Q: But let’s say your character for instance he sees this guy that is being glorified and he decides I’m not going to follow this just because I’m told to glorify this guy because this guy is going to save us.  But he decides to question that.

John Malkovich: Yes and that’s also part of his job and in fact his questions about the myth of Beowulf are in fact quite accurate and well founded so I think it’s also to do with the tribe meaning this tribe of which Hrothgar is king were quite a rough and tumble tribe themselves then this kind of young turk comes in talking about all he can do and they’re, I think, very skeptical and that’s skepticism is most sort of brought to bear in that character.  I mean it’s also part of the dramatic structure but it’s also his position to be skeptical.

Q: Everyone’s praising the CGI and the way you’re all working now, but there must be some drawbacks?  Are they not?  I mean is it just an ideal way to do it?

John Malkovich: I would say the drawbacks—Robert is much more well placed to respond to that question than I am. 

Q: As an actor?

John Malkovich: As an actor there are no drawbacks.

Q: Really?

John Malkovich: It’s incredibly expensive and it takes a massive amount of time in post production, which I would think must be so detail heavy and so wearing that it must be really difficult to maintain.  As far as the process goes for instance we are—our company produced a little film a few years ago called Ghost World so in other words we took Dan Clouse’s adult comic, adapted it to a screenplay, then got real actors to do it and tried to give it a kind of gloss of an adult comic.  If you could do that film for $6.3 million in this process you would just film the book. There wouldn’t be 2 or 3 years of-- actually 6 of screenplay writing and etc, etc.  You could still get real actors to do it because for instance in this—I haven’t seen it yet—but it was explained to me and perhaps I’m wrong that Anthony Hopkins character Hrothgar, he looks like Anthony but he’s very, very heavy.  Very, very big.  You know 600 pounds is a lot of pasta by any standards.  Why wouldn’t you want to do that and for us really we came and put our dots on and worked all day.  We had a ½ hour lunch; we worked the rest of the day.  If I’m not mistaken by the first morning by 10:00 we were into the 3^rd days shooting.  That’s how fast it went and a lot of the people, everyone was well prepared.

Q: So it’s ideal then?

John Malkovich: For me it was.  I rarely have a terrible time doing movies.  I rarely have a bad time doing movies.  Normally I have a very good time, but the process can be maddeningly slow and often times you’re quite removed from it.  The work you do or need to do might be quite removed from the work that’s going on. Let’s put it that way.  And in this it isn’t because they do all their work really-- of course there’s an enormous amount of pre-production planning but during the actual registering of it, it’s just the actors.

Q: How would you dive into the water when you were doing this on a stage without anything where there’s no water there?

John Malkovich: I think I dived onto some pads if I remember just like a regular stunt into a pit or something like that off the table or something.  It’s really like rehearsing a play. I mean, you rehearse a play.  You don’t…

Q: You’re in a spare room and there’s no audience there?

John Malkovich: Yeah and there are no lights and no…

Q: You have no sense of worry that this isn’t good or not good because we’re just doing it and the director will tell us?

John Malkovich: Yeah, you just do it and they say actually you’re right it is no good because blah, blah, blah.  Oh, okay, thank you.  But for the actors I couldn’t see a drawback in it.  For the process I would just compare it to is impossible, I have no idea, because I’m sure I don’t have $200 million and God knows what they’ll spend on marketing and etc, etc. and P&A  and whatnot.  Although I’ll take it if someone wants to give it to me.  Either this will be a process where these things used to be like this and they had tapes and they went around and they were incredibly expensive and you couldn’t…or  satellite phones you carried on your shoulder and you tried to call your family from Vladavalstock or somewhere and it cost $185 and now everybody has 3.

Q: They’re this big.

John Malkovich: Yeah, and I don’t mean everybody but so the point is the price of the technology might go down drastically and if it does I think it could be a really invigorating or re-invigorating process.  If the price doesn’t go down, it’ll stay as risky as movies always are, you know?

Q: Is this your first time with Clint since In The Line of Fire?

John Malkovich: Yeah.

Q: What was that 20 years ago?

John Malkovich: 15, yeah. 

Q: Was it any different this time?

John Malkovich: It was good.

Q: Does he still shoot the rehearsal?

John Malkovich: Yeah, he doesn’t waste tons of time.