Colin Firth Career Timeline

Apartment Zero

GENRE: psycological/political thriller

DIRECTOR: Martin Donovan [Carlos Enrique Varela y Peralta-Ramos]

SCREENPLAY: Martin Donovan and David Koepp

PRODUCER: Stephen J Cole

PRINCIPAL CAST: Colin Firth [Adrian LeDuc], Hart Bochner [Jack Carnes] et al

ABOUT THE FILM: A much talked-about film at the Sundance United States Film Festival 1988, Apartment Zero has been labelled a Hitchcockian thriller with satirical overtones and homoerotic undertones.Set in present-day Buenos Aires, Colin plays a reclusive movie buff who operates a movie theatre specializing in good old movies. While his dying mother is in hospital, Adrian decide to get a roommate for his oversized and too expensive apartment. The film is shot in a claustrophobic apartment block in an eerie, murkily-lit Buenos Aires - rendered even more ominous by a brooding deep-toned music score. Apartment Zero centres around the close friendship which develops between Adrian and his charming lodger Jack, while a series of brutal murders spreads terror in the city.

AWARDS

From Film and Filming, September 14, 1989
[Director Martin Donovan:] "Apartment Zero for me was a metaphor for Argentina. For me, Adrian LeDuc is Argentina - old-fashioned, elegant, detached. He senses himself invaded by a presence which he at first finds positive. By the time he discovers that it is not, it's too late. He's grown used to it."

Colin Firth also found himself disturbed and fascinated by Argentina. "There was something in the air which was confusing", Firth says, "because Argentina is no longer a place where people 'disappear'. There aren't any death squads in action now, but there were five years ago. It must have been like a surrealist nightmare! This is actually what the film is about, the fact that the monster hasn't gone away."

Firth couldn't be more different from the character he plays in the film, that of Adrian LeDuc - a tortured loner, teetering on the verge of madness. It's yet another difficult character to the list, for this smiling, eminently sane, attractive 28 year old, who seems to have a great talent for portraying highly intense, often sexually repressed, always psychologically complex individuals.

"People ask me if I have some deep rooted psychological problem that attracts me to screwed up characters! But it's quite simply that they're easy to play. You see, playing deeply disturbed neurotics is such a laugh!"

However much Colin Firth may say that playing difficult characters is "a laugh", each time he gets deeply involved. And he admits it: "I've lost myself in a character pretty much most times. You get rather possessed by a character while you're playing it. It just takes over sometimes in your daily life. Strangely enough, sometimes it has a contrary effect and I think that Hart Bochner (who plays a sexy, superficially-relaxed American hunk) and I took opposite characters. I was much more relaxed and easy-going, and very cheerful during the shooting of Apartment Zero. Hart was much more nervy, introspective and uptight."

"Making the film was one of the most interesting experiences. It's left me obsessed with Argentina. When Hart and I meet, we talk about it constantly. We were both very nervous and frightened a lot of the time." Read the full interview here.

From Time Out, 1989:
Firth plays Adrian, the quintessential Englishman abroad: arrogant, repressed, alone to the point of madness... "You can take the hang-ups and see it to its conclusion; it's like splashing around in the mud, much more exciting than putting on a winged collar and walking around with your hands in your pockets."

Apartment Zero has had an unusually mixed response, winning festival prizes and comparisons with Hitchcock, Chabrol and Polanski, and inspiring a number of walk-outs. "Despite odd pretences the film has, ultimately I was pleased because I found it very truthful to the experience I had in Argentina. Have you ever heard real Argentinean tango? It's unfulfilled, very scrappy... there's a romantic yearning, the Parisian-sounding accordion, but the direction it's going in is positively weird - I think the film has that quality."

From Premiere Magazine, Nov. 1989:
"After I read it once, I didn't want to do it. I misread it as a B-movie thriller." What finally drew Firth to the part was the chance to play a character "as full of need as he is unequipped to address it". He was also intrigued by the location, Buenos Aires, having recently starred in Tumbledown.

"Everyone said Colin was too good looking to play the lead," says Donovan. Adrian could not be overtly attractive, the filmmaker asserts, "because beautiful people have an advantage over the rest of humanity, an advantage Adrian does not have."

But Donovan had observed Firth's ability to inhabit a role, and Firth allayed all skeptics' fears by layering his performance with unscripted quirks. For example, "Colin thought that smiling would be painful for Adrian," says Donovan. "Every time he smiles in the film, it's almost a wince."

"It's a film about longing," Donovan said during a visit last month. "The inhabitants of the apartment building and Adrian in particular are Argentina," he says - crippled by "a sort of stilted elegance" and its European aspirations, anxious to deny its black recent past and uncertain future.

"They say Argentina is a country of Spanish-speaking Italians who live in French houses and want to be English. It's not a joke. The cultural insecurity there is incredible," he goes on. "If I'd stayed in Argentina myself . . . well, I would have probably died. But I might have escaped inwardly like Adrian, living my life through watching films."

Donovan says the attractive but dangerous Jack stands in for the terrorizing sway both native-born and imported military personnel held in Argentina in the violently troubled years preceding democratization.

From the Chicago Sun Times 21 Jan 1990:
/.../ His handsome, GQ-ish looks notwithstanding, he plays the warped film fanatic in Apartment Zero, a psychological, political thriller that has made a favorable sweep at several international film festivals.

"I feel much safer playing guys who are not supposed to be good, or good-looking for that matter," said the 29-year-old Firth in a quiet British accent while he reclined on a folding chair during a recent Chicago visit. "It is kind of scary playing someone who comes out and says, You know, you are supposed to like me. "

And getting easier all the time, especially after taking a walk on the darker side of Buenos Aires to film Apartment Zero, which revolves around the meeting of a mentally unbalanced Argentinian (Firth) and a mysterious, magnetic American (Hart Bochner). "He is a loner who might appear vulnerable to people," Firth said. "In a sick mind, appearing to be needy, though, is one of the most controlling, manipulative things anybody can do." /.../

Firth, however, was not always what everyone thought. His British parents are scholars, and he sounds like the recipient of a Ph.D in literature. The truth is that he was never wild about school and nixed any college plans. Instead, he made tea in the wardrobe department of the National Theatre before quitting for a three-year tour of duty with the Drama Centre London, a famed acting training center.

With one year left to go, Firth checked out to take the lead role in the London play Another Country. After two short months, he was cast in in the movie version, which is where Apartment Zero director Martin Donovan noticed him.

Up until this point, Firth's track record of playing neurotics and the generally repressed obscured the fact that he is good-looking and extroverted. "I nearly lost the role in Apartment Zero because I was told that I was too attractive," said Firth, obviously embarrassed. "So I brought out my bag of tricks, which include smiling painfully and acting awkward in the film. Of course, I do worry that these mannerisms can be a crutch. They can really just be something to latch on to and lean on in a performance."

From the Washington Post, November 3, 1989:
We're all entitled to one or two . . . hundred idiosyncrasies, says Adrian Le Duc, a lip-quivering Brit who's repressed to the point of discomfort. He's telling Jack Carney, his new, mysterious flatmate, he's prepared to accept him at any cost. But Adrian's also confessing to his uptight ways and implicitly stating the theme of Martin Donovan's Apartment Zero, a brilliantly crafted psychological drama set in Argentina with at least two hundred marvelous idiosyncrasies of its own.

Unlike the sensation-a-minute velocity of Hollywood's linear-scripted, agent-negotiated star shows, Zero's momentum comes from a subtly menacing accumulation. When cine-club proprietor Adrian (Colin Firth) -- whose only friends are the movie-star portraits festooning his apartment -- takes in boarder Jack (Hart Bochner), he thinks he's found the solution to his existential loneliness. Jack is everything Adrian is not: walking-surfboard handsome, confident and consoling.

But things take a turn for the strange. Jack starts befriending the neighbors -- a bunch of morbidly curious busybodies, as far as Adrian is concerned; Jack's work schedule seems erratic; and out in the streets of Buenos Aires, bloodied political corpses are piling up.

Donovan, co-scripting with David Koepp, not only builds an eerily affecting relationship between the two (things get even weirder), he also revels wittily -- and creepily -- in the incidentals: Zero's subsidiary characters are so richly (and darkly) conceived, they could spin off into movies of their own. Adrian's invalid mother is wasting away horribly in an asylum run by nuns; a sultry, lonely neighbor makes doe-eyed advances to Jack; and the tea-and-crumpet gargoyle-featured spinsters (Liz Smith and Dora Bryan) who snoop the corridors are a scream -- perhaps Donovan learned a casting thing or two from Federico Fellini after appearing in the Italian director's bawdy Fellini Satyricon

"We're not used to gallantry any more," says grateful spinster Smith with the air of someone used to a lifetime of dashing suitors -- this after Jack has retrieved her kitten from a precarious ledge.

Perhaps derailed by the force of his own originality, or possibly suffering from novice's overdrive, Donovan loosens his grip somewhat during Zero's final act. But the sardonic, gruesome conclusion is nonetheless entertaining; a minor skid for Donovan is sure-driving for too many others, and by that time you've felt already Zero's full impact.