HOLLYWOOD -- Daniel Craig can have the tuxedos and licence to kill. Clive Owen is just fine, thank you very much, in his flip flops.
The 42-year-old British actor, for years thought to be Pierce Brosnan's heir apparent prior to Craig's debut as superspy James Bond in Casino Royale, instead arrives in theatres Friday as a decidedly atypical and un-Bond-like hero in the futuristic thriller Children of Men.
For Owen, eschewing the cliches of cinematic derring-do happened one step at a time. Sometimes in bare feet. And other times in, yes, flip flops.
"It's a highly unusual lead character for a movie of this size," Owen acknowledges during a recent press conference in L.A.
"It's unusual to play a lead character who's this apathetic, cynical, depressed and sad, really."
Not that the film itself fits too snugly into the norms afforded the science-fiction and thriller genres.
Based on the P.D. James novel of the same name, Children of Men imagines a world two decades from now when the human race has become, suddenly and inexplicably, incapable of reproducing.
Without the hope of future generations, society has all but crumbled in the face of what will be, in a matter of years, the end of the species.
Owen's character, a former social activist named Theo, lives in a London plagued by terrorism, decay, government repression and crushing hopelessness.
Making matters worse, the film opens as the world's youngest person is killed in a bar brawl after refusing to sign an autograph.
Into Theo's dire, dystopian existence -- in which the only levity comes from a long-haired Michael Caine as Theo's best friend, Jasper, an aging hippie -- enters Julianne Moore as his ex-wife, a revolutionary (i.e. terrorist) leader who leads Theo to what may be humankind's last chance for survival: A young pregnant immigrant girl who he must smuggle out of the country and deliver to the ultra-secretive Human Project.
This is where Theo's footwear -- after trudging around sans shoes he has no choice but to don a pair of unheroic flip flops -- becomes critical.
"It is a real stroke of genius because suddenly Theo is active, running around, trying to save the girl, which in turn could save the world. (Director Alfonso Cuaron), who has a huge aversion to sentimentality, wanted to stop any notion of this cliche -- the guy who becomes active -- and to do it, he put me in flop flops. And that's never going to become the cliche action guy."
Owen's own aversion to becoming a cliche action guy has been evident since 1998's Croupier launched his film career.
There is Sin City, of course, and those BMW The Hire ads, which probably inspired all the Bond talk to begin with, but he's just as known for such dramas as Closer, Derailed and Inside Man.
It turns out it was in Croupier in which Cuaron first noticed Owen. In fact, Owen made such an impression that Cuaron penned his Children of Men adaptation with the actor in mind, realizing the studio would probably want a bigger name to headline the costly production.
Shortly after completing his script, however, Cuaron shelved it to first helm Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
By the time Cuaron was done shooting the third adventure of J.K. Rowling's boy wizard, Owen was considered enough of a marquee star to assuage the fears of anxious studio executives.
"When I finished Harry Potter, suddenly the studio wanted Clive."
And while Children of Men, in its bones is a science-fiction chase flick -- with Theo propelled into the archetypical role of everyman-turned-reluctant saviour -- both star and director downplay the fantastical trappings and emphasize the story's relevance to present-day woes and issues.
Explains Cuaron, "if it was science fiction, we would have gone into the why and mystery of infertility. But we decided to just take it as a point of departure and try to make observations about the state of things (now)."
"He's using a film set in the future as an excuse to talk about things today," Owen says. "He's looking ahead and saying, 'If we're not that careful, this is where things are going.' It's not a fantasy."
Cuaron admits he wasn't even originally interested in adapting the book.
"I was not interested in science fiction and the book takes place in a posh universe.
"I love P.D. James, but I couldn't see myself making that movie. Yet the concept of infertility kept haunting me for weeks and weeks. I would ask myself, 'Why does this premise haunt me so such?' I realized this could serve as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope of humanity."
And to illustrate that point, as well as further distance the project from over-wrought and over-produced genre adventures, Cuaron stripped the film's designs down to grim and gritty functionality.
Instead of flying automobiles, he wanted "to make cars that they feel like today, but if you look closely, you've never seen that car before. I wanted them to look like today, but to honour the fact the story's 20 years from now. When I started (on the movie), the first meeting with the art department, they had come up with amazing things -- supersonic cars, buildings, the whole thing. It was really beautiful. But I said, 'This is not the movie we are doing.' "
Instead he provided them photographs of such war-torn regions as Iraq, Sri Lanka and the Balkans.
"I said, 'This is the movie we're doing.' "
Hence, the film is replete with images that purposely echo those from Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
The broad-daylight midtown London bombing that opens the movie recalls, with harrowing intensity, the subway attacks that horrified the city in July 2005.
Filming that scene, says Owen, "was really upsetting because it was so close after the (real-life) bombings. I was amazed we got permission because it was a big explosion and it was right in the middle of London. It's an eerie and awful, but incredibly poignant opening to the movie because it's set in the world we live in.
"Because I've got two young girls, there is this fear and trepidation about the future, this feeling of fragility. You're bringing kids into the world and is this something they're going to have to deal with? That's an awful and worrying idea, really."
In the pivotal role of Kee, the pregnant girl whose baby may spell salvation for the human race, Cuaron at the last minute cast relative newcomer Clare-Hope Ashitey.
The relationship between Theo and Kee, explains Cuaron, is crucial because "part of our premise is you don't choose who you survive with. We needed to keep a certain tension there.
"I didn't want it to be father/daughter or even the suggestion of a sensual relationship between the two of them. We wanted to keep it very dry.
"They kept that dryness, but played it with great compassion. More than chemistry, they had empathy."
Recalls Ashitey, "I didn't have a lot of time to prepare. That in itself was a good thing because she's completely out of her element the entire movie. I'm lucky that Alfonso is that audacious and working with people like Clive and Michael, they're great to learn from."
Still, she says with a laugh, "anyone who wants to give me a job wearing a gown and nice shoes, go right ahead."
Shooting style bang on
While Children of Men is much more than just a thriller, it will likely be best remembered -- and regarded -- for the bruising urgency of its action.
That's because for many of the film's clashes, director Alfonso Cuaron chose to shoot the action in a single take.
One uninterrupted shot towards the climax follows Clive Owen's reluctant hero Theo through a war zone erupting with bullets, bodies and explosions for an astonishing 17 minutes.
The objective, explains Owen, was to "viscerally put you in the action and keep it in as much real time as possible and not cut away."
The results are heart-pounding and often shocking -- so much so Cuaron's name is now being mentioned in the same sentence as movie-making maestros Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles, both of whom were legendary for their filmmaking bravado.
"It's a genuine collaboration with everybody pulling together," Owen recalls of the meticulously staged film sequences.
One misstep 13 minutes into the scene, after all, would mean starting entirely from scratch.
"It's painstaking and very specific because you have to feel like you're catching it on the run. It's all about the pacing. Hold a little too long and it would feel manipulative ... Everyone was very adrenalized gearing up for those takes. Technically, some of this film is pretty staggering."
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