INTERVIEW: KEIRA KNIGHTLEY AND TONY SCOTT
by Jeff Otto
“I’m Domino Harvey,” says the confident Keira Knightley throughout the acid trip-like action/thriller/drama directed by Tony Scott and based loosely on the life of supermodel-turned-bounty hunter Domino Harvey. Did I mention that Harvey was also the daughter of acclaimed actor Lawrence Harvey (The Manchurian Candidate)? As if all that weren’t enough for a pretty wild story, Tony Scott and screenwriter Richard Kelly have thrown in a mishmash ensemble of every variety including Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramiraz, Lucy Liu, Christopher Walken, Mena Suvari, Macy Gray, Riz Abbassi, Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering. And yes, the latter two play themselves. Simply put, there is no way to fully explain this story.
Keira Knightley has been riding a hot streak ever since her memorable American debut in Bend It Like Beckham and subsequent wham-bam follow-up in Pirates of the Caribbean (which she is currently filming back-to-back sequels to). The actress has already proven her chops, but this is easily her most challenging role to date, both physically and mentally.
Director Tony Scott has, in many ways, become the only director achieving a mix of avante-garde film techniques driven within the context of narrative filmmaking. From MTV-style jump cuts to just about every kind of filter imaginable, Scott experiments with new methods on just about every frame. Even the dull moments of his films are riveting visually.
IGN FilmForce sat down for a chat with Keira Knightley and Tony Scott at the faux-swanky “W” hotel just outside of Westwood Village in Los Angeles recently. We spoke about the film and the actual Domino Harvey, who was a friend of the director’s long before the project.
“She inspired me to make the movie,” says Scott. “I’ve known her for 12 years so that was what was great about it. As I got older I think I’m learning about how to make movies better and once they are better I find it’s easier to actually access how to make a movie, because I access real people. So, real people are always the inspiration to make the movie. When I touch real life either in this movie or Man on Fire in Mexico City, you know when I cast a movie I always have a role model in real life and that’s what inspires me to go to Keira or to Mickey or to Edgar. They are all where my ideas come from…”
“I’m always inspired by people who are extraordinary people. I grew up in arts school in the north of England and my life has been surrounded by life’s casualties or lonely drug casualties. And the people who went down and got back have a life I find interesting. I’ve always gravitated to that throughout my life [and] even [when] I was a teenager at art school I was attracted to those darker characters. And she was definitely that. Heads you live, tails you die. That was her motto at 25.”
Knightley had the chance to meet Domino briefly before production: “I did. A couple of times. Maybe twice before we actually started. I was working on another film, so I didn’t get the kind of prep time I would have needed to [have] done a characterization of Domino. Actually Tony said just to make up your own character. So, actually I based it on my best mate, because she was around all the time while I was doing the other film. And I would look at her and go, ‘OK, I can keep her in my head.’ And then I could do it. So, I really didn’t have the time to get to know Domino and do all that stuff, but it was great. She sent me pictures of her and taped interviews and stuff like that. Just so I had an idea of what she thinks with and the stories, her stories. It was really, really helpful. And then I combined that with my best friend and did it that way.”
Besides the short preparation time between films, Knightley also had to make a quick emotional 180 from the prim and proper world of Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice. “It was hard. I was freaking out big time. The last couple of weeks on Pride was absolutely awful. I had Tony phoning up and asking me costume questions and all this about Domino and I couldn’t get my head into it at all. And was so freaked out by that, because I’ve never had a problem getting my head into a character before. And then I was passing a hairdresser’s and I thought, ‘This is how I’m going to do it. I’m going to cut Lizzy Bennet out of my hair.’ And I did, I cut all my hair off and I could actually, mentally look at the page and go, ‘Yeah, this is it. I see it.’ Because, I’m not looking at myself and seeing Lizzy Bennet every two seconds.”
Scott didn’t cut the actress any slack either. Her first scene involved a very sexy lap dance in front of gang members. To top off the pressure, the gang members were played by actual former gang members. “It was great. Talk about starting in the deep end. The first couple of days I did that lap dance sequence with the gang members. That was my first thing. So, it was quite a wake up call and got it put me in the character…
“It’s definitely a body double, I don’t have that body. What a bum! (Laughs) I wish I had that bum! No, it was fantastic. We had a great experience where [Tony] called me up and goes, ‘Come into the office, I think you need to see something.’ I walk into the office and there are three naked women all standing there. And he goes, ‘Which one do you want?’ Wow, so I picked my bum! There were three lovely bottoms, they really were. But, I was trying to pick one that could be as close to mine as possible if mine were the perfect bottom, which it isn’t.”
The life story of Domino Harvey had been kicked around Hollywood for a while before this version came to light. Richard Kelly (director of Donnie Darko) turned in a radically different take, one that used Harvey’s life more as a jump off than a basis. “The script had been written by two other writers,” says Scott. “But they had written bio pics. I had a stack of transcripts and interviews, because I had known Domino for twelve years and they were boring bio pics… So, I read Southland Tales and this is the guy who had also done Donnie Darko. Richard has a brilliant sense of humor…”
“The story was really manufactured. Everybody is a real person, but the story is we took segments of Domino’s real life and sequences in terms of bounty hunting… But Richard Kelly manufactured the story. He manufactured the story sitting in the DMV trying to get his license back. And he saw this woman called Latisha sitting behind the counter… [He] orchestrated the whole plot and he sat there and he came up with that idea…”
“It was a pretty complex story,” adds Knightley. “I had problems from the word go because I had four days off in between one film and the other. And I remember that on the plane over to London to L.A. to rehearse the next day I spent the entire plane ride breaking down the entire script and annotating everything just to get my head around it and I got to L.A .and by then it was a brand new script that was completely different from the one I just wrapped my head around! (Laughs) OK, so that’s interesting. So, it was actually really cool, because obviously yes I did know where I was in the story. Yes, it did take putting your head around, but there was a ways to kind of feel that you didn’t know what was going to happen next. And I feel that was kind of the right vibe for the film as well. So, I did feel a tiny bit like I was flying by the seat of my pants, which was quite good I thought.”
Although Domino was on hand during much of the filming, she never got the chance to see the final product prior to her death this past summer. “She didn’t,” says Scott. “She saw lots of pieces, lots of sequences and it’s been misreported by the press that she didn’t like it and that she was pissed off and that it didn’t represent her in the right way. And everything she saw she loved. And the song you hear at the beginning and the end of the movie ‘Heads You Live, Tails You Die.’ That’s Domino singing it. She wrote it… That was the model for her life.”
Scott says that, though he was saddened by her death, she lived life to the fullest while she could. “That’s how she conducted her life. I have to say this is a pretty wild existence… When I first met her she was actually living in a house on the hills in Beverly Hills…. Her mom wouldn’t let her live in the house with a gun, so she lived in this apartment over the garage. And the apartment had AK-47′s and fatigues and Soldier of Fortune magazines. And that’s how I met her. And that’s how she ended up back with mum. So, my vision was to always like it’s a dream. Here is the girl who lives on the house up on the hill and grows up and ends up being a bounty hunter. Barely escaped with her life and ended up back at home.”