Nostromo Interview

Nostromo Interview FIRTH and FOREMOST
Hot British actor Colin Firth plays an icy enigma in Nostromo on PBS.

BYLINE: KINNEY LITTLEFIELD, The Orange County Register

No same old English sex icon, Colin Firth
The Brit heartthrob made 1996 the Year of Firth Frenzy with his turn as smoldering, withholding Fitzwilliam Darcy in A&E's Pride and Prejudice. Now he ushers in '97 as icy businessman Charles Gould, who falls obsessively in love with a silver mine in the PBS epic Nostromo, premiering Sunday.

"I'm actually aroused by the silver in a way - it's a peculiar fascination," Firth, 36, says on a visit to Los Angeles, speaking first person for his character.

Such is the Darcy-like intensity of Firth, who smokes furiously. His hair has lightened from Darcy dark to its normal chestnut, looking as it did in "The English Patient," in which he played a British hubby cuckolded by ragingly sexy Ralph Fiennes.

But Firth can burn as hot as Fiennes and just as implosively.

"You know in Nostromo I make love to my wife in the silver mine - a real mixed message and mixed motivation," Firth says of Gould.

"Ennio Morricone ('The Mission'), who wrote the music for Nostromo, wrote a love theme for me and my wife. Later whenever I look at the silver it becomes the same love theme."

In Nostromo, based on Joseph Conrad's classic 1904 novel, Gould travels to the fictional South American country of Costaguana in the 1890s to reopen his father's mine, closed after his father was murdered. As corruption and insurrection spreads, Gould angles to keep his mine open through dubious political alliances. And he grows ever more distant from his loving wife, Emilia (Serena Scott Thomas of "Nash Bridges").

Albert Finney also stars as alcoholic English expatriate Dr. Monygham, who sacrifices himself in unexpected ways. Brian Dennehy plays greedy American tycoon Joshua Holroyd. Steamy Italian film star Claudio Amendola takes the title role of Nostromo, the trustworthy chief of dockworkers whose name means "our man". Yet Nostromo also falls under the silver's spell in this allegorical tale of loyalty and honor - and whose man he is becomes unclear.

"Yet it's very clear what happens to Charles Gould in Nostromo - he becomes a man who loses his soul," Firth explains.

"Still, Conrad never allows his characters to be simple. Gould wants the silver to civilize what is regarded as an uncivilized country. He wants all those turn-of-the-century ideals - beauty, order, truth - to come from the silver. He sticks with that even when it's quite clear that he's turning into a monster.

"And Conrad likes to keep his characters paradoxical. When Gould needs guns, the French intellectual Martin Decoud (Lothaire Bluteau) comes over as a courier, all for the love of a woman who's living in Costaguana. He stays because of her, even though he hates it there. And he actually dies for her in a way, although Conrad questions Decoud's vanity, his self-absorption. Conrad doesn't romanticize it, yet Decoud does die for love."

KILLER EPIC

Even the making of Nostromo proved a paradox befitting Conrad.

The sweeping yet cerebral miniseries is a multinational jigsaw puzzle, a co-production of WGBH in Boston, Britain's BBC, RAI Italy and TVESpain.

Shot entirely in Cartegena de Indias, Colombia, Nostromo involved steamships, trains, explosions, skittish horses, 15,000 extras, 2,000 costumes, and a made-to-be-filmed harbor and jetty, all in the hands of English director Alastair Reid ("Tales of the City," "Traffik"), Italian producer Fernando Ghia ("The Mission") and a multilingual cast and crew.

Like earlier PBS effort Middlemarch," Nostromo is the kind of classic period drama that has reinvigorated the BBC. Like "Moses" and other made-for-cable movies on TNT, it is the kind of U.S.-Italian-Spanish co-production that makes large-scale drama affordable.

Yet for Firth and his fellow actors, Nostromo also was a dangerous kind of chaos.

"You'd be sitting on a horse that wasn't really trained in front of 50 to 100 other horses and carriages on a dirt street in a shantytown with the camera miles away and a huge crowd and a language barrier and explosives going off. They gave me a quite uncontrollable horse the first day, a mustang or something, and I was thrown for the first time in my life - and I pride myself on being quite good.

"And there's a scene where I'm being garroted - do you know what garroting is?"

You wrap your hands around your neck and start to strangle to show you do. Firth nods and murmurs "um" appreciatively as he does after every question, savoring the thought.

"Um, yes. There's a metal collar to strangle me around my neck and someone yelled an instruction which I didn't understand. My hands are tied behind my back and I don't speak Spanish to tell them I'm REALLY being strangled and to stop. And yet we finished on schedule and it looks great." And Firth lived to tell the tale of emotionally constricted Gould, who remains closed-hearted to the end.

"In playing Gould I drew on that blankness, that inexpressiveness. I think it's essential to the man. And actually I was given a lot more to say than Gould has in Conrad's book - actually I'm skeptical of anyone who says they've read the novel, it's a tough read. Conrad has no sense of humor, but our production does, a little. I even got to smile. You see, we're not making the book. As much as anything, we're digging the adventure story out of the book."

CULTURE CLASHES

So did Nostromo's stew of international acting styles - English, American, French, Italian, Colombian - mesh or clash on set?

"I had a Method training in an English drama school, and I have a lot of respect for it. There is something to be said for getting the character inside here, inside you, first. Often English actors are just expected to be good troopers, no matter how much noise is going on, like it doesn't matter if we have no rehearsal, like it doesn't matter how many people are walking through or if the performance stinks - let's just get on with it, let's impress the crew.

"And there are some American actors who just want to hit their mark and get it done.

"Really, I think people love to try to create an image of culture difference, but I've never felt at loggerheads."

Indeed, Firth is very much at home in Los Angeles, loggerheads - not a word often heard on Melrose or La Cienega - aside. Firth's son by actress Meg Tilly lives here, and he visits regularly.

"I really have a romance with this place," Firth says of Los Angeles. "I miss it terribly when I'm not here. But I also miss walking in the streets where something peculiar and spontaneous can happen. And I don't mean driving to Santa Monica so you can walk down the street.

"And I get impatient with America's extraordinary lack of recognition for the rest of the world. It's seen as CUTE. Europe is thought of as toy town or like 'It's so old and exotic!' It's NOT old and exotic. It's like HERE. We've come into the 20th century all by ourselves. We've got mobile phones. It's not quaint little old ladies in cottages. It's sophisticated, violent, messed up and we've got our own problems.

"Still, if America is criticized by anyone when I'm back home I defend it - to the barricades."

Yet America does love those quaint little old Brit ladies, especially "Pride and Prejudice" author Jane Austen, that 19th-century chick - indeed old maid - who penned the chatty novel that led to Firth's U.S. fame.

"Actually, I think the English are in the same position as the Americans, longing for that, too. The English feel rootless and without identity and without tradition. We're not as steeped in culture as a lot of North Americans think we are. We just don't seem to like ourselves a lot right now and we've got a longing for an age that never existed.

"So I developed a healthy respect for Jane Austen doing Pride and Prejudice, but I don't want her to represent England because it's not like that."

But back to Conrad, where it is the women who remain pure, as mounds of shining silver taint Gould, tarnish close-to-saintly Nostromo and corrupt lesser men.

"I think Conrad idealized women. He treats them with a certain distance and respect. Only Emilia (Scott Thomas) truly maintains her humanity. She's terrified of the way her husband is going. Partly because of Serena's performance I think we bring Emilia to the fore a little bit more."

Still, at the close of Nostromo imaginary Costaguana remains morally and ethically troubled, as tragedy strikes several families and several pairs of lovers, with questionable justice done.

"You know one of the greatest artifices that exists in drama is the giving of answers to things, answers that don't exist, solutions that aren't in people's minds. But that's disingenuous.

Yes, a lot of questions at the start of Nostromo are even bigger at the end. But I think that's appropriate. That is just the kind of drama I believe in."

Kinney Littlefield is The Orange County Register's television critic.

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