Walking into the Hilton with the Cardiff spring sun showing its typically friendly side, it would be unconvincingly visionary to suggest that one imagines that by night the same Cardiff will be the set of a horror film based loosely on the book of Job, Neil Jones’ The Reverend: the tale of a man of the cloth who tries to clean up his parish after being bitten by a mysterious girl, but using the same horrific methods as his assailant.
Perhaps even stranger though, is that Rutger Hauer, star of Blade Runner, The Hitcher and Sin City is the man waiting for me in the hotel, fresh from lending his commanding yet ambivalent screen presence as the Withstander (the devil in The Reverend). He’s best known for his elegiac performance as Roy Batty in Blade Runner, the counter point of the poetic and human themes of the film, remembered for his beautiful speech just before the Replicant ‘expires’. This may seem a far cry from the devil role he has just finished as I meet him at the hotel, but it’s clear from both his acting and his literate and romantic clarity when talking, that he would be an arresting and captivating presence wherever seen. He has in fact played a dazzling variety of roles Cannibalistic Cardinals, Romantic leads, greedy executives, and of course, A hobo, with a shotgun. Hence his open mind towards starring as the satanic counter to the eponymous protagonist of the Reverend in this production.
I talked to Rutger about being the devil, why he ends up on so many genres movies, the iconic Blade Runner and why smart people are scarier.
Are you playing a human character or are you out-and-out evil?
Well, I am a devil, but for the piece it’s probably really stupid to call it the devil/God. You don’t need to know he is called the devil the way it has been written. He’s also called the withstander, but you don’t need to know either. We’ve been talking about it a lot but not in Biblical terms – i’m so uneducated when it comes to religion.
But you’ve played priests several times before.
But thats the funny part, i can play it, but it doesn’t mean i know about it. In Goal I played a football coach. I don’t know anything about football! My take is we’ve made up these wonderful stories over the centuries, they give us a purpose, and if that’s what you need you must have it, but the good, the bad and the ugly live in one place. It’s very subjective and different for other people, but they don’t live next door you know.
So what inspiration did you pickup for the devil character?
Well, what I would like to do (but it would not fit for this film) would be like Monty Python; I would come in some horns and a carnival tail and shout ‘watch out, i’m the devil’. But that doesn’t present it as very real. If you want to play a devil who is really scary, it has to be at least as smart as you are. Because ‘smart’, it’s subjective and something more specific than just knowing things – playing smarter characters keeps you humble as well as scared. The dumb people and dumb characters, you don’t need to meet them, you ‘get’ them quickly. We are so Disneyland in terms of what is scary; it’s the carnival devil rather than anything else. If you look at paintings or whatever you can get a good idea of devils, but on film it’s too comfortable an idea to be scared by.
The thing about vampires and devils and gods is, they can show up anywhere. It’s hard to photograph them, you know how do we play for them- i’ve a great god to talk to [in the film] and i’m going to be addressing him, he’ll be sat on the table- and that’s a dead giveaway that he’s a special kinda guy, even if he’s not got the big white beard. For me, evil is always more of a presence than a guy with horns – it’s an idea rather than a single man we can see.
How do you relate to the parts you’re playing then?
I basically look at how the film comes out, and how my job fits in. The biggest thing with this piece is I need to know where me and my character fits in- even though my scene is quite unique, finding my place within the overall movie is my biggest homework. But I know what I do and what I did, but when I feel that it worked out well, that’s when a film hits home with an audience, like Hitcher and Blade Runner and Hobo With A Shotgun. It’s not about relating to the parts themselves as such, but looking for pieces which the audience will resonate with. I enjoy my work, but even more when the audience and the film combine; that’s the biggest success there is. With Hobo, it really delivered on what it promised in the trailer.
Your career path has seemed to lead you into movies of many different genres. Is that something you did deliberately?
No, It was pure chance. More thanks to the things you don’t do rather than what you do. But you know i’m a European and have different tastes and variety and doing different things is good to do. There were things I know I wanted to explore a few times – you don’t know what you can do if you don’t try. Maybe I’m slow but I feel you need to work under pressure so see what it brings and what I can give to a film. Also, I feel that aside from Hollywood, there are 95% of films which aren’t Hollywood and are people who have been waiting 10 years to make a film and they are often more interesting ideas that come out from people sitting on ideas for years.
How do you feel about the seemingly self-generating post-humous success of Blade Runner? Has it affected the way you choose films?
Well it’s actually one of the cutest feelings that a film that was received so reluctantly by most of the audience that it grew and become a success thirty years later. That’s the weirdest thing – you may notice because fashions come and go but for a film to stay around that long and the shift in perception four or five generations later from people saying ‘Oh my god, that’s so depressing’ to ‘yeah, we completely get this film’. But I knew when I saw the script what it was about- that it’s drenched with possibilities and interpretations, you can get in from any perspective and still find a way out. Everything has a flipside to it; like a French tout Deux – a two way mirror. Like there’s so many things in the film about eyes and seeing what the other character sees correctly yet the film has many ironic things in it in the sense that as well as that, the whole film is completely Ridley’s vision. As well as these characters learning to see one another properly, Ridley came up with the entire world that we don’t know, in the future.
Rutger Hauer plays the devil in the forthcoming Welsh film,
The Reverend. Info: www.burnhandfilms.com / www.thereverendfilm.com
Words: Lloyd Griffiths
Published 2014