When Josh Hartnett was offered the leading role in 30 Days of Night, he initially resisted the prospect of working on another horror film. Then he read the script. Michael Dwyermeets the engaging actor who wants to work in Ireland
Anyone mistaking Josh Hartnett's new movie, 30 Days of Nights, for a prequel or a sequel to his 2002 film, 40 Days and 40 Nights, will be very surprised indeed. That mildly raunchy comedy featured Hartnett as a young man who struggles to abstain from any form of sex for the duration of Lent. In 30 Days of Night,Hartnett is cast as another character who goes without sex, but for very different reasons. The movie is set in the depths of winter in Barrow, the Alaskan town that is the northernmost in the US and is plunged into round-the-clock darkness for four weeks every year. This makes Barrow an enticing attraction for bloodthirsty vampires, and their arrival leaves the local sheriff, played by Hartnett, with much more pressing matters than sex.
At a time when so many movie actors prove to be a good deal smaller in person than they seem on screen - Tom Cruise, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman - Hartnett stands 6ft 3in. When we met last week in London, he stretched his long legs across and over a hotel room table as he found a comfortable position for conversation.
An entirely unassuming actor, Hartnett strikes a relaxed, engaging presence. He says that when he was offered the leading role in 30 Days of Night, he initially resisted the prospect of working on a horror film. He already paid his dues in that genre at the beginning of his film career, in the forgettable 1998 releases, The Facultyand Halloween H20.
"I wouldn't have wanted to be in it if it was going to be just another vampire film," he says. "The reason I took it seriously to begin with was that I got a call from Sam Raimi, who produced the film. We had come close to doing another movie together. I wasn't really interested in doing a film in this genre, but Sam made it sound more interesting than that. I read the script and the graphic novel it's based on, and I thought it was a simple but different concept for a scary movie."
Hartnett was further intrigued by the project when he heard that David Slade was set to direct it. He had seen Slade's earlier Hard Candy, a deeply unsettling drama in which a 14-year-old girl (Ellen Page) meets a 32-year-old man (Patrick Wilson) over the internet. Assuming he is a paedophile, she entraps and drugs him, and prepares him for castration.
"I met David Slade and he showed me a couple of screen tests he had shot," Hartnett says. "He talked in-depth about what he wanted to do with the film, and I really liked the script by Stuart Beattie, who had done Collateral. With so much talent and such good ideas involved, I began to feel the film could be something special, and it turned out that way."
In 30 Days of Night, Alaska is convincingly played by New Zealand, where the entire film was shot. "It's the perfect place to make a movie," Hartnett says. "They have a very good infrastructure there and they have that terrific special effects house, Weta, which worked on the Lord of the Ringstrilogy. They built a lot of really interesting sets that really add to the atmosphere. We shot it in 33 days, which, of course, was 33 nights of shooting because almost all of the movie is set during darkness."
I ask Hartnett if he has any thoughts on the enduring appeal of vampire movies. "I guess it's because vampires in general are so closely related to us, except that they're immortal and they need to kill us to survive," he says. "This brings up a lot of moral issues. The mythology has been intact for so long that I think a lot of people believe that vampires actually exist. Why would this myth continue for so long otherwise? It's not that they have morphed in the way a werewolf does. It's just that they are. They look like us, and they could be just around the corner. I think Danny Huston does a great job as the lead vampire in the film. He brought it all home."
The release of 30 Nights of Nightcoincides with the reissue of the 1958 Dracula, with a sharp-fanged Christopher Lee in the title role, and Hartnett expresses surprise to learn that the author of the original novel, Bram Stoker, is from Dublin. "I should have known that," he says, shaking his head. "My father is half-Irish and my stepmother is fully Irish, and I've spent quite a bit of time in Ireland. I've been on the southwest coast a few times, because that's where my family is from originally. My mom's family is from the Dingle peninsula.
"I have friends in Dublin and I was there a couple of months ago for the Oxegen festival. That was amazing. It was very muddy there, but it was really well organised. Everyone was having a good time."
Have many people recognised him on his Irish visits? "I was wearing a hood one day at Oxegen because of the weather, although some photographers spotted me. But yeah, a lot of people have recognised me when I've been in Ireland, but it's never an issue. In London it's a real pain in the ass, because the paparazzi are such jerks who will do anything to get a picture."
Hartnett says that he inherited his passion for music from his father. "My dad plays guitar and his claim to fame is that he played with Al Green on tour. He was never famous but he was in a ton of bands, and he was often the only white guy in different soul bands. He was a funky guitarist, really good and really cool. I'm obsessed with music. I've always got my MP3 player in my pocket. One of the biggest perks of being an actor is getting to meet all these rock'n'roll bands and going to great gigs like Oxegen."
In 1997, when he was 18, Hartnett landed his first significant screen role, playing a character with the thoroughly Irish name of Michael Fitzgerald in the US TV series based on Cracker. He played the son of the eponymous detective originally played by Robbie Coltrane and in the US version by Robert Pastorelli.
"Oh yeah, the great Irish actor Robert Pastorelli," Hartnett jokes. "The American series did not quite take the way the original version did over here. It was too smart, I think. But it was a good show for me to start in, and it got me the roles in the first three films I did. I got lucky."
As he approaches his 30th birthday next summer, Hartnett relishes the chance to play older roles, as the sheriff in 30 Days of Night, and as a father for the first time in the recent US release, Resurrecting the Champ. "That was a milestone for me, and one of the best roles I have had," he says. He was cast as a sports journalist who meets a homeless man, played by Samuel L Jackson, who he discovers is a former boxing legend believed to be dead.
Did playing a journalist change Hartnett's view of that profession? "Of course," he laughs. "My sympathy for you guys has gone through the roof. Obviously, there's a certain cat-and-mouse game between actors and journalists. We spar a bit and sometimes I'm out to protect something that you guys need for your article or whatever. Spending a lot of time with journalists while I prepared for the role was very interesting.
"I live in New York, so I spent some time at the New York Times, and in Denver with JR Moehringer, the journalist who wrote the magazine article that was the basis of the film. I also became more aware of the pressures on journalists from the corporate systems that run the newspapers and are making it very difficult for journalists. The pressure to sensationalise is greater now than it ever was because of the competition from the internet."
Last year, when Hartnett starred in the offbeat thriller Lucky Number Slevin, he discovered that much of the media coverage distracted from the movie itself because of the many scenes in which he wore just a towel. "The writer's a friend of mine and I was living in his apartment when we were working on the script," he says. "We were throwing ideas back and forth. One day he came up with the idea of starting the movie with me in only a towel. I dismissed it as a gimmick at first, but I realised it suited the character, to show how vulnerable he was. What's more vulnerable than being naked, especially when you're out in the cold on the street? I agreed to it as long as I could pick the towel, and I picked the smallest, most floral towel I could find."
Hartnett doubles as producer and star on August, which was filmed earlier this year and is set in New York in the month before 9/11. "I play this guy whose dotcom company is floundering and he is desperately trying to keep it together just by sheer force of personality. At that time a lot of those companies had a front man who would go out and raise money, and a lot of banks and investors were interested in backing some of the most obscure ideas. They felt that if they didn't understand it, it must be original and worth backing.
"David Bowie plays my arch nemesis, a satanic type. I've always been a huge fan and it was just great to work with him. He was a real gentleman on the set and obviously he's an excellent actor. I think he's very underrated as an actor. His Andy Warhol [in Basquiat] is probably the best there is on film."
Hartnett went from the Manhattan set of August to Hong Kong for the leading role of I Come with the Rain, the new film from Tran Anh Hung, the Vietnamese director of the richly textured Cycloand The Scent of the Green Papaya. "There is a lyricism to his films that is different to most of what's been made these days, and he gets these stunning visuals. We shot it in Hong Kong for 3½ months. I play a troubled private investigator, and he works almost entirely through empathy. He relates so completely to the people he is looking for that he finds them.
"His next case is to trace a pharmaceutical company executive's son who has gone missing and who has the power to heal by touch. The movie is very poetic and with a sense of the surreal. It was a tough shoot, but I had a great time working on it. We finished shooting in Hong Kong last week and we have some scenes in New York next week."
Having worked on a succession of productions back to back in the past few years, Hartnett says he is looking forward to a break. "It would be fantastic if I could make a movie in Ireland some time." ...
30 Days of Night is now on release
FILMOGRAPHY
In his 10 years as a screen actor, Josh Hartnett has featured in 23 movies, moving between big-budget blockbusters and small-scale independent productions, and working with a diverse range of directors. They have included:
1998 The Faculty(directed by Robert Rodriguez)
1999 The Virgin Suicides(Sofia Coppola)
2001 Blow Dry(Paddy Breathnach)
2001 Pearl Harbor(Michael Bay)
2001 O(Tim Blake Nelson)
2001 Black Hawk Down(Ridley Scott)
2005 Sin City(Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez)
2006 Lucky Number Slevin(Paul McGuigan)
2006 The Black Dahlia(Brian De Palma)
2007 Resurrecting the Champ(Rod Lurie)
2007 30 Days of Night(David Slade)