The movie Tim Roth said “woke me up and really inspired me”
Underrated actors are constantly flying under the Hollywood radar while the likes of Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie steal the limelight. Over the years, such iconic stars as Christopher Walken, Harry Dean Stanton and Jesse Plemons have somehow avoided the spotlight despite having worked with some of cinema’s very best minds, with this very same fact being the reality for Tim Roth, too.
Indeed, what other performers could you say had as impressive a start to their career as Roth, collaborating with two influential figures of British cinema, Alan Clarke and Mike Leigh, while he was still a mere whippersnapper? The actor wouldn’t fully find his feet till the late 1980s and 1990s, but his formative roles in Made in Britain and Meantime, respectively, were a crash course in gritty performance that would mould his later approach to acting.
The violent skinhead of Made in Britain and the introverted ball of anxiety that he played in Leigh’s Meantime gave Roth the perfect basis to build his career, with these attributes coming to the forefront in such later movies as Vincent & Theo and Pulp Fiction. The actor has gone on to achieve international stardom, even picking up an Oscar nomination for his troubles, but arguably, he’s never been so riveting than in his early works of cinema.
Alan Clake, who gave Roth his debut, clearly made a significant impression on the young performer, who revealed to A-Frame just how significant the director’s 1989 film Elephant had been for his development as an actor.
“Elephant is only about 40 minutes long,” he told the publication in regards to Clarke’s film, “But it’s about Northern Ireland and a series of killings. I think there are about three lines of dialogue in the whole thing, and it’s an extraordinary film. It was fascinating to watch. It was heartbreaking and very difficult, but on a cinematic level, it woke me up and really inspired me.”
Produced by Danny Boyle, who would later go on to become one of British cinema’s most accomplished directors, Elephant was a stark depiction of a spree of killings in Northern Ireland where a culprit is never shown. Well depicting the social problems of the country during the time of the troubles, the film was screened on BBC2 in 1989 and received widespread acclaim.
Remarkably, the humble British TV movie would also go on to have a dramatic effect on the world of cinema overseas, with American filmmaker Gus Van Sant seeing the film as the major inspiration for his own provocative study on the Columbine Massacre of 1999. Released in 2003, Van Sant’s Elephant won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, nicking the title of Clarke’s movie as well as its distinctive handheld style.
