Alexander

Alexander (film)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_(film)  

Alexander is a 2004 epic historical drama film based on the life of Alexander the Great. It was directed by Oliver Stone, with Colin Farrell in the title role. The film was an original screenplay based in part on the book Alexander the Great, written in the 1970s by the University of Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox.

Colin Farrell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Farrell

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Aleksandar Veliki

ALEXANDER, 2004., Njemačka, SAD, Nizozemska, Francuska, 175 min.

http://mojtv.hr/film/1238/aleksandar-veliki.aspx

The Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Colin Farrell

http://www.details.com/celebrities-entertainment/cover-stars/201211/colin-farrell-seven-psychopaths

"This isn't hot," Colin Farrell says, standing in the damp inferno of a sauna at a Russian bathhouse in West Hollywood.

"It gets worse, but you'll get used to it," the 36-year-old Dublin native promises, his familiar brogue brightly reassuring in the sweltering haze. I'm sprawled on a bench, liquefying. My hair is close to combusting, my brain steadily confit-ing in its own juices. Farrell is upright, unmoved—a seasoned veteran of saunas and a believer who preaches the restorative powers of a good schvitz.

"When I got out of rehab, I went to New York and randomly moved into an apartment two doors from the Russian & Turkish Baths," he says. This was 2006, following his turn as the pouty, slickly pomaded reincarnation of Crockett to Jamie Foxx's Tubbs in Michael Mann's big-screen version of Miami Vice. He'd made an epic run of it—the near-instant success, the standard Hollywood Rich-and-Famous Contract with its all-access allotment of money, celebrity, sex, drink, and drugs in potentially fatal doses. At age 29, he found himself fat-faced and exhausted, ill from good fortune and bad choices.

"For a one-man band who didn't have, like, three or four other dudes helping trash shit and talk smack, I did fairly well," he says, with a certain degree of gentle forgiveness for his past self—and no interest in going back.

"The bottom line is I ended up miserable. I'd done enough of a job of flagrantly abandoning myself in a very loud and public way that I began to fall apart, you know?"

Anyone who needs a refresher in this spin on the be-careful-what-you-wish-for Hollywood cautionary tale can dial it up online anytime: the drunken expletive-laced tirades, the interview wherein he compares the convenience of call girls to pizza delivery, the sex tape that, despite all legal efforts, didn't stay private.

So he checked himself in for treatment, chucked the bad-boy brand, and entered a new period that still, seven years later, feels to him like uncharted territory.

"I'm not Scandinavian," he says, returning to the subject of the baths. "I had no background with saunas. But a friend said, 'Check 'em out,' and I did. And that was it. From then on, I was there three or four hours a day for four months."

We've been in the heat maybe 10 minutes, but they're long, slippery minutes that make it hard to grab hold of an idea like four hours. Time feels different when you're trying not to think about it, and maybe therein lies the allure of the sauna: a slow-paced, cleansing, away-from-the-world zone in which the afflicted life-aholic can rest and reset.

"There was a time when I needed to do three or four films at once," Farrell says. "It was the best place for me to hide." He's less frenetic now, taking fewer gigs but giving each more of his attention, more of his self. He's just wrapped Saving Mr. Banks, with Emma Thompson. Next month he's headed to New York to begin shooting Akiva Goldsman's adaptation of Mark Helprin's supernatural novel Winter's Tale, with Russell Crowe and Will Smith. In between, Farrell practices yoga regularly, reads compulsively, and takes road trips—solo. "I'm shit print compared to what I was before," he jokes.

Time regained is the reward of rehab, and it was, for Farrell, an unfamiliar commodity.

"Honestly," he says, "I've got eight hours a day now that I didn't have before, when I was drinking every day for 18 years."

What to do with that windfall? How to process the reclaimed clarity of those found hours? These are questions never far from Farrell's mind.

One of the answers is being a dad to his two boys, James, 8, and Henry, 2. Becoming a father is a classic catalyst for getting one's shit together—but in Farrell's case it was a slow-acting cure. "When I had James, I made a decision not to change," he says. "I literally said, 'I'm not changing! I'm gonna be his friend!' Like a fucking 28-year-old drug-addicted drunk friend is exactly what my 6-week-old son needs." After two years of substance-fueled fatherhood, he thought, "Why am I resisting?"

"That was a whole by-product of fame," Farrell says. Not changing was his way of staying true to his Dublin roots, of keeping alive his outsider status and his sense of himself as removed from the drive and ambition it takes to fuel sudden fame.

"There's a form of expat guilt," he says. "I feared people at home would think I'd changed. So my Irish accent got stronger in America. This was me coming in and going, 'I don't give a fuck!' But, of course, not caring is a form of caring."

His public image was the product of a great deal of effort to make his ascent look effortless. "I wore the same fucking pair of boots for 10 years," he recalls, laughing. "From Cape Town to Tibet to L.A. to Dublin without laces. The same fucking grubber boots that I bought for fucking 20 pounds in a market in London. Initially I wore them because I didn't want to care about how I looked, and then they became my identity. They became my character. And then I wouldn't wear anything else—the idea of it put the fear of God in me."

In 2000, Farrell met the director Joel Schumacher in London to read for a part in the Vietnam-era army drama Tigerland. "We read 44 actors in three days," Schumacher recalls. Farrell, who was doing some TV in Ireland, was an hour late for the audition.

"He had a T-shirt on, a motorcycle jacket, I'm not sure if he'd had a couple beverages by this point," Schumacher says. "He walked in the room and it was the same feeling I had when Julia Roberts came to my house when she was 20. It's almost a little like falling in love—I can't explain it."

Schumacher told him to watch Hud and Cool Hand Luke, and he cast him as the lead in Tigerland and again in Phone Booth (2002), his breakout role. Within a year, Farrell was working with Steven Spielberg on Minority Report, and a year after that he was in Oliver Stone's Alexander, reportedly making $10 million.

One way to keep the folks at home from thinking he'd gone Hollywood was to put them on a plane and import them for premieres and parties—so that they'd go Hollywood too: "I'd fly over loads of uncles and aunties. I think the most I brought over at one time was 30 friends and family. 'Cause the money back then was fuckin' stupid, man! It was so stupid."

In truth, the money isn't so bad now either. What's really changed is his relationship with status and the strangeness of his chosen profession. Get him talking about the good/bad old days and you quickly realize that celebrity itself was one of the mind-altering substances he indulged in, grappled with, and is finally beating, one day at a time. My name is Colin, and I'm a movie star . . . [Forgiving applause]

"It's very easy as someone who has in his life a certain amount of material wealth, but the best thing about fame is debunking it," he says. "The best thing is that you get to go, 'Oh shit—I've just knocked a big

 • • •

"Aww, it's funny, man—these fucking interviews . . . "

Farrell arches those famously emotive eyebrows—they could be twin shaggy characters in a Dr. Seuss book or a pair of Afghan hounds up on hind legs—and the look says: Are we really going to keep talking about the old exploits?

We've cooled off in the pool and rehydrated and are now returning to the sauna. I've sweated out more toxins in an hour than Farrell's seen in seven years, but here we are still talking about his past.

"Inevitably it ends up back on the drugs and booze," he says. "It's such an energetic part of where I came from. It was part of my brand, and it's hard for me to talk about the last 20 years and not have fame and addiction be a part of it. But it kind of does get old . . . "

Contra Fitzgerald, there are second acts in American life—you just have to spend them rehashing every fucked-up thing you ever did for the press. Better to talk about what's changed. For one thing, if he tells me it's going to get hotter but I'll get used to the heat, then I have to believe him now, because Farrell exudes a sincerity that is as irrepressible as his serial lying once was.

"Oh, I wouldn't tell a truth all day," he says flatly. "If I'd had chicken and beans for dinner, I'd tell you I had steak and potatoes. No purpose, just habit. The amount of energy you have to put in and the amount of lies you have to tell to keep a drug habit alive, it's fairly significant. Your whole life is a lie."

Being honest with yourself is another answer to the riddle of what to do with the extra hours in your day. Part of that is embracing the unknowns. "Not knowing what the fuck I'm doing as a dad is huge," he says happily. "I don't know what I'm doing, and that's a very liberating thing. You just go, 'Oh look, there's shit on the floor.' There's actually shit on the floor—I have a picture of it on my phone. So what do you do? You clean it up, put a diaper on his ass, and that's that. It's just about being present for these guys."

That presence is something new that's mentioned over and over again by his recent colleagues. Jessica Biel, Farrell's costar in this summer's Total Recall redo, calls him a doll and more fun and playful than she'd imagined him but reserves her greatest praise for his on-set focus: "His performances were different every take and surprising and exciting. He just has the ability to be trying different things all the time."

And acting opposite those eyebrows? "Those eyebrows pretty much live in their own ZIP code," Biel says. "He's got a good sense of humor about those things."

Farrell puts the eyebrows and rakish humor to good use as Marty, the beleaguered straight man in Seven Psychopaths, with Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, and Christopher Walken. Martin McDonagh's sharply written, energetically loopy story revolves around Marty, a struggling screenwriter (and possible alcoholic) caught up in a bloody showdown of his own making. "It's very hard to get a film star who's open to looking weak or sad or hurt or broken," says McDonagh, who also directed Farrell in the 2008 black comedy In Bruges. "It takes a lot of integrity to go there, to explore a character's weakness and not be worried about box office or hurting one's image."

Rockwell watched In Bruges repeatedly before pairing up with Farrell on Psychopaths. "I got an idea of what his gift is as an actor," he says. "It's his vulnerability. He's got a powerful emotional instrument. I think he's really coming into his own. He's going to be a serious leading man. He could become like a Sean Connery for us."

Rockwell and Farrell had hung out a few times at the Chateau Marmont back in the day. "He had a shaved head then," Rockwell says. "He's a different guy now. Older and wiser. More focused and accessible. One of the most generous—I'm kind of in love with him. I have a man crush on Colin for sure."

• • •

"Life is change, life is evolution, growth . . . " Farrell is saying. We were talking about love and the impermanence of everything, and this has set him off on one of his verbal flights, in which the words tumble out quickly and he seems to be performing a speech he's writing in his mind as he goes. "Life is apogee, apex, decline, life is death—and everything else is open to discussion."

We're in our robes by the pool, drinking water. The mostly Russian bathers are doing a good impression of not recognizing the photogenically scruffy schvitzer in their midst.

Farrell isn't with either of the mothers of his sons, though everyone gets along. He was married once, to the British actress Amelia Warner. It lasted four glorious months. Or as he puts it: "I had a brief liaison with the notion of permanence."

The problem with monogamy, he believes, is that we make vows for eternity, but change is the human condition.

"I haven't been in a relationship in a while," he says. "Two and a half years since I was with Henry's mother. If I ever do get involved with somebody again, I will try as much as possible to shut my fucking mouth and stay fucking present. Love in action, man! Not love in fucking words."

He recounts a childhood story he's told before but is worth repeating for the sheer sweet wackiness of it. "I've joked about it in interviews, but it's true, no joke. The first time I fell in love was with Marilyn Monroe.

"I left Smarties for her under my pillow."

Smarties, the candy?

"Yeah, Smarties the candy, like M&M's."

Why would she look under your pillow to find candies?

"Because fucking love conquers all! Including the limitations brought about by death 50 years in advance and time—all that quotidian bollocks. With full seriousness and absolute awareness of what my intent was—and a deep, deep abiding hope each night—I left Smarties under my pillow . . . "

Farrell's not joking.

"On my life: It's not some cute story. I had better things to do with my time even when I was a fuck-up than to create stories like this! It was that Christmas when I didn't just see but felt, experienced, and lived through Some Like It Hot. And there was a strength in that 7- or 8-year-old's feelings for Marilyn that was in every promise and every vow that I've made to every woman subsequently."

I mention that both drinking and dalliances can be a kind of hedge against loneliness. "They're not hedges so much as they are curtains," he says without missing a beat. "Hedges are natural, curtains are manmade. And they work until they don't."

What is immensely likable about Farrell is his inability to become jaded and bored.

"I've never seen a moon in the sky that, if it didn't take my breath away, at least misplaced it for a moment," he says, unashamed by his own corny enthusiasms. "When I was living a different way, I was probably profoundly bored. I had moments of elation. Now I never get fucking bored. I get excited about room-service menus! I really do. Even though the french fries are soggy as fuck and I still haven't figured out an exact way to open up that Heinz mini jar—sometimes it's my nails, sometimes it's my teeth. I'm just grateful that I'm actually alive, to be honest. Anytime I have a shit mood, now it's some aspect of me that is present and is feeling whatever I'm feeling, and the same counts if I'm giddy or jocular. It's honest, it's real. That's quite simply the coolest thing. Everything is real now."

At this point we are both really and truly sick of the heat. We start to retreat to the showers. There is talk of making like the Russians and jumping in the icy-cold plunge pool.

"Nah," Colin Farrell says. "I've got to get home to put the lads to bed, and really we don't have anything left to prove."