Direct and Indirect Speech
Channing Tatum: A Work in Progress
In Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 film “Magic
Mike,” we meet the title character, played by Channing Tatum, as he emerges
from postcoital slumber into a beer-colored Tampa morning, dragging his
remarkable body — huge shoulders, tiny waist, a bas-relief of bare buttocks —
to the bathroom to shave his pubic hair. “Foxcatcher,” the new film by Bennett
Miller, opens to a somewhat different expression of Tatum’s intense and
bankable physicality: the figure of Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz grappling
violently on the mat with a dummy, the camera trained on his squirming fingers
and misshapen ears, the microphone uncomfortably sensitive to the sound of his
panting. After practice, Schultz retreats to a grim brown apartment where the
lampshades don’t entirely cover the bulbs, and where a gold medal in a
velveteen case seems to offer hollow consolation. This is a Tatum role bereft
of sexual glamour; the jock has come crashing down to earth.
One of those blockbusters, “21 Jump
Street,” offers a hilarious exploration of the high school reunion effect. In
it, Tatum plays a barely literate meathead (opposite a meek and bookish Jonah
Hill) who returns to high school as an undercover police officer to find that
the behavior that had made him a popular teenager — for example, punching a
black, gay student in the parking lot — now begets outrage. Reid Carolin,
Tatum’s best friend and production partner in the company Free Association,
believes that the movie succeeds in part because we are watching Tatum work
through his own life story. “I don’t know if he understands how brilliantly
he’s channeling and poking fun at that part of himself in the character,”
Carolin explains. It’s tempting, in any case, to think that Tatum has been
reappraising an old idea about himself so that he can move on to new ones.
Tatum’s path to fame is well known: a
blue-collar upbringing mostly in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, an
unsuccessful go of college on a football scholarship, then construction jobs,
stripping, dancing, modeling and, finally, Hollywood. The actor, now 34, had to
cobble together an education along the way. He is still adding matter, to use a
term from sculpture, which has been his quiet passion for the last few years.
“I could never carve away marble like the ancients,” he says. “I’m more of an
additive guy.”
Tatum did not exactly coast through
adolescence on the strength of his appearance, and he did not always believe
that the world of ideas was available to him. As a child he struggled with
A.D.H.D. and dyslexia, was prescribed stimulants and did poorly in school. “I
have never considered myself a very smart person, for a lot of reasons,” he
says. “Not having early success on that one path messes with you. You get
lumped in classes with kids with autism and Down Syndrome, and you look around
and say, Okay, so this is where I’m at. Or you get put in the typical classes
and you say, All right, I’m obviously not like these kids either. So you’re
kind of nowhere. You’re just different. The system is broken. If we can
streamline a multibillion-dollar company, we should be able to help kids who
struggle the way I did.”
I went to New York and did the whole
modeling thing, and I just learned everything I could from anybody who knew
something I didn’t. I’ve had a few John du Ponts in my life, to be honest. I
think that’s one thing I’m pretty skilled at. I can look at a person and say,
They’ve got something that I want up there in their head. I’m going to do my best
to get in there and absorb it. My mom said, ‘Be a sponge.’ And so I’ve learned
more from people than I have from school or from books.”
“Chan’s a blue-collar person, a worker by
nature,” Carolin said. “So when he’s producing or financing or developing, he
doesn’t just want credit for something. He’s looking to get into it, to learn
to do it. He’s so physically talented and good-looking and all that movie star
stuff, but there’s a curiosity in him that originates in the fact that he
really did struggle. Football didn’t stick. College didn’t stick. And yet he
has the highest emotional intelligence of anyone I know. And he has the ability
to teach others, including me, how to make decisions from that place.”
People who know Tatum often refer to his
sweetness, and lately, unbidden, they mention what a terrific father he must
be. In May of last year, Tatum and his wife, the actress Jenna Dewan-Tatum, had
a daughter, Everly. He finds fatherhood difficult, but it has taught him to be
a more diligent student of himself. “You notice your behavior, like, Wow, I
don’t have much patience right now. Why is that?” he explains. “You spend the
day watching this thing constantly taking in information, and you have to be
sure you’re making that happen. At the end of the day when I put her to bed, I
feel glad to have some peace but say to myself, That was so much fun.”
Tatum, who still prefers to work in clay,
cites Auguste Rodin as one of his sculptural heroes. (“My stuff ends up looking
like his stuff,” he says, “although it’s crazy that I would even put our names
in the same sentence.”) He acknowledges that making art has been a refuge from
acting at a time when he has never had more offers. “It’s so internal. You get
so focused on yourself as an actor,” he says. “You never feel totally confident
that you got it right, and in the end the director will cut everything away to
tell the story he wants to tell. With sculpting, nothing is cloudy or mystical.
It’s just about this object, and if you’re trying to depict reality, and you do
it well, then the outcome is the truth.”
“Foxcatcher” is a film that frustrates any
search for the straightforward truth; it offers a devastating account of an
inexplicable act, and Tatum admits that when he first read the script, about
eight years ago, he didn’t understand it. Was John du Pont, played by an
utterly transformed Steve Carell, in love with Mark Schultz? Was he driven by a
desire to please an unloving mother (Vanessa Redgrave, marvelously haughty as
the old Mrs. du Pont)? “There’s definitely an Oedipal element,” Tatum
acknowledges. “But there’s no resolve. There’s no huge lesson. It just tries to
show what really happened, and that’s never easy.” Tatum’s friends say that he
has never prepared more intensely for a role. He trained for it in the gym
during breaks from shooting “White House Down” in Canada. Mark Ruffalo, who
plays Mark’s brother Dave Schultz, advised him to study the real Mark Schultz
closely. Tatum spent a number of days with Schultz, and the two remain in
touch.
read
the full story here:
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/channing-tatum-foxcatcher-interview/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
direct & indirect:
Statement:
“I
don’t know if he understands how brilliantly he’s channeling and poking fun at
that part of himself in the character,” Carolin explained [Direct]
Carolin explained that she did not know if he
understands how brilliantly he’s channeling and poking fun at that part of
himself in the character.[indirect]
“It’s just weird that for some people art is a luxury,” he says.[Direct]
He said that it was just weird that for some
people art is a luxury[indirect]
Imperative:
My
mom said to me, ‘Be a sponge.’[Direct]
My mom said to me to be a sponge.[indirect]
“notice your behavior,” he said [Direct]
He said to notice your behavior.[indirect]
Question:
“Was
John du Pont, played by an utterly transformed Steve Carell, in love with Mark
Schultz?” he asked. [Direct]
He
asked whether John du Pont, played by an utterly transformed Steve Carell, in
love with Mark Schultz. [indirect]
“Was
he driven by a desire to please an unloving mother?” She asked. [Direct]
She asked whether driven by a desire to please
an unloving mother. [indirect]
Joko Tri Santoso
4SA04
13611858
