Crazy Super caught up with crazy of another kind, Eric Bana. Eric's new film due to be released next week is 'Chopper' and is already receiving critical acclaim around Australia. You should also remember Eric Bana as the dodgy kick boxing son in law from 'The Castle' - he was great!!! Read on to discover what to eat when you want stack on weight...
[V]: Hey it's Super here and opening nationally across the country from August 3 is a great new Australian film, Chopper. And today we've got the star of the film in a cardboard version and for real, Eric Bana!
Eric Bana: Very weird, very weird man. I feel like I'm looking the mirror but I'm not! So its like, I'm kind of doing a double take. It's very very bizarre.
[V]: Now this was an amazing process to turn into this character. And of course now in the film this character is a lot wider. It actually, its not really to scale, is it?
E: He's got a bit more girth, especially in the second half. I had to be quite a bit bigger than normal. Ahh, but its all a part of the um ... part of the process. And and when I auditioned they explained to me that whoever got the role would have to, you know, put as much fat on in as humanly short as possible time, so ah that was a part of it.
[V]: So what was the best thing you got to eat to put on fat? There must of been something you must of loved being able to eat as much of it as possible?
E: Donuts
[V]: Really?
E: Yeah I love cinnamon donuts!
[V]: Yeah?
E: And um I didn't I didn't go easy on it - I ran that line pretty hard. I always had a good stock in the cupboard in the mornin' with the brekkie. At least half a dozen donuts!
[V]: Wow, what a way to start the day!
E: Phew!
[V]: What I really liked about the film was that it that wasn't really glamorising crime at all.
E: Yeah.
[V]: But I guess now that now because you played the part of Chopper Reed and now your going to do the promotional trial, now I wonder what Chopper thinks about all this because you played him. So is it weird for you?
E: It is weird. I mean, it's weird but then it's not because I don't' go down that line, I mean I'm happy to promote the film. But um... But there's a point when you say that you know, well, I can't answer for him. And I've kinda spoken enough on his behalf and done an interpretation of him in the film. So if people want his thought's they have to go to him. I won't speak on his behalf cause he's has a T.V and he has a radio. You know? So ahh... That's where I say ahh... That's that's enough. [V]: How many years was this film in the making and when did you get pulled in to play the part? Did you have to go through heaps of auditions for it?
E: The director has been working on the project umm about seven years. And so its been a long long very determined project for him. I got involved half way through '97. I auditioned half way through '97, got the part and then we began shooting half way through '99. So it was kinda a two year preparation period for me so it was a long time sitting around waiting or things to happen. And ah, by the time the film actually comes out on the third of August it about three years all up that I've involved with it.
[V]: Wow...
E: Yeah... So it's... So it's been a long time.
[V]: Listen, congratulations!
E: Thank you, Andrew.
[V]: Fantastic film, highly recommended. Opening in cinemas everywhere from August 3. Don't forget I say you see it twice to get a popularised sensation And of course watch him in 'Something in the Air' ABC weeknights Monday to Thursday at 6:30pm. That Neighbours thing is over, OVER, its been around for too long. 'Something in the Air' is the new television hit with Eric Bana.
E: He know he knows what he's talking about, this fellow!
-from channelv.com.au (8/1/2000) - click here for audio from this interview
"So what do you think of Eric Bana?"
Andrew Dominik: "We weren't really comfortable with anyone until we saw Eric Bana's test - and Eric was actually Chopper's idea ! " One of Australia's most celebrated stand-up comics, the good-natured Bana did not at first seem the obvious choice to play Chopper Read and was nonplussed when his agent called, urging him to rush to Sydney for a screen-test. Having just embarked on his honeymoon, the screen test had to wait, but two weeks later he auditioned. Two months later, the part was his.
"I thought it a unique opportunity to approach a delicate and potentially controversial subject, in an intelligent and humane way," noted Bana. "I remember thinking that prior to being loaded with information, it was vital I be able to recall my first reaction to Chopper's name, as my initial perception would be indicative of the general public's when the film was released."
"Eric's a really mentally healthy person, but basically, he can 'do' him," commented Dominik. There were some days with Eric when it was the easiest job in the world. I'd be watching him and it was as if he'd left his body and somebody else was there and those moments are amazing because you cease to be a director and become the audience.
Eric has incredibly expressive eyes and he's one of those people who cannot hide what's going on within. He's also without vanity and in an actor, that's a real attribute." Bennett agreed. "Eric has a complete absence of fear. He lends humor and empathy to the role and we instinctively felt that he'd be able to handle the complexities of the character. We've been so impressed with his performance. He's had to sit in make-up for five hours from four in the morning and then put in really long, strenuous days to appear in every single scene. I don't know how anyone else would have coped physically, let alone emotionally."
As it was never their intention to make a straight bio-pic, certain characters in CHOPPER are amalgamations of figures from his past. "Their importance is only determined by how they affect Chopper and his feelings towards them."
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Melbourne to a German mother and a Croatian father, Bana is one of Australia's best known comedians.
His first major break came in 1993 when, after several years on the comedy circuit, he was invited to join the cast of the top-rating TV comedy show, FULL FRONTAL. With an uncanny ability to hilariously impersonate famous personalities from all walks of life, Bana soon became one of the program's most popular, and talked-about, performers. In 1996 he wrote, co-produced and starred in his own comedy special which proved a ratings winner. This led to his own weekly comedy show that aired nationally from late 1997. That year, Bana was also voted
'Most Popular Comedy Performer' at the Logies.
CHOPPER is Bana's second feature. He also starred as 'Con' in the hugely successful feature, THE CASTLE, directed by Rob Sitch. Following his work on CHOPPER, Eric has been seen in the ongoing role of Joe, in ABC TV's SOMETHING IN THE AIR.
-from www.chopperthemovie.com (8/3/2000)
What research did you do into Mark 'Chopper' Read himself?
I basically inherited about five years worth of research that the director Andrew Dominik had accumulated. Then there was stuff I did myself: a lot of reading, a lot of talking to people. I hate guns, so I had to learn how to do all that. It was about visualisation and interpretation - trying to find relevance in all that was the most difficult part.
Was it difficult realising a person well known to the Australian public?
There had only been a small fracture of the character presented to the public. I knew that what I had in my arsenal was always going to be interesting for this very reason. He only had one persona, and that was the one he put forward himself. The film undoes a fair bit of that. People are more confused than what they were initially.
What did you conclude about the figure of Chopper?
I didn't really surmise anything. I never felt pressured to come up with some kind of definitive explanation, or judgement of him. It's like someone you might hate in the media, but then you hear they're a really nice person but you actually don't want to know about it. It's the same with Chopper. People who read his books might like him because of the image he put forward, but the more politically correct might think him an idiot because he's a criminal. Somewhere in between all that, there's a judgement for those who want to judge.
-from www.bbc.co.uk (11/22/2000)
Incredibly disciplined ... Eric Bana.
A dusty town in Morocco may not be the obvious place to look for the next big thing, but that's where Phillip McCarthy found our own Eric Bana.
It's his big break, his shot at the big time, but all Eric Bana really wants is to go home. And, really, who can blame him? He's sitting in his trailer on the set of Ridley Scott's military thriller Black Hawk Down. The $US95 million ($183 million) film is being shot in Morocco and we're on the edge of an appropriately bleak section of the capital, Rabat, which is standing in for the movie's setting, the Somalian capital Mogadishu. Convincing though he looks as a crack marine - the extra weight he gained for Chopper is long gone, and then some - Bana looks forlorn.
The former Full Frontal star has been in this scruffy north African take on Canberra for 10 weeks and he needs to get out. He's been planning a three-day break in Spain with his wife, Rebecca, and their two-year-old son, Klaus, for weeks. Scott has told him he can't go. He's confined to barracks. It seems, when you're a commando, even just for the duration of a movie, the mission comes first.
"I'm not angry, I'm just frustrated," Bana says fingering his M16 in a distracted way. I nervously remind myself that it's just a prop. That this time round he's not playing the loose cannon Mark "Chopper" Read, but a disciplined commando who would never shoot a civilian out of frustration. Trouble is, Bana seems to inhabit his characters so thoroughly.
The 33-year-old went from the doughy flintiness of Chopper to the chiselled silhouette of commando Hoot Hooten in a matter of months, a weight fluctuation that amounts, he figures, to about 23 kilograms. He weighs about 10kg less than he did before he gained all the beer-and-burger weight for Chopper.
"Eric is so incredibly disciplined," says English actor Matthew Marsden, who plays a young American soldier in the based-on-fact Black Hawk Down. "He's so careful what he eats. He has about 6 per cent body fat. And he's good, very good. Eric is going to basically steal this picture. I've told him, 'You're going to be a star, mate'."
This is just Bana's third feature film. In The Castle, he played Sophie Lee's kickboxing boyfriend Con. Then came his extraordinary turn in Chopper. Black Hawk Down, though, is in a different league.
Based on writer Mark Bowden's 1999 book, the film reconstructs the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since Vietnam. On October 3, 1993, about 100 elite US commandos were dropped by Black Hawk helicopters into the teeming market of Mogadishu. The aim was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord. The mission went horribly wrong. By dawn, 18 Americans had died. Bana's character, Sergeant First Class Norm "Hoot" Hooten, is a composite of several of the Delta Force commandos who took part in the mission. One part of that composite is almost certainly an irascible real-life Delta sergeant named Norm Hooten.
Hooten was one of the team leaders of the shadowy and secretive D-Boys, as they are known, who served uneasily in Somalia alongside the more conventional hierarchy of the US Rangers. Bowden writes of the D-Boys: "They eschewed salutes and all other traditional trappings of military life. Disdain for normal displays of army status was the unit's signature. They simply transcended rank."
It's the perfect role for an Aussie larrikin. Even so, Bana had some serious preparation to do. "We went to boot camp at Fort Bragg, which is the Special Forces camp," he recalls. "I was really impressed about how intelligent and politically aware they were. I have to say my preconceptions about them being gung-ho types were altered."
Bana's also found that not carrying a movie can be quite appealing. "The workload is more spread out," he says. "What is interesting is that, despite the budget, this is just as disorganised as any $2 million film. In terms of the last-minute rush - and improvising - it's unexpectedly familiar. The hard part is that if you're not working there's nothing to do and the schedule is such that you can't really get away - even when you think you can. And, of course, going home is not an option for me ... I've been here three months already and, yes, I am incredibly homesick."
At least Bana has his wife and child with him at the "barracks", the Rabat Hilton. "Eric's wife is incredibly resourceful," says British actor Jason Isaacs, who reprises his role of nemesis to Aussie actors, having badgered Heath Ledger and Mel Gibson in The Patriot last year. "She joined a mother's group here. His son thinks he's in a house with 300 rooms and he has about 300 uncles."
It's all quite a leap for a migrants' son (Bana's father is Croatian, his mother German) from Tullamarine, Melbourne. Bana was working as a barman when he decided to try his hand at stand-up comedy. That was 1991. Two years later, he was on television as a cast member of the sketch comedy show Full Frontal. The ill-fated Eric Bana Show followed and, while the critics didn't warm to his interview technique, he won fans with his knack for impressions.
He skewered the likes of Warwick Capper and Ray Martin and got great milage from the character Poida.Then came the move to the big screen, with the smallish role in The Castle and the not-so-smallish, career-defining turn in Andrew Dominik's movie based on real-life crime figure Mark Read.
Despite its ensemble nature, Bana has been given second billing in Black Hawk Down, just below Pearl Harbor's Josh Hartnett. For his next major project his name will top the bill: he's been signed to play the lead in Ang Lee's adaptation of the old Marvel Comics classic The Hulk. He has signed on for a three-film deal.
Given the hype and the sudden career momentum, will Bana move to Hollywood? Not likely. "I've given no thought about moving to America at all," he says. "I think it is becoming less and less relevant. We're here in Rabat. Right now there are shoots in Prague, in Canada, in Sydney. I see it is important that I spend certain periods of time in Los Angeles and after this I will go there for two weeks and do meetings and stuff. It's inevitable that I have to visit, but I am more than happy to keep Melbourne as home."
Bana points out that he recently slipped in an Australian film, The Nugget, which was shot in Mudgee. In this effort from writer-director Bill Bennett (Kiss or Kill), Bana plays opposite veteran Max Cullen in a story about a group of council workers who find a gold nugget. It's a kind of fable, he says, about how the discovery affects their lives. "I made the decision to do it a long time ago," he says. "Then all this stuff happened and I remember thinking, 'I hope I'm doing the right thing'. And I re-read the script and I knew I was. The first thing I thought when I read it was, 'This is a film I would want my son to see'. So I had to do it."
After September 11, Hollywood was micro-agonising over what sort of films audiences would accept and Black Hawk Down looked like becoming a casualty. Sure, it was being made by Ridley Scott, who gave us Blade Runner, Gladiator, Alien and Thelma & Louise, but was America ready for a war movie? Especially one in which it looked decidedly vulnerable? Filming on Black Hawk Down finished in August. By the time of September 11, Scott was hard at work on his edit. Then America went into Afghanistan and things changed again. After all, the film deals with the very same elite forces Washington is relying on in its latest campaign. The geopolitical backdrop of Somalia, a dysfunctional Muslim state with striking parallels to Afghanistan, added yet more frisson.
As it happens, the mood seems to be that all this has only brought an added poignancy to the film. Just as Bowden's book is suddenly topical again as a primer on the seeds of fundamentalist violence, so the film has acquired something like the status of a public service announcement. Black Hawk Down is even set to get a brief end-of-year season in New York and Los Angeles in order to qualify it for Oscar consideration. All of which is extraordinary luck for Bana. He plays one of the film's central characters. In fact, it's probably not going too far to say that, in the canon of Ridley Scott films, Bana has the Russell Crowe role. And we all know where that can lead.
Black Hawk Down opens on February 14.
-from www.smh.com.au (12/8/2001)
"Eric Bana, who will play the title character in Ang Lee's upcoming Hulk movie, told SCI FI Wire that he was more influenced by the 1978-'82 TV series than the Marvel Comics series of the same name. "I was obsessed with the TV show," Bana said in an interview. "I was never a huge comic book reader when I was a kid, but was completely obsessed with the television show. So I was very familiar with it."....
Bana said the show could possibly influence his performance, but he added that it was too early to talk at length about the movie. "All I can tell you is I play both the scientist and the monster, and how we do that I'm not allowed [to say]," he said.
Jennifer Connelly, who will play Betty Ross, told SCI FI Wire earlier that Ang Lee was planning to interpret the film as a Brecht-ian tragedy. About this Bana would only say, "We've talked about a lot of things, but I really am not at liberty to discuss them too much. I can confirm that I'm doing it, and I can confirm that we're shooting it next year." The Hulk starts shooting in March 2002, aiming for a 2003 release."
-from www.inscifi.net (12/28/2001)
NUGGET, THE ON LOCATION
YOUR MONEY OR YOUR MATES
A funny fable about three friends who discover a huge gold nugget that promises wealth but strains their mateship is Bill Bennett's next film, starring Eric Bana, Stephen Curry and Dave O'Neill; Andrew L. Urban went on location in Mudgee, NSW.
Producer Jennifer Bennett is dressed to the nines, red lipstick flashing as she wields a large black dildo, thumping Peter Moon over the head during a skirmish inside the town brothel. There are bodies on the floor, kicking and scratching as Vince Colosimo and a gaggle of girls fall on the pathetic figure of Peter. Writer/director Bill Bennett looks on approvingly and Danny Ruhlmann gets his camera ready to roll for a take.
Peter Moon and Vince Colosimo play the two villains of the piece in The Nugget, both trying to get a piece of the action when three friends, council workers who spend weekends lazily digging for gold, find the monster gold nugget just outside town. The town is Mudgee, and the council workers road maintenance crew are played by three comedians who have previously worked together in revue and stand up, but not in a movie.
Eric Bana (between making Black Hawk Down and The Incredible Hulk for Hollywood) plays Lotto the unlucky one, Stephen Curry plays Wookie the conspiracy theorist [who swears he saw a Wookie in his garden one day] and Dave O'Neill plays Sue, who sued a pie company after discovering a severed finger in one.
Belinda Emmett, Karen Pang and Sallyanne Ryan play the wives, with Jean Kitson as neighbour Joyce and Max Cullen as the mystery man and narrator of the story, Wally.
"Why choose Mudgee for the film?"
Mudgee is a fine town, wineries surround it; like the splendid by name and splendid by taste, Frog Rock. The folk are middle class, homogeneously collected, it seems, and a film shoot is welcome. There's money being spent, and the end result can only help the town's profile. Who knows, maybe it'll start another gold rush, not so much digging for gold but spending it at Frog Rock and its like.
Why choose Mudgee for the film? Well, for one thing, Jennifer Bennett comes from here and still has a family home just up the road from Madeira Road, where two adjacent houses have been taken over for the shoot, to be used for both exterior scenes and interiors. Mudgee also suits the story and Bill Bennett's desire to anchor the film in small town reality. It's a comedy, but Bill sees it as a fable, too, with its morality tale trappings. "It's about mateship and how that's put to the test when the mates stand to become millionaires.
"I'd always wanted to make a film about The Pearl, the John Steinbeck novella," he says, "about a poor Mexican fisherman who finds a beautiful pearl and comes into instant wealth. It sets off a series of changes in his life and in that case, quite tragic ones. I then found that the film rights weren't available and I started thinking about an Australian equivalent, but in a comedic form."
Eric Bana, offered the role of Lotto the guy who is so permanently unlucky he was inevitably nicknamed Lotto by his mates, "loved the script straight away."
But as well as the quality and cleverness of the script, the thing that really appealed to Eric Bana was that this was a film he could show his young son. "I wanted to do a film that I could show my son before he started driving a car. I felt I could show him this film at 8 and 12 and 16 and he'll pick up different things each time. It'd be three different films."
Lotto is no replacement for a poor Mexican fisherman, of course, nor are his mates. But the film no longer links to the fisherman's story. And, as Eric says, its characters are defined by their language, which he finds a remarkably easy way into the character. "There's so much of the characters on the page it took the hard work out of it for us.
"there's nobody being precious about who gets a laugh"
"We've worked together in comedy so we have some prior history," he says, "and that's working well. We all interact with each other on screen much like we do off screen and it shows. And there's nobody being precious about who gets a laugh."
But then it's not that kind of comedy, as comic Peter Moon points out. "It's not a jokey comedy at all; the humour comes from the characters." Moon took a day or so to turn the volume down on his performance, he recalls. "I think Bill's first direction to me was 'pull it back about a thousand percent.' I'm so used to working on stage or radio and making it all big . then I saw Dave (O'Neill) who doesn't act at all."
Dave O'Neill concurs. We're sitting in the lounge room of the house next to Lotto's house (Joyce's house) between scenes. "I was never that interested in acting, but when they said I'd get to play a lazy, fat council worker, I thought it'd be a bit of a stretch but I can do it," he quips.
A day on the set turns into a day and a night; having taken the 7.10 am XPT from Sydney Central, I am met by Jennifer's assistant, Matthew Wooldridge, at Lithgow, to be driven to Mudgee. It's still (just) breakfast time by the time I get there. Locals are sparse in the main street, and film crew and cast are gathering for sidewalk breakfast at the café that would be well at home in Darlinghurst or Carlton. Eric Bana is munching at a pavement table, while producer Jennifer Bennet guides me inside and we order the breakfast I didn't have on the train.
The day's shoot at Madeira Road begins at 2pm, with int and ext scenes, right through to night scenes. After snatching interviews between set ups, I watch the crew bustle and toil it reminds me of a movable factory, with its carpenters, trucks, cranes, hoists, lights and rigs. A block away, caravans and the catering tent waits patiently for meal breaks.
Peter Moon slips away to get some shut eye: he's up at 6am every day doing his breakfast show with The Morning Crew on Sydney's 2DAY FM by special link-line which he pays for. He didn't want to miss out on doing the film, but he couldn't escape his contract, so he found a work-around. "I had to do a bit of begging," he says, "to get agreement, but it's great and the local Real FM station has been very helpful. I've also helped them a bit . reading the death notices of a morning."
"there's a fine line between drama and comedy"
Bill Bennett first wrote The Nugget "just to have a bit of a laugh. I didn't think it would get financed. I'd been writing a lot of dark material and had a gap in my schedule so I thought it'd be nice to cleanse myself as it were. A lot of my work in the past has been quite serious but in fact there's a fine line between drama and comedy."
The Nugget, fully financed in Australia, will be released in 2002 by Roadshow.
-from Urban Cinefile (1/03/2002)