|
Ready, Eddie, Go!
------------------------------------------------------------------------ There's more to Eddie Izzard than lipstick, powder and paint. For a start, he looks great in suede. Philip Wilding goes cruising in New York with America's hottest ticket. Photos: David Corio ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Under the theatre awning for the New York musical smash Titanic - Making History All Over Again a vivid stream of yellow taxis is slowly coming to a standstill. The red lights turn contemplative. The crush of rush-hour traffic shudders and halts as a heavily made-up figure in a close-fitting brown suede trouser suit dances past their hoods. Horns honk as the figure twirls gracefully from one sidewalk to the other. "Bloody hell," hollers an English voice. Paul, who is in America on a backpacking holiday, has just spotted a hero. "It's Eddie Izzard!" Izzard, a man who does jazz dance to keep fit, is unaware of the sudden attention. In the true spirit of Fame, The Movie he performs one final pirouette and smiles up at the lights. He is in New York, staying at the Chelsea Hotel, to begin his mini-world tour. It starts here, at the PS 122 theatre, for three weeks, most of which has sold out in advance. Word of mouth and praise from The New York Times promises to take care of the rest. By the time you read this he will have appeared on the David Letterman show, a rare accolade for a British comedian, taken his show to Paris, attempting the near two-hour set in schoolboy French (he has been having eight-hour lessons while in New York). This is followed hy London, which he has divided, venue wise, into points of the compass - Labatt's Apollo, Hammersmith, Brixton Academy, Docklands Arena and The Forum, Kentish Town - and the rest of the UK. If all goes well, as it promises to judging by the advance ticket sales, he will then take the whole thing hack out to America's East Coast and start all over again. 'He is arguably Britain's most successful comedian. Rarely a week goes by when he is not in some photo-spread in eyeliner and terrifying trousers' Gruelling tour schedule aside, Izzard also spent the summer filming a revamped New Avengers movie, of which more later, and appearing as a rock-band manager alongside Ewan McGregor in Velvet Goldmine. And before that he staged the well-received show One Word Improv in the West End for seven weeks, and last year made The Secret Agent with Bob Hoskins and Patricia Arquette. As the sun begins to set over New York, he is nursing a bruised coccyx, fears he has trapped a nerve, which is making his right arm almost immobile, and has to finish two days of shooting a film around the city for his Izzard - Lust For Glorious video. The title is a well intentioned lift from the classic war film Patten - Lust For Glory. And then there are the shows he came here to do. At one point he looks up and smiles wanly as I scribble furiously in my notebook. "I'm absolutely shattered and we start shooting again at seven tomorrow morning." Izzard's love of the movies has taken its next logical step. Not content with playing the part of Second Bad Guy to Sean Connery in The Avengers, he has finally decided to make his own film, albeit less than half-an-hour in length. It will appear either at the beginning or the end of his live Glorious video - he hasn't made up his mind yet - and receive an airing in its own right on Channel 4 towards the end of the year. Izzard's past video glories, Unrepeatable, Definite Article and Live At The Ambassadors, continue to sell strongly. This time the show, recorded at Labatt's Apollo, will be shot over two live sets on the same day. One will be in the afternoon for an invited audience and used to film cutaways and close-ups, the other will be a more conventional shoot of the regular set. This is Izzard's way of tweaking the video production values, of, he says, bringing that little bit more to it. For the sake of convenience, he's having a bed set up at the venue so he can sleep there between shows. Izzard admits that he has had a plan since he was 18. At 35, he is arguably Britain's most successful comedian - and has two British Comedy Awards and a big house in Notting Hill, west London to prove it. And undoubtedly, for someone who showed disdain at the idea of a telly show early in his career, he is its most visible. Rarely a week goes by when he is not featured in some photo-spread in eyeliner and terrifying trousers. When I suggest that perhaps he is a bit of a self-publicist, his response is exuberance itself. "Oh yeah, you have to be, relentlessly. You have to publicise the shows, I'm in the shows, so I have to do it." He grew up betwixt Bexhill and boarding school (his father was a high-flying accountant) and realised he was a transvestite at the age of four. His mother died when he was six, which, he says, made the transition into female clothes more difficult. Not the emotional baggage so much, it simply meant that, with only a brother and his dad around, there was nothing in the house that he could try on. Talk to him about it now and you end up deep in conversation regarding the side on which his jackets button up. "They're all clothes, just wear what you want," he concludes cheerfully. He studied accounting and financial management at Sheffield University, purely so he could get the chance to take his embryonic one-man show to the Edinburgh Festival. Unfortunately, no one came. He dropped out of college and turned to street performance, which consisted of Izzard and a friend successfully escaping from woolly jumpers and making cornflakes disappear. He talks of it now with genuine fondness. Eventually he turned to stand-up comedy, to "help me discover my own voice". He went back to the Edinburgh Festival and, in 1991, was nominated for a Perrier Award. Two years later he had his own show in the West End and in 1994 appeared in David Mamet's play The Cryptogram at the Ambassadors theatre. But before he realised that it was possible to specialise in comedy, it was always the movies that attracted him - the chance to step out on to the set of his own film. The location Winnebago, a truck-sized camper van with stubby, hydraulic legs, sits just off Fifth Avenue. Eddie in full make up, his lips traced in an exaggerated lipstick pout, chews a Jelly Bean and studies the video monitor above the driver's head. "Is that The Third Man?" He leans forward to get a better look. "Excellent! It is The Third Man. I love this film." Get Izzard started on film and it is difficult to make him stop. His perfect day, he says, would be one spent in bed, The Third Man on television followed by pretty much any black and white war movie. Acknowledging the bus driver's choice of viewing, he instantly falls into knowledgebly detailed conversation that pin-points highlights of Orson Welles's career, how Chaplin was the first true film-maker to understand the nuances of production and that, proudly, Welles's film was shot at Shepperton Studios where Izzard worked on the Avengers movie. Throughout the two days of exacting shooting, he can't help but hide his delight at being involved in the film-making process. As we travel in a speeding freight elevator to the 43rd storey of an office building on Third Avenue, I mention that it's like playing with the world's biggest train set. Izzard, standing atop the flat roof practising his lines, pauses to agree. The light of the Art Deco Chrysler building frames him in its fuzzy glow. The bounding gargoyles at its corners leap from each of his shoulders. "When we were filming The Avengers, there was myself and Sean Ryder - of Happy Mondays and Black Grape fame - zooming around in a Mini firing Uzis at Emma Peel. I remember thinking then, 'It's the biggest train set, cowhoys and Indians and going camping ... all rolled into one.' Very silly. 'There are things in the film that have happened to me - the fight scenes. I did get in a fight when someone objected to the clothes and make-up I was wearing' His movie, Izzard - Lust For Glorious, follows the fortunes of a comedian who looks and acts very much like an over-inflated, egotistical, self-fulfilling Eddie Izzard might. "The arsehole version of me," he points out dryly. His character is a successful comedian in the UK, eager to break into the lucrative American market. To ease the transatlantic transition he hits on the idea of creating a three-minute, hard-edged, MTV-generation. promo film to sell himself to the Americans. "A sort of Eighties video, hit like Duran Duran's Rio," is how Izzard sees it. Musically, however, Durnn Duran are out. Suede's single, Filmstar, will provide the musical colour. Then, there is a film within the film. Most of the shooting time is being spent on the documentary based around the making of the promo. Izzard adlnits that at times even he and the director, Peter Richardson, who created the pastiche Professionals ad for Nissan and looks unnervingly like a chain-smoking Sir George Martin, get a little lost. They have a treatment, they insist, but large chunks of the script appear to have been written on hotel headed notepaper. "That's extra writing, the treatment was printed out really quite nicely. It was, I can assure you," insists Izzard, not unreasonably. When I suggest shades of Spinal Tap, Izzard waves it away with his good arm. "As far as there being this fly on the wall approach, yes. But they were three actors playing the part of a rock band. With this, you know, I am a comedian, the lines of truth and fiction are much more blurred. And there are things in the film that have happened to me, the fight scenes we're doing. I did get in a fight last year in Camhridge when someone objected to the make-up and the clothes I was wearing." His response, he says matter-of-factly, was; "Why do I have to sit around and take this? I got very angry, this bloke attacked me, and I defended myself. Unfortunately, he had four friends with him. It was madness. "I didn't go down though, I'm quite pleased about that. I took him to court and eventually won, so in the end it was a moral victory for me. Of course, in the film I'm certainly going to win." At that night's shoot in SoHo art begins to imitate life. Izzard runs through lines of dialogue to patch in with the fight scene that has already been shot. Face up close to the camera, he reiterates the line "Have some respect" like a mantra. This is what he said to his real-life assailant before he was attacked. "I've been in one situation where I had one guy trying to beat me up and another one trying to get my autograph," recalls Izzard later, as we're sitting outside a restaurant across the street. "This one guy was going, 'you gay twat' and his friend's there going, 'wow, you're Eddie Izzard'. Meanwhile, I'm trying all this point of order stuff. 'No, I'm a transvestite, you really should get your slander correct.' The guy was totally bemused." The Village Voice once described PS 122 as the Petri dish of downtown culture. High praise for a former school turned avant-garde performance theatre in Greenwich Village. Petri dish or not, the show is a stifling sell-out, to the point where the local bohemia are bringing cushions with them to secure a decent vantage point on the floor. Louise, who is originally from upstate New York, but now lives in the East Village, doesn't seem to know what to expect. "I hear he performs in a dress, but is really funny." Which is half right. Capacity at PS 122 is around 200, the ceiling a little over 15ft high. The long, glorious drapes that fringe the floor fail to fully unfold in the space. The intro tape, a booming, rhythmic bass pattern, is still intact. Like the fluttering cloth logos, it snakes across the floor, not filling the space. But Izzard doesn't seem to mind. He insists that the rambling comedy he specialises in, often labelled as surreal, is not only bonkers, but completely universal. Monty Python, a regular subject of his admiration, transcends national boundaries, he says. The Germans, the Japanese, North Americans, they all embraced that supposedly quintessential English humour. The American comic Jerry Seinfeld, whose earnings last year were said to be in the stratospheric $90 million bracket, currently appears in an advert on American TV. In it, he performs a set in a London theatre that dies a death because of his misunderstanding of the customs and references used in a foreign culture. One trip around the UK later, courtesy of his American Express card, and hey presto, he's playing sold-out shows to appreciative crowds. Know your audience, it says. Izzard appreciates the point. "You just write universal stuff, drop the obvious references. It's a human comedy, that doesn't stop once you've crossed the Atlantic. They have Christianity here, they know about Robin Hood, the City of Troy. They use toasters, computers, showers and lawnmowers." In Izzard's world, God is played by James Mason, Noah by Sean Connery. The action of sawing a plank of wood in half is the opening to Izzard miming the punching of a baboon. The Grim Reaper forsakes his scythe to upgrade to a power mower. Birds caught in the jet engine of an aircraft are saved by the parachutes they're carrying. The effect on the New York audience is mesmeric. Although Izzard does refer to a bionic Queen Mother and a mythical, fun-loving Queen in the Fifties, the comedy has a universal spin, drawn in snatches of mime and wide, bright, gleefully human splendour. 'The last time we came out here, we saw a dead body and someone put a bullet through our camper van,' recalls the local production co-ordinator Next day, while the sun is set high in the afternoon sky, Izzard uses the light to criss-cross the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Richardson follows, filming. Izzard at the wheel of a 1970, E-type Jag and sporting huge sunglasses that can only have been designed to scare children, is delighted. "I am going to buy one of these when I get back home," he beams, patting the car's bonnet. We're on our way to a neighbourhood in Brooklyn for the final set of the New York shoot. Izzard is eager to throw the Jag around under the B-train line that stretches away from Manhattan to Coney Island. Tne overhead grids of rusting steel rattle above the houses and roads, carrying the subway trains with a deafening roar down to the ocean. Momentarily the light blinks out and conversation is drowned as the carriages burst by. Izzard looks very pleased. "The French Connection," he recalls, summoning up Gene Hackman's frantic car chase under these very rails. Susannah, the local production co-ordinator, is less awed. "The last time we came out here, we saw a dead body and someone put a bullet through our Winnebago." At that point, we all agree that we've seen quite enough and it's probably best if we get inside. Izzard, however, is delighted by the location. At one point, he persuades two teenage girls in a red Mustang convertible to chase his Jag for the cameras. He pulls up to the truck, amazed. "Both 17, excellent. It was very much Brooklyn 90210. He puts his car into gear one final time before it has to go back to the hire company. Releasing the rasping throttle, he waves conspicuously, adjusts his monstrous glasses and takes one more run at celluloid history as the traffic heading for home threads carelessly around him. |