“I was at Shepperton Studios doing The Sandman, after that I went to Iceland to do a film, being tested every day and always coming back negative. “I’m 90% back to normal,” he reports, wryly noting the insidious nature of the virus. Speaking from his London home, Dance is in good form considering he is recovering from Covid-19. We got sore arses sitting around for two or three days, but Gary drove that scene, and in every single take he went from beginning to end. The most takes Dance was involved in for a set-up was “in the upper 30s”, during that dinner scene. But although we might moan about it, you don’t moan very much, because you know that we’re contributing to what’s going to be a special film.” “So it’s incumbent on all of us to maintain our energy level and focus and concentration. And then, when he’s happy with the composition, he’ll hone in on the acting. So we do take after take after take after take. You set something up and go into a take, and maybe two of the cameras will be right and the other two not quite, so we go again, and then those two are okay but there’s a problem with the other one. “We were working with four cameras all the time. ![]() “I became more aware this time of David’s eye for composition,” he says. That long, complex scene, taking place in production designer Donald Graham Burt’s recreation of Hearst’s grandiose San Simeon home, epitomises for Dance his director’s perfectionism. ![]() ![]() “Yes! It was something that Elton John would wear… on a subtle day.” The perfect take Even in the film’s black and white, his circus costume in the film’s pivotal scene - a fancy-dress dinner upended by the drunken Mankiewicz - looks suspiciously like gold lamé. “When throwing his many parties, he was pretty outrageous,” Dance observes. “And one identifying thing that I could latch onto for Hearst - I bear no resemblance to him physically - is that he did have a rather peculiar hair arrangement, which of course Trump has. “But I guess I thought more about Donald Trump than anybody else,” he laughs. Having discovered the power that a newspaper magnate could wield in 1930s America, Dance thought about recent media moguls, such as Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell. There are elements of southern American, but then there’s this sharp, precise Philadelphia sound, so I put all that into the pot.” “I tried to pinpoint his accent, which really is very strange. ![]() And we had two or three weeks sitting round the table talking about it, pulling each sentence apart and not leaving any stone unturned.”īeyond that, he read about Hearst and found what footage there was of the man speaking. On approaching his real-life character, he says: “Principally what I needed was in the script, because it’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. Fincher’s Netflix-produced paean to Hollywood’s Golden Age - scripted by his late father Jack and told through the prism of Herman Mankiewicz’s controversial scripting of Citizen Kane - has six Golden Globe nominations, and is figuring in many other awards.ĭance has only a few scenes, but all integral as they chart the relationship between Gary Oldman’s Mankiewicz and Hearst, the press magnate and inspiration for Kane. He didn’t hesitate.Īnd their second collaboration has fared a lot better than the first. They had kept in touch only rarely - “the occasional Christmas card” - so Dance was pleasantly surprised when he received an email from the director, preceding a script for Mank and the juicy role of William Randolph Hearst. He is a film animal from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.” “It was very apparent, even then, that he could talk to any department about their job on equal terms, there wasn’t an aspect of filming that he didn’t know about. “I thought, ‘My god, this guy is smart,’” he says. That was an infamously troubled shoot for Fincher and the result much-maligned - neither of which affected Dance’s regard at the time. Charles Dance and David Fincher go back a long way, the veteran UK actor having appeared in the director’s first feature, Alien 3, almost 30 years ago.
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