A disastrous encounter with Anthony Hopkins was the trigger for this profile-writer to find his voice. A sneak peek from the December Walkley Magazine....
This is foolish and embarrassing and I’ve rejigged this increasingly laboured introductory sentence some 36 times because I am deeply uncertain of mentioning it… but as this is a story about writing in first person and stories behind the stories, and as I spend my days extracting and reporting the secrets of mostly decent and honest individuals, it is probably fair I share a secret of my own so I’m just going to go right ahead and say it.
Before really big interviews with really important people, or before all-or nothing interviews where we have 30 minutes to gather enough quotes to sustain a cover story profile that will carry a reader through 3000 insightful, emotive words, I often begin to feel queasy.
When this happens I rush discreetly to a toilet, often in the foyer of a city hotel. At the basin I splash my face with water, wipe it with a paper towel, then recite the following mantra: “Don’t pussy out on me now. They don’t know. They don’t know shit. You’re not gonna get hurt. You’re a fucking Beretta. They believe every fucking word because you’re supercool.”
It’s a line Tim Roth’s nervous undercover cop says in Reservoir Dogs before a meeting with volatile gangster Harvey Keitel.
Roth actually says “You’re fucking Baretta”, a reference to the 1970s American cop show starring Robert Blake as unflappable Detective Anthony Vincenzo “Tony” Baretta. But I’ve always said the line as “You’re a fucking Beretta”, as in, “You’re a fucking gun”, not to be played with, likely to go bang and such. I first said it to psych myself up.
I soon realised that the mantra had a reverse effect and left me feeling worse than before because every time I said it I analysed why I said it and immediately felt deeply foolish for saying it aloud. But then it became a good luck charm, a pre-game ritual; to not say it would be to cast a dark and grim cloud over the coming interview, to inexplicably transform the thoroughly likable Matt Damon into a fire-breathing dragon spreading misery and grief (but enough about publicists).
Now I say the mantra quick, colourlessly, the way priests recite the Lord’s Prayer.
The last time I said it was in Room 4 of the Blakehurst Motor Inn, in southern Sydney, prior to spending three extraordinary, surreal days in the company of boxer Anthony Mundine.
The first time I said it was in the men’s toilets of the Hotel Intercontinental, Sydney, prior to spending eight extraordinary, surreal minutes in the company of actor Anthony Hopkins.
I was 21, earning $26,000 a year and sitting on top of the world; resplendent in the $200 Roger David dinner suit I wore to my brother’s wedding, on my first real crack at a celebrity profile for free glossy colour inner-city magazine Brisbane News.
Hopkins was in Sydney promoting Red Dragon, prequel to The Silence of the Lambs, a film I greatly admired and knew many things about, like how Hopkins ad-libbed some of that stuff about Clarice Starling being a wellscrubbed rube with a little taste from West Virginia and how Jodie Foster was so disturbed by Hopkins’ performance that she was briefly concerned for her co-star’s sanity and that the fear she shows in those iconic Baltimore prison scenes was, to an extent, genuine.
The weeks I spent researching Hopkins culminated in 42 probing, illuminating questions typed out in bold 14-point font – for ease of reference – on several stapled sheets of paper which lay in front of me at my table in the Intercontinental’s foyer.
I was studying the questions, committing them to memory – “When you starred alongside Kate Hepburn in The Lion in Winter…” – when a presence loomed over my shoulder.
“What’s that ya got there?” said one of Hopkins’ female minders, a woman tasked with marshalling journalists to Hopkins’ room for their allotted 10 to 15 minutes (depending on how much time the TV journalists left the print journalists).
“Just some questions,” I said, nervous, covering the questions with my hands.
“Mind if I take a look?” she said, smiling. There was permanent sunshine in the minder’s voice. She could bring optimism to the sentence: “I’m gonna lodge this here fountain pen into your jugular if you don’t let me see those questions.”
These days if a minder asked to see my questions I’d come over all wrath-of- God-like, real Charlton Heston: “From my cold, dead hands!” But I was green, weak and timorous; a well-scrubbed rube from Brisbane’s outer northern suburbs. I handed the questions over. The minder raised her fountain pen and began slashing ink lines across my questions.
“Can’t ask that,” she grunted. Slash, slash. A question about Hopkins’ recent divorce.
“Can’t ask that,” she grunted. Slash. Cut. Parry left. Slice. Parry right. Stab!
Blobs of ink spilled from the tip of her pen like blood on a bayonet. The pen seemed to salivate, thirsty and rabid.
A reference to Hopkins’ reported alcoholism. “I don’t think so,” she said, viciously.
The foyer was filled with experienced feature writers from across the country. I felt their knowing stares. I remember glancing across at the table adjacent to mine. The great Adelaide film critic Stan James gave me a kind, supportive nod, a tender smile. It was a look that suggested I didn’t have to take this, that I should stand up and call the minder out for what she was: a power tripper unnecessarily protecting an intelligent, strong-willed man who could more than capably handle himself in conversation with a 21-year-old journalist....
Read the rest of the story - with Morgan Freeman, Slash, Morrissey, more Hopkins and David Rowe's full illustration - in the Walkley Magazine.
Trent Dalton is a feature writer for The Courier-Mail’s QWeekend magazine. His feature piece on Anthony Mundine, "Shadow Boxer", was highly commended a Walkley for Best Sports Journalism
David Rowe is a Walkley Award-winning artist with The Australian Financial Review
