I felt that too.
Yeah, that’s the thing. That’s what I’m really obsessed with. I feel like there are three types of male actors. Actors obsessed with Al Pacino and (Robert) Deniro, those obsessed with (Marlon) Brando, and those obsessed with Cary Grant. I have more of a Bogart/Cary Grant obsession right now, and it really plays to that sort of fetishism of that era of cinema. Although the execution is extremely modern and the ideas are modern, there was something in the script’s rhythm that took me back a little, and I loved that.
It shows on the screen, and I wasn’t really able to voice that feeling until you said it. It’s very powerful with a nostalgic edge to it like it was made 50 years ago rather than a year ago.
That’s also exacerbated, highlighted, and underlined by Sultan, and to go back to your question, but by his profession; the fact that he’s an archaeologist. There are so many Middle-Eastern characters that are so embedded in geopolitics. They’re identified by the geopolitical dilemmas in their surroundings and the cultural stigma. The fact that he’s’ an archaeologist almost takes him completely out of the conversation about what his religion is, ethnically where he is. You know, nobody ever says whether he’s Coptic or Muslim or Sunni or Shia or half-American or what. He’s so identified with his exploration of a past that is so vast and so different from the cultural stigma of the region that it’s almost freeing. This kind of scholarly, academic, free-form identity that Sultan brings really allows him to be a supportive character in the true sense of the word. He’s extremely able to bring her into his world but not trample on the delicate, fragile beauty that’s in her past, and not rush her into anything. I think that ability to be so passionate about his world and so inviting at the same time while being so delicate was the fundamental thing that drew me to him.
Speaking of Sultan being an archaeologist, what kind of research did you do to get into that frame of mind?
Out of all the research that I did, the most interesting stuff was the Jungian parallelism. (Carl) Jung and his study of the unconscious worked on archetypes. What he found about the archetypes was that the archetypes pop up as a common manifestation of the unconscious in many different cultures at many different times, almost always in the same way. So he’s able to link a Greek archetype to an Egyptian archetype to a modern archetype. That work with the archetypes and through the study of alchemy, through the Greco-Egyptian period, always inevitably leads you to the Egyptian pantheon. Because that and the Babylonian civilization/the Sumerian civilization are the two founding civilizations for everything afterward. In that sense, whether it’s through the religious texts–which when Moses comes out of Egypt, you’re already in that world where we’re breaking away from the ancient divinities of ancient Egypt and what they mean. Really, what that means is moving away from religion representing the unconscious into a more formal, anthropomorphic religion. It’s more reflective of who we are. It’s more conscious. Jung really describes those primitive religions as representations of the unconscious. I think that really was my way in because I’m in Jungian analysis.
Oh, you are?
Yeah, I’ve been in Jungian analysis for quite a while, and my therapist is really happy sometimes to recommend books because he sees that I have these theoretical tendencies. So, I ended up reading a whole bunch of Jung. Zeina and I are sometimes in tune over the aether. I’m reading my thirteenth volume of Jung’s complete works, and then she sends me Luxor. I think, “Oh, how perfect!” This is often how things happen between Zeina and me.
“…women are up against Freud. We should all be up against Freud…”
Interestingly, when I spoke to Zeina, she brought up Freud, and you said Jung and those two together are like the yin and yang of psychoanalysis. They both brought about the birth of what became modern psychiatry.
Also, Freud, I think right now, women are up against Freud. We should all be up against Freud, I think. Because Freud almost formalized a very patriarchal view of how to use story and archetype to describe the unconscious. So, instead of allowing it to be a free-form, fluid experience, he decided that there were models. He modelized it, which is an extremely masculine, square way of discovering the unconscious but wanting it to fit in his story of how it works. He focused on certain myths, which he turned into these formulas. That was criticized intensively by Jung. I feel where Zeina draws her dialectics and what I’m up against, they’re almost opposites, but they resonate so well. We’re very compatible in that way. We end up at the same place, but we come at it from opposite directions.
You and Andrea Riseborough have the most amazing chemistry in this film. It’s incredible. When I spoke to Zeina, she said you guys only shot for eighteen days, but I didn’t know how long you knew or even knew Andrea before shooting.
I hadn’t met Andrea before. You know that Andrea is this extremely chameleon-like actress, so I’d seen a number of her performances but never connected the dots and realized that all these wonderful performances are almost haunting me were her. She was in this Tom Ford film (Nocturnal Animals), and she’s there for, I don’t know how long but not very long, it’s almost all I can remember from the film, it was kind of haunting. When I saw her in the Billie Jean film with Emma Stone (Battle of the Sexes), it was the same. I went to see that film with my sister when it came out, and that’s all we were talking about, the sensuality of the moment and how ethereal that actor was. I had never put it all together and identified Andrea Riseborough. I had identified those characters that I really enjoyed. I was flying from Cario to Luxor on the day that we went shooting, and there was only one sort of European-looking woman on the plane carrying a guitar, and I figured that must be Andrea. I avoided her on the flight a little bit. I had been traveling from L.A. I was tired. I almost wanted to observe her from a distance. It wasn’t until we landed in Luxor—it’s because I lost my luggage. My luggage didn’t arrive, and I had to go to baggage claim. We had the same driver. So I had to walk up to her, and I said, “Listen, my luggage hasn’t arrived, please take the driver and go to the hotel. I’m sure that by the time the driver comes back to the airport, I wouldn’t have been able to finish looking for my luggage.” and she said, “No, I’ll wait.” At that moment where she said that this was when time started to slow down. It almost felt like time came to a halt, and we shot two days later. So it was in that little bit of space between Luxor airport and the time it came to shoot that we worked out and mapped out the entire silent story between us.
That’s really impressive.
It wasn’t done deliberately. It’s something that really happened to us, and it was immensely fueled by what we were doing. It was very organic. I don’t think there were any boundaries between reality, fiction, all that jazz. It was an extremely transcendental experience. I think Luxor as a city and being in those temples, and Egypt in its religious form really encouraged a form of boundary dissolution. It really encouraged this fluid approach to acting. An extremely personal approach to acting.
That kind of leads into the next question, had you ever been to Luxor before shooting the film?
I’d been to Cairo but never to Luxor.
So, what’s your favorite thing about Luxor, the city?
One thing about Egypt that is really interesting is that you can’t see Egypt truly for itself. You can only see it through the eyes of the different periods that explored it. It was explored by the Arabs, who drilled a hole into one of the pyramids to get in. There was a Greco-Egyptian civilization. The Romans were there. Then the Europeans arrived. Then the Egyptian government took over. There are so many filters between you and the pure experience. But in Luxor, because of Salima Ikram, a lead archaeologist and a consultant for our film, she allowed us to get into places that weren’t really open to the public. She didn’t overwhelm us with a historical perspective of what we were looking at. She just opened it and told us the story as she sees it, not as a historian, but as an archaeologist. She allowed us to bring in our imaginations and experience them in this silent, pure way. You’re not influenced by the history and the different sort of stages of your perception of the region. So, what I enjoyed the most about Luxor, and it was afforded to me by Salima, was this almost sensual exploration of something that I decided to tackle more as a mystery than in its historical context, if that makes any sense at all.
It does, and you give a voice to how I felt about the movie because it is very mysterious when it could be totally stiff. The choices that everybody made make the film so magical.
