The boogie man - actor Mark Wahlberg - Interview

Interview, Oct, 1997 by Graham Fuller

With a title that connotes sentimental yearning for a long-lost era of orgiastic excess, this month's Boogie Nights unfolds in an underworld - the porn film Industry of the late '70s and early '80s - that is both more and less than it seems. At once a modern fairy tale (whose skin-flick stud hero's talisman is his humongous wand), a maverick slice of mock anthropology, and a cautionary fable of comeuppance, the movie is inevitably going to send up a red flag to the Moral Majority. It seems likely that once they learn what it's "about," thousands of family values advocates will stay away from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's movie, not realizing that it's one of the most morally responsible films of the decade.

Deploying an insistently curious camera and long, documentary-style takes, Anderson doesn't skimp on the period details (the coke lines go 'round the block) or the heady aura of sex less. It's not that It finds porn to be pernicious; rather, it Identifies pornography as a symptom of the pernicious circumstances that cause people to annihilate their potential for intimacy - namely, abuse by members of the immediate family, and by the larger family: society and the state. The answer Boogie Nights proposes is an ironic alternative family. The most moving aspect of the film is the way its four main characters - brilliantly played by Mark Wahlberg (in a career-making performance as the well-endowed Initiate), Julianne Moore, Butt Reynolds, and Heather Graham - can't help but replicate a nuclear family in lieu of the real ones that have been denied them. The message - love will find a way - is encouraging, but neither sloppy nor Indulgent.

Is America ready for a film that gets to the heart of heartache like this? There's no reason to think that Boogie Nights will be understood or accepted any more than, say, Kids, which is why an insurgent filmmaker with startling Ideas like the twenty-seven-year-old Anderson should be cherished.

GRAHAM FULLER

(The phone rings. As scheduled, it's Mark Wahlberg calling from Toronto where he's been shooting yet another movie. But there's a hitch: He's on a cellular, and that doesn't work, tape-wise. A few minutes later, he calls back - this time from a phone booth - and we're on. . . .)

INGRID SISCHY: Hi, Mark.

MARK WAHLBERG: Hi, Ingrid. I guess you have some high-tech equipment goin' on over there.

IS: Yes, big-time. It's a DAT tape recorder. Like the rest of the world, we've gotten much more technological since we did that last piece with you In 1992 - when Bruce Weber shot those photographs.

MW: That piece will always be one of my favorites.

IS: A lot has happened since then, huh? Anyway, it was after seeing a screening of Boogie Nights that we decided to do another cover story with you. There's been a lot of stuff about the movie. But it doesn't touch on what you're really like in it, which is right on the mark - forgive my pun.

MW: Thank you.

IS: It feels like a part that gave you a chance to express a lot - both in terms of the movie and in terms of yourself.

MW: Definitely. There were lots of things that interested me about it. When I read it, I was impressed with the guts that it had, and at the same time I had my own reasons, because it gave me the opportunity to really go out and act and deal with things that I needed to deal with. In fact I didn't really realize how true this was until I was doing certain scenes, certain things in the movie. It was a very strange feeling.

IS: Yes, and watching the film was haunting because there are two things going on: There's the story of the movie - and I wouldn't want to confuse the story of the movie with the story of you - but there's also an extra thing going on, which has to do with your personal story.

MW: Yes, with a lot of the stuff that went on when I was younger The movie is set in a different time period, but there are definite parallels with my own life. It was a tough one to do, but at the same time it was really helpful. And the connections made me realize at the end of the day and at the end of the movie: I don t think anybody could have understood it better than me. That didn't take away from the challenge in the acting. I still had to play this young, innocent kid after I had already gotten over so much of my own stuff. It made it harder-because I don't live in the past too much. I live for the future. But there are certain things you just have to accept in life.

IS: How did the part come about?

MW: Well, there was talk about it. But the whole subject matter kind of turned me off in the initial stages.

IS: Why?

MW: You know, it's the same stuff that will turn off a lot of people who haven't seen the movie. It's a lot easier to say, "Oh, a story about porn. And sex. And Marky Mark running around naked"-and downplay the whole thing. It's easier to just play it off as a joke, as opposed to really looking at what it's all about. And 1 did the same thing until I read it. If I'm going to play a character, I need to know about the character before the movie. If it's not something I'm interested in, then I don't even really want to get into the material, because the material could change my opinion and make me overlook what's most important to me at the end of the day - which is doing something great and different as an actor. Anyway, it was interesting enough for me to keep reading it. And by the end, I said, God, I've got to meet the guy who wrote the film and is going to direct it. I thought, For better or for worse, I have to meet him; then I'll know what he's going after And I met him, and I just fell in love with him. I thought he was genuinely interested in me as an actor. He pulled the part out of me - which is a great thing with any filmmaker I've worked with, because I don't have the most experience in the world. But being around good people is always helpful, because I'm a learner it really made it great that there were all these other great people who were interested in doing this movie that's not your ordinary, commercial, happy-go-lucky type of movie. It's a film that really pushes the envelope, and there were lots of wonderful people taking a risk in doing it. I said, Hey, if I'm going to act, I might as well go for it now.