"You're a moron."
"You're the moron."
The voices over the telephone from Vancouver indicate that Bruce Greenwood has emerged from an interview and is being told by his publicist that another reporter is on the line, waiting for him. Their exchange has nothing to do with star personality, although Greenwood is in fact one of the biggest stars in the country. What it means is, Greenwood is just a big kidder.
In fact, Greenwood's publicist has just said that he's a pretty funny guy, but it's an aspect of his personality we seldom see on screen. Ask Greenwood himself, and he's amusingly modest: "Well, she's a paid associate."
Ask him about playing the romantic lead in The Republic of Love, the film version of Carol Shields' love story about two adults who struggle to find each other in a world of disappointing relationships, and he says: "It's long overdue. I was really looking forward to playing a guy who didn't have a hidden agenda, and this guy has his heart on his sleeve. And he had a sense of humour. And so often I play guys whose sense of humour is pretty much concealed."
This time, he's not kidding: the melancholy father in Exotica, the single dad who witnesses a tragic bus accident in The Sweet Hereafter, a cranky internal affairs investigator in Hollywood Homicide with Harrison Ford, a troubled JFK dealing with the Cuban missile drama Thirteen Days, and, most memorably, the duplicitous husband being hunted down by Ashley Judd in Double Jeopardy.
"I'm a happier soul than anyone would guess from watching the raft of defeat and agony in various roles," says Greenwood, 48, who at this point is waiting on a street corner for the publicist to pick him up and drive him to the next event. Greenwood is doing interviews for The Republic of Love -- which opens next week -- at the same time as he is preparing a staged reading in Vancouver of Griffin and Sabine, based on the epistolary novels by Nick Bantock.
"I think part of it was that I was stuck in television for so long (Road to Avonlea and St. Elsewhere, among others) and when I finally decided to try and do movies exclusively, I happened to get something high profile where I was a nefarious bastard (Double Jeopardy). And so I came to people's consciousness in that way. And right around that time was The Sweet Hereafter ... and there wasn't a lot of joy coursing through the veins of that character."
The Republic of Love gives the Quebec-born star a chance to show his softer side. "I'm a romantic and a bit of a sap, so that certainly resonates," he says. His character, Tom Avery, is the thrice-divorced host of a late-night radio show who has given up on love until he meets Fay (Emilia Fox), a single woman afraid to commit herself to a relationship. It's love at first sight, although outside events conspire to drive the couple apart before the inevitable.
Or, as Greenwood puts it, the role is a showcase for "a much lighter, less intelligent perhaps, side of me: my stupidity is screaming to be let out." He says Tom is one of the most decent men he has ever played.
"It's fun, you know. You're not standing around looking grim all the time."
The Republic of Love was directed by Deepa Mehta (Hollywood/Bollywood), who has said that it was the most difficult shoot she has ever done. The movie was scheduled to take 35 days, but the filmmakers could afford only 25, and financing fell through twice. For Greenwood, that's just one of the realities of making the low-budget movies that he alternates with Hollywood star vehicles. He likes it that way: jumping from big projects to smaller ones that he says "might be nearer to my heart."
"You can't have as many takes as you'd like, and you have to get stuff quickly, make sure you get the master (the main shot) before lunch or complete a whole sequence before lunch or otherwise you won't make the day, and the movie will only be 20 minutes long. It puts pressure on you, but in other ways it frees you because you realize going in that it's not going to be perfect. So you just go, 'You know what, let's dive in here and not waste any time talking. Let's just do it.' And sometimes that'll give you good stuff, you know."
At this point, Greenwood gets into the car being driven by the publicist ("who'll be harassing me and terrifying me driving this 500-year-old Accord"), and is ready to address one of the tricky questions about the film. Shields' novel was a sort of love letter to Winnipeg, where it was set, but the movie takes place in Toronto. Some Winnipeggers resent the move -- the Winnipeg Free Press termed it "another helping of centre-of-the-universe Toronto arrogance" -- but Greenwood says it was necessary if the movie was going to be made at all.
"Carol Shields' family saw it and apparently said in regard to that they thought Carol's tone was captured in the film and not to sweat the change of locale.
"When you adapt a book, a lot of things are going to fall away, and unfortunately the character represented by Winnipeg did fall by the boards. But a lot of stuff for which Winnipeggers, particularly in Carol Shields novels, are famous -- for example, everybody intersects with everyone else, somehow everybody knows everybody -- I think that was firmly established in the movie too. So as much as we wish it could have been in Winnipeg, it couldn't have been."
His busy Vancouver schedule aside, Greenwood is taking a bit of leave from movies. He's been working non-stop since May: he was in Budapest to film Being Julia with Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons and Juliette Stevenson; in Vancouver to shoot I, Robot with Will Smith; and in Africa for four months for a family movie about a zebra that thinks it is a racehorse. "It's very sweet and quite cute," he says, which is another departure from his usual screen persona.
"I'm just trying to do stuff that at least mixes it up 50-50 between creepy bad guys and less creepy good guys."
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