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Amid More Lies About Jerzy

Thru Feb. 11
By Randy Gener

NEW YORK -- If More Lies About Jerzy required Jared Harris to recreate the persona of Polish йmigrй writer Jerzy Kosinski, the actor would not have agreed to take on Davey Holmes' new play, which began performances Jan. 21 at the Vineyard Theatre and runs through Feb. 11.
"Once they offered me the part, I found that the most important question I had revolved around whether it is a fictional character or not," Harris recalled. "Do I have the responsibility to deliver a biographical performance? If they said yes to that, I wouldn't have done this play. I wanted my character to be an imaginative exercise from the very beginning."

It helps that Harris' character isn't named Kosinski; in Holmes' play, he's called Lesnewski.

"The play is inspired by Kosinski but it's not based on him," Harris said. "He's based on a couple of other different characters and similar events in Kosinski's life. But it's a piece of fiction. It is in no way biographical."

And the result is that as an imaginative departure the play's title reverbs with an ironic twist. Instead of exposing the lies that surrounded Kosinski's fiction, Holmes' play actually adds more lies on an already messy blurring of truth and art. Holmes' play paints a landscape of ambiguity and paradox.

Author of "Being There, The Painted Bird, Pinball, Cockpit" and "Passion Play," the Polish emigre Kosinski wrote haunting novels that reflect the troubled life of a man whose career was marred by the eccentricities and myths that he had cultivated.

Born in Lodz, Poland, on June 14, 1933, Kosinski was a Jewish child who, sent away by his parents during World War II in order to escape Nazi brutality, wandered through villages throughout the war. In a literary controversy as bizarre as any of his books, some critics attacked him as a fraud whose works were taken from other authors or written largely by editors he had hired, while others defended him as the victim of longtime efforts to discredit both his life and his art. In particular, a Village Voice reporter pursued the untruths and evasions that mar Kosinski's supposedly autobiographical work about the Holocaust, "The Painted Bird."

"The character I play is a writer whose first book is famous fictional account of growing up during the World War, being abandoned by his parents and wandering alone," Harris said. "But a question arises concerning the specific accuracy of that tale. And then question arise surrounding his writing process."

Instead of describing that process in black-and-white terms, Harris feels more comfortable likening the creative process of writing novels with the collaborative process of creating theater, a system in which it becomes quite difficult to pinpoint who is responsible for what.

"For example, here we are working on play," Harris explained. "One man is credited with having directed it. I am credit with performing the part and creating the part. The playwright is credited with words in the play. But there's, to some extent, a lot of blurring of those lines. A few lines were written by the director. There are many cases where the direction of the play comes from within the cast of actors, especially in terms of the choices in performance. You get ideas from other people all the time. Don't get me wrong. Davey did write the play. Darko did direct this play. And yet no one operates in a vacuum. We all take inspiration from many sources and places."

In Kosinski's case, the nature of authorship became somewhat thorny because "he was an oral storyteller." "He'd sit down and someone would type," Harris said. "He'd start talking and telling stories and the editorial assistants would type it down and fill in a few of the missing dots. It all originated from him."

Kosinski wrote only in English. He taught himself by memorizing words from a Russian-English dictionary, repeatedly viewing movies, and memorizing poems by Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1991, Kosinski committed suicide. He had already been suffering from heart trouble.

"Rather than focusing on one person, the play is essentially about how everybody creates certain stories about themselves as a way of getting through their life," Harris said. "This is an extreme case of somebody who makes up their life. So it becomes very difficult to tell what's real and what isn't, and yet we also must reality that the essential nature of fantasy and rewritten history is that it is a very necessary human survival tactic. Davey's play is very exciting, well-written and well-crafted, the way a ship is built. As a playwright, he's crafted a good vessel. It's fun and surprising, and it's a great part."

More Lies About Jerzy offers Harris a welcome challenge compared to the slew of Hollywood and independent films, in which he is mostly cast in character roles. A former Royal Shakespeare Company member and son of Irish actor Richard Harris, Jared Harris is slated to appear in films like Shadow Magic, which will be released by Sony Pictures Classics on April 6; Perfume, a digital film about the fashion world with costars Paul Sorvino, Rita Wilson, Jeff Goldblum and Peter Gallagher; Greg Pritikin's Dummy in which he stars with Adrien Bordy and Illeana Douglas; Lush, a comedy with Campbell Scott and Laura Linney; Bullfighter in which he stars opposite Donny Wahlberg and Willem Dafoe; and How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog, starring Kenneth Branagh.

"Very few movies I've done I regret being involved in," Harris said. "But if the Actors Studio asks me to perform again in its production of Oedipus [in which he appeared in the Chorus opposite Al Pacino and Dianne Wiest, I'd say yes in a flash yeah. I think you always learn something in every character you play onstage, either personally or creatively. In the case of Les in More Lies About Jerzy, you hold up this picture of yourself against the character and in comparison you learn things in the process."

THE MAGIC OF JARED HARRIS

by terry keefe
Venice Magazine

Most of us were first introduced to actor Jared Harris in 1996 when he portrayed Andy Warhol, the King of Pop Art, in director Mary Harron's debut feature I Shot Andy Warhol. He played Warhol not as a flamboyant ringmaster of a circus of freaks, but rather as a shy individual who could only communicate with another person when there was a camera or tape recorder between them to bridge the divide. The performance rang true and heralded the arrival of an exciting new acting talent.

Jared Harris was born in London, England, the son of famed Irish actor Richard Harris. For college, he came to the United States where he attended Duke University, and it was there that he first tried acting. Although he's often been tagged in the press as "the son of Richard," Jared Harris' consistently daring and innovative body of work is entirely his own. In fact, to his growing body of fans, it's likely that Richard is known as "the father of Jared."

Probably the only reason Harris isn't an even bigger star already is that he's such a good actor that you sometimes don't recognize him from one role to the next. Chameleon-like, he's transformed himself from Warhol to the homeless Ray of Sunday (1997), to the amoral Russian cab driver Vlad in Happiness (1998), to John Lennon in Two of Us (2000) where he starred opposite Aidan Quinn (as Paul McCartney) in a fictionalized story of an almost-reunion of the two Beatles frontmen.

Harris has also been segueing into more traditional (but no less interesting) leading-man roles such as B. Monkey (1998) and his upcoming feature Shadow Magic to be released this month by Sony Pictures Classics. Based on a true story, Shadow Magic depicts the events which led up to the creation of the Chinese film industry. Harris plays Raymond Wallace, a threadbare nickelodeon man who visits imperial Peking in 1902, bringing with him the West's latest invention-the moving picture. With the help of local photographer Liu Jinglun (played by Chinese star Xia Yu), Raymond sets up the first movie theater in China, which he dubs "Shadow Magic." It's an instant sensation, but Raymond and Liu quickly run up against great resistance from the cultural powers-that-be in Peking.

Directed by Ann Hu, Shadow Magic is a gorgeous film shot entirely on location in China, and it provided a unique acting challenge for Harris: his dialogue was in both English and Chinese, whereas the dialogue of most of the cast is entirely in Chinese. To complicate matters, he had only one day to learn the language when he arrived on the set!

This year looks to be a corker for Harris, who has five additional features scheduled for release: Perfume, in which he stars as a once-hot fashion photographer on the comeback trail; How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog, opposite Kenneth Branagh and Robin Wright Penn; Lush, playing an alcoholic New Orleans attorney opposite Laura Linney; Dummy, co-starring with Adrien Brody and Illeana Douglas; and Bullfighter with Donnie Wahlberg and Willem Dafoe.

Venice sat down recently with the funny and completely unpretentious Harris to discuss Shadow Magic and his career.

Venice: Is it true you had only a day to learn Chinese for your role as Raymond in Shadow Magic?

Jared Harris: Yeah, I went out there early to acclimatize myself and to give myself a chance to learn Chinese. But when I got there they were like, "You're here, let's use you." I had a guy named Zhang Kang phonetically teach me how to say my stuff. He himself was an actor who loved Taxi Driver, so he'd teach me how to say the lines a la Robert De Niro. But that was kind of a problem when I'd get to the set and say a line like 'Nebu lau' which means "You're the boss," but depending on the inflection can mean "Are you the boss?" Everyone was looking at me like I was insane. (laughs)

Besides Xia Yu, did any of the other actors speak English?

Xia Yu learned English about four months prior to the shoot. Nobody else could speak English, but nobody else needed to. In some bizarre way, you would talk to each other in your own language and some essential form of communication would pass through. You wouldn't understand exactly what a person was saying but you'd sort of get the spirit of it, like watching a foreign movie without the subtitles.

Xia Yu is one of China's best known young actors. How was he to work with?

He's absolutely lovely. We got on really well. In some ways it mirrors our relationship in the movie because he had to take me under his wing, to show me around.

Did you do any research into the period prior to playing Raymond?

I only got the part about a week before I went out there, so I didn't have time at all. I just had to approach it with the sense that my journey was going to be his journey. Essentially, he arrives in the country knowing nothing, and I did as well. He's ignorant about the culture and I was as well.

You've got a few other exciting films coming out this year. I just had a chance to see the excellent Perfume. Was most of the film really improvised?

All of it. I've done a bunch of improvised movies. I think there's sort of a fad for doing improvised movies, totally inspired by the effect of Mike Leigh's movies. His movies are improvised, but they're improvised for six months. And then out of six months of improvisation, a script is written. But that whole part of it seems to have been forgotten. You do these improvised movies and they think, 'We'll just improvise and shoot it.' And what you end up doing is getting rid of the writer. But writing's very important. Michael Rymer (the director of Perfume) decided to do something different. On each take, he'd say, 'You can't repeat yourself. You can't repeat any line you say (from the previous take).' Even the blocking would change. So what happened is that every single time you did it, you were doing the scene for the first time. I thought it worked as an approach to improvising.

Coming from an acting family, did your family push you in that direction?

No, my younger brother was the one they always felt was going to be an actor. My other brother was going to be a director. I was shy so they didn't think about me in terms of acting at all. I was stuck in boarding school when I was seven years old and I knew that the only way to get out was to go pass your exams, so I studied. And they thought, "He'll be a lawyer or something like that." I was curious about it, obviously. It looked like fun and I thought, 'Why can't I have fun as well?' I went to Duke University and there was this flier on the table that said there was a free keg of beer (at an audition for a play). And I said that I'd go along and I'd try this once. If I wasn't cast, I would never ever think about this again. And I got cast in the play.

Let's talk about some of your earlier films. What was it like playing Andy Warhol?

I remember being nervous about it. I was aware that it was a big opportunity. I felt that I had enough of my homework and preparation done but there was something that was off. I didn't quite feel that I had it down, and then Billy Name (one of Warhol's Factory entourage) provided the final key. He said to me, "You've got everything. It's just the way your sentences are structured." Andy could never start a sentence cleanly. He'd start three or four sentences at the same go and then one of them would tumble out. He had this strange rhythm to his speech.

Last year you played another legendary figure, John Lennon, in VH1's movie Two of Us.

The experience of preparing for it was great because I got to immerse myself in all this Beatles stuff for a reason and I didn't feel like I was just being lazy, or sloughing off (laughs). It was nerve-wracking because he's become semi-deified and people don't like to have their demigods exposed as being human beings, which is, of course, the only reason for doing this. So there was a little bit of tension about the myth of somebody and what you think is the reality of that person, which, of course, who are we to say what that is? It was a big, big, big challenge and for that reason alone worth taking.