Brendan Fraser offered praise of the Saudi Arabian film industry while speaking at Red Sea International Film Festival today (Sunday, December 8
Brendan Fraser offered praise of the Saudi Arabian film industry while speaking at Red Sea International Film Festival today (Sunday, December 8).
Responding to a question at his in-conversation event about what the local industry can do to grow, in the context of his own break from and return to acting, Fraser said, “Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing it right. You’re telling stories that you know.”
“The filmmakers of this territory are working from an emotional place that’s intensely personal,” he continued. “It proves we can captivate, educate, enlighten, transport an audience without all the decorous elements of filmmaking. By simply working from a place of what you know.”
“My understanding in Arabic culture is it has been a nation of storytellers. For that reason, I think you’ve got the hard part out of the way; you have to want to do it and know what you’re doing. The rest will fall into place – believe me. Hang in there, everyone.”
Fraser also advocated for risky storytelling, in the one-hour session in the up-to-date Cultural Square venue. “Take the risks, you must,” said the actor. “Being creative and artistic is a risk. That’s where you learn, you’ll make the most discovery.”
“Pick the project that makes the choices that make you look twice. Have that courage – that’s what’s most important. A hero isn’t the guy running round with a sword and a shield all the time; it’s someone who is willing to stand their ground. As creatives and artists, we have to do the same thing.”
Canadian actor Fraser also said he has no wish to direct; but does see a original future outside of acting. ”I’m no director and don’t want to be; but I do have an interest in producing,” said Fraser. “That’s where I think I’ll head next.”
Next projects
As well as discussing his career of over thirty years, Fraser gave updates on two projects he has finished shooting this year, and that he hopes will release in 2025.
He plays Dwight D. Eisenhower in Anthony Maras’ Pressure, the story of the 72 hours before D-Day. “Anthony creates the reality of a scene to give an audience a feeling as if they’re a fly on the wall and we’re seeing this happen in real time,” said Fraser of the film, which also stars Andrew Scott, Kerry Condon, Chris Messina and Damian Lewis for Studiocanal and Working Title. “The movie is called Pressure, which is exactly what it was.”
He has also wrapped Japanese-American filmmaker Hikari’s Rental Family, in which he plays an American actor in Tokyo who is hired by Japanese families to play random family roles in their lives. Praising the experience of working with a Japanese crew, Fraser said the story was “so far removed from anything I’ve seen, anything I’ve been asked to go and work. If I saw someone in Tokyo flying by with a jetpack, I’d think – I guess we’re doing that now.”
Fraser won the Academy Award for best actor in 2023, for his performance as morbidly obese man Charlie in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale.
The actor said he doesn’t believe the film would be received the same way today as it was following its Venice Competition launch in 2022, partly due to it having filmed during the pandemic in 2020, prior to the introduction of Covid vaccines.
“We all had a collective experience of wondering if there will be a tomorrow,” said Fraser. “Each day we approached the work, we thought ‘is this the last time you ever will’ – because it could have been. I know that intangible showed through in how it was received with audiences.”
Fraser also discussed the jobs he did prior to his breakthrough role in 1992’s Encino Man – which included waiting tables, parking cars, and one particular decorative role. “I cabled up Christmas lights on a 150-foot sequoia tree, with a guy who’d just got out of jail,” said Fraser. “I didn’t find that out until I was about 80 feet up in the air,” he quipped, to laughter from the mainly local audience.
After rising to stardom in the behind schedule 90s in films including George Of The Jungle and The Mummy, Fraser was absent for the industry for several years, with no on-screen film credits between 2013 and 2019.
He later claimed he was the victim of sexual assault by Philip Berk, the former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2003.
He recently played W.S. Hamilton, attorney to Robert De Niro’s reservation owner William King Hale, in Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon.
The Red Sea conversation sessions continue tomorrow with Andrew Garfield and Michael Mann.
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