Exclusive Interview: Emile Hirsch on Twice Born

My phone interview with Emile Hirsch was shortened due to a bad connection that took a few minutes to get corrected. If I’d known it had eaten so much of my time, I would have gotten into John Belushi sooner. There was plenty to cover about Hirsch’s current movie, though. In Twice Born, he plays Diego, a free spirit who meets and falls in love with Gemma during the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. They struggle to conceive or adopt a child, and ultimately become embroiled in the Bosnian war. Sergio Castellitto directs the film, which opens December 6.

 

CraveOnline: How did the intensity of Twice Born compare to films like Into the Wild and Milk where you portrayed characters, in those cases real life ones, for significant portions of their lives?

Emile Hirsch: I feel like Twice Born had an intensity that had two sides to it, almost like a seesaw. On the one hand, when he’s up high, Diego is happy go-lucky. He’s almost like a straight version of Harvey Milk. That’s the best way I can describe his personality in the beginning. He’s just one of those happy dudes who just cannot be in a bad mood for the life of him and is just optimistic to an extreme. Then once the Bosnian War comes and he’s ravaged by the times of war, he becomes very withdrawn and that bright spark inside of him is sort of fizzled out. He kind of becomes a much different character, so the role was almost two different characters I felt.

 

Since it could have been so many people’s true story in that era, did that give it an additional weight?

Yeah, absolutely. When I was in Bosnia talking to Bosnians, even Adnan Haskovic, the actor who plays Gojco in the movie, he’s fantastic. He would share stories about what the war was like. Of course he was just a little kid back then, but I would talk to other Bosnians and they would recount the stories and it’s crazy. It’s horrific. You go around Sarajevo and you still see all the bullet holes in all the buildings. It makes it very real very quickly and you realize how devastating that period of time was for those people.

 

What kind of location is Bosnia for making a movie, compared to the locations around the world you’ve visited?

I loved it. It’s a wonderful city. It’s very multi-cultural, beautiful architecture, great night scene. Adnan would take me out to different clubs and bars. Adnan was the dream host you could ever have for a city. He would pick me up from the hotel every day that I wasn’t working. We would go out to a restaurant, then we would go out to a bar and a club and then he would take me to the movie theater and take me to a park. I give a lot of credit to Adnan. He made my experience in Sarajevo amazing and he’s kind of a fixture in Sarajevo theater out there. He’s a very respected actor on stage there, young actor on stage. Me and Adnan are the same age.

 

So were there fun times, even given the heavy material?

Oh, absolutely. I think we went out of our way to have fun times. We would go to parties and clubs, great restaurants, having good laughs on set. Really the Italian way seems to me to be to really enjoy life. That’s something that’s really refreshing. We’d shoot for the day and Sergio would take everybody out to dinner, a really nice dinner, laughing and breaking bread and sharing stories, having really good times and that’s something that seemed to be really important to them. I loved it. It felt like a family out there.

 

Was this your first time playing a father in a movie, even one struggling to conceive?

I guess it was. It definitely felt more adult than any role that I play, even a character that was trying to adopt and was as involved with someone like Penelope Cruz who is a woman and who is mature. I felt like that was, strangely, the dichotomy of the character. He wants all these things and wants to be a father, wants to be an adult, but he’s so impulsive and he’s so immature, and he’s so boyish that it doesn’t really fit. Even the way that he handles the situation at the end of the movie, I would argue, is a very immature, young and impractical that he even dealt with his problems. I feel like an adult would not have done the things that he had done at all. I feel like he was very immature. He’s a tragically young character.

 

Was this a part you auditioned for or campaigned for?

No, this was a part that I got just straight up offered. I got the call and it was my agents. Into the Wild was a very popular movie in Italy. In particular, the Italians really connected with it, so Sergio was familiar with me from Into the Wild and I think that he had wanted to work with me since he had seen that. So I was fortunate enough to have been in the position where they just wanted me for the movie.

 

Going into John Belushi, is that going to require a big physical transformation for you?

I’d say yes. I’m not sure exactly what it will be but whatever it’s going to be it’s going to look like, it’s going to feel right and people are going to be happy with it.

 

Will you learn to do The Blues Brothers and Samurai Chef and “Cheezborger cheezborger?”

Oh, I’m sure that there’s going to be all kinds of stuff. I mean, the samurai character is just too funny. I want to sneak the samurai character in there for sure. That’ll be in there. 


Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.

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