This interview was initially published in Estante Cinema Jan 2020
EC: Your acting is impressive when you need to be angry or upset. Is there a feeling that is challenge to an actor?
LF: That sort of explosive big energy may have come from working in theatre, the high stakes in Shakespeare’s narratives, or maybe that’s just me sometimes. I always resented the idea of projecting in theatre, forcing my voice and body beyond what it naturally wanted to express. Instead, I had some very good directors I was working with early on in Australia who encouraged me to use even stronger choices in my emotional character work to make the performance naturally bigger and more expressive, from an authentic place.
The most challenging emotional range that takes time to develop as a person not just a performer, is a sort of empathic listening which forms the baseline of any great performance. It’s about understanding other people and one’s self which is an ongoing conversation with the universe.
The real challenge comes in honing the complexities of a one’s feelings for the camera, to tell a subtle and effective story of a character, to “explode” when needed and then to keep it small and precise the next moment. It takes a lifetime to develop that craft and it never really comes to an end.
EC: Tell me how was to act in a biblic movie. Are you religious? If yes, you certainly hadn't difficult to develop your character. Is my thought correct or you see from another perspective?
LF: I saw Apostle Peter & The Last Supper as a modern adaptation of the sort of classical pieces I was doing in England not long before that. It was a period piece and people of that time were very informed by their religious outlook. The Romans had their Gods and Christianity was only a growing movement at the time. These were the circumstances of Martinian’s life that inform where he’s coming from at the start of the film, when we meet him as the powerful cocky Roman general. Then he gets taken on a journey as Apostle Peter played by Robert Loggia tells him about another way of life. For me it was an honor to be on set opposite an Oscar Nominated actor, so I sort of let myself get swept away with the wisdom of this great actor’s facility with storytelling, that was really the key to this piece for me.
Am I religious? I believe a secular religious experience that’s akin to love and a humanitarian caring of our world is possible in a sort of higher cultural learning and understanding. To learn from the best of cinema, the best of art and film, to discipline oneself to take only the things made with the highest level skill and emotional content.
This is why during the Renaissance the church and the Monarchies would employ the most talented artists to express these high emotions and reach the masses in a way that no one else was capable of doing.
My personal message is a humanitarian one more than anything else, to take care of our earth and it’s creatures. Creativity is at its most vibrant when coming from a place of spiritual connection with ourselves and our world.
EC: I'd like to praise the film photograph. I was thrilled in the moment I saw Andrew and the boy sitting by the piano, where the surrounding were dark and only you and the kid was visible. This take showed me a unique moment which mattered to both characters. How was your participation in this short, besides the acting?
LF: My only contribution to this film was the acting. Zachary Risinger is a very talented young man so it was easy working with him, he picked up so much intuitively from the energy around him and went along with it all.
Henry's brother Max Quilici wrote the main theme to Echoes. The piece was so minimally and yet effectively done, I felt there was no way I could do this part without learning at least some of the piano in order to play this song. With the couple weeks preparation, never having laid hands on a piano before, I managed to learn how to play the first half of the song.
I came across a documentary preparing for the role called Pianomania, about a piano tuner for some of the world's best pianists. He was someone whose love for the piano extends beyond the performance, becomes almost an intellectual pursuit, like preparing for a role that one never acts. The language that he began to use to describe moments within a sound were complex, abstract and beautiful. The joy and the passion for the music then became a dedication to the development of someone else’s craft.
That has always been something that’s interested me, how much should we use art of the same medium to influence our work. I feel that art should be the language to express the fullness of life. But the conflict then comes when confronted with another’s work that we stand in admiration, that admiration must then come from an ideal within us that we wish to reach. Then the choice becomes wether to run forward towards that same goal, almost like an Oedipus trying to surpass the father, or wether to stand back and remain in a place of fixed and constant admiration allowing it to either influence one’s work in another medium, or is it enough to touch a place within a performance, to shape the artists work by pushing a sound, an aesthetic a feeling further than they could have by themselves. The position of a conductor to a musician, a director to an actor, or a parent to a child, shaping the raw materials of a human being in a particular direction, for the purpose of benefiting humanity.
EC: Echoes Of You received a beautiful production. Would you like to see a feature filme of it, or you think there are some works which deserves to be untouchable?
LF: Both Henry and I respectively have a few film projects in development that I’m excited about.
Henry showed me a short documentary he made about discovering his grandfather through a box of letters and journals he found in the attic. We discussed how eerily similar the project which fills my days is, a film about my father, the late art critic Peter Fuller and going through his journals almost every day from the TATE archive. I’ve made my way through a huge chunk of his writings public and private, to piece together a singular man of principles in his writings. And now his echoes speak to me. Some things are so special they take more than just one lifetime to complete. That's really what this piece is about, the Greek philosopher Hippocrates said "Life is short, but art is long". The screenplay just won 3rd place in its first script competition; Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival Screenplay Awards 2020, participating this February:
http://www.laurencefuller.art/peter-fuller-art-critic
"Art, I believe; help thou mine unbelief"
Peter Fuller, one of the most influential Modern Art critics of all time, is making a name for himself in the art world of the 70s and 80s, disrupting the establishment with his radical ideas and passionate debates. It’s not long before his demons catch up to him, as he undergoes psychoanalysis to prepare for fatherhood and escape the shadow of his own evangelical father. Peter confides in his childhood friend Michael, as they develop a friendship with the Revolutionary art critic John Berger, which changes the course of all their lives and sends ripples throughout the art world, which are still being felt today. Artistic betrayals lived out on a grand scale, art deals in the many millions, new movements in art court an impassioned public. One of the last true Modern Art critics, Peter Fuller’s life was tragically cut short by a car crash in 1990, but his spirit lives on and his son survived the crash to tell this story.
EC: Tell me how come is to work with Quilici and what are his qualities (as a director; as a person)?
LF: I found Henry to be incredibly clear about what he wanted, everything very specific in emotional terms, he spoke very subjectively and compassionately, not the sort of move your head a little to the left which can leave actors feeling like meat puppets and end up with mechanical performances. He worked as many of the best directors do, from the inside out.
The first meeting with Henry Quilici happened at the end of last year shooting his USC short "Tweaker Speak” about a meth addict dealing with the demons of addiction as he tried to get his daughter back. A very different piece. I noticed the things Henry would say were very to the point, very clear, uncluttered by doubts or abstract theory, his notes always referred back to the story or to human experience.
A couple months later I was contacted by Henry and his producer Cam Burnett (a young filmmaker with similar sensibilities). When I first read the script and came to the end, I burst into tears, it had come to me soon after I had finished reading a passage by John Berger in his book “A Painter Of Our Time” which detailed the life of an artist, most often one of constant sacrifice for their work. Henry had captured that plight so beautifully with this story, I had to do it.
EC: A personal question, do you have a dream?
LF: I’m an actor, a published writer on art, screenwriter and film producer, in the art world I’ve worked at galleries, auction houses, as well as curated exhibitions, I’m a private collector and champion of major and emerging artists in my personal life and with my writing since I was young. As for acting I think about the amount of times that craft has saved my inner sanctity as a human being; I feel so grateful to have this as a part of my life. The craft when done properly is a deep well, it’s a personal poetry experienced within and expressed through the senses, the point of acting in itself is a sensual experience that is alive with the entirety of all a person is and can be. The act of doing it for its own sake, as a kind of spiritual development is rewarding enough, all the applause in the world, can’t compare to that alone. I try to incorporate all the arts into my process preparing for a role, the visual, the physical, the auditory, it’s about synergy with all of life and the journey to one’s own paradise.
I overcame trauma as a young boy, finding love for film and art and their creators. My father, the notorious art critic Peter Fuller died in a car accident when I was three. The arts saved my life. From a young age I learned that art must come from life, not art about art. The smallest moments in life are the greatest represented and remembered through the soul. One writes with every step a new chapter in the fortune, the legacy of each human life.
I believe that making art should be akin to act of love, wether it is love for a muse, the piece, or love for oneself, otherwise it doesn’t make much sense. My father, once talked about painting being like a skin between the internal and external world, he was talking about the work of the American Abstract painter Robert Natkin, but I think that idea translates to all the arts. And like the child has objects, toys, teddy bears which he/she transfers their emotional inner life to create their manifestations of the world they would want to see so too do we grow up as adults spiraling over the same behaviors with greater intensity, focus and realization. He also said that ‘Great art, makes great demands upon us’, the best artists lead by example in that sense, as their work comes from inside, it is an extension of their inner world, which like Kiefer or Enrique Martinez Celaya there develops an iconography, language and myth of its own.
With actors this is all read in the depths of their eyes, their face, their emotional life. The better the actor the more complex range of feelings and responses they have to their world and their relationships. Empathic people develop this naturally, it’s like holding a loved one tight when it becomes an electrical charge like a bolt of lightening or call that bellows from the depths of their humanity and just holding on is powerful enough to speak volumes.
The search for beauty is not always as pleasant as its end result. Quite often it is underpinned by a rugged brutality, stringent, uncompromising quest to prevail, exclusivity, a climb, a struggle, a ruthless clawing at the flimsy veins of existence, which pretend and shelter. One begins to claw, because of a feeling of not knowing, or of knowledge that there must be more. But getting there, spending one day in the company of beauty is worth’s lifetime in its absence.
So much Romantic literature is about the loss of the mother, today our relationship to the declining conditions of our world. My own mother has suffered from dyslexia her whole life so she’s not had a very good facility with the language of words, but an amazing talent with the language of images. She helped me to see the natural world for what it is, the Australian landscape in particular, we went on many treks through the forests of East Australia, some of the best memories I have.
At the time I was a kid and just thought that the moment was for the living and once it passed it would sit there like a leaf on the ground of myself, eventually to be assimilated back into the earth. Later I came to find, with the writings of dramatists like Lee Strasberg, that these could be the source of my talent:
“Imaginary objects are precisely that - objects which human beings deal with literally in life, and which the actors learn to recreate without the presence of the actual object... These would appear real and come alive on stage if the actor had been trained in stimulating the senses to actually respond to these objects. It should be emphasized that only the object is imaginary; the response is real.”
I found the work of Strasberg through learning about DeNiro and Day-Lewis around the age of 13, Strasberg lead me onto others like Boleslavsky, Adler, Stanislavsky et al, as did my drama teachers at Narrabundah College, a truly great place for fostering young artists of all mediums, their art departments and especially their theatre departments at the time were among the best in the country, Peter Wilkins and Ernie Glass, took me through the works of the 20th Century dramatists from Brecht to Stanislavski. At Bristol Old Vic Theatre School I would discover the classical in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
“Equally important was the implicit recognition that not just the actor’s technical means - his voice, speech, bodily actions - could be trained. Boleslavsky contended that the actor’s internal means - what was still at that time called the “soul” could be trained.
The challenge is to find each character anew, I often feel a sense of loss picking up a new script for the first time, like carefully treading through a complex, dangerous, rich jungle at night, cold sweat dripping underneath the arm pits, as wild cats tear up dark trees of unknown growth. Branches intertwined cut the ferns from the moon. Courage withstands the night to find morning breaking upon the realization that people are ultimately well intended, though agendas may not be the same, nor do their obstacles lay in the same spot. The most interesting characters are inevitably guided by their desires, away from their fears which stand only as obstacles to overcome. Usually if a character is playing it safe in their life, there comes an epiphany of sorts to open up to the world. The arts are much the same, to feel fully is to live fully. I know I’m attracted to people with a positive attitude regardless of their circumstances, people who use their trauma to overcome, when there’s a beacon of light people are drawn to it.
Beauty is out there, in the modern world and in Los Angeles it can be harder to find. Don’t loose faith in humanity, in all three of the lead roles in features I’ve had there has been an underlying theme of a repressed soul who looses their faith, to ultimately find it again with even stronger conviction than before.
The feature I had out earlier this year “Paint It Red” was about the search for faith, but not in a religious sense, faith in the realization of one's own artistic vision, in this case the survival of a struggling artist in his quest to get out of poverty and survive a very fortunate and very threatening bit of good luck. At the same time the underlying themes and relationships deal with artistic integrity and ethics. I had a brilliant time exploring the life of a painter for a while. It inspired me to paint my own first painting, which was a long time coming.
I wrote this poem about working on that character; “Alone in the darkness of our own avoidance to the beast of feeling that lurks in the passionate night unseen, chained to the stumps of reason, practical, bland objects, unrelated interactions in the presence of other people which relate solely to food or to sex or to expending less effort. All these things make me want to smash those chains and for all those things to dissipate. All these perspex surfaces hiding the truth. Ciaran is running through the hills of a dream of the world he wished to create, sprinting up mountainsides to grab at a feeling for something real. He is a man of faith, who knew what he stood for and would demand it of life. And yet he knew that if he let any of it slip even for a moment, it would all fall apart and that dream he so carefully cherished and held onto would fall into the hands of another equally hungry LA dream chaser.”
In Apostle Peter & The Last Supper Snt. Martinian’s journey through faith is a lot more direct and obvious, being a faith based film, none-the-less it was a fascinating challenge to discover a man who went against the entire empire of Rome for the quiet feelings of his personal beliefs and became the first Roman Christian martyr.
As appose to the character of Frank in Road To The Well, who is going through a much more modern existential crisis where he is just numb, and then as with “Crime & Punishment” or “The Stranger”, is thrust into centre of a murder and his life changes forever.
In Echoes Of You my character eventually loves faith in himself and his artform (the piano) after holding on for his entire life and then something remarkable happens.
I find myself internally oscillating in an emotional and artistic sense between Anselm Kiefer, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Sima Jo, Nicola Hicks, Peter Howson. Once these artists reached me in a spiritual sense, they became guardians of paradise, standing at the gates, holding off the barrage which is Modernism.
Our fractured culture makes its attempt to intrude and rip up patches of our cultivated gardens. However paradise grows of its own accord as well in unpredictable directions which flourish by their own making.
The famous speech by Iago “put money in thy purse” from Shakespeare’s “Othello”, I must have heard hundreds of times when I was starting out auditioning for drama schools, it’s a favorite among monologue choices for actors. And yet right before the beginning of this piece they overlook an outstanding bit of poetry and a metaphor for the discipline to cherish your inner world, it starts off “Virtue, tis a fig! Tis inside ourselves that we are thus or thus, our bodies are our gardens which to our wills our gardeners.”
I don’t believe that artists are separate from the rest of humanity, the concept of the ivory tower, but the arts are inherently a humanitarian pursuit and that paradise is like a seed that you plant within your soul that grows out to your fingers, your voice and all that you manifest comes from a core that is the self. That art exists within a strong belief in love for oneself which stands as the guardian to the essential problem of who we are and what we stand for.
Laurence Fuller, photo cred; Brian Earle
An artist’s voice becomes is the individual’s creation, that is pulled from what has ultimately affected the individual on a daily basis. Leon Kossoff just died which I found tragic when I heard the news one of the best artist working today, a painter who through daily meditations on and assimilating history into his soul, realized his own voice. And built upon who he was, what he wanted to tell the world from that place. I believe if you give over all of yourself to your art with a commitment to achieve whatever the emotional qualities you are trying to create, even if it really costs you something in the end, if you keep showing up and delivering with an open heart your best work, more will come.