Ricky Gervais reveals all about Ghost Town (From Basingstoke Gazette)

Ricky Gervais reveals all about Ghost Town

3:44pm Monday 20th October 2008 in

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AS SOON as the first series of The Office aired to great acclaim in the UK back in 2001, Ricky Gervais was inundated with film roles - and he turned them all down.

He was looking for quality not quantity, and carefully picked a few supporting roles – Night At The Museum, For Your Consideration and Stardust – but held back on accepting the lead in a big American film until he was absolutely convinced that all the key components – script, director and cast - were in place.

And the “right material” that would mark his debut as a leading man in a Hollywood film finally arrived when the script for Ghost Town dropped on to his desk.

Its writer/director David Koepp is acknowledged as one of Hollywood’s leading screenwriters, with Jurassic Park, Carlito’s Way, Mission Impossible, Spiderman, The War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on his impressive CV. He’s also directed Stir of Echoes and Secret Window, amongst others.

In Ghost Town, Gervais plays dentist Bertrum Pincus, a man who has elevated being rude into an art form. Pincus’s intentionally isolated life is turned upside down when a minor operation goes wrong – leaving him clinically dead for several minutes before he is resuscitated. When he leaves the hospital he discovers that he has acquired a strange, frightening and ultimately (for a decidedly non-people person) very annoying new ability - he can see and communicate with ghosts.

Greg Kinnear plays the recently bereaved Frank Herlihy who wants Pincus to stop his ex wife Gwen – played by Tea Leoni – from marrying a man he believes is out to fleece her. Reluctantly, Pincus agrees to help which means that he has to befriend Gwen. And once he does, Pincus discovers, alarmingly, that his ice-cold heart is beginning to melt.

Gervais, 47, was born in Reading, and after graduating from University College London formed a band, Seona Dancing and enjoyed minor success in the British pop charts. After working in radio and as part of the comedy team at Channel Four’s The 11 O’clock Show, he starred in his own series, Meet Ricky Gervais.

He wrote and co-directed The Office with his creative partner, Stephen Merchant. Gervais also played David Brent in the BBC series, which became a worldwide hit. Gervais and Merchant also wrote and directed two series of Extras and both appeared in the show.

Their next joint project is a feature film called The Man From The Pru, which is set in England in the 1970s. Gervais has recently directed his first feature film, This Side of the Truth, which will be released next year.

Q: You must have been offered plenty of leading roles before?

A: Oh yes. If I got offered 100 films in that first year, 70 of them were awful. And I’d see the people who took those roles and you’d never hear of them again. And some of the scripts – awful. You know a film with a bloke from the telly trying to get a girls’ hockey team into division two or something. I mean, shoot me. Of that 100, there were about 30 that might have been a good prospect but I was either too busy and it was arbitrary. I looked at the role and I thought ‘there are other people you could have chosen, why me?’ I felt I had to justify being the one they picked. I mean, I had to be David Brent – it was my part. But these other ones, I just didn’t feel were me. So I resisted for many reasons and fear was one of them – I didn’t want to jump too early and I didn’t want to fail.

Q: So there was a natural resistance to the film offers?

A: Exactly. I wanted to wait until it was right. Even the cameos I did had to tick a lot of boxes. I took the film with Christopher Guest (For Your Consideration) because he was my greatest influence. I did Stardust because it meant I would be doing scenes with Robert De Niro. What’s the other one I did? (laughs). Oh yeah, with Ben Stiller (Night At The Museum) well, I had to do that. He did Extras for me and later he sent me an e-mail saying, ‘Do you want to return the favour?’

Q: Were you also worried about over exposure?

A: Oh yes. And I was very, very careful. I didn’t want to be everywhere. Some people seem to do everything they are offered and I didn’t want to be like that. I always knew that I’d never regret saying ‘no’ but that I could easily regret saying ‘yes.’ With some people you can turn on the television and get sick of them in one weekend (laughs). You see them in something on the Friday and by Sunday it’s like “I can’t watch him anymore!’ And you pop up on stuff when you don’t want to. I’m in the paper every day. If they do a survey about office chairs, there’s a picture of David Brent (laughs). The worst one I ever saw was when there was a story about a woman who sued her boss for sexual harassment and the court found in her favour and there was a quote in the report in the paper which said ‘he was like David Brent..’ And they didn’t put a picture of the real boss on the front page of the paper - they put a picture of me as David Brent! (laughs) So there you are.

Q: You usually write your own material. Was it difficult working with somebody else or did David let you collaborate?

A: He was fantastic like that. He even let me help cast it, which was great. And he came to London and we did the script polish and he let me do that. And it was very collaborative on set. Actually, I’m not sure that it would have been quite so collaborative if it had been one of those films I turned down a few years back. I would have been told where to stand and what to say. But David had seen The Office and Extras and he was great. There are some ad-libs in there. I think it will be obvious the bits that are mine. But it’s David’s film and I certainly wouldn’t want to take a co-writing credit. And I learnt a lot, as well.

Q: You’re in virtually every scene. What was that like?

A: It was a 39-day shoot and I was in for 35 days. But it was absolutely fantastic. And the thing that clinched it for me – as well as being allowed this freedom to collaborate and the fact that it was it was the best script I’d read in five years – was that it was set and shot in New York, the best city in the world. It’s amazing and I loved working there.

Q: You play a very obnoxious character. Why did you like him?

A: I loved the script and I loved the character immediately. When I was reading it I really loved the way he was talking to the admittance nurse when he’s going into hospital. And when he was wheeled in and he said to the doctor ‘why are you so tanned?’ and I could hear me saying that. There were lots of little moments in it that I just love. And when I really fell in love with it was when he goes around helping the ghosts because I thought he would never do that because he is a horrible, misanthropic guy.

And you know, the thing is, it’s like that Larry David thing – he is brilliant at being grumpy. And I like those sorts of characters. They’ve grumpy but the thing is, they’re usually right and the reason is, the world is full of idiots! (laughs). I remember I spoke to Larry David about this and we decided that people like us create our own villains, so we can get this off our chest. So we create these personas so we can say these awful things with no victims. (laughs).

Q: Redemption is a theme that you use a lot in your own writing, isn’t it?

A: Definitely. Steve (Merchant) and I stick it in everything we do. In The Office we made sure that Brent was redeemed and at the end of Extras we made sure that Andy (Millman, lead character played by Gervais) was redeemed. And the worse they go the more they get dragged down, the better it is when they come round. So yeah, I think everything should have a bit of Scrooge in it, otherwise why should you care? If someone starts off good and ends good, that’s boring. So Ghost Town has that morality tale that you find in A Christmas Carol and it’s also a bit like It’s A Wonderful Life - people are out there who care and you have to care, too.

Q: But that’s got to be a moment for a boy from Reading..

A: Oh of course. And I’ve said it before, this isn’t like a career, it’s like I’ve won a competition. Working with Robert De Niro, winning a Golden Globe – I mean, it’s amazing. But I could blow it. I could go and do every chat show, every panel show, every party, waving at people, and all that, and that and everyone could get fed up with the sight of me.

Ghost Town is on general release from Friday, October 24.