By Fred Topel | Image property of Sony Pictures Classics.
Youth Without Youth
Francis Ford Coppola had the task of conveying all the psychological elements of Youth Without Youth visually. It was Tim Roth's job to act them all. He plays a man with restored youth and the power to read all languages. That's a tall order even for a method actor.
Tim Roth Acting on Youth Without Youth
"It's more just mimicry really," explained Roth. "I would try and pin down exactly what he wanted me to say. How much of a piece of poetry? Then we would go and get someone who spoke that language, not somebody who is genuinely a teacher, but somebody who is normal. For example a nurse we had, someone who worked in a bar that was German, they would come in and they would phonetically go over what I had to do. I would just try and get as close as I could to how it sounded. It was a lot. I think initially it was about 15 [languages] or so, then with the new language, the invented language on top of that, so it was pretty tricky."
Playing his own mental or metaphorical double was more than just a technical process of split screens and CGI too. "It messed around with me a lot. Sometimes it would be ‘Okay, what are we going to do first?’ and he would read off the lines of Dominic and I would play the doppelganger. Then we would do another round where someone else would read. And then he said do them all at the same time. You would have to switch form character to character. That was the stuff that always interested me. Then I would say, ‘Who am I?’ and he would say, ‘Well, who do you think that you are?’ and, 'Is he just a crazy man? Is all of this? Is all of this just a dream? Is all of this unreal or is it something just going on in his mind?' That element of it, that layer of it, for me was very interesting."
Roth admits he normally does not watch his own films, but there is so much going on in Youth Without Youth that even he may be surprised. "I’m interested. I’m really interested. Francis is fascinating to me. He is one of the reasons I became an actor. The things that he put me through, and the things he had me do, I mean the whole aging, and trying to get a hold of myself, I’m fascinated to see if that is going to come off. I did see a rough cut of it, but I haven’t seen the finished product yet. I’m nervous about seeing it though."
Even completing the whole film, Roth has not settled on an artistic interpretation of it. "This is an issue too. I don’t know if he is young or if he’s old. I quite often say it, I don’t know if he is in the film as 100 years old, but we did him as 100 years old at one point. Dreams of a young man, or dreams of an old man, I’m not quite sure what they were. That was discussion that flew around the set quite often. That was also the fun of the choice really."
Youth Without Youth opens to theaters December 14th.
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