USA: USA: Helen Mirren enters the spy game in the post World War II film drama,"The Debt"

Record ID: 826004

  • Title: USA: USA: Helen Mirren enters the spy game in the post World War II film drama,"The Debt"
  • Date: 28th August 2011
  • Summary: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (RECENT) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) HELEN MIRREN, SAYING: "But you know, honestly, I didn't do a lot of training for this film, I really didn't. Jessica did. I mean I'm lucky. I kind of cruised. In the film I kind of cruised off Jessica's performance, which is so wonderful and so layered and so beautifully calibrated and thought out. And then I get to just come in and take the baton. And really she's already won the race for me, if you like."
  • Embargoed: 12th September 2011 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Usa, Usa
  • Country: USA
  • Reuters ID: LVADKTMQROXQP0ORBEPFI93080TD
  • Story Text: "The Debt," a big-budget remake of an obscure 2007 Israeli movie called "Ha-Hov," stars Helen Mirren as Rachel Singer, a former Mossad agent with a guilty conscience over a botched mission to capture a Nazi war criminal in East Berlin. The film jumps back in time to 1967 to uncover why Singer and the other two agents on the assignment, played by Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas, are unable to move on with their lives 30 years later. Jessica Chastain plays the young Rachel.
    Mirren said that Chastain did all of the hard work for the role.
    "I mean I'm lucky. I kind of cruised. In the film I kind of cruised off Jessica's performance, which is so wonderful and so layered and so beautifully calibrated and thought out. And then I get to just come in and take the baton. And really she's already won the race for me, if you like," said Mirren.
    Chastain said she and Mirren worked closely to make sure their portrayals matched up.
    "Then we pinpointed a couple of points in the movie where we would do a similar mannerism. I don't know that you would notice it on first watching the film, but little things that in your conscious you would imagine that they're the same people," said Chastain. "Then also I did things like, I tried to soak in as much of her as I could. I watched all these YouTube interviews of her, I read her book. I was like a crazy Helen Mirren stalker for a while."
    The film has taken its time getting to theaters. It was originally slated for release last December but got caught as the last film to be delivered to Miramax before the then-Disney subsidiary was sold. The film was shot in Budapest, London and Tel Aviv and completed in late 2009.
    It finally hits theaters in the U.S. on August 31.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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