Rhys Ifans interview: Under Milk Wood
Rhys Ifans tells us how his new film, Under Milk Wood, a cinematic version of Dylan Thomas's radio play of the same name, blows the dust off the 1954 text and visualises its dark, erotic core
Great screen actors need iconic moments; the images that cement them in the public’s consciousness. Rhys Ifans has one, and it was achieved while wearing a pair of unflattering underpants. It’s a path well trodden. Tom Cruise did the same in Risky Business. The film in question was in 1999's Notting Hill, and Ifans, as Hugh Grant’s layabout flatmate, was a pleasingly anarchic presence in that glossy Richard Curtis-scripted affair.
He didn’t let that breakout performance pigeon-hole him, though. In the succeeding 16 years he's navigated a circuitous path, working on both small-scale indie projects and Hollywood blockbusters. Often, these films have been terrible. And more often than not, Ifans is the best thing in them. He's played a DJ who ingests vodka through his eyeballs (Kevin & Perry Go Large), Satan’s eldest son (Little Nicky), the mutated villain in a superhero movie (The Amazing Spider-Man), and international cannabis smuggler Howard Marks (Mr Nice). He even got in on every British thespian’s favourite gravy train with a small role in the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
This eclectic eye for roles was evident at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival; he ws all over the programme. We found him playing a lascivious matinee idol in Peter Bogdanovich’s feather-light screwball She’s Funny That Way, a veteran rocker in Tim Godsall’s Len and Company, and an author with an enlarged head in Mills & Boon satire The Marriage of Reason and Squalor. When we meet the 48-year-old Welshman in a swish Edinburgh hotel, however, it’s to discuss Under Milk Wood, the finest of his EIFF quartet.
The film is a vivid cinematic rendering of Dylan Thomas’s 1954 radio play of the same name. It centres on the fictional Welsh fishing village of Llareggub (now read that backwards) and the frisky goings on of its inhabitants (who include Charlotte Church as a saucy young mother and Ifans’ brother, Llyr). Ifans is Blind Captain Cat, our narrator, and the film unfolds as if we’re witnessing his wild fever dream. “It's an assault on all the senses,” says Ifans of the film, “to the point where the imagery is so strong sometimes that I swear I can smell it.” A stuffy old film about poetry it is not.
"When you hear the shagging bits on the radio, you’re imagining it pretty vividly. That’s all we’ve done with the film” - Rhys Ifans
This isn’t the first time Under Milk Wood has been brought to the screen. Andrew Sinclair directed a star-studded version in 1972, with Richard Burton in Ifans' role, and Liz Taylor and Peter O’Toole among the village folk. It’s been adapted for the stage too, with a major revival last year to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth. Despite its popularity, Ifans reckons its masterpiece status looms large over the text. “There’s a reverence towards this piece that has shackled it for years,” he suggests. “The same is true of any great literary piece; they accumulate a reverence around them that almost stops you really experiencing or addressing the piece for what it was originally.” And when we ask what Ifans considers Under Milk Wood to be originally, he doesn’t miss a beat: “It’s a bawdy romp – it really is. Essentially when you’re listening to this piece you become your own filmmaker: when you hear the shagging bits on the radio, you’re imagining it pretty vividly. That’s all we’ve done with the film.”
Helping bring these “shagging bits” to life is Ifans' old mucker Kevin Allen, who gave him his breakthrough role in 1997’s Twin Town, and who joins us during the interview. Its colour saturated visuals and dreamlike atmosphere suggest a Luis Buñuel satire that’s been filtered through the darkly erotic lens of a League of Gentlemen sketch. It really blows the cobwebs off the 50-year-old text, and, most pleasing of all, it reminds you how hilarious Thomas’s poetry could be. Allen is convinced that Thomas would have approved of their approach: “He was such an animal ahead of his time in terms of accessing technology,” he says of the poet. “He was connecting with great filmmakers, great composers. He would have explored this through film without a shadow of a doubt.”
Ifans, however, doesn’t consider what they've made to be film at all. For him, the experience of this expressionistic collage of colourful tableaux is closer to listening to a good album than watching a movie. “Even the craziest films out there follow a kind of film grammar, in terms of continuity and story structure,” he explains. “That isn’t present here because the writing itself doesn’t have those elements: it’s poetry and prose intertwined. And that’s a one-off as a piece of literature, never mind as a piece of cinema.”
Under Milk Wood - Official Trailer