John Rhys-Davies is making two major appearances at the moment – as the star of The Gates, a new Victorian-set horror movie about a serial killer who seems to have returned from the dead and has cursed the prison where he was executed, and in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, where he reprises his role as Sallah. Paul Simpson caught up with the actor…

 

What fascinates you about the setting of The Gates?

The interest in the paranormal is partly a product and partly in opposition to the rise of Darwinism, the death of God and that belief… Yet there is still something invisible to see, and of course the great image of that was by William Herschel, measuring the temperature of the spectrum, pushing it beyond the ultraviolet and then seeing that he’s still getting a heat reading in an invisible thing. There is an invisible world out there…

In a way, the great arguments, the great questions, are still unanswered, aren’t they? Why should anything exist? Science basically consists of arguments that are propositions that can be contested or verified and yet you cannot understand how a proposition like that can be answered. It does seem to me to be a very legitimate question.

And if you go right back, that’s something that’s fascinated people five thousand, ten thousand years before us and I suspect, assuming we haven’t blown the planet up, it will do to our great grandchildren… all without an answer.

We are the curious ape. If you can believe in something like Boltzmann’s Brain, that if you have enough time and space from quantum froth, there will emerge an intelligence or a Volkswagen bus, and if you have enough space and enough time, that anything is possible, I don’t see how you can eliminate the possibility of God. I would have thought that God is a racing certainty, the real question is… how many and what is its nature?

You were filming The Gates in a real prison, a place that, if we take ghosts as existing, would be full of them. Were there moments of ‘What the hell is happening?’ during the filming or was it actually, effectively, just a film set?

It’s such a magnificent building, [like all] those modern prisons that were built around that time. There’s one in Costa Rica that was designed very much along those English/Irish lines, a state of the art prison which had a cell for every person and ended up with seven people in every cell and every human abuse possible there – in fact, so much so, one of the last governors dynamited one of the blocks. For a repository, if any place was going to have the spiritual hallmarks of misery, a prison like that would be one of them.

The Stone Tape theory, isn’t it, that the walls take on the horrendous attitudes that had gone on there – but did anything actually happen?

I am such a coarse and insensitive soul that I wouldn’t have been able to measure it! I’m sure that there were more spiritually well-attuned souls there that might have done. I count myself a rationalist and a sceptic and yet I am quite convinced that the probabilities of this universe existing really do raise a few questions, and the inferences we can draw from that certainly go beyond anything that we can scientifically claim. Did I sense anything? No. The depression of the place and yet, that glorious big well lit central area…

It’s a sort of panopticon Benthamite idea isn’t it?

Yes. How lovely to know somebody who knows about Bentham!* It brought very much to mind Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

I’ve been to the prison in Dublin when they were shooting Primeval and there is definitely a coldness with it. In terms of the actual filming of it, what was the biggest challenge for you?

Oh dear heart, there are always challenges. Every day there’s a challenge but you know, I exist in a world of such delight.

I am 79 years old, I bounce out of bed every morning thinking ‘Oh good, I get to go to work today. It’s 5 o’clock, I get to go to work.’

Paid to play, I used to describe it.

It’s joy and I don’t care what the difficulties are. Yes, for me on those very cold days with that back broken in five places by doing a bit of rubbish for Disney in Croatia twenty years ago, the difficulties are going up and down those damn stairs on a very cold winter’s day but look, there are always problems. You find solutions and that’s the glory of my profession. We’re not interested in people who point out that there are problems. Of course there are, not interested in your perception of the problems. ‘Actually yes, I hadn’t actually realised that one, what’s the solution? Find me solutions.’ And they do.

Irish filmmaking at the moment is really on a wave: the actors are superb, their technical people are superb, their creative people, their directors wonderful, wonderful.

That was one reason for going to do it, added to which I hadn’t played a character like this who has doubts, who has insecurities. It’s very hard to get away from the person who has all the answers.

Typecasting effectively, isn’t it?

Yes, and directors love people doing things that they know they’ve been successful in, and that’s the nature of money men, but it’s good to work with directors who want to ask a little bit more of their actors or will let their actors explore different things. It’s all a question of being alive and thinking on camera, like being in an interview, isn’t it?

Indeed! That came across. It was one of the most enjoyable performances of yours  I’ve seen in recent years, it felt like I could see what you were thinking in it. There was enough that wasn’t spelled out in the script and was off the back of how you played it.

I must let you go but just very quickly, when I asked you before about Indy 4, you didn’t do it because it was just a bit of green screen but you’d potentially be interested in a 5 if it happened. What did get you back for Dial of Destiny?

Well, let me say that I thought that the part was going to be a little bit bigger and that was one condition, but the real truth of the matter was if it is the last one – and of course, we know that in Hollywood there is never a last word as long as the moolah keeps coming in – it would have been disrespectful to Harrison, who is a great film star, to turn down the last one. I think it would have been disrespectful to him and in a way, disappointing to the audience.

 

The Gates is out now from 101 Films

 *There followed a five minute discussion about the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and the fact his stuffed corpse was put on display (although neither of us got the location right – it’s University College, London).