THE BANG BANG CLUB written and directed by Steven Silver, from the book by Greg Marinovich and João Silva, with Taylor Kitsch, Ryan Phillippe and Malin Ackerman. 109 minutes. An eOne release. Opens Friday (May 6). See listing.
Taylor Kitsch would rather not be so beautiful. I can tell when I kid him about the heavy breathing coming from some of my workmates when they get word I’m going to talk to him. How do you feel about that kind of attention, I want to know.
“I don’t know them, so it doesn’t totally sink in,” he says, lowering his sapphire-coloured eyes with heart-melting shyness. He’s just cut off his trademark shoulder-length locks, but that’s done nothing to harden his look.
The Kelowna, BC-born Kitsch is best known as the troubled high school football star Tim Riggins on the TV show Friday Night Lights – airing its final season on the Global network on Wednesdays – and as the hot Gambit in X-Men Origins. But his role as photojournalist Kevin Carter in The Bang Bang Club should take him to a whole new level.
Kitsch’s commitment to his work means he’s actively fought directors to avoid being stereotyped as a hunk.
“In Friday Night Lights, the script would sometimes say, ‘Riggins, driving shirtless’ – like, who does that? Texas heat or not, I’ve never done that, and I don’t see Riggins doing it either, so it was just a blatant ploy.
More on being a sex symbol:
“I feel like I have a lot more to offer than just standing there. I wouldn’t have been on Friday Night Lights for five years if I were that guy who just took his shirt off, believe me. It’s more about what you bring emotionally to the character. Otherwise, no one gives a shit about Riggins or Kevin.”
In the new movie, he plays the substance-abusing photographer in the group of photojournalists known as the Bang Bang Club, who took pics in riot-torn South Africa as apartheid was going down. He steals the movie from Ryan Phillippe, who’s not exactly a small presence, because the charismatic Kitsch has a gift for playing characters in turmoil. He also throws himself into a role and prepares meticulously.
On training to play a photographer:
To start, he had to make himself look believable as a photographer.
“I shadowed a photographer in L.A. and trained on a Leica M6 mostly,” says Kitsch, now looking me straight in the eye. “That’s what Kevin used – it was like his child. I went to a store in L.A. and finally found one exactly the same as Kev had. I immersed myself in it, shooting 10 or 15 rolls a day.”
Kitsch also went through a massive physical change so he could come across as a drug addict.
“I lost 35 pounds. It changed my walk, my idiosyncrasies, how I felt with myself. I wanted to get as lean as I could without taking audiences out of the film. No one asked me to lose the weight or to do a lot of that stuff prep-wise – it’s just the way I work.
Michael Watier
“I didn’t want people to see only a drug addict, but then again, I thought it would be a complete injustice if I showed up with Riggins’s kind of physique. I couldn’t play Kevin like that.
“There’s a bit of muscle on me now, though,” he says with a grin. “That’s my ego talking.”
On dialect:
There was also the small matter of the accent. When I ask what it takes for a Canadian actor to sound like a South African, Kitsch can’t help but resort to expletives.
“Repetition, repetition, repetition. Fuck, it’s a lot to take in,” he admits in a follow-up interview while taking a break from shooting Oliver Stone’s Savages. “And the director was adamant about picking it up in South Africa and not practising in the States.
“It’s tough, because Kevin was a super-emotional guy and he was always breaking down. It’s hard to sustain a pitch-perfect accent when you’re in the emotional moment.”
Kitsch came to New York from Kelowna hoping he could parlay a stint as a model into a career as an actor. Though he took a few fashion gigs, they didn’t keep him from falling below the poverty line. He was homeless for months, sleeping on the subway for weeks after squeezing what he could from his friends’ hospitality.
He’s never forgotten the experience.
“It makes me want to put in the work, to prep, to be disciplined. It grounded me. I realized that if you get a chance, you have to act as if it might be your last gig. You can never take anything for granted.”
He got his first major break in 2006, when he copped the role of Tim Riggins and showed he could convey inner conflict even while being the show’s primary chick magnet.
“Friday Night Lights was its own little enigma,” he recalls. “We had a lot of room to improvise, grow and take risks, and I’ve taken that with me to every job I’ve done. The makers of the show gave me a lot of room to test the character and ask questions and not be a robot or puppet. I learned so much about trusting your instincts.”
On acting as self-discovery:
Kitsch also has the smarts to grasp The Bang Bang Club’s thorny issues. One of these is the question of whether a photojournalist should take the shot or step in to stop the violence or the pain the subject is experiencing.
Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for a photo of a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture and took heat for exploiting the moment. Another Bang Bang Club member, Greg Marinovich, won the same prize for his photograph of African National Congress supporters brutally murdering a man they believed to be an Inkatha spy.
“We had really heated debates on set,” Kitsch says. “I don’t think it’s ever gonna be black-and-white.
“If Greg had come in on that picture that won the Pulitzer, he’d be dead,” he continues, his passion rising. “There’d be no picture, there’d be no justice done. There would have been just another body on the ground without any evidence.
“When you’re a photojournalist, you’re exposing something that’s timeless – the violence, the politics. What do you give up for that? Do I give up on a picture that will raise millions of dollars for a cause and save millions of lives?”
Of course, photojournalism, except in wartime, isn’t what it once was (see sidebar, this page), thanks to the rise of the digital camera.
“We’re all walking around with cameras in our pockets, and you set it on A and you’re fine,” says Kitsch. “These guys had two or three heavy cameras, a long lens – Kev shot the vulture shot with a long lens.
“It’s important to know who the four guys were. You’re going to leave the theatre making a judgment about Kevin Carter based on how I played him, and that pressure and doing justice to him is where I wanted to put my focus.”
Super-serious, this guy, but not so serious that he can’t throw me for a small loop. As the interview comes to a close, he gives a little laugh and says, “Don’t forget to say hi to the people in the office.”
So he’s not so into being a heartthrob, but he won’t forget his fans.
See the review of Bang Bang Club here.
susanc@nowtoronto.com
