Alien Autopsy - Declan Donnelly interview
Interview by Rob Carnevale
DECLAN Donnelly talks about his role in Alien Autopsy at the London press conference for the film…
Q. How did you get involved with Alien Autopsy?
Dec: Qwerty films, who made the film, got in touch with our agent and said they had this unbelievable story that they’d like to talk to us about with a view to playing the two lead characters. So we had a meeting and heard what the story was. We instantly remembered the whole hullabaloo around the release of the alien autopsy tapes back in 1995 and the controversy it caused world-wide. Was this footage real? Or fake? I remember the TV debates and seeing it on the front page of all the newspapers and yet here we were, ten years later, sitting with the writer [Will] and director [Jonny Campbell] and they were telling us the real back story to what actually happened and how the footage came to be. Again, we couldn’t believe the story and we got the script, read it and it proved a real page-turner. We then decided this was the project that we wanted to do. We’ve been offered films in the past but none of them have ever hit the mark really. But this was such a good story, it’s based on a true story, and it features two great characters. Something felt really good about this.
Q. Ray and Gary claim that the film was based on a genuine piece of footage. Do you believe that?
Dec: For me to play the character of Ray Santilli I had to believe in that journey. So it’s a very interesting story and I’m intrigued to know how it goes on. This isn’t the end of it because the film ends with it still leaving a kind of question.
Ant: I guess it bounces back to Ray and Gary now, I suppose. You have to ask them whether they have still got the original footage and whether they would still want to show it.
Q. Did you need strong stomachs for the autopsy scene?
Dec: It’s weird because when I watch things like Casualty and Holby City I’m be really squeamish. I always thought that if I ever got a job on one of them I couldn’t do it. But actually when it came to do it on the day and I knew it was a latex dummy, some strawberry jam and a bit of haggis in ladies’ tights, it wasn’t that bad. But then watching it on the screen with friends, we had to reassure them it was just jam.
Q. Do you see this as a one-off movie? Or the start of something bigger?
Dec: Well it’s a one-off in the sense that we haven’t been offered another one! But it’s certainly a one-off for the moment. We have a busy year with the rest of our television commitments and we’re signed to ITV until the end of 2007. So for the next 18 months or so we’ll be working on all our TV projects. But we kind of wanted to see how this went really. See how people react to us doing it and see whether they could put Ant and Dec out of their minds. If things come along, we’ll have a look at them but we’re certainly not looking to launch an assault on Tinseltown just yet!
Q. You’ve become known as presenters but you started out as actors. Was it harder than you thought going back and becoming actors again?
A. We were halfway through this scene and Jonny [the director] said: “Woah! Can we just bring everything down a little bit.” This kind of went against everything we do as TV presenters, so it was a different discipline and it took a week or two to get back into that mind frame. And, of course, everything we do now is live, it’s all about pre-production, getting ready and performing. For this, we had rehearsal time, then did the master shot and were told: “Ok, see you in three quarters of an hour.” It was a bit of a change of gear for us in that way.
Q. How was working with Harry Dean Stanton? Is the man a genius or slightly scary?
Dec: Meeting Harry for the first time was a bit nerve-wracking really because he is this legend. We were very aware of who he was and I’m not sure that was reciprocated. In fact, I’m still not sure whether he knows who we are or what we were doing. But we had great fun working with him. He’s kind of a grumpy old sod, really, but with a heart of gold. He took us out on our last night after filming for a drink in downtown LA. We ended up in one of his drinking holes with a weird mish-mash of people. It was kind of like being in an episode of The Sopranos or something. We were sat in this bar in LA with red and white cheque table cloths, Italian men with big moustaches and ill-fitting suits at the bar and we sat drinking with a homicide detective from the LAPD, Harry Dean Stanton and some guy who runs an illegal printing den down the road. I turned to Ant and said: “I’ll level with you, I’m really scared! I don’t know what we’re doing here, take me home!” [Laughs] But we had a great time with Harry. He’s very generous to work with and was generous in his performance. I learned a lot from him, as I did with Bill Pullman. There are times when you’re sitting there, in the middle of a scene, and something just goes off in your head. I remember sitting there and going: “That’s Harry Dean Stanton!”
Q. How do you think your legions of fans will respond to this given that it is a slightly different style?
Dec: I think they’ll enjoy the story because that’s what appealed to us – what these two guys did. Their relationship and the hoax element of it is kind of in the same vein as what we do with the hidden camera stuff on Saturday Night Takeaway. It’s kind of cheeky what they did, to put it mildly [laughs] but the sense of what they did and the style in which they did it is very much in the style of what we do as well.
Q. How are you feeling about the reaction to your performance? Are you nervous and will you be reading the reviews?
Dec: I’ll be very interested to see what people make of it, whether they like it and what they think of our performance. But it won’t affect any further decisions we make. You can’t base decisions on what people say all the time, you have to go with your gut sometimes and that’s what we did on this. I think we made the right decision.
Q. Do you believe in aliens, UFOs and things like that?
Dec: I’d like to think so. I remember the autopsy footage coming out in 1995 and not 100% believing it, but kind of wanting to think that there was some kind of massive cover-up by the US government and that a space craft did land in Roswell in 1947. But I do think there is something else out there because I think it is naive to think we’re the only intelligent – using that term loosely, of course – in the universe. There must be something else out there.
Q. And finally, what do you think of Embrace doing the World Cup Song?
Dec: I think the World Cup song this time is a bit of a poison chalice really, because they’ve got such a tough act to follow after the last one. Who were those two fellas? But it’s quite an honour to be asked to do the World Cup song and I’m sure they’ll do a great job on it. I guess there’s will be a bit more serious than ours. We were really excited when we did it.
I’d like to see the squad do the record like they used to. I’d love to see Rio [Ferdinand] do a little bit of a rap, Wayne Rooney doing a falsetto bit in the chorus. David Beckham doing the harmonies. It makes it more interesting for me.
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