Christoph Waltz on Brexit: 'It's one of the silliest, most infantile things on earth'

Speaking out: Christoph Waltz brand Brexit 'infantile'
Rex
Tom Teodorczuk30 June 2016
The Weekender

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Christoph Waltz is a better actor than most to ask for his views on Brexit.

It’s not just that the 59-year-old Austrian-German mostly worked in European film and theatre prior to a late Hollywood career renaissance that has seen him win two Oscars for Quentin Tarantino films (Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained) and star as Blofeld in last year’s James Bond film Spectre.

In 1990 Waltz played a German diplomat navigating the politics of the EEC (the EU’s precursor) in Channel 4’s long-forgotten 1990 satire The Gravy Train.

I interviewed Waltz in Los Angeles before the EU referendum but he was frank on why he thought the gravy train should not be derailed. “It’s like handing someone a gun and telling them to shoot themself in the knee,” he said of Britain leaving the EU.

“Go for Brexit? It’s one of the silliest, most infantile things on earth. Why would you want to leave the European Union?”

Waltz is adamant that the positive aspects of the EU need to be sold harder to the British public: “It’s time to get them a little educated about the European Union and what it’s supposed to do.

"America already indicated it is not interested so much in giving Britain special status if it is not in the EU, so what’s going to be left?”

We’re not meeting to talk about The Gravy Train but The Legend of Tarzan, in which Waltz plays a corrupt Belgian captain.

The loincloth-clad warrior swinging through the African jungle was the invention of Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912.

He has been portrayed countless times on television and film but in the 21st-century reboot he is conflicted and his companion Jane is feisty, never more so than when she is kidnapped by Waltz’s Leon Rom, envoy to King Leopold of Belgium.

(Tarzan is played by Alexander Skarsgård, Jane by Margot Robbie and the movie is directed by Brit David Yates, who made five Harry Potter films).

Waltz saw The Legend of Tarzan hours before we met in a LA hotel suite and professes himself satisfied in unusual terms.

“It actually looks much better than I expected,” he says. “I expected great imagery but certain things work fabulously. Am I happy with everything unreservedly? No. But I’m happy with a lot of things and, as Goethe said, ‘You see what you know’.

"So if you think about it a little further you see that much more and it’s actually much more fun”.

As timeless as the Tarzan story is, it is intriguing that a story about a noble savage is being retold in today’s post-colonial world, surrounded as we are by persistent accusations of western arrogance:

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“It’s an interesting aspect of the story that they [Victorian England and Belgium] need the ‘civilised savage’ to guide them through that conundrum.

"They are either outraged about this or participating in that but they can’t negotiate it. That’s very much a current situation. You can do colonial studies in college now and read popstar-status post-colonialists.”

Waltz in person is puckish, playful and on occasions evasive (he denies even knowing about reports that he would appear as Blofeld in two more Bond films if Daniel Craig carried on being 007).

Some journalists have considered him pompous but his wry humour helps him evade that charge, whether it’s discussing re-teaming with Tarantino alumni Samuel L Jackson in Tarzan (“It was totally different — we didn’t have a scene together!”) or 3D film (“this is an adventure movie in 2D — that’s real. Who needs bloody 3D, which doesn’t work anyway? In a 3D movie I have to let them throw stuff at me.”)

Waltz now lives in Los Angeles with his second wife but he lived in London from 1988 for more than a decade. “It’s completely changed,” he says about London.

“I was at the tail end of the beginning of the end anyway because Thatcher had laid her claws on it and the financial market was deregulated and London was ruined more or less.”

How so? “In that authentic, somewhat eccentric, wonderfully unique, sort of admirable cultural way. There are pockets that are still like that but it turned into this real-estate insanity.

"I think that is what brings down the world. You shouldn’t really be able to speculate with land. We share this earth and you should be able to put it to its proper use in the interest of everybody — but you shouldn’t be able to speculate for your sole purposes and profit.

“Who can actually live in London? Either the slaves or the masters, meaning the filthy rich who don’t care or the ones who live in the 1880s in the basements who service the elders. The ones who try to eke out a decent living in between? Where do they go? Certainly not to London.”

The reality of Hollywood economics can get Waltz down. “I think it’s because people can’t be bothered about educating themselves about what a good movie really is,” he says.

“It’s only the short-term return that counts so they limit or reduce films to their first weekend take, because then everybody can have an opinion. So if Spectre makes only $76 million [in its opening weekend] but Skyfall makes $81 million, Skyfall is the better movie?”

Does he approach a Tarantino film differently to, say, his supporting role in Horrible Bosses 2? “Do you enter the Royal Opera House differently from the porn cinema around the corner? Yes, you do.”

Yet he insists American movies sate his appetite for complex characters: “I like an interesting character to play and something to think about as much as I like an interesting conversation rather than a flashy, completely void exchange with some cute blonde.

"Don’t get me wrong — I don’t mind cute blondes but I’ve seen a few, so after a few minutes the conversation runs dry.”

Waltz’s social media profile is flattering (one tweet suggested Casablanca should be remade featuring Waltz in the Humphrey Bogart role) but he doesn’t see any of it, citing Apple music supremo Jimmy Iovine’s dictum on the need to not breathe your own exhaust.

While Casablanca might not be on the cards, don’t be surprised if Waltz collaborates with Tarantino again (he defends The Hateful Eight, the director’s most recent film, which received mixed reviews, as a “monumental piece of art”.)

Wouldn’t it be great if Tarantino directed the next Tarzan reboot? He’s excited by that notion: “All the journalists would be required to watch the next Tarzan suspended on a vine!”

The Legend of Tarzan is in cinemas from July 6

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