By James Mottram
“It’s singularly the most bizarre thing that I’ve ever read, and it’s one of the most bizarre films that I’ve ever seen,” Colin Farrell smiles of The Lobster at The Cannes Film Festival.
“I laughed a lot while I was reading the script. And of course, I didn’t know if I was supposed to be laughing because it was funny, or if it was nervous laughter because I was confused.” The Lobster is the first English-language movie by infamously unconventional Greek director, Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth), which ended up taking out the Jury Prize at Cannes. Along with Farrell, this absurdist piece stars John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, and Rachel Weisz, and was unquestionably the strangest film of the competition. A deadpan tale set in a world where singletons are forced to go to a hotel and find a mate within 45 days, or be turned into an animal of their choosing, it’s a brilliantly dry comic work with an anarchic undertone. And for the record, Farrell’s sad and lonely architect, David, has chosen to turn into the titular crustacean, because they live for a long time, and he has always loved the sea.
Though it might appear that Farrell – who has always mixed the odd with the mainstream in films like Tigerland, Intermission, In Bruges, Miami Vice, Alexander, Minority Report, Phone Booth, The Recruit, S.W.A.T and Daredevil – was intentionally courting the bizarre when he took The Lobster, the Irishman shakes his head. “Not really,” he says. “You get exposed to certain experiences, and they paint your opinion on what you’d like to continue doing, and they colour your taste on the kind of work that you’d like to do. This was about working with someone as masterful as Yorgos, and a writer as masterful and idiosyncratic as Efthymis Filippou. There are things that I have read in the last year, that in times gone by, I would have certainly contemplated more than I have done in the last year. There are a couple of things that I may have gone, ‘It’s not brilliant but it’s good, and we can elevate it,’” he says in a wanky, mocking tone.
One of the things that Farrell did take was the much debated second season of True Detective, which walked in the long shadow cast by the extraordinary first installment starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. “When I heard that they were making a second season, I thought ‘Ooooh…who is going to go near that?’ Because, being human, I understand that if people have an affection for something, and it becomes part of their life and they own the experience of it, then they want to protect it. I’ve done remakes, but if I heard that they were going to remake something that I held very dear to me as a kid, like Back To The Future, I’d be like, ‘Hollywood! No original ideas!’ Yet, I was in two remakes [Fright Night, Total Recall], and I still get it when you hold something precious. I know that a lot of people loved the first season, so I knew that it would happen, and I did have quite a bit of fear about it. The daggers will be. But then I read the scripts, and they were so good. And if there’s one thing that I have learned, it’s that you go where the writing is good. You have to go where the writing is. A genius director cannot really do that much with shit writing. Film is a director’s medium, but writers are left in the dark quite a bit. Through the years, I’ve come to place a greater degree of significance on what’s on the written page.”
Once a notorious bad boy of the first order (with a sex tape and a variety of boozy indiscretions on his resume), Farrell claims that he is now a well and truly changed man. “I live pretty healthy,” he says. “I certainly live a lot healthier than I ever thought that I would. I enjoy it. I wouldn’t say that vanity isn’t in the building at all, but it’s not really an exercise in vanity. I love doing yoga. Every time that I put the mat down or even stand on it, I get excited by it. Truly. I don’t think that I get jaded very fast, but I’ve been doing it for four years now, and I don’t enjoy it any less or get excited by it any less than I did four years ago. I hike a bit. There’s beautiful nature around where I live in Los Angeles in the hills there. I live right by Griffith Park, and it’s extraordinary. I hike there, and I take the kids sometimes.” What about drinking? “Boring,” he replies. “Been there done that…it’s passé. It’s very 2005.”
And finally, per the premise of The Lobster, what kind of animal would Colin Farrell like to be? “A seagull,” the actor replies. “It’d be nice to take flight and live between land and sea. Seagulls fly in flocks but not all the time. They’re rambunctious birds that flock together but have their own individuality at the same time…so maybe a seagull.”
The Lobster is out now on DVD and Blu-ray.
