  Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers in The Soloist. |
LOS ANGELES — They were two boys harbouring the same fear: Both terrified of losing their minds.
Nathaniel Alexander Ayers, a musical prodigy from Cleveland, would attend Juilliard before spiraling into schizophrenia.
Eric Marlon Bishop hailed from Texas and would play football, get top grades and earn a scholarship to study classical music and composition. Later, he would change his name to Jamie Foxx.
“And then,” he remembers, “that childhood fear almost came true. I was 18 in college and somebody slipped me (a drug). And I flipped out for like, 11 months. And I was just gone. And the doctor said, ‘Sometimes people take that and they never come back.’ ”
He did come back, of course — tethered to sanity, he says, by his love of music. “Anytime I felt like I was losing it, I would play the piano.” He would go on, famously, to wealth and stardom.
Ayers would end up in Los Angeles, too, living on its streets and in its tunnels, pushing around a shopping cart that carried all his belongings, including a battered violin. He would live like that for years until, in 2005, he was befriended by newspaper columnist Steve Lopez, who had watched and listened as Ayers played that same two-stringed instrument. A series of columns in the Times resulted in an outpouring of public support for the gifted street musician.
Soon there was a book deal, and then one for a movie — The Soloist, which opens in theatres Friday. Robert Downey Jr. plays Lopez. And portraying Ayers? Well, you know.
The serendipity of it all was not lost on Foxx. In fact, it unnerved him before cameras began to roll.
“I go to see a psychiatrist because I’m nervous about taking this role: ‘What if I lose my mind?’ I say, ‘Can you catch schizophrenia?’ He says, ‘No, you can’t,’ so I explain to him what I’m feeling and he says, ‘Whenever you have flashbacks like that, it’s post-traumatic stress over what happened to you when you were 18, and you may feel a little of that.’
“I felt antsy about playing someone who’s lost their mind, because that’s everything — all my creativity comes from there. If I couldn’t draw on that, I’d be nowhere. So in doing that, it was tough because ... it’s like taking a brain and putting it into a meat grinder and then having to still think ... We’re halfway crazy anyway as artists. We go places in our minds — that’s why we are who we are.”
But what made Ayers who he was? What was it about music that captivated him, that transcended his illness? “When he plays his music, that’s what soothes him,” says Foxx, who compares Ayers’ thought process to “pop-ups you get on the Internet. That’s what’s happening in his mind, and music soothes him. And understanding that is a scary thing.”
While Foxx, who won an Oscar for channeling Ray Charles in the 2004 biopic Ray, is a talented mimic, he says in approaching Ayers, “You start with an impersonation and then you grind it down to him.”
At one point, he says, “I snuck downtown with a disguise on and sat down next to Nathaniel. He didn’t know who I was. I watched him talk to the world, watched him play music, just watched everything.”
Interacting with him later proved trickier. “He’d get to know you and things would be great, and then he wouldn’t know you and things would be different. He might get angry at times ... There were different weird things. But to see Nathaniel and Steve interact — Steve was a rock. He had seen every aspect (of the illness).”
Still, Foxx wasn’t sure he had captured Ayers completely until he met Nathaniel’s sister prior to filming. “It reminds me of doing Ray Charles and his son walks in on the set and starts crying, saying, ‘That’s my father.’ Those are the moments you need before you start shooting.”
For the 41-year-old Foxx, The Soloist further solidifies his rep in the dramatic arena — a career, he admits, he never expected, having started out as a stand-up comic, In Living Color castmember and star of such low-end comedies as Booty Call and Bait.
That all changed when director Oliver Stone cast him in 2000’s football opus Any Given Sunday. “I never would have done Any Given Sunday if Oliver Stone had known who I was,” Foxx says. He didn’t know. He told me, ‘I’m hiring you because you came in and did a good read.’ ”
Next came a critically lauded supporting turn in Michael Mann’s Ali, opposite Will Smith. He would collaborate with Mann twice more: On the 2004 thriller Collateral with Tom Cruise (for which Foxx earned a best supporting- actor Oscar nomination) and on Miami Vice (2006). But it was Ray that not only won him an Academy Award but reintroduced him to his first love: Music.
“In movies, you’re the hired help. But in music, it’s your expression. Right now, we’re having major success,” Foxx says. “It feels good to have started out wanting to do music and now music is working for me.”
He released his third album, Intuition, last December. “Kids will come up to me because I did a song with Kanye West,” he says, referring to the hit Gold Digger. “They’ll be like, ‘You’re the one who sings with Kanye.’ ”
But for the moment, he’s not turning his back on the big screen, either. He has just wrapped the thriller Law-Abiding Citizen opposite Gerard Butler. Like his previous work, it is a character part, he says. “My career has never been about super-big box office success ... It has to be about the character. I’m a good character actor. I look at Will (Smith) and go, ‘He’s so good looking and, at the same time, what’s scary, is his acting is getting better every single second.’ With me, I like a character I can play and be comfortable with and not have to worry about the Hollywood aspect of it.”
Maybe he’ll even make another comedy. Or not.
“I was overseas and someone said, ‘Really? You did comedy?’ ” Foxx says, affecting a European accent, “ ‘I don’t see you as funny at all.’ ”
Columnist says ‘Soloist’ gets story right
LOS ANGELES — How’s this for a headline: True Story Really Happened.
So says Steve Lopez, who confirms The Soloist, inspired by his improbable friendship with homeless violin virtuoso Nathaniel Ayers, “gets the story right.”
In other words, Hollywood didn’t botch it. Or make the whole thing up. Go figure.
Still, the Los Angeles Times columnist acknowledges he struggled at first with whether to tell the story at all.
“It presented many moral conflicts for me from the beginning, from the first column,” says Lopez.
At issue: Was he exploiting the schizophrenic Ayers by writing so publicly about his life and illness? And even now has the media glare on Ayers — undoubtedly intensified by the movie, which stars Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx — proven more of a disservice or a benefit to its subject? Lopez, not surprisingly, believes the latter.
“We don’t often print the names of people who have a mental illness and here I was asking Mr. Ayers if that was okay, and asking myself if he is competent to make that decision,” Lopez recalls.
Ultimately, of course, he and the Times opted to publish the articles, concluding that to not to would be to turn their backs on a social issue — the homeless and the mentally ill — too often ignored. “We thought, ‘What are we hiding?’ ”
The resulting columns caused a sensation in Los Angeles, eliciting an enormous reader response as well as a book and movie deal. Now Lopez and Ayers have become celebrities in their own right, profiled in print and on television, including on journalistic heavyweight 60 Minutes. Throughout it all, though, Ayers’ health continues to weigh on Lopez’s thoughts.
“I remain concerned about how Mr. Ayers can handle all this,” he says. “But I would have greater regrets if we didn’t move forward ... By humanizing Mr. Ayers, we’re humanizing thousands like him and de-stigmatizing mental illness. I have to be more vigilant than ever that Mr. Ayers can handle all of this because he does pay a price. He has surrendered his privacy. But there are times he basks on that ... I think he’s enjoying this moment and being acknowledged as a man and a musician.”
And, again, Lopez considers the film, directed by Atonement’s Joe Wright, essentially accurate.
“I think people will leave the theatre re-examining their thoughts about many things — friendship, the power of art to heal, chance encounters that can change lives. I haven’t just helped Nathaniel; he’s helped me in countless ways. He’s introduced me to the true meaning of friendship and passion. You can say, ‘Oh, that poor unfortunate soul,’ but how many people do you know who find their purpose in life and it saves them every day and they’re loyal and faithful to it, regardless of what happens?”
kevin.williamson@sunmedia.ca
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