| By Fred Topel
In Theaters September 16
|
Just because seeing Elijah Wood dressed as a hobbit is no longer an annual tradition, you don’t have to wait to get your Frodo fix. He’s got two movies coming out this month, offering two very different sides of Elijah Wood. Everything is Illuminated casts Wood as an obsessive collector of family artifacts on a journey to find a family connection in the Ukraine. Green Street Hooligans casts him as a despondent youth who falls in with a British football firm.
Frequently cast as the wise beyond his years tyke in his child acting career, Wood still fights to be seen as an adult now that he’s 24. “I'm always looking for something different than the last thing that I was part of,” Wood said. “I guess that's the easiest way to put it. I don't think that there's ever anything that I'm specifically looking for. I'm kind of at the mercy of whatever becomes available, but yeah, I'm always looking for roles. I think that the thing that I would be specifically looking for is just roles that will continue to sort of build me as an adult. I think that I'm still perceived a lot younger than I am. So I think that would be the one thing that I'd be looking for the most, having them more adult in nature and a bit older.”
Everything is Illuminated was a personal story for director Liev Schrieber, who adapted Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel as a way to explore his own family history. Wood himself has yet to make such a journey, but the film may be a start.
“I know that I do have family in eastern Europe which is interesting to me. I've got roots there. I think that it's Poland and Germany. So that was interesting because the film came at a time in my life when I was kind of asking those questions and kind of wondering about my heritage when this movie came along. I was just wondering where I pretty much come from, essentially where I come from. So it was interesting, but I haven't. I haven't really been on that journey of self-discovery.”
That’s not to say he hasn’t had life altering experiences in his young life. Filming three Lord of the Rings movies simultaneously made a man our of Wood. “I left home at eighteen and living in New Zealand for 16 months on my own was an incredible learning experience and growing experience for me. It was the first time that I really lived as an adult in my life on my own outside of my comfort zone and it informed a lot of who I am and my life. It was definitely that whole process and even over the three years that followed was a lot of self-discovery and a lot of growth.”
For Illuminated, Wood had to get in touch with his inner OCD, because he does not possess the organizational skills of his character, with plastic baggies and labels for every object he finds. “I'm a collector that's not nearly as organized as he is. It's rubbish how poorly organized I am. I keep the tiniest pieces of paper that have some kind of relevance to an experience. I sort of attach sentimental value to absolutely everything. So in that sense wanting to grasp hold of memories, not keeping a journal is sort of my way of doing that in a way except that they're not in scrap books. They're kind of all over the place and if I pull one up I'll know what it is and I'll know what it means. So one of these days I'll have to put it together. But I certainly relate to that. I attach so much meaning to everything - to experiences, to interactions, to moments, to things that remind me of moments. I think that's one of the reasons that I love music so much and film because it does make you remember experiences. It brings you back. So that's definitely something that I can relate to.”
Green Street Hooligans took Wood on a different sort of journey. Immersing himself in London’s world of violent soccer fans, Wood quickly learned to hold his own. “The experience of traveling up to London and those two works of rehearsal were really kind of incredible because it very much mirrored what my character went through. An American who's not really familiar with that world, having never been to a proper football match and kind of experiencing those things with the guys for the first time. So it was kind of perfect because it was very much setup for what my character has to go through. It was actually a great time those first two weeks. It really cemented our relationships with the guys. That group became a strong unit which is important in terms of trying to depict that in the film and we all had some pretty incredible experiences going to the matches and going to the pub before the matches. It was really amazing.”
Hooligans features some brutal, knock down, drag out fights. While it was all safely choreographed, just faking it took its toll. “We had pretty intensive training and choreography for the fighting. I did about three weeks of training with Pat Johnson who was our choreographer before I went out to London and then consequently during those two weeks of rehearsals we all trained together and choreographed the fights. It was fun to be trained in fighting and learn street fighting moves. It was very male and masculine. Interestingly enough I think that we all kind of assumed, 'Oh, those are going to be the best days. The fight scenes. The easiest and most fun because it'll be the fighting, the scrapping and all of that.' They were the most complicated days. They were the most exhausting. Those scenes took the longest because it was all very, very specific and it looks very manic. But of course it's all these tiny little moments that are all cut together to make it look chaotic and manic. So those were definitely the most difficult days particularly the last fight which is actually the first fight that we shot, I believe. That I think took two and a half to three days and it was cold. It was exhausting. We were sore from just exerting ourselves.”
Green Street Hooligans opens September 9 and Everything is Illuminated opens September 16, 2005. |
