10/04/2006

"Show business is an addiction, it’s like a drug. It’s a world that teaches you to be self-centered: audiences strokes your ego, which asks for increasingly more stimuli and then it leads you to solitude". This is the glossy and scintillating world of show business according to British actor Colin Firth, the lead in the UK/Canadian film Where the Truth Lies by cult director Atom Egoyan.

Cineuropa met with Firth for the presentation of the film in Italy, where it will be released on April 14 by Fandango on 80 screens. Based on the eponymous novel by Rupert Holmes, the film tells the story of two famous television hosts in the US (Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth), at the top of their careers at the end of the 1950s, who meet up again 15 years later, to face a crime that has remained hidden for too long, which a young journalist is intent on bringing to light.

"The character of Vince Collins is English, like me", explains Colin Firth. "He is a man who is not in control of his life, he’s addicted to everything and, like a drug addict, is never satisfied because reality is never enough. He comes from the working class, like me, he didn’t go to particularly good schools and in America he knew how to create a persona for himself that went on to become famous".

Firth is already on Italian screens with the film Nanny McPhee. Reflecting on the billboards for the two films, one for children, the other with a naked woman, the actor joked: "In the first, I’m Mister Brown, a truly respectable man, in the other a violent drug addict with homosexual tendencies. That’s the beauty of cinema".

(Translated from Italian)