The Face, #9, October 1997

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Ewan And Cameron's Extraordinary Adventures

She's the one.... with gorgeous goofiness and burgeoning fame. He's the one with jockular charm and instant acclaim. They're the two... at the love-heart of the new film from the people who gave you Trainspotting. Can they survive the hype?
Ewan McGregor has read my mind. We've only just met, but already he's guessed that I'm apprehensive about what Cameron Diaz is going to be like, and he's trying to reassure me. "She's a cracker, she's brilliant," he says breezily. "You worry about famous American actresses being so up their arse, but she's so funny. No pretence or hassle at all."
   We are sitting together in the impossibly expensive Japanese restaurant Nobu, situated inside London's improbably fashionable Metropolitan hotel. Ewan is so excited about Cameron's arrival that he stands on her foot when he leaps up to embrace her, although he downplays it with a scathing "It was nice here till you turned up." Within minutes they've turned into the equivalent of a young married couple, finishing off each other's sentences, gentle mockery, almost continuous laughter and low-level flirting (if it wasn't for Ewan and Cameron being so avowedly in love with their respective partners - set designer Eve Mavrakis and actor Matt Dillon - I'd suspect something).
   It is Cameron who laughs the most: an infectious mirth which spans the scale from titter to hopeless guffaw. She likes to laugh, it seems, and mostly at Ewan McGregor.
   The pair met when they both arrived on the Utah set of A Life Less Ordinary, the latest film from the Trainspotting director-producer-writer trio Danny Boyle, Andrew McDonald and John Hodge. A modern spin on Thirties Hollywod romantic comedy, the movie throws rich heiress Celine (Cameron) into the arms of vengeful sacked janitor Robert (Ewan) after the latter kidnaps her. Naturally, divine intervention - via a couple of angels dispatched to earth - is on hand to keep the pair's jeopardy factor at maximum, in the belief that only situations of extreme adversity will throw them together (a cruel-to-be-kind approach to playing Cupid). It's not exactly schemie smack addicts leaving babies to die, but nor is it One Fine Day.
   It was on the cards that Boyle & Co would bank on McGregor to bring the requisite edge to their first foray into American movie-making, but the casting of Diaz seemed like a risk. A former teen model who leapt on to a million magazine covers on the back of her showy but fluffy contribution to The Mask, Cameron was always more likely to top a Most Sexy poll than win an Oscar. A series of roles in obscure, edgier fare - the low-budget black comedy The Last Supper, the disappointing Keanu Reeves indie pic Feeling Minnesota and Ed Burns' sophomore ensemble effort She's the One - suggested only that if she was going to make mistakes, then she'd prefer nobody saw them.
   Since shooting Life...., of course, My Best Friend's Wedding has been released, and Diaz's performance in it as the sweet, slightly spoilt Kimmy sugests Boyle knew what he was doing all along. It would be wrong to say that she steals the movie from Julia Roberts - Rupert Everett does that - but let's just say that Sandra Bullock will no longer be sleeping easy. There's a new pretty, sexy, loveable, goofy girl in town, and she never made Speed 2.
   Ewan, meanwhile, continues his ascent. He has followeed A Life Less Ordinary with Todd Haynes' hotly-anticipated glam rock picture Velvet Goldmine (Ewan plays the Iggy Pop-like Curt Wilde in the film to be released next year; fans of the tackle much in evidence in The Pillow Book will be delighted to know that he sings naked in one scene and fucks Christian Bale plein air in another), and now with a role as the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas' Star Wars: Balance Of The Force (at a screen near you in 1999). Bear in mind that he not only has two earlier films completed and ready for release (Serpent's Kiss and Nightwatch) but also three more projects lined up after Star Wars (The Rise And The Fall Of The Little Voice, a Nick Leeson biopic, Rogue Trader, and Stephan 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' Elliot's new film), and you have a picture of how in-demand the young Scot is right now.
   Cameron is in town for a bunch of solo press interviews and the odd joint thing with Ewan (Cameron: "That's how they got me here, by the way. They told me you were going to be present all the times." Ewan: "Yeah. In fact, 24 hours a day." Cameron:"In the chest at the bottom of my bed." Ewan: "I don't think there'd be any objections from me."). They have a lot to catch up on (Cameron on Ewan's wife Eve and their one-and-a-half-year-old baby, Clara; Ewan on Cameron's sister Chiméne's baby, Chloe, born during the shooting of A Life Less Ordinary.
   They last met at THE FACE photo shoot, the day after Ewan flew into Los Angeles to join Cameron at MTV's surreally pointless Movie Awards. Which is where we begin...

The Face: So who did you give the MTV Award to?
Ewan: Will Smith. And of course I'd just been quoted saying really awful things about Independence Day. Really awful things. I did a lot of that. I made it my mission to slag that one off. I showed up at the rehearsal and said: "By the way, who are we giving it to? Will Smith? For Independence Day?. You're kidding!" It was in Entertainment Weekly that week that I wouldn't taint myself by being involved in anything that shit.
Cameron: (splutter splutter)
Ewan: We were coming down this press line in front of him, and he was about two groups behind us, and he was surrounded by the biggest black bouncers you've ever seen in your life. These huge guys. And I could just see myself in the car park afterwards being on the deck with these big guys, kicking hard at my head.
Cameron: (imitating said bouncer) "You think it's funny, motherfucker?"
Ewan: God, I was so scared!
The Face: Was Will magnanimous?
Ewan: He was really cool. He probably hadn't read it. Maybe he saw it afterwards (imaging Will's response) "That fucker!" He'll get me next time I'm in L.A.
Cameron: He will. He'll be waiting at the hotel for you.
Ewan: He'll be waiting at the airport with his henchmen.
Cameron: That whole evening was very funny though.
Ewan: This weird glitzy affair. You realise afterwards that nobody's there unless they've got a reason.... We were there, obviously, to promote this movie, and everyone else that's there is doing it to promote some movie that they're in. If it was just people that wanted to go, there'd be fucking no one there.
Cameron: The only reason I went was because of this. There's no way I was ever going to do the MTV Movie Awards.
Ewan: No fucking way. And I can say with my hand on my heart that I'll never do them again.
The Face: I hear Mike Myers was actually good at presenting the show.
Ewan: He was very good. We went down like a bucket of cold sick. Me and Cameron. We went on and tried to be amusing....
Cameron: And nobody got it.
Ewan: Nothing happened. The audience was going: "Get the fuck out of here!" So we were like: "And anyway, the awards are..."
Cameron: But we thought we were funny.
Ewan: We were funny, that's the sad thing.
Cameron: But they didn't get it. I think it has to do with the accent. (pause) Not that I'm putting the blame on you, Ewan...
Ewan: It's just that they didn't understand a word I said.
Cameron: They didn't understand a word he said.
Ewan: It's not so difficult. My accent's not so hard to understand. It's probably as different from standard American as, say, Matthew McConaughey's. And they understood him.
Cameron: (imitating Matthew McConaughey's Southern drawl) But he's been in a lot of Amerry-cun moo-vees.
Ewan: (also imitiating Matthew McConaughey) Yeah, goddammitt!

Salt Lake City Limits

The Face: So Cameron, what were you expecting Ewan to be like?
Cameron: I had no expectations in meeting Ewan - I was just hoping that we got on and he wasn't a total prick.
The Face: What about you, Ewan?
Ewan: I was more or less the same. Except I'm usually disappointed. Because I always give - and this isn't just with actors - I always credit people with.... I always assume that people are nice people. And I'm just constantly fucking disappointed. Most people aren't. Most of my worry wasn't to do with Cameron, it was to do with American starlet, and the connotations of that are: nightmare to work with.
The Face: Last time you spoke to us you were looking forward to meeting Cameron. Your quote was: "My brother's particularly pissed off about that. He's fucking gutted."
Ewan: My brother was really, really jealous. I think it was around then that a magazine had just come out and on the cover was a big picture of you and it said: "Thank God for Cameron Diaz."
Cameron: (cracks up laughing)
Ewan: And I thought: "That's the best thing I've seen on a cover, ever." And everyone I was telling, I've never been sworn at so much. They were like, "You bastard. Fuck you, bastard." And I was like, "She'll probably be a pain in the neck. Don't worry about it."
Cameron: And then he met me, and of course we had to be in Utah.
Ewan: Three fucking months in Utah!
The Face: Had you ever been anywhere like that before?
Ewan: No. That was kind of the interesting thing about it. That's America as well. New York and LA are one side of America, but Utah... I know everyone says Utah's a dodgy state, and it really is, but it's a weird place to be, and the weirdest fucking people I've ever met.
Cameron: You know, Ewan's there with his rocker haircut, and he's walking around with...
Ewan: ... my baby. They hated that. They hated me walking with my baby because I was a young, scruffy guy.
Cameron: They were afraid that you might have seven, like they do.
Ewan: And they were really afraid that I might actually have some fun in my life, that was a huge threat to them. No fun in Utah. It says that when you drive in: "No fun. In Utah. Thank you."
The Face: Cameron, had you ever been anywhere like that before?
Cameron: I had. Nevada, Arizona. Actually, Utah is the most unusual, because of its religious... elements.
Ewan: They're out of control with that shit.
Cameron: Yes they are. What struck me about Salt Lake City, everything is big and square. Because the Mormons have like six kids, they're thinking ahead about population. They know all these kids are going to be adults one day with their own children, so they've built all these stores that are like massive stores, with huge parking lots with enough parking space for everyone's mini vans.

Toilets, Booze, Fags

The Face: Did you two hang out much together in between shooting?
Ewan: It was funny the way it went. Because we were in that place with precious little to do, and because we were shooting hard, we were up against it. What happened was we kind of fell into this everday, nine-to-five-job existence. So we'd do the job through the week, and Friday night, or the night before our day off, we'd all go out and get fucking plastered. All of us, en masse, would go to this one bar called Spanky's which was the only biker bar in town. That's what I used to do when I worked on farms: You'd work all day, and then the night before your day off you'd go and get plastered. With this film we kind of became normal people.
Cameron: He'd go home after the day, try and see Clara before she went to sleep. Get some good time in with the wife. I'd go home to my cat (self-deprecating chuckle). Friday night it would be: "Ok, Span-kys!" It was good, it was actually a great group of people. When we were working it was a lot of fun. As always on movie sets we waited around all day. The first few weeks we really rolled, but once you get into the studio and there's lighting and all that....
Ewan: We used to watch movies a lot, didn't we? That's the one really nice thing about working in America - you get a video and a TV in your trailer. That's something you don't get here.
Cameron: You don't?
Ewan: (camply) I do now, darling.
The Face: Did you sit in your own trailers, separately?
Together: We sat in each other's trailers.
Cameron: We'd sit in the trailer....
Ewan:... and smoke up a fog. We'd have to open the door every now and again (both giggle at this recollection)
Cameron: We had a trailer that was divided, and he was on one side and I was on the other.
Ewan: So we could talk to each other when we were on the toilet. (shouting through partition) "Morning!"
Cameron: "Morning!" I'd like knock on the door and I'd hear him (makes toilet-related tongue-clacking noise). I'd be like: "What is that?"
Ewan: (explaining his bowel condition) "Sorry, I was out. Spanky's!"
Cameron: We'd have a movie we'd watch all day long. Start it...
Ewan: .... pause it, go and do a scene.
The Face: It must have been intimidating for you, Cameron, with these guys who all worked together before, and you're coming in as this glamorous Hollywood outsider figure.
Cameron: I never could forget.... (realises what I've called her) I don't consider myself a glamorous Hollywood figure or else I probably would have some trouble (both snigger). They didn't make me feel any different. It wasn't like I had to get initiated into the team. I didn't feel I had to work my way in any way, although the language.... (snigger). I don't speak their language.
Ewan: You got there in the end.

Japan, Drugs, Tiger Woods

The Face: Neither of you had a very productive time working in Morocco, did you?
Ewan: I was there a month to do one line of dialogue for Being Human. Fucking great job.
Cameron: I was there for a week to do two seconds on film. It's that kind of place.
Ewan: I love it.
Cameron: I don't think I even made it into the commercial.
The Face: It was a commercial? How many of those have you done?
Cameron: Maybe like 15.
The Face: How about you, Ewan?
Ewan: I've done two Japanese ads.
The Face: Since you've become famous? What were they for?
Cameron: Do you really want to say? You do it in Japan because you don't want anyone to see it. Don't torture yourself.
Ewan: (dramatic pause) A jeans one and a drink one. Fuck it, I don't care. But that's right, you do it in Japan because no one will ever see them except people who live in Japan.
The Face: They don't have a problem with people doing commercials. Everyone does it. Once De Niro's done it, who gives a shit?
Ewan: Did he do one?
The Face: (thinking: Probably not. I meant Dennis Hopper)
Ewan: That's what I've always said about things like the Letterman show and stuff. When I see De Niro on, then I'll do them.
The Face: You used to live in Japan, didn't you, Cameron?
Cameron: I spent three months in Tokyo when I was 16. I was working as a model there. It was amazing. It really made an impression on me. Having that at a young age, the influence of another culture, especially one so foreign. In Japan I could be totally uninhibited.
Ewan: It sort of widens you out. I left home at 16, suddenly being on your own... Being in a totally different culture broadens your mind.
Cameron: I like to experience things totally different to what I know.
Ewan: Crack cocaine, for instance. (Cameron guffaws) Something I'm going to try later on this afternoon.
Cameron: The first time wasn't enough, huh?
Ewan: It never is. Ha ha ha!
The Face: (seizing my chance to ask about drugs) Cameron, I read the Movieline piece where you were quite candid about lots of things. With drugs, you wouldn't deny it, you kind of give hints. ("I didn't try everything. Heroin scares me. Acid doesn't.")
Cameron: (offering a pat response) Drugs, it's an individual thing. Some people can handle it, some people can't. And of course each drug is different in its influence on a person. So I don't say that you shouldn't do it, but I'm not lobbying for it either. It's all an individual thing.
The Face: What about you, Ewan?
Ewan: I don't talk about drugs at all. Because of Trainspotting. That film is too important to me. And I know THE FACE isn't like this, but anything anyone says about drugs in this country, it's suddenly in the tabloids. They make such a fucking noise about it.
The Face: (letting them off the hook) Whether you like it or not you're role models. If you tell the truth, people are going to read it and say...
Ewan: "If it's all right for Tiger Woods to get smacked up in the morning before a round of golf, it's alright for me!" [Note to readers for lawyer's benefit: this is a groundless joke. Tiger Woods does not and never has taken drugs.]
Cameron: You know that swing he's got?
Ewan: It's not a swing, it's crack cocaine baby. Crack, the ball goes anway. Wooh! He's in Britain at the moment, for the British Open, and someone asked him about role models - is it an extra pressure? Either he's been asked this question so many times or someone has given him a great answer. He said: "You know, whether you're a policeman, a teacher or even a parent, we're all role models." I went: "Oh ho ho! Teacher or parent! That's beautiful. Or even maybe a multi-millionaire 20-year-old golfer. We're all role models, baby!"

Metallica, Star Wars, Big hair

The Face: Since we're talking about role models, let's talk about heroes. Ewan is already on record about Billy Connolly. Anyone else?
Ewan: Jimmy Stewart, who's just died. He was always my favourite actor. I never had one particular hero guy. Denis Leary was a bit of a a hero. That angry comedy stuff. I used to love that No Cure For Cancer stuff so much. I used to know it all. I could do pages of it.
The Face: What about music?
Ewan: I was into Elvis when I was a small kid. But I never really had any... And then along came Oasis and I've found my boys. I never was fanatical about a band until now.
The Face: Do you hang around with Liam and Noel?
Ewan: I wish.
The Face: What about your heroes, Cameron?
Cameron: (momentarily reverting to bland Hollywood actress mode) My family has always been a huge influence in my life so as a child my heroes were my dad. My dad was like the most. As far as actors go, I used to really love Harrison Ford when I was a kid.
Ewan: Have you met him?
Cameron: I won't ever. I don't ever want to meet him. Never.
Ewan: I'll have his people call your people.
The Face: Talking of Harrison, are you jealous of Ewan doing his Star Wars thing? Were you a Star Wars kid?
Cameron: I remember seeing it. I didn't collect the toys or anything.
The Face: Don't worry. It was a boy thing. What about you, Ewan?
Ewan: My Uncle Dennis [sic] [Lawson] was in them all, he was one of the X-Wing fighters. So remember, I was about five or six when the first one came out. This was the first time I'd been to the cinema to see my Uncle Dennis [sic] in a movie and I thought that was about the most exciting thing that had ever happened in my life. It was kind of a double whammy: the movie threw me and so did he. It's very peculiar doing it. It's very weird, it's so familiar, wearing all the Jedi stuff, the clogs and the lightsabers. And I'm actually like: "What is this?" It's part of your childhood, and your involved in it, it's very weird. Completely different to anything I've done before in my life, it's kind of like starting again. And the scale of it. I've never done a big movie like that before either. You can see how enchanting that would be.
The Face: But it must be scary as well. What if the Star Wars fans come up to you and say: "Ewan, you were crap. You've ruined it"?
Ewan: I never worry about stuff like that. I don't think it's scary. I think it's exciting. So much of it's not there. The exciting thing will be in the preview theatre in two years' time, watching it and going "fucking hell", and seeing what they've put round about you. What wasn't there is suddenly there.
Cameron: You don't know what you're acting against? I had to do that in The Mask. Acting with something that isn't there was so hard. You feel like an asshole.
Ewan: And because everyone's attention is on so many other things - what background is going to be, what's going on in the foreground - I think it would be very easy to get away with it. But I wouldn't worry about Star Wars fans thinking I'm crap. I've never worried about what people thought while I'm making a film. I'll worry about it after, but not now.
The Face: (suddenly remembering) Hey! We managed to avoid talking about the music Cameron was into at school.
Cameron: (pleading) We don't need to talk about that.
The Face: We do. 'Cause people who don't know would be surprised to learn you were a heavy metal chick.
Cameron: Metallica...
Ewan: (loud snigger)
The Face: You knew about this?
Ewan: Yeah, yeah.
Cameron: Listen, the "Master of Puppets" album still holds up. It's rock'n'roll. It's good.
The Face: Cameron, I'm not putting Metallica down.
Camerion: You'd better not be. There was a period when I was into a lot of things. There's something we had, we called it glam rock.
The Face: (teasing him about his Velvet Goldmine fashion crimes) Ewan knows all about that, don't you?
Ewan: I know all about glam rock.

Sex, nudity, more booze

The Face: Do you guys have a love scene in A Life Less Ordinary?
Ewan: There were a few but they didn't shoot them. We did them, they just didn't have any film left. We did them out of work time. We were practising. (Cameron is in hysterics)
The Face: I've got to ask you about nudity, because you did total nudity in The Pillow Book...
Ewan: Love it.
The Face: ... which of course you did for art.
Cameron: I've heard about this. My girlfriend came over to my house and tried to get me to see it with her for the third time that day.
Ewan: Really?
Cameron: Swear to God. She'd seen it twice already in one day. And she was like "You have to see it." And I was like: "I don't have to see it. I don't want to see it. I know him."
Ewan: (imitating Cameron) "I don't want to see that. I won't be able to look him in the face any more."
Cameron: She was like: "There's no wonder Ewan McGregor is confident."
Ewan: (filthy cackle)
Cameron: (still being her friend) "He doesn't have to be a movie star to be confident, let me tell you!"
The Face: You have never done any nudity...
Cameron: No.
The Face: ... apart from those photos that got sold to Celebrity Sleuth. Does that incident make you more apprehensive about doing nude scenes in movies?
Cameron: (weary and annoyed that I sneaked it round to this topic) That incident with this guy, because I was so young, I just don't think.... Obviously it was my fault too because I made this decision, but it was poor judgement at a young age. I felt that I could handle it. It wasn't that I was naked. I don't care: I'm not afraid of my body. It was just the fact that he took advantage of me. He took pictures that he took six years ago and sold them as if they were from yesterday. And I thought that was really shitty. As far as nudity goes in films I just haven't found anything where I find it warranted.
The Face: Have you been offered scripts with nudity?
Cameron: Less and less. You don't need to be totally undressed for sex.
The Face: Ewan, Cameron has this anecdote that crops up in every interview where she got really drunk. Have you...?
Ewan: What's her story. I don't know it.
Cameron: I got alcohol poisoning in Australia when I was 19 and I nearly died. I lost seven pounds in one day and was crippled for a week.
Ewan: Fucking hell. I'm drunk so often. They're not stories any more, it's just a state of being for me. I'm just usually drunk. someone sent me an interview from America, this tape of an interview I did in New York for Brassed Off, and it was on CNN, and I'm sitting in a bar with this guy, and I'm going: (does antagonistic drunk impression) "Bleyearggh. And why is everyone worried about a penis in a movie? I like it!" It's no big story any more with me. I've yet to be found in a gutter somehwere. I always get away with it somehow.
The Face: Have you had much hassle from the press?
Ewan: They found me once. A News Of The World turned up on my doorstep asking me questions about my daughter.
Cameron: What an asshole.
Ewan: It was about my daughter being ill and he wanted to know about it. He called her Clara. He said: "I want to ask you about Clara" and I just about took his head off. "Don't ever call her by her first name!" Some things are really offensive and I don't know why. I could have fucking swung for the cunt. What is it about News Of The World journalists? I could tell he was a News Of The World journalist when he was 50 yards up the road. I said: "Are you talking to me? Well who the fuck are you?" He said: "Well, I'm such and such from the News Of The World." I went: "Ha ha. I bet you fucking are."

Gold lame, hangovers, catsuits.

Ewan: You don't think you're going to get away with not talking about the photo shoot, do you?
Cameron: Huh huh huh!
The Face: (gulp)
Ewan: Ooh ho ho! What was that all about? What the fuck was that all about, that's what I want to know. I'm leaving the country when this magazine comes out, I'm leaving the country!
The Face: I haven't seen the pictures yet, but they faxed the fashion credits, and it was like gold...
Cameron: Gold lame catsuit worn by Ewan McGregor.
Ewan: Red and black zebra-stripe leotard The only good thing was the 55 assistants they had there. Lots of assistants. Really awful fucking clothes. I actually said at one point: "Please, please don't make me wear this." "Oh, you'll look so fantastic!" I've never been in that situation before.
Cameron: You were kind of handicapped that morning (ie after the MTV awards)
Ewan: I wasn't in a very useful state, I admit, but you can't deny I looked like a complete cunt wearing those clothes.
Cameron: (on the verge of hysterics) I kept going: "I'm sorry, Ewan, I'm sorry." It's going to look good, though, it's going to look good. Because you know what? It got better for me after you left.
Ewan: Did it? Did it really? I bet it did.
Cameron: If you'd had more time, I'm sure it would have worked out for you better. It was kind of doing it in the morning, only two hours, "let's get him done". It wasn't really fair to you.
Ewan: I would say so. No argument from me there, mate (both dissolve in hysterics again).