If you ever want to know how not to interview Christoph Waltz, there's a handy guide online, at a website run by his most dedicated fans. It starts off by noting that his interviews often turn out to be awkward and frustrating encounters, and offers the following advice to journalists, among other things: Please do not ask him about "villains". Please do not ask him to recite a catchphrase. Please do not offer him milk or strudel.
In short, please do not confuse a versatile and experienced actor with just one of the hundreds of characters he has played, namely Colonel Hans Landa of the Nazi SS, the charming genocidal maniac at the heart of Quentin Tarantino's World War II revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds.
The opening scene of that movie is one of the great cinematic entrances. Waltz, at that time a completely unknown actor to everyone but the keenest students of German and British television drama, drives up to a French farm flanked by stormtroopers, asks for a glass of milk, and in 15 intensely claustrophobic minutes compels the farmer to admit he is "sheltering enemies of the state" under the floorboards. Brad Pitt is the nominal star of the film, but it's Waltz that everyone remembers.
The role of Landa called for fluency in English, French and German. After auditioning actors who "didn't have the poetry in this language or that language", Tarantino worried that he had written an "unplayable part" and considered abandoning the film. But as soon as Waltz read the first scene the director knew he had found his man. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, accepting his Best Actor award, Waltz addressed Tarantino directly, his voice cracking with emotion: "You gave me my vocation back."
Six years and two Academy Awards later, Waltz has established himself in the first rank of Hollywood character actors. At 58, he is too old (and too odd) to be a conventional leading man, but he has found consistent and varied work, most recently in Terry Gilliam's Zero Theorem. He has played a murderous circus owner in Water for Elephants and an insufferable upper-middle-class dad in Roman Polanski's Carnage. He won his second Oscar for his performance as bounty hunter Dr King Schulz in Django Unchained, a part Tarantino wrote with him in mind.
Next year, he will join the pantheon of Bond villains in Spectre, playing a character called Franz Oberhauser that he insists is categorically, definitely, absolutely not Ernst Blofeld under another name – and may yet turn out to be.
Waltz is in New York to promote Big Eyes, a most un-Burtonesque Tim Burton film, about the married couple responsible for a series of incredibly kitsch paintings of children that hung in every other suburban living room in America in the 1970s. Waltz plays Walter Keane, a hack painter and genius salesman who bullies his wife Margaret (played by Amy Adams) into letting him take credit for her art.
At first, it's odd to hear an American character speaking with the hint of an Austrian accent, but if you can tune that out, Waltz is inspired casting. Walter is a seducer – of women and potential clients – and as the scheme unravels, he becomes increasingly unhinged. It's a good fit for Waltz's unique blend of menace and charm.
Was there a key to playing Walter, to understanding his character, I ask him. "In the media, when people talk about it, there's sort of a formula to it," he says. "It doesn't work like that with parts. Sometimes they are mysterious attractions. Sometimes they are undiscovered allures. Sometimes you're intrigued by some dark spot on the map and your excitement about discovery and investigation."
Waltz is an engaging conversationalist. He gives thoughtful answers, but not necessarily to the question posed.
I try again. When he discussed the character with Burton, what did they talk about? "You seem to be kind of fixed in your way," he chides me, before heading off on a tangent. "There's no formula. That's one of the greatest disadvantages of that digitalised form of communication nowadays. The algorithm is all that counts. We are robots. No! Sorry, I beg to differ. I want to do it like a human being." On the interview tape, there's an audible European shrug.
Waltz was born into a theatrical family. His grandparents were actors, his parents set designers, and by the age of four, he says, he was already sick of the stage and determined to do something else with his life. Somehow, despite that instinct, he ended up studying opera at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, then acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York.
For 15 years, from the late 1980s onwards, he lived in London, raising three children and taking what work was available in touring theatre productions and on German television shows. His most notable English-language role was in the British television series The Gravy Train, set at the European Union headquarters in Brussels. "You have to make a living, support a family," he told The New York Times after his big break. "But in a way you're still striving for excellence, and your frustration only increases."
Some of it can be viewed online: Waltz in a multi-coloured leotard on an Austrian children's show; Waltz pleasuring a witch with his toes in the bath; Waltz as a serial killer with a fetish for dressing women as dolls. When Tarantino discovered him, he was 51 years old and had been honing his craft for decades without finding fame or success.
"That worked in my favour," he says. "I was already weathered. I was already a veteran. So the circumstances and the form and the trend and the moment, I can distance myself from and observe as a phenomenon, but I do what I do."
These days he lives in Los Angeles. He has become good friends with Tarantino, who regularly invites him over to his house to watch "Japanese movies, American movies, Italian schlock, French art" and whatever else he's currently enthused about.
After making the move, Waltz found that many of his prejudices about the American movie business were unfounded. "That's one of the fabulously surprising things about Hollywood," he says. "There are more sensible, clear-thinking, critically thinking professionals in LA than in any other spot. I would never have expected it. That whole Tinseltown bullshit – meh! That's the middle management. That's people who want part of the action. It's there, and you can participate or not, but that's not what Hollywood is."
On December 1, Waltz became the 2536th person to be honoured with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. Tarantino was at the ceremony, which took place outside Musso & Frank, a legendary restaurant that has catered to the movie business since the days of silent films. Waltz's grandfather, who emigrated from Vienna to Los Angeles in 1937, used to eat there regularly.
"It's such an anachronistic ceremony, really old Hollywood. And it touched me because of my personal connection to Los Angeles, into the past," Waltz says. "To be put in that context … it's more than an honour."
As Hans Landa would say: "That's a bingo!"
Tarantino's Second Acts
Christoph Waltz is far from the only actor whose career has been rescued by Quentin Tarantino.
In Grease and Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta starred in two of the biggest movies of the 1970s, but the following decade was disastrous for him. He reportedly turned down lead roles in American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman, and his only hit was the Look Who's Talking franchise, which saw him upstaged by a talking baby. His dynamic turn as hitman Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction reignited his career – and directors John Woo, Barry Sonnenfeld and Terrence Malick all took notice. Travolta has made some poor choices since, though, including Scientology passion project Battlefield Earth and a cringe-worthy Christmas album with Grease co-star Olivia Newton-John.
Even if Harvey Keitel had never made another film after Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, his place in the cinematic pantheon would be assured. The 1980s must have been a major disappointment, though, as he laboured through a series of mediocre crime flicks and risible science-fiction flops. Tarantino caught him on an upswing, following Thelma & Louise, Bugsy and The Last Temptation of Christ, but the role of Mr White in Reservoir Dogs was what re-established him as a Hollywood great. Powerful, contrasting performances in Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant and Jane Campion's The Piano followed soon afterwards.
Uma Thurman was a relative unknown until her breakthrough in Pulp Fiction, as Mia Wallace, a gangster's wife with a taste for $5 milkshakes and cocaine. She parlayed her Oscar nomination into lead roles in The Avengers and Batman & Robin, a box-office catastrophe that is generally regarded as one of the worst comic-book adaptations ever. Tarantino called her up again – and called her his "muse" in numerous interviews – for the role of The Bride in Kill Bill. She gave a memorably stylish performance, but has yet to equal it with any other director.
