Saint 007

>> Richard Attenborough directs Pierce Brosnan as Grey Owl

by MATTHEW HAYS

Looking at Richard Attenborough, it isn't too hard to understand why someone thought of casting him as Santa Claus in the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street. He has snow-white hair and a beard. He's sort of roly-poly. He has bright red skin. Dammit, this man makes you believe in Santa.

That is, until he opens his mouth, opining about his various filmmaking projects, his latest being Grey Owl, shot in Quebec this past year. Nope, no department store Santa would be using words like this, in answer to my first question: doesn't Attenborough tend to deify his film subjects just a bit too much?

No way, says the knighted actor and director behind such films as Gandhi and Cry Freedom. "If I want to make a film about a particular subject or person, in order to achieve a fascination with that character, to denigrate him concurrently would be nonsense. Churchill was a great leader. He saved Western Europe, maybe the world. Equally, he was a shit socially. He was a bigot and very right wing. I made a movie about him [Young Winston, 1972]. To add that other stuff simply wouldn't help in what I wanted to say."

In fact, Attenborough says that when he tried to cram everything into a biopic about a person's life, it spoiled the formula. "I made a film about Chaplin, who was a great hero of mine. It was a fuckup, I got it wrong. I felt I had sufficient objectivity to portray the full picture, and I wanted to examine so much about him. I tried to depict his entire life, and that failed. But Robert Downey, Jr.'s performance was brilliant, of course."

With Pierce Brosnan in the lead, Attenborough's latest film takes on the true story of Grey Owl, a native environmental activist who turned out to be an Englishman posing as a native. "Grey Owl was a liar and a bigamist. He was a reprehensible character in many ways. But that, really, has nothing to do with the story I want to tell.

"There are certain things I care about and believe in, and I've always believed that not to follow my political convictions would be dishonest."

Grey Owl opens Friday, October 1