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FROM SPUD TO DONKEY-BOYJatinder Sidhu / BBC News Online / November 14, 1999
Best known as Spud from Trainspotting, Scottish actor Ewen Bremner says he's tired of playing characters who suffer. In the 1996 box-office smash, he was the manic job applicant on speed. In his new film, julien donkey-boy, he plays a young man suffering from schizophrenia. "Victimisation has been my staple diet for a while," says Bremner, who has also played down-and-out characters in Mike Leigh's Naked and The Acid House, an adaptation of another Irvine Welsh book. Bremner met julien donkey-boy's director Harmony Korine while Korine was making his debut feature film, Gummo. "I was really knocked over by it," he says of the film described by the New York Times as "the worst film of the year." But Korine, 25, is admired by such distinguished film-makers as Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant. He was impressed with Gummo and said: "It makes me rethink the film-making process and makes me want to create a film that is just like it." A lot of people want to work with Korine, says Bremner and "real big-time actors" were lined up to play Julien. The character is based on Korine's uncle Eddie, who is in a psychiatric institute. Bremner says he strove to play the role sympathetically: "I submerged myself in psychiatric research and the politics of the experience." He spent six weeks working in a Manhattan psychiatric hospital apparently finding it a shock to the system: "I've never done a proper job in my life." He had to take courses in first-aid, hygiene ("a half-day course in washing my hands") and crisis management before he was given the job. He found the residents "fairly broken, but incredibly well-mannered". They were there for committing "weird, horrendous crimes" and were trying to rehabilitate themselves, to relearn how to cope with everyday life. Bremner adds that working with American cinema's most uncompromising young director was not easy. He explains how they started with a script that was a plan for the film but had no dialogue. Improvising throughout, they shot scenes that weren't on the sketchy schedule and were constantly alert for the director's spontaneous, brilliant flashes of inspiration. "Harmony doesn't like to rehearse. On the one hand he's a truly great intellect, and on the other has got incredibly strong instinct and intuition," says Bremner. But he says trying to imagine what it is like to be schizophrenic was not the most testing part of playing Julien. "The gruelling part was trying to become American and to lose my Scottish accent. I had to be completely spontaneous in American. In any circumstance, anywhere, anytime that Harmony would decide," explains Bremner. Bremner is, however, in no doubt about the overall experience. "It's the greatest privilege to work with the man I consider to be the premier artist of our time," he says. julien donkey-boy has divided critics despite showing to packed audiences at the London Film Festival. It uses a fragmented visual style and syncopated rhythms to portray the confusing world inhabited by Julien and his bizarre family. Ewen Bremner's next film is a psychological thriller called Paranoia. He also stars in a romantic love story for Channel 4 called The Secret Life Of Michael Fry. Scripted by the creator of Cracker, it's about a Welsh town planner who falls in love with an internet porn actress. Bremner says he feels drawn to love stories more than anything else at present: "Comfortable stories of romance speak to me," he says. Perhaps it's all that victimisation. 
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