Tim Robbins: The media must tell the truth

Noted for serious films like, to mention only a few, Robert Altman’s The Player (as the amoral studio chief, for which he won the 1992 Best Actor trophy at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy), The Shawshank Redemption (for which he got a Screen Actors Guild Best Actor nomination), the highly-acclaimed Dead Man Walking (which he wrote, directed and produced) and, of course, the Clint Eastwood-directed 2003 also critically-acclaimed drama Mystic River (which won for him an Oscar Best Supporting Actor trophy), it’s a refreshing change to see Tim Robbins in a kiddie film like Zathura: A Space Adventure (currently showing in Metro Manila) which is, like Jumanji (starring Robin Williams) and The Polar Express (lead and other characters voiced by Tom Hanks), written by Chris Van Allsburg.

For the older generation (like this one) not familiar with it, Zathura is an adventure story based on a popular board game in which two squabbling brothers (played by Josh Hutcherson, recently featured in Funfare, and Jonah Bobo, with Kristen Stewart as their older sister) are propelled into the deepest and darkest space while playing the mysterious board game they discovered in the basement of their old house while their divorcee father is away.

The father is played by Robbins who is seen only in the beginning of the movie while saying goodbye to the two kids as he leaves for work, and reminding them to behave, and toward the end when he comes home after the two kids are brought back to earth by a friendly astronaut after an out-of-this-world (literally!) adventure that brings them – and their whole uprooted house – into the scary outer space.

Like mothers, fathers are sometimes the last to know.

Funfare also did, as with the boy Hutcherson, a one-on-one with Robbins in Hollywood in October last year. In person, Robbins is as mysterious and as brooding as he is in most of his films, hardly smiling even when tackling a light topic (like how it was working with his kiddie co-stars), and turning even more serious when shifting to very serious topics like why the media should stick to telling the truth, free from political constraints, which is the theme of his play-later-turned-film Embedded Live: A Film which takes a speculative look at the war in Iraq and the accuracy of the media’s reporting as a result of embedding journalists. The film was shown at the 2004 Venice Film Festival.

Here are excerpts:

As a writer-director yourself, do you give suggestions to your director (Jon Favreau in the case of Zathura) how your scenes should be done?

"As an actor, I have a couple of my own ideas and I try them on camera but I generally follow what my director(s) tell me to do."

You appear only at the beginning and at the end of Zathura. Don’t you think you miss all the fun in-between (your appearances)?

(Deadpan) "Oh, what’s the fun all about?"

You tackle a controversial theme in Embedded – the media telling the truth and you’re emphatic about it.

"I think what’s happening is...I think it all starts with the media. Until the media demands the truth when the administration is lying or when a senator is lying, you and I and everybody else will never know the truth. If the media cannot do its job of demanding for the truth, it’s difficult for people at-large to make the same demand."

You’re not alone in your anti-Iraq-War stand; several other actors are with you.

"You know, you can go back a couple of years before the war started. A few actors sensed that. They said, the inspectors didn’t find any Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq and the inspectors should have spent more time looking for the WMDs. The government has been criticized heavily for going to war and, you know, it’s like we are traitors. There was nobody in the opposition and nobody in the media asking questions. It’s the duty and responsibility of the media to ask the questions and to bring out the truth."

Back to Zathura... Favreau said that he chose you for the role of the family’s dedicated if distracted father right from the start because you’ve got a family, "so I think the film was appealing to him," and that when you do comedy, you always bring a lot of heart and soul to it.

"I recognize that although Zathura is first and foremost a space adventure, it’s also about the journey the family goes on, one that leads to better understanding among them. For a family to work, it has to come out of a believable situation. There have to be issues like in any great family movie. There has to be a path the family must take to discover, to evolve, to change. The first 20 pages of the script are really about problems and what’s going on at home, that’s why I like it."

Have you ever done a role you think deserved a nomination and yet was "overlooked" by the award-giving bodies?

"You know, it’s weird how those things happen. It like a ground-swell that catches on. Like when Mystic River came out, I don’t think the critics gave it the notice that it deserved. But when the Hollywood foreign press started praising the movie, it created some kind of a ground-swell and people also began noticing it. Before you know it, you’re getting one award after another."

One last question. What can you say about the US war in Iraq?

(Breaking into a sarcastic smile): "Bad idea!"

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