Interview: Ricky Gervais
What a liar
An honest chat with Ricky Gervais about the folly of fame, being too smart for his own good, and telling one lie after another in his clever new comedy The Invention of Lying
By Bob Strauss
Brit wit Ricky Gervais has often found himself being the smartest guy in the room. And he long ago figured out the wise thing to do in many such situations: act like a boob.
“There’s nothing smart and clever about being smart and clever if it offends someone,” the stocky 48-year-old says during an interview at Los Angeles’ Four Seasons Hotel. “In a room full of idiots, the clever one’s out in the cold.
“I do like playing the out-and-out idiot, but I also like playing the guy who struggles with his intellect,” adds Gervais, which — to some extent — describes his two signature characters from the groundbreaking television series he helped create. David Brent of the original version of The Office being the former and Extras’ Andy Millman the latter.
The struggling intellectual also describes the evil genius Gervais plays in his new movie The Invention of Lying. His character, Mark, lives in a parallel universe much like our own, except people there don’t possess a certain signature human trait. Until this weasel comes along.
“Imagine this world, but the human race hasn’t evolved the gene for lying,” Gervais explains. “So in a world without lying, there’s no fiction or imagination, as such, no dreams. But I just have it, I figure it out and do it. And everyone believes what I say, even in the face of evidence, because what I say must be the truth.”
This enables the unlovely and generally unliked Mark to bed women out of his league (though it gets complicated with the girl of his dreams, played by Jennifer Garner) and excel in his chosen field of show business by doing what we on Earth just naturally assume our entertainers do, even when their work is supposedly based on a true story: make things up.
“It really is a lovely concept,” Gervais, who co-wrote the script, says with evident pride, “one of those concepts you think must have been done already, but it hasn’t.”
Must be; Invention of Lying attracted such crack comic players as Tina Fey, Jonah Hill, Christopher Guest, Jeffrey Tambor, Louis C.K. and Jason Bateman, and earned a coveted spot at this month’s Toronto International Film Festival. It’s the first feature film Gervais has co-written and co-directed (with Matthew Robinson); a second, Cemetery Junction, created with Stephen Merchant, his collaborator on The Office and Extras, is already in the can.
Filmmaking isn’t that much of a stretch from TV, according to the unapologetically confident funnyman.
“It wasn’t any different from directing the TV shows, actually,” Gervais says. “I knew where I was with comedy and I did it. It’s just on celluloid, takes a bit longer with a bigger budget. Fundamentally, direction is about taste. It was a great experience, we were left alone to do what we wanted.”
That said, Gervais was not so arrogant that he failed to learn a thing or two.
“It’s a little different in film, in that it’s also a bit about beauty,” he notes. “I was a real sucker for the comedy and we always shot with two cameras, so I thought I would also shoot this with two cameras. But when I saw how great it could look one shot at a time, I came over to the old school.”
Though he brags/admits to having always been clever, Gervais tends to observe and learn at a deliberate pace rather than brashly plunging ahead. The son of a Francophone from London, Ontario, and an Englishwoman his dad met in Britain during World War II, Ricky grew up wanting to be a rock star. After that didn’t pan out, he went into music management and radio, where he hooked up with Merchant and eventually hatched The Office.
Performing success didn’t come until his mid-30s. And although some have accused him of acting a bit too impressed with himself — and he doesn’t go to great lengths to counteract that impression in conversation — maturity certainly informs his views on the excesses of modern celebrity.
“I want people to know there’s a big difference between a Big Brother winner and Robert De Niro,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with being famous, but it depends on what you do. Once a journalist rubbed me the wrong way when she asked, ‘What advice would you give to other people who want to become famous?’ I said, ‘I’d tell them to go out and kill a prostitute.’ They looked at me as if I was mad. But my point is, if you want to do anything to become famous, there is no difference now between fame and infamy.
“I’m so phobic about the celebrity end of the business,” adds Gervais, who lives in London (England) and New York with his companion of 26 years, writer-producer Jane Fallon. “I don’t want to invite people into my home and take pictures, I don’t want to go to premieres and celebrity parties. But I want to shout from the rooftops: ‘Come and see my film!’ But not at any price.”
And not for just any movie. Gervais has been quite picky since Hollywood started calling — just a few supporting roles in friends’ films such as Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum hits and Guest’s For Your Consideration (which he effortlessly stole), and a single lead in last year’s well-reviewed Ghost Town. Call it conceit or exercising good taste, but one thing Ricky Gervais seems dead serious about is not selling out.
For any reason — even the ones a clever fellow’s own psyche might trick him into believing.
“I know actors that take bad films and they know they’re bad films, but the actor’s ego says, ‘It’ll be a good film if I do it,’” he notes. “I will walk away. There’s no bluff, there’s no games. There’s this lovely quote by Bob Dylan that says, ‘A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night, and in between does exactly what he wants.’ Amazing quote. That’s always been the idea, even when I was working in an office.”
Bob Strauss lives in L.A. where he writes about movies and filmmakers.