Malcolm McDowell Philadelphia Film Festival Interview 4/15/05

Malcolm McDowell here for Phila. Film Festival award
philly.com | Gary Thompson 4/15/05

Malcolm McDowell receives the Philadelphia Film Festival's Artistic Achievement Award tonight at the Prince Music Theater. The festival is screening the docudrama "Evilenko," featuring McDowell as a Russian psychopath who killed some 100 people. He spoke to Tattle yesterday.

Q: How do you prepare to play Evilenko, the Hannibal Lecter of the Soviet Union?

A: Well, I didn't do much research. You could go nuts doing that. I had to find a way of playing a man who literally murdered 100 people, and ate some of them. And he was a pedophile. He was such a monster, I didn't think there was much hope of understanding him as a human being. Also, I didn't want to take this guy home with me. I figured the only way to do it was to get the externals first the facial expression, the glasses, the hair. I saw some video, saw his gestures. He made a little crooked smile, and I thought, "that's it."

Q: Caligula, the Sheriff of Nottingham, a Nazi, a racist South African, you've played some bad dudes in your career. Now this. What's up with that?

A: Type casting, I suppose. I think I'm good at playing sort of immoral characters, or reprehensible characters, and giving them a sort of human face.

Q: You played the guy who killed Captain Kirk in "Star Trek: Generations," and reportedly received death threats.

A: Yes, but I don't know how serious they were. Anyway, I was very happy to be the man to do it. It gave me great pleasure to get rid of him. Bill Shatner, by the way, is a very amusing guy, not nearly what he appears to be in public. The whole picture was a delight.

Q: You're receiving an artistic achievement award. What do you regard as your best work?

A: I never think about it. I prefer to think about what's next. And I'm very suspicious about this kind of stuff, which I'm starting to get now, because I've been around so damn long. I know that people are very taken with "A Clockwork Orange" and certainly that was an exceptional film, and Stanley Kubrick was a great director. But I would like to say that I'm very proud of my association with Lindsay Anderson, who directed me in "If" and "O Lucky Man." He was a humanist, unlike Stanley, and a great director of actors.