During a recent interview with IGN, Jeremy Irons discussed his new film, Assassin’s Creed. The film is in theaters now:
Irons on not being a gamer: “No. Never played a video game. Actually, I try to keep them out of my house. No one bought the children Xboxes only because I just wanted to them to get out and get some fresh air and not sit in front of the screen for too long. But I do understand that they — apart from the fact that this is a large franchise — they can introduce children to history in quite an interesting way. There are good things about them.”
Irons on why the movie appealed to him: “No, purely what appealed to me was that it was a big movie, it’s always useful to be in big movies for one’s career. But it was more than that. It had Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard already attached and I thought well, that’s a really interesting pairing. We’ve seen them in Macbeth and to see them doing a movie like this, maybe we’ll make something which is better than the game which I think no film has yet done. You probably know better than I.”
His thoughts on director Justin Kurzel: “He was indeed. An emerging director, but someone who takes on like that is not to be scorned. And I knew that he hadn’t done the genre before and that he would approach it in a fresh way. He’s a very visual director and he’s also interested in subtly. And I thought, well, those two things, and also I like him very much. Those three things convinced me to get on board. I thought this could be an interesting film and I have to say when I saw it the other day — I saw it on Friday — I was deeply impressed on many levels. It seemed to me to be a movie which has so much going for it.
The photography on it was great, the story was very strong and fascinating to an adult as well as to a child. I thought the period stuff was quite brilliant and the action sequences, I thought, because Justin didn’t want to have to rely on CGI, that he wanted real sometime elliptic performers during those sequences so that they are actually running across those roofs. They are actually climbing those walls. I think that gave it a level of seriousness and suspense that many films that rely on CGI don’t have. We were really invested in the characters and I also love the very enigmatic relationships between both Michael and Marion and me and Marion and me and Michael. I felt they were deep complicated relationships that were not easily colored in black and white.”
Irons on the fascination with the Knights Templar: “Well, I think it sort of starts with, of course, the start of the Crusades, but any organization that is sort of underground like the Masons, the Masons are always looked at with suspicion and you can find in anti-antisemitism the same thing — a group or a nation or whatever who seem to be and have power and how do they get the power? But they do have it. I think it’s very much a feeling now in global economics, you know G7 and all of that. There are a group of people who are managing the world to their advantage and who just look to the rest of us as people who will buy their products and fund their salaries.”