goal.
You've made your first film thanks to crowdfunding, it's played at festivals, and it's about to be released theatrically. Do you want to crowdfund your next film as well? If so, what lessons did you learn, not just in crowdfunding this film but also in watching these other people?
First of all, not every project works for crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a very specific way of raising money, and some projects just might not fit with it. Second of all, from going through the process ourselves, we learned that we wouldn't make a campaign that early on — it's definitely better to do when you have more to show, and I think one of the main reasons it worked with us as no-names was just the topic itself. Everyone was like, Oh my god, it makes so much sense!