Landau, Plummer team up for Canadian revenge thriller ‘Remember’
Posted October 21, 2015 9:37 am.
Last Updated October 21, 2015 2:23 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – Martin Landau calls them “grunters” — the old guys in films that young characters make fun of.
The veteran screen star says he won’t take these roles, and shies away from projects that don’t offer rich material he respects.
But he leapt at the chance to co-star with Christopher Plummer in the Nazi thriller “Remember,” a Canadian drama from director Atom Egoyan. The two acting legends play Holocaust survivors seeking revenge for the deaths of their families.
“I like stuff that has an arc, that has a reason, and this picture should be seen, because six million people were killed…. To think this went on in our lifetime, my lifetime, is horrendous. It shouldn’t be forgotten that mankind is capable of doing this,” Landau said at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“The fact that this is called ‘Remember’ is a damn good thing and I mean that.”
Landau’s wheelchair-bound character Max enlists his more able-bodied friend Zev, by Plummer, in a scheme to track down and kill a man he believes is a former Nazi guard living in North America.
Supplying him with a train ticket, cash and a detailed list of instructions, Max sends Zev on a road trip across the continent to kill a man named Rudy Kurlander, but there are several he must visit in order to be sure he’s found the right one.
Complicating matters is Zev’s own failing memory. Suffering from early stages dementia, he wakes calling out for his dead wife, is flustered by the gun he gingerly carries in his toiletries bag, and routinely forgets the mission he is on.
Plummer said the role is unlike anything he’s played before.
“Everything is in the present – his dead wife is in the present, he talks to her all the time, everything is ‘now.’ There is no flashback because he cut that off a long time ago,” Plummer noted in a separate interview.
Egoyan said it’s a deceptively challenging role, praising Plummer for a “radical performance” because he had so little backstory to refer to.
“You need a great performer, you need an amazing instrument as a performer to be able to play that and to keep it compelling and to give it a sense of tension,” said Egoyan, who also directed Plummer in 2002’s “Ararat.”
“Normally, the currency you have as an actor is working with subtext, there’s a story that you’re holding back, certainly in my films.”
Landau’s character was different.
The sharp-minded Max is immersed in the past and consumed with a rage that the doddering Zev struggles to muster. In tackling his role, Landau said he did something he’s never done before — he gave Egoyan a variety of performances to choose from.
“I felt my character was the one that could actually balance the picture if he chose less stern, more stern, more this, more sympathetic,” said Landau.
“I never had in my entire life allowed a director that freedom, ever. I come in with an idea and I figure if they don’t like it, they’ll tell me and I’ll do what they want. I have not been directed by anybody in probably 30 years. Anybody.”
It was different for “Remember” and Egoyan, a director Landau first met 28 years ago on the set of the old anthology TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” Landau said he was immediately struck by “his intelligence, his clarity” and they kept in touch ever since.
It was a similar story with Norris, who befriended Egoyan at a film festival in Rome.
Eager to keep his resume diverse after a star-making turn as a driven DEA agent on “Breaking Bad,” Norris said he saw a chance in “Remember” to display a wide range of colours while working with the “daunting” Plummer.
After so many decades in show business, Landau and Plummer both said they still relish their craft.
“I love the profession, it’s been good to me,” said Plummer, who earned his first Oscar just three years ago at age 82 for “Beginners.”
“It’s not a boring life. And I’ve always been in work so I’m looking forward to the next 10 years at least.”
“Remember” opens in theatres on Friday.
