Автор: Pam Grady

With the 2007 Cannes Film Festival just around the corner, it's perhaps instructive to take a look at how last year's Palme D'Or winner has fared.

Granted, Ken Loach's acclaimed period drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley has only just made its way this month into limited U.S. theatrical release, but there's still no denying that 99% of its current $20.5 million worldwide box office has come from elsewhere. Perhaps IFC Films needs to ready a youthful PR campaign that emphasizes this is a film that stars Scarecrow from Batman Begins. The halo of a Palme D'Or is evidently not as golden here as it is for European and other international theatergoers. Still, despite this, you can bet that next month, a whole gaggle of American journalists and bloggers will be breathlessly trying to handicap which film is going to win this year's grand prize. For star Cillian Murphy, even after all the Cannes hoopla, that's not where the fondness for this project comes from. "Working with Ken Loach was the most blissful experience I've had making films," Murphy reveals during a recent interview with FilmStew. "Because it's so divorced from all that sh*t (sic) of films, which is trailers and egos and hierarchy and all that." "You really feel like you're going on this journey with the character, and Ken would be gentle in maneuvering you towards one way of thinking or one way of behaving," he adds. "He's very quiet, very warm, and he's got the whole thing in his head. He edits it all chronologically, as well, which is unheard of these days. He also doesn't watch the dailies until the movie has wrapped. He's a total maverick."

Murphy, whose film noir comedy Watching the Detectives screens at next month's Tribeca Film Festival, cannot heap enough praise on Loach. Much of the attention surrounding Loach last spring at Cannes revolved around the fact that he needed eight Palme D'Or nominations to take home the prize. But for Murphy, it's all about the improvisation. "Ken doesn't give you the script, so I didn't know the story at all," he recalls. "I just knew that I was one of two brothers who was a doctor and that's all I knew. I signed on the basis of wanting, at all costs, to work with Ken Loach and second of all, because it was a story that, it was like in my DNA, you know?" "I didn't know up until the last day of shooting that the film was going to end like it ended," he continues. "We didn't know if someone was going to get in and I was going to get f*ckin' (sic) rescued. That's probably not a very good example of how his method works, but it's like at the start. We finish the hurling game and then we go back to the cottage and all the Black and Tans rush us. Nobody knew that was going to happen. So what it does is it provokes a totally honest response. There's no acting going on, just reacting." "In my opinion, in an ideal world, all films would be shot like this."

Loach also doesn't concern himself too much with things like lighting cues and an actor hitting their mark. In fact, the filmmaker is sometimes so far away from the action, filming it all through a long lens, that it brings the added benefit of the crew also being that far way. "It's a very private thing you have going on, not like ten techies standing around smoking cigarettes and waiting for lunch break," Murphy says. "It's very, very much designed to get the best out of the actors. That's why, when people look at Ken's films, they're not like watching film, they're just like watching real people. Also, because a lot of the cast had never acted before, you get true people's emotions up there." "There's an awful lot of self-indulgence in film acting, I think," he avers. "I mean, I never trained or anything like that, but you do inevitably rely on tricks and stuff. I loved peeling that way. It's not glamorous; you're not going to look cool. You're just looking as you would as a person in that situation. That's terrific, you know, because it's ultimately believable." When Murphy first began acting, he remembers being absolutely wowed by Loach's 1998 drama My Name is Joe. And so he remains to this day proud to have had the opportunity to work with the 70-year-old Loach, whose modest approach to the craft makes him perhaps—in age and touch—sort of a current U.K. equivalent to Clint Eastwood. "I was just so emotionally winded by My Name is Joe," says Murphy. "To get performances out of people like that, out of those actors… Any actor worth their salt would want to work with Ken."