More Max.

I recently had the great privilege of interviewing Max von Sydow, one of the true legends and finest performers of the cinema, mainly about his memorable supporting role in The Diving Bell and The Butterfly. The "proper" interview is on the "proper" Premiere website, here. As I allude to in the intro, I did indeed ask him about one of my personal favorite roles of his, this one:

...in Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis' criminally underrated (as far as I'm concerned) 1983 comedy Strange Brew. It's a film von Sydow remembers well.

"Yes. Brewmeister...Smith, it was," von Sydow said after I brought up the film and his character, as part of a list of his more offbeat and comedic roles (I also mentioned his Ming the Merciless in the 1980 deLaurentiis Flash Gordon. "The problem is, or has been for me, that all through my life, until about ten years ago, I've been doing theater...and I've done everything. No, all sorts of things, classics, modern, comedy, a lot of comedy. But film producers generally don't dare—probably they don't have the imagination to figure out that maybe I can say a line in an intelligent way so it might be funny! They want to play it safe. They choose me for a part because I have done that sort of part well before. Which means that comedy does not come my way often. But sometimes I accept to do films which are comedies, but maybe the part I'm offered is not very funny...but at least it is something off the realistic serious part that one has been taking for so long. And I wouldn't say that the brewmeister in Strange Brew is a comedy character really. He's not--well, He's a fantasy crook, I would say."

"He has this earnestness that borders on the absurd," I offered, before doing the unspeakably tacky—feeding one of his own lines back to him. Happens to be a favorite of mine, but still...everybody say it with me now...

"It takes experience to run a brewery! And you have none!"

von Sydow smiled. "I haven't seen it for a long time, I have to see it again! It was funny when we did it because...of course you remember the film's plot. you remember the story. Well, we needed to shoot in a brewery. And we shot in Toronto and of course there was a wonderful German brewery in Toronto and they said, 'Well, wonderful, come and film, but we'd like to see the script first.' So they read the script and just about the first thing in there is dealing with Doug and Bob McKenzie's scheme for getting free beer by manipulating...and putting a dead mouse in a beer bottle! So the brewery said, 'No, we cannot do that with our brewery, because then people might think that that might happen with our beer.' And over and over again: 'No, no, not the mouse.' Finally they found a brewery—I don't recall its name, unfortunately— way up north in Prince George, British Columbia. A small town in the middle of nowhere in the forest, in the middle of winter. Snow. Everywhere. And the people up there, they were very happy, because they got a lot of publicity because they were courageous enough to let this—how should I say?—very daring story about beer-making shoot in their brewery! It was wonderful to do it. And it was wonderful to work with those two guys, Rick and Dave."

Comments

[bill]

It seems to have paid off, but I would never have the guts to ask Max von Sydow about "Strange Brew", as much as I would want to. Well done.

[cinetrix]

"Strange Brew" taught me what a gaffer was! ["Gaff gaff."] Now I'm wishing I'd shown a clip of Brewmaster Smith to my class after we watched "The Virgin Spring." It would have blown their minds. Nice work, Glenn.

[Andrew]

Fantastic! Easily his best role. Well, he was pretty amazing in The Virgin Spring, and I love him in Three Days of the Condor. But I will never forget the Brewmeister. "Just one more test, and then we are ready for the world! Light them up."

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