"Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fiddly Bits!"

Tina here.
I present a bit of the Oldman interview:

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Gary Oldman Visits The Box 6/9/06

Steve: Do you like some of your movies?

Gary: Some of them, yeah. I don’t…watch them. I mean, I watch them once and then…

Steve: Watching yourself, do you get all squirrelly when you see yourself?

Gary: Not anymore, no. But I don’t have um…memorabilia. I don’t have pictures and posters on the wall at home.

Steve: No gold records…

Gary: No, none of that stuff.

Steve: Me neither. I have a few pictures of meself, but I don’t have any of that, gold records. I only ‘ave one.

Gary: I don’t really. I mean, I rent the place and the bathroom, it comes with mirrors, so unless I want to kind of, tear them out of the wall, I probably wouldn’t even have a mirror up. It was handy, I had one today, coming to see you.

Steve: …to see me, right (laughs).

Gary: Cos I have a comb in me barnet. (both laugh) So, I’m a pretty low-key chap, really I terms of all that Hollywood stuff…but I’m here, kind of by accident and um, I was in New York for nearly ten years. And those winters, Steve…bloody hell. Those winters’ll kill ya.

Steve: It is, it is taters there, innit, sometimes? And the heat in the summer.

Gary: And then the summer is just like, ohhh. It’s like grease in the air, you know, that…thing. It’s like chicken soup there in the summer…like, bones floating around, know what I mean.

Steve: Yeah, yeah. Horrible, yeah. Quagmire.

Gary: Yeah. And those dirty water dogs, you know those vendors on the corner, that smell?

Steve: The hot dogs.

Gary: Yeah, what I call “dirty water dogs”.

Steve: It’s…a messy place. It’s a dirty, stinky place.

Gary: But I love...at the time, (US accent) “in the eighties”, I loved it. I like, the thing I like about New York is, you come out of your apartment building and you’re…“in the production”. It’s like, “curtain up”. There’s all this…the “show’s” going on and I miss that a little. You know, you don’t see anyone here – where I live - you don’t see people actually…walking.

Steve: It’s all in cars, innit?

Gary: It’s all in cars here, yeah. I went back recently to do a commercial and that was four days in New York and it was, it was nice. It was nice to be around people.

Steve: One more movie question and we’ll move on…cos I like it when we just have a laugh. But, the JFK, I just saw another documentary on the History Channel where they’re actually saying now, after all the conspiracy, that he might have actually did…shoot him, your character.

Gary: Yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Steve: Yeah. Did you do any…what’d you think? I mean, I know you was only acting in it…

Gary: Oh, no, but we were on the locations and…

Steve: It’s possible, then?

Gary: It’s not impossible.

Steve: …from where, from that window?

Gary: Yeah, I mean I went up there…that was one of great things about, I mean, not only I think it’s one of Oliver’s great movies, but you were given this gift because you had a few lines of the script, you know, some money and a bunch of air tickets and then he said, “Go off and find out who Oswald was”. So you actually became, you were an investigator, more than you really were an actor, you know. So we were there and we were on the actual really, most of the locations were the actual locations and he had Dealy Plaza shut down and that whole thing and I was up at that window, with that gun. The moment you get up there, and you look down and…

Steve: Well, did you, was there a scene when the car was actually going by and you was up there?

Gary: No, but I, we were…I mean, in one of the scenes, yeah. But that was the window below, because the window above, that floor is now a museum, but they allowed me to go up to the window with the rifle, just to sort of try it, kind of thing. And the moment you got up there in the position with the gun, you just said, “Oh, no. No way he could ever do this. No way.”

Steve: Really. Cos he was a marksman as well, wunnhe, though?

Gary: Well…you know, was he involved? Yeah, you know…it is a kind of very weird thing where…here’s someone who goes and sort of renounces his citizenship to America and goes and lives in Russia and then comes back and they allow him in, in a time when they were debriefing tourists who had been to Russia. But somehow Oswald slipped through the net. But yet he had worked for the airbase here, in Japan for the U2 spy plane and all that, yet he slipped through. You know, there’s something very “iffy” about all that.