Like a Ghost Dog
Exclusive Forest Whittaker Interview by Paul Fischer
Actor, director,
producer, screen icon. Forest Whittaker is an actor and filmmaker
who happily jumps from the mainstream to the independent arena without
batting an eyelid. His latest r
ole,
in the new, intoxicating Ghost Dog, from director Jim Jarmusch,
could well be his most formidable to date. He talked to Paul Fischer in
Los Angeles.
Throughout the first 20 minutes or so of Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Forest Whitaker, in the title role, moves across the screen stealthily, no dialogue is uttered. It's all in the body and face, as actor and character become one. Ghost Dog is a hired assassin who works for the mob, violent on the one hand yet quietly introspective on the other. Two halves of the same coin. So it is with the actor who plays him. Whitaker enters the room and remains an unobtrusive, enigmatic presence, a man who is as contradictory as the character he plays. It's a label he's happy to wear. "I tend try and live my life by a certain set of beliefs, and I have a certain way of looking at the universe; that doesn't always coexist with all the things inside of my life." The kinds of beliefs the actor is referring to, he adds contemplatively, are "that everything is connected, I believe that life is transient, that energy can be moved or transformed, that our goal is to find peace and to connect with that energy."
The ethereal
hit man of Ghost Dog was written for Whittaker, who was involved with
the development of the character from the outset. "We met quite a few
times, talking for about three or four hours at a times. They were great
conversations, about life, codes, Japan, this concept, across the board.
Then he said: I'm going to go off and write, and he did." Ghost Dog
is not your conventional contract killer-Mafia-martial arts action film.
Whitaker plays the title role of Ghost Dog, a hit man living in an unidentified
but run-down city in what license plates call "The Industrialized State."
Known for his gift of being able to come and go without people noticing
him, Ghost Dog is a self-styled samurai who is obsessed with order and
his personal 
moral
code, drawn from the philosophies of the Japanese warriors. As every samurai
needs a leader to whom he swears loyalty, Ghost Dog has devoted himself
the service of Louie (John Tormey), a low-level crime boss who
saved his life as a child. When Louie's superiors decide he's outlived
his usefulness, Ghost Dog leaps into action, methodically wiping out his
many enemies.
The movie takes on a surreal approach to familiar material, not that it's lacking in action. Whittaker has his share of martial arts sequences to shoot, which he was more than familiar with. "When I was young I studied martial arts, and I incorporated a lot of that into the movie." There was little pre-preparation or even specific training that the actor went through for a lot of those physical sequences. "It was all improv, I didn't do anything for that", he explains matter-of-factly. His character spends much of his time on a roof, which he shares with dozens of pigeons that act as carrier pigeons. Working with these unpredictable birds might have been troublesome indeed, but Whittaker insisted he be prepared. "I arrived three months before we started shooting and I insisted on being given a pigeon to stay in my apartment in New York, because I wanted to understand them. It was great, because I learnt enough to be comfortable in those scenes."
Forest Whitaker was born in Longview, Texas on July 15, 1961. His father was an insurance salesman, and his mother was a special-education teacher. His family moved to the Los Angeles area when he was still a baby, and later moved to Carson, California. At six-foot two and 250 pounds, Forest first found success on the football field at high school as an all-league defensive tackle, which won him a scholarship to Pomona College. In his first year, he appeared in college stage productions and was discovered by a Hollywood agent; his first acting job followed: a small role in the classic 1982 comedy Fast Times At Ridgemont High. But Forest could also sing, and his tenor voice led to a classical music scholarship at the University of Southern California. Whilst there, "seeing Robert De Niro's performance in Taxi Driver convinced me to pursue a career in film", he recalls. He eventually won a special scholarship (created especially for him) to the Drama Studio of London.
With his
soft-spoken style, he quickly became one of the industry's best young
character actors, working alongside Tom Cruise, Paul Newman and Robin
Williams in some of the top 
movies
of the 1980's. His first lead role was that of jazz-saxophone legend Charlie
"Bird" Parker in director Clint Eastwood's 1988 biography, Bird.
That performance won Forest the Best Actor trophy at the prestigious Cannes
Film Festival; he was also nominated for a Golden Globe. Four years later,
he starred in The Crying Game, the most talked about movie of 1992.
His other acting credits include Vision Quest (1985) North and
South (1985) Platoon (1986) The Color of Money (1986)
North and South II (1986) Stakeout (1987), Good Morning,
Vietnam (1987), Johnny Handsome (1990), Criminal Justice
(1990, for which he received a Cable ACE nomination), A Rage in Harlem
(1991), Diary of a Hit Man (1992), Consenting Adults (1992),
Body Snatchers (1993), Bank Robber (1993), Smoke
(1994), Ready to Wear (1994), Jason's Lyric (1994), The
Enemy Within (1994, which earned him a Screen Actor's Guild Award
nomination), Blown Away (1994), Species (1995), and Phenomenon
(1996). During his acting career, Forest was directed not only by Eastwood,
but also by such greats as Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Robert Altman,
and Barry Levinson, which resulted in his own interest in directing.
After a few small projects, Forest directed his first big-budget effort, the HBO drama Strapped for which he received Best New Director honours at the Toronto Film Festival. His next directing project, and his first feature film, was 1995's Waiting To Exhale, starring Whitney Houston. The movie was a surprise box office smash. He next directed Hope Floats, starring Sandra Bullock and Harry Connick Jr. Whittaker has divided his career between working on big Hollywood films, and more idiosyncratic fare, such as Ghost Dog. As a director, though, he insists his heart is where the money is. "As a director, you really want to be able to have the money to tell the bigger stories. There's a movie I'm going to direct in Venice that I couldn't do in the independent arena." Despite his success as an actor, the always modest and contemplative Whittaker is actor first, star second. "I am an actor. And I guess I've done so many movies I've achieved some high visibility. But a star? I guess I still think of myself as kind of a worker ant."
Paul's review of Ghost Dog here Cranky's review of Ghost Dog here