ary Sinise is often spoken of as an actor's actor, but he finds himself on
the verge of becoming a full-fledged movie star as well. Mission to
Mars, in which he plays astronaut Jim McConnell, marks Sinise's
debut as the lead in a big-budget film. But it's only the
latest in a string of high-profile roles for the actor, who last appeared
in The Green Mile with Tom Hanks.
Making his professional stage debut at age 17, Sinise has made the long
journey from Chicago theater (as a founding member of the Steppenwolf
Theatre Company) to Hollywood, where he's built a career as a featured
player in dozens of movies. His roles include an Oscar-nominated
performance in Forrest Gump and an astronaut in Apollo 13
(both with Hanks), as well as the villain in this month's Reindeer
Games. In Mission to Mars, he re-teams with director Brian De
Palma, with whom he worked on 1998's Snake Eyes.
Sinise's next project also has an SF theme. Impostor, in which he stars with Madeleine Stowe, Vincent D'Onofrio
and Tony Shalhoub, is about a futuristic war between humans and
aliens. In the film, which is based on a Philip K. Dick story of the same
name, Sinise plays a human engineer who builds a weapon that can resolve
the conflict, but ends up raising suspicions that he's an alien himself.
Sinise spoke to the press while promoting Mission to Mars, and this
interview is drawn from those comments.
Is it true you took this role because you were frustrated at not getting
to go to the moon [in Apollo 13]?
Sinise: [laughs] I got the better ride, I think. It's nice to have
been able to put the space suit on [again] in this and get off the ground.
What was it like to act in a film like this where much of the work is
done on a green-screen stage and the effects aren't there? And how did
Brian De Palma communicate to you?
Sinise: Brian, well, sometimes you have to pry it out of him a
little bit. But whenever we weren't clear about what it is we were actually
supposed to be looking at or anything, we would get together with him, or
get together with the special effects people, especially the computer
graphics people, and say, "Okay, tell us what you're actually going to be
doing here." So that we can ... [think], "Okay, is it this big? Or is it
this big?" Because this big would require this kind of reaction, and
this big [another]. So we really had to get together with them and
make sure they were telling us and showing us through storyboards or
computer animatics ... how much this was going to be coming around, or where
that was going, or how big it was. And then we could say, "Okay, okay, now I
understand. I'll act like this." It's not any different than being
on stage and standing at the lip of the stage and looking out, pretending
you're seeing the city burning, and you're looking at the balcony exit
sign.
You're ending up in a lot of SF and genre films. Is that the direction
you want your career to be going right now, or is that just the way the
scripts fall?
Sinise: You know, when I played Harry Truman [in the 1995 HBO TV
movie Truman] and then I played George Wallace [in the 1997 TNT TV
movie George Wallace], people said, "Are you just going to be doing
political figures now, or what?" It [just] falls together. ... In
the last year, I did That Championship Season, which was a Showtime
Jason Miller play, then I did Reindeer Games, with this villain,
then I did Mission to Mars, which is a more noble character. And I
just finished a futuristic action thriller, which has more action than any
movie I've ever been in. I'm running around and jumping off things, and
doing stunts.
Is that Impostor? Can you talk about that?
Sinise: Yeah, it's Impostor. ... I will in August, when it
comes out. Right now, we've got to talk about Mission to Mars, don't
we? [Laughs.]
How about comedy? You had a couple of lines in this movie that were
unexpectedly funny.
Sinise: Did people laugh? Well, he's a funny astronaut, isn't he?
[laughs] ... In a movie like this, you don't necessarily play it for the
comedy. What makes it funny is that it's played kind of straight, and it
just seems ironic that he's saying certain things at a certain point. ...
Sure, I'd like to do a real farcical type thing [in the future], where I
can be really stupid.
Brian De Palma has said he likes to use actors with stage experience,
and also dancers for their physical work.
Sinise: In every movie I'm in ... the foundation of my acting has a
lot to do with what I've done on stage. I can't escape that because I've
done so much theater, and that's my whole schooling. ... The physical work,
we ended up being in pretty good shape actually for some of these things.
They put a gym on the set for us, and we were all in and out of the gym,
staying in shape. Some of the physical work with the wires [simulating zero
gravity], if you didn't have like a strong center, where your center of
gravity was, and where you were balancing yourself on these wires, it could
be pretty strenuous. So we were constantly trying to stay strong to be able
to do the physical work.
Could you talk a little more about working with Brian De Palma again,
and perhaps what he brought to this project that perhaps another director
might not have brought to it?
Sinise: Brian is a visual filmmaker. He's very concerned with a lot
of big shots. And there are some spectacular shots in this. He was also
very concerned with trying to avoid the things that have been done in space
movies before. And that's hard to do. But that's why you don't see the
launch of the guys going to Mars. You don't see them landing on Mars. You
never see any of that. The only thing in that area is the end of the movie.
But you never see the first man stepping on Mars, making a speech, any of
that. He really was trying to focus on staying away from that. He put
Mission Control on a space station, as opposed to Houston. He just tried to
do things that were a little bit different. Which is hard, in a space movie,
to find ways that things haven't been done before.
There are echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey in this movie.
Sinise: Yeah, some of that, which isn't bad. The science in our
movie was all based on NASA research and different scenarios that people
have come up with as to how we might get there, and what it would be like
living there.
Did it pique your interest in space travel?
Sinise: Oh, sure. Just think about a mission to Mars, what it would
take to go 100 million miles away. What a logistical nightmare. ... It takes
a special kind of individual to do that kind of thing.
What are you like to work with?
Sinise: Whenever I'm working on a movie, I can't help it. I take it
seriously, and I want the entire picture to be good. I don't just think
about my lines, and what I do in the movie. I'm trying to look at the whole
picture. And I can't help doing that, because even prior to my directing
background, my theater background, working with Steppenwolf, our whole
approach to things was a collaborative one, where we would all have a
voice, and everybody would be able to speak up and say, "I don't think
that's working, and here's why, and what if we tried this." Everyone got in
there and funneled their ideas through the central figure, who was the
director. But ... my approach was always an organic one. I don't just come in
as a director and tell my actors, "Do this, and do that, do that, 'nuff
said. I don't want to hear about it." I like to work organically with
everybody, and so it's just natural for me to bring in as much as I can and
present it. And I've never had a director tell me, "Don't say anymore.
Don't bring that in. I don't want to hear anything anymore." Because
usually, something I say might be a positive thing for the movie or the
play I'm working on. If the director doesn't want me to do that, it's their
right to say, "Shut up." But I've never faced that problem. Or rarely
[laughs]. ... But I don't come in to try to direct the piece. If I wanted to
direct, I would go direct. ... But I feel it's my obligation to contribute as
much as I have to try to make something good, or to try to make it better,
or to challenge something that I don't think is working. But to do it in a
collaborative spirit, and not a spirit of ... antagonism. ... It just seems to
me, we're all in it together; we're all there to make something good.
Having performed a lot of this movie against green screens, without the
effects, what did you think when you saw the finished movie?
Sinise: Well, the effects are spectacular. It's really beautiful
stuff. The vistas on Mars. We saw storyboards, some little computer
graphics of certain things, but I think for the most part, it's beautiful
stuff.
Did you ever get sick spinning on the wires?
Sinise: No, I didn't. But there was one scene, a quick shot of me
with Kim Delaney, and I'm kind of doing a somersault,
and she kind of pulls me in on this tether. When I was doing the
somersault, I did about four takes, and started to get a little nauseous
[laughs]. ... But just when you were hanging on the wires, you could hang
there for hours ... and it was fine.
If you had the opportunity to spend six months in space, what would you
take with you?
Sinise: I wouldn't go! I would go for eight days or ten days on the
shuttle, if I could. How many people would go on the shuttle if they had
the opportunity. If they said, "We're going to give you a year of training
and give you the opportunity to go into space for eight days and look back
at the Earth from 300 miles up," wouldn't you do it?
