Posts Tagged ‘Video interview’

The video of Michael Sheen being interviewed by Absolute Radio is now up in the Video Gallery. This video was filmed at the beginning of December during Michael’s promotion of New Moon.

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Michael Sheen being interviewed by Vianessa Castanos from Reel Hollywood is now up in the Video Gallery.

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Michael Sheen has appeared on SKY Movies ’35mm’ film review show.  Its a great interview and has now been added to our Video Gallery. Please click on the thumbnail below.

Michael Sheen was interviewed by Ryan Seacrest on Bing just prior to the New Moon premiere. He is accompanied in the studio by his daughter, Lily.

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About.com have released an exclusive interview with Michael Sheen, talking about his role as Aro in New Moon.

Good job of stealing the film from all your young co-stars.

Michael Sheen: “Chris Weitz was saying that, he said, ‘You know at that point in the story it’s'…even though I’m in it at the beginning as well…he said, ‘If you introduce a new character quite near the end, you better hope that character delivers.’ Because the audience doesn’t want a new character, particularly at that point. It has to kind of give a new energy.”

Well, introducing a new character to audiences in this one is different because Twilight fans know your character, Aro, and have been waiting for you to be in scenes.

Michael Sheen: “That’s true, that’s true, yes. I know, that’s the extraordinary thing about doing this film, is that the audience for the film obviously is the audience of the book as well, and so they know everything about it. So it’s not like anything is kind of new to them, other than the way you’re going to represent it. So that’s a lot of pressure as well. And when I knew I was going to be doing it, I heard through various means that people were going, ‘Oh, I hope he’s going to be the right thing,’ and all that kind of stuff. So you feel this pressure of people, kids having their own imaginative idea of what this character should look like, or the whole of the Volturi.”

Exactly. How tough was that? Did you really feel that extra weight when you were stepping into it?

Michael Sheen: “Yes. I mean, it doesn’t mean that I’d do anything different because I always try to be as true to the writer as I possibly can, or the writer’s vision of it and try and connect with it. So it didn’t alter the way I worked on it, but it made me take it very seriously. You know, people say sometimes, ‘Oh, you do these other films like Frost/Nixon and The Queen and all that. This must be very different.’ And no, I don’t take it any less seriously than anything else I’ve done, you know?”

Really?

Michael Sheen: “Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. In some ways the important thing is there are a lot of people who are very connected to this stuff and it means a lot to them, and you take that seriously. You can’t take that lightly, it doesn’t matter how old they are or whatever, if the story means so much to them. And I completely understand why having read the books. The first book, especially the first two books in a way, but the first book really made me go back to what it was like when I was 12, 13 or whatever and feeling the first kind of flush of really falling in love with someone and how your heart just feels so exposed. And then the second book, feeling what it’s like when that gets kind of crushed. That pain, and there’s nothing like it. There’s nothing trivial about that.”

“These books and these stories kind of, I think, in some ways document that and help people through it as well. They help kids who are going through that stuff themselves to kind of navigate their way through it and feel like they’re not on their own, or they’re not going through anything weird. It’s kind of something that happens and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel or at the end of it. So coming to make the films, I don’t in any way take it likely, this stuff. And it means so much to my own daughter. She’s 10 and just seeing the ferocity of her passion for these stories was a good a lesson as anything else to take it seriously.”

What was your daughter’s reaction when she first found out you were maybe getting attached to this?

Michael Sheen: “Well I had to try and not let her know for a while until it was definite because I didn’t want her to think that I was and then it not happen. But she was my main source of information before I’d read the books myself. I had to kind of get it out of her about the character, who the character was, without letting her know that maybe I was going to be doing it, which was tricky, especially with an incredibly bright nine year old as she was then.”

“I said, ‘You know, I heard someone talking about these books and is there a character called Aro?’ And she’s like, ‘Yes, he’s the head of the Volturi. He can read peoples’ thoughts by just touching them. Are you playing him?’ I was, ‘No, no, no, no.’”

“And then eventually when it was all done and sorted out I told her, and you could just see this huge mixture of emotions went through her. She cried and then she sort of got angry with me and then she got excited. It was all these different things. Because, of course, it was her thing and then suddenly daddy comes along and he’s sort of taken it away from her… Not taken it away from her, but you know what I mean. Like, suddenly he’s got in on the act and it’s her special thing and her private thing. And she’s got used to that now, and now she’s just really excited about it.”

I would imagine this is the role that you play that she can say to her friends, “That’s my dad!”

Michael Sheen: “Exactly. I loved doing it, but my original impulse for doing it was for my daughter. I never got to be in the Harry Potter films so I thought, ‘Well, here’s an opportunity for me to be in this.’ So, given that, I was really excited about how it would be for her with me doing it, and so she’s very excited.”

Has she seen it?

Michael Sheen: “She hasn’t seen it yet, no. She’ll be seeing it for the first time with me.”

How close was your daughter’s interpretation of Aro to how you ended up playing him?

Michael Sheen: “Completely different. I said, ‘What does he look like?’ She said, ‘He’s bald.’ I think she was mixing it up with Nosferatu, the old vampire, you know? I said that to her, ‘Do you remember you said that you thought he was bald and all this stuff?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Were you mixing it up with something else?’”

“But it shows that people, and this is the beauty of books for a start, that your imagination creates your own version of these characters. And so when a film comes along and you’re kind of going, ‘No, it looks like this,’ then that’s a very delicate thing to get right or to find a way to meet everyone’s imaginary requirements of the character. So I was very aware of that because of my own daughter. I said, ‘Sorry, I’m not bald. I’ve got long hair.’”

How collaborative was director Chris Weitz in actually getting the character down?

Michael Sheen: “Chris kind of left me to it, really. I mean when we were talking, working out the look of the character, he wanted to be as true to Stephenie [Meyer’s] vision of the characters as much as possible. So when we were working on the look, there would be pictures taken. Stephenie would get to look at them and it would be a kind of a group thing, a very collaborative thing, about coming to what the final look is. And that was good because they know far more about it than I do.”

“I had my own input into it and what I felt was right and what worked with my face and everything. But I was very glad that Chris and Stephenie were involved in that as well. But then in terms of interpreting the character, they kind of left me to it, really. I would have loved to have talked to Stephenie loads about it, but I just kept rereading a few of the chapters in the book – especially the opening chapter where she describes Aro – just looking for anything that would help give me a clue. And then I was just left to my own devices.”

And the voice?

Michael Sheen: “Well, the voice really came from Stephenie, what she wrote in the book. She writes this one line where she says, ‘His voice was like feathers.’ I liked this idea of this very soft kind of [voice]. Chris always said that Aro on the surface is very charming and very sort of serene and relaxed, but actually he’s the most dangerous of all the vampires. So I liked that idea of on the surface this character who, and not that he’s pretending to be something that he actually isn’t, but he really believes that he is a soft, warm, cuddly, grandmotherly-type sort of sentimental old fool, and a romantic, really. And he thinks of himself like that. He just happens to be a blood-sucking vampire who pulls peoples’ heads off. That’s just what he is in the same way as a wolf is what a wolf is, a lion is what a lion is. We could still have a sentimental [attitude], you know? I loved that idea.”

“The voice was very much based on that kind of soft thing. And then I started thinking about characters that I grew up with, watching them, the ones that really affected me when I was a kid and stayed with me. Characters like the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Blue Meanie in The Yellow Submarine, so there’s bits of all that.”

You’ve done the werewolf thing in the Underworld films and now you’ve played a vampire. Have you figured out why audiences are still so into these mythological creatures?

Michael Sheen: “I think ultimately it’s a mystery and that’s why it stays around. If we knew why we liked them, then we’d be able to put them in a little box and put them to one side and they wouldn’t have such a hold on us. So there’s ultimately something kind of mysterious about it. But I think it sort of touches on something deep down in us all, something kind of primal, something that’s kind of untamed and uncivilized. You know, we all live in this civilized society and we all pretend that we’re all polite and civilized creatures, and we’re not. We’re animals. You know, we have animal instincts and animals lusts and animal desires and animal needs, and we sort of keep those down. And so the idea, especially in the Twilight world where you’ve got these vampires who have these kinds of animalistic, incredibly powerful urges and yet have to keep them down, I think it’s very easy to connect with that just generally as a society because that’s what we do.”

“But, more specifically, I think for a young audience who are just starting to become adults really, and starting to feel adult feelings and emotions and have adult thoughts, that can be quite frightening to navigate your way through that. I think the idea of a group of people who have to deal with that stuff themselves is, obviously, something that they connect with.”

“I think each generation reinterprets things like vampires and werewolves. They’re symbols and that’s why they stay around for so long because they can mean something different, slightly different to each generation. And obviously by the amount of vampire things and werewolf things that are around at the moment, you can see that it’s kind of regenerating itself for this generation.”

Source: About.com