Ralph Fiennes: ‘When Ulysses draws his bow, he puts himself back together’

In Book 21 of The Odyssey, Ulysses is shown to be the only one capable of stringing and drawing his old bow to emerge victorious in the test that spectacularly reveals his identity to the suitors of his wife and kingdom, whom he later massacres. That moment of reunion with the formidable weapon is one of Homer’s finest moments (and the poet had many): “So did Odysseus string the great bow, with effortless ease. Shifting the grip to his right hand he tested the string. With a pluck: it twanged, shrill, like a twittering swallow.” The scene is simultaneously moving and foundational in The Return, the extraordinary film by Uberto Pasolini that recreates the final section The Odyssey, starring Ralph Fiennes as a broken Ulysses covered in physical and emotional scars, his eyes still red with the blood of Troy, who nevertheless regains his integrity and power with the bow in his hands.

In the scene, Ulysses is still hiding his true identity. Upon hefting the weapon, the hero remarks, ironically, that it’s not every day one has the chance to try Ulysses’s bow. Fiennes (Ipswich, United Kingdom, 62 years old) offers a small smile marked with Homeric ferocity upon being asked, archer to archer, how it felt to take up Ulysses’s bow in his hands, even if it obviously wasn’t the real weapon.

“It’s a good question. To me, the bow is a key point,” he says. “Here we have a man who comes from war, physically and psychologically wounded, doubting his identity and on a journey in pursuit of a goal. The bow is a very powerful symbol. It is Ulysses’s gift from his youth, representing something very pure, the chance for an accurate shot, of hitting the target, opportunity. There is something incredibly definitive about the bow. Ulysses’s lost and broken personality is restored when he picks up his bow. As he draws it and fires a perfect shot, he gains back his composure, aligns himself internally. He puts himself back together. Ulysses has buried so many people… you see that in the scene in which he visits his father’s grave. He was lost, and drawing the bow means reclaiming himself as a human being with a purpose and destiny.”

Last Thursday night, Fiennes presented The Return at the Barcelona-Sant Jordi International Film Festival in a gala at Cines Verdi, where he received the festival’s Honorary Award (and walked the red carpet to cheers of “Ralph! Ralph!”, a heartfelt “Pope Ralph!” and a festive “after the blackout, here comes Voldemort!”) Fiennes fondly remembers the bow in the film, a long, spectacular, “magnificent” horn bow.

The actor, who was interviewed the following Friday at noon in a Barcelona hotel alongside Pasolini (Rome, 68 years old), conjures the film’s impressive moment in which Ulysses, letting his cloak fall, draws his bow, shoots, passes the test, and then slings a quiver full of deadly arrows over his shoulder and takes aim at the suitors (“Terror gripped them all, blanched their faces white,” notes Homer). “I did a lot of archery training. They were actually afraid during shooting, and I’m not surprised,” he laughs. “In the majority of scenes you can’t see that drama, everything is done in bits and pieces, but in this one, there was a lot of intensity and that moment was tremendous.”

For The Return, in which Fiennes reunites with Juliette Binoche as Penelope after their turns in Wuthering Heights and The English Patient (in their latest film — pardon the pun — she’s the patient one), the actor underwent special training in order to achieve a physique that is at once aging, ravaged, sinewy, and muscular. It’s the body of a great warrior, hardened by a thousand battles. “I went to the gym, but above all, my trainer starved me,” says Fiennes (Ralph Fitness?). He says the result was that the audience not only sees Ulysses’s desperation, exhaustion, and defeat in his physical form, “but especially in his eyes, where his soul is revealed.” The actor points out that he and the director agreed that Ulysses should have an eloquent physical presence. “It was very important that his exterior reflect his interior, the harshness of his experiences, the violence, the torment, the heartbreak.” Both thought that their Ulysses, who has shed so much blood and seen so much death, expresses what we might today call post-traumatic stress disorder, the Troy edition.

Pasolini — who despite bearing no relation to fellow Italian director Pier Paolo, but rather, Luchino Visconti, delivers a very Pier Paolo Pasolini-esque film, insomuch as its characters and textures — emphasizes what a privilege it was to work with veteran performers like Fiennes, Binoche and Ángela Molina. (The latter plays a splendid Eurycleia, who shines in the sequence in which she recognizes Ulysses by the scar left on his knee by a wild boar during a hunt in Mount Parnassus.)

“This is my fourth film and when I thought about the ones that they have made, I realized that I had to let them loose.” Pasolini is clear on his reasons for returning to The Odyssey: “Why not? It influences us, it still speaks to us, it challenges us.” He says there is room for everyone in the epic, a clear reference to the film being made by Christopher Nolan with Matt Damon as the protagonist. But, he warns, no one should expect to see Polyphemus in his version (although at one point Fiennes’s Ulysses introduces himself winkingly as “nobody”), or the sirens. “There’s none of that. This isn’t the 1954 version with Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano, so if anyone wants to ask for their money back, they can have it,” he jokes. The Return focuses on the final part of The Odyssey, beginning with Ulysses’s homecoming to Ithaca. Instead of the wooden horse (to which there is a fleeting reference in a fireside conversation) and the conquering of Troy, we have Fiennes’ wonderful, expressive blue eyes and their moving look of recognition upon seeing the destroyed hulk of the Argos.

It’s a movie, according to its director, that is both essential and sobering, that breathes Mediterranean culture, having been filmed in Corfu and the Peloponnese, with its acropolis of Ithaca played by the disconcertingly medieval Castle of Chlemoutsi. “The Odyssey has meant a lot to me ever since I was young, when adventure and travel were what interested me the most,” says Pasolini. “But that’s only part of the work, and as I get older, it interests me more as the story of a family trying to rebuild itself after 20 years of war. The second part of The Odyssey is more universal. We are all children, spouses, fathers, and mothers. And that’s where my attempt to converse with Homer, to dialogue with his work, comes in.”

For his part, Fiennes says that he’s always had an interest in classical history and Greek mythology — his mother read him The Odyssey when he was a boy — and that he liked that the script of The Return wasn’t about the creation of a classical hero but rather “a psychologically exhausted man, a tired warrior” in an Odyssey “with no gods nor monsters.”

Fiennes, though remarkably attractive, seems too normal to carry within him so many unforgettable characters, from the sinister Nazi commander Amon Göth in Schindler’s List; the romantic Count Almásy in The English Patient; Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave; not to mention M in the James Bond series, Onegin, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Macbeth — even Lawrence of Arabia (in a 1992 television production that focuses on the British Army officer’s participation in the Paris Peace Conference), who himself translated The Odyssey. How does he co-exist with this crew? Does he carry them with him? “When you create a character, you keep them inside you, and there is always something you can reach to in order to bring them back, something in your memory, your psyche,” he says.

Does he have any special memories of the Almásy character? The actor thinks for a moment about everything that made up that film: the dunes, the airplane, Herodotus and the Hungarian nanny. “I liked how antisocial he was,” he says. “There’s that scene where they’re driving through the desert and he says to Katharine, Kristin [Scott Thomas]’s character, ‘I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn’t speak for nine hours… That was a good day,’ a not-too-subtle way of telling her to be quiet. He is a difficult man, full of love and desire, a man used to having control in his life and who has to face an unexpected passion. I love that character, yes.” Does he prefer tormented personas? “All human beings are complex, and brilliant ones also have their dark side. I want to understand them all.”

Of Oscar nominations, he says they are a wonderful thing, but that they leave you “very exposed.” What does he think of the conclave? Will life imitate art? “Well, it’s all been very surprising. I will certainly follow the conclave in a way that I did not expect before making the film. I would not have believed that I would find it so interesting. With the film, I have discovered how complex and secretive the world of the Vatican is.”

Shakespeare or Homer? Fiennes passes the question to Pasolini. “Why not both? Aside from the fact that Shakespeare got so much out of the Greek classics and Homer,” says the director. “Shakespeare recognized up to what point the Greeks understood human nature and the construction of drama. We Mediterraneans, unfortunately, cannot enjoy Shakespeare as those do who are native English speakers, but even so, he is so gratifying.”

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