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Film interview: 21 – Kevin Spacey

Kevin Spacey talks about rising above the criticisms of his early tenure as artistic director of London’s Old Vic Theatre, how he went about winning back audiences, and some of his British passions…

How did Vegas take to the production?
Kevin Spacey: Well, at first we wondered if we’d be rejected by the casinos. But then it turned out to be completely the opposite, they didn’t only want us they welcomed us, and they let us shoot in so many different casinos and places. I think it’s because they secretly want everyone in America to see this movie and think they can come to Vegas and break the bank – I do think there’s an ulterior motive to their welcoming favours. I’ve got to say that Robert Earl in particular, who runs Planet Hollywood, couldn’t have been better to us. It was our home base while we were there, it was where we all stayed, and we shot quite a lot in Planet Hollywood. But all the other casinos where we shot were equally welcoming to us. I guess they look at it as an advertisement.

Would you describe yourself as a risk-taker in real life?
Kevin Spacey: Yeah, I probably am. I think coming to London and starting a theatre company was probably a pretty big risk. But as I sit here in the middle of our fourth season, about to hit our millionth patron mark of audiences that have come in, it’s encouraging for a fledgling theatre company.

You weren’t given the smoothest of rides when you started, though, were you?
Kevin Spacey: I didn’t expect it. I think that’s par for the course. If you go back and study the history of theatrical beginnings as I did when I started, you would easily have been as prepared as I was for the critical assessments. If you go back and look at the first three seasons of the Royal Shakespeare Company, they were a disaster according to the critics. Now, we think of the RSC as the RSC, and they can do no wrong. But when they started they were not welcomed. Sam Wanamaker was not welcomed with his idea of the Globe Theatre. Peter Hall had his critics, and he was called a disaster in his first three seasons at the National. Olivier had his critics. You just go down the line and you start to realise that that’s the way things have been greeted. Now, I kind of fully prepared myself for even worse, because I knew I was a film actor and I was an American and that seemed to be ripe for a sniper’s target. And actually it was less personal than I thought it was going to be. And it ended when I hoped it would. By that I mean when they stopped judging the theatre company and it was about me. When it stopped being about my “reign” and they started to judge the plays as the plays. I always knew it would take us probably three or four seasons to establish ourselves, and that’s exactly what happened and that’s exactly what I kept telling my staff. I said: "Keep your heads high, we have a 10-year vision, and we’ll get through this, it’s been done before." The truth is that unless I'd have come riding down Waterloo Road on a white horse with Laurence Olivier on my shoulders, they wouldn’t have liked me no matter what I did. So, I did what I wanted to do.

Why do you think you experienced such fervent criticism?
Kevin Spacey: Well, you have to also put in context why there was the passionate criticism [there was]. People have very, very strong, fervent memories of what the Old Vic theatre is to them. Both as critics – some of them have been doing it since the ‘50s – but also as young people who remember going to the theatre. There’s kind of an impression that the only thing that belongs on the Old Vic’s stage in some people’s minds is Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw and Chekhov. But I had to look at what I was facing, which was a theatre that had ceased having an artistic director in 1976, that ceased being a company in 1976, and for 30 years was a booking house. There were two exceptions: when Jonathan Miller came and tried to start a company, and when Peter Hall came and tried to start a company. They were not given subsidy and they both eventually abandoned those companies. My task was, how do we return the Old Vic as a destination theatre for audiences who’d not been coming for 30 years? Yes, there’d occasionally be a hit play, but there was no audience development, there was no education, there was nothing like what we do with Old Vic New Voices [the theatre’s emerging talent programme]. It didn’t exist, it was a building with a great history, but not a great recent history.

So, I had to face the question... it’s not the Almeida, it’s not the Donmar, it’s not The Royal Court, it’s a 1,045 seat theatre. If you’re playing under 70% you’re dead in the water, because we have no subsidy. Our risks are our risks, and if we have a show that goes down, it seriously damages us, particularly as we were just starting out. So, what I had to look at was, alright, I could pretty much predict that people expected us to start with Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw and Chekhov. But I was fairly convinced that if I started there, I would be playing to an already theatre-going audience and that audience would be very now. And unless I put big stars in every show, it was not guaranteed that you’d be playing over 70%. The only way I felt to get a broader, more diverse and younger audience into that building and start to build an audience was to do work that I thought would be exciting, entertaining but maybe not what you’d expect to see on the Old Vic stage. But something that would bring more than the audience that already goes to Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare.

That’s what we came under criticism for, what we programmed. And I maintain we were right to programme what we did because if we hadn’t have gotten our audience in the first two seasons we wouldn’t have lasted because there’s no way I could convince anybody to keep giving us money if nobody’s coming. I always said, although I guess some things you say just fall through the cracks: "We’ll get to the classics, we’ll do the classic works, we’ll absolutely do it." Well, now we’ve done The Entertainer and A Moon For The Misbegotten, and we’ve got a Pygmalion coming in the next couple of weeks. We’ve got Sam Mendes directing two classic plays over the next three seasons, a year in rep, so that’s six classic productions that will be coming into the Vic. And at the same time we’re doing new work like Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother, and Stephen Fry’s Cinderella.

We’re trying to appeal in some ways to a slightly different audience with each production we do, and we’re encouraged by the response of the British public. In the face of all of that criticism they never stopped coming, and I never stopped getting letters from the British public saying: "Hang in there, hang in there!" It was always my intention to hang in there, so I’m glad that it’s going along alright.

Is there anything else in British culture you’ve taken to?
Kevin Spacey: I’ve definitely gotten into modern art in a way that I never really was before. I go to art galleries and see a lot of stuff. I’ve bought a few things. I’d sort of admired it before but I never really got into it, there’s just such an incredible amount of places to go and galleries to see and openings. I’m kind of flying in for a half hour and looking at some place and being introduced to a lot of interesting artists that are emerging – and some that have been around for a while, the Chapman Brothers and Paul Insect, Goldie’s even become an artist and actually done some really interesting stuff. That’s a scene that I’m getting more and more into. I’ve also always been into the jazz scene here, on any given night I’m very happy to be cosily tucked into Ronnie Scott’s. And, of course, there’s the theatre and being able to go see all kinds of things.

One of the great breaks I’ve given myself is that Speed-The-Plow is the first of the five plays I’ve done at the Vic where I made a decision that we wouldn’t do Wednesday matinees – simply because if you’re just an actor in a play, eight performances a week, you can do it, But running the company at the same time, having a Wednesday matinee absolutely killed my week because it screws up Tuesday night, it screws up Wednesday, it screws up Wednesday night, and it screws up Thursday morning. Doing two in a day is a lot, especially if it’s a play, as Speed is, that reaches a kind of epic, emotional life. So, I’m very happy that I gave myself a break because it’s given me another chance to go see things on Wednesday when I normally wouldn’t be able to.

Interview: Rob Carnevale
Photo: Sony Pictures