Kiefer Sutherland Improvised Audition In Bar, Snatched Cult Classic Film Role
I think I scared him a little bit, but he took a chance with me because of my enthusiasm
When Kiefer first walked into the bar, he couldn’t have known what the director of his next movie would need him to do if he wanted the role.
Fortunately, Kiefer’s slouching career didn’t mean he’d become a slouch in auditions. He’d memorized the script, already aware that Alex Proyas — the rising star who had recently directed Brandon Lee’s final film The Crow — had been carrying the script for Dark City in his back pocket since he was fifteen years old.
Dark City was a story of the heart. Just so, getting the role of the conflicted memory surgeon Schrieber would require an audition of the heart.
It’s hard to know what signaled Kiefer to go big or go home. Was he worried that meeting in the bar of a hotel signaled Alex Proyas wasn’t taking him seriously for the role? Or did he feel free to improvise because he brought the same wicked confidence to this audition that he seems to bring to every role anyway?
Speaking with Steve Weintraub for Collider (offsite), Kiefer Sutherland gave us a hint into what really happened.
My career was treading water, to put it politely. And we were just supposed to talk about the script, but I had read it, and I had memorized parts of it already just because I loved it so much that I did an impromptu…
We were talking, having a discussion, and I said, well, I don’t think I can articulate it as well as I can just show you. And in the middle of the bar of the hotel, I started playing Schrieber, and with the voice, and the walk and all of it.
I think I scared him a little bit, but he took a chance with me because of my enthusiasm.
There’s a lesson in Kiefer’s spontaneity for the rest of us. Whether you’re an actor, a writer (including on Medium), or the next critic M. Night Shyamalan will eviscerate, lean into the poetry of it all.
You can’t control what opportunities come to you, but you can control whether you’re ready for them. Kiefer Sutherland memorized the script. He respected that this was a story of the director’s heart. He delivered an improvised performance in the middle of a bar.
He won a role in what would turn out to be a series of great movies and great characters that would catapult Kiefer back to the top of the A-list.
And I was really grateful because I’m very proud of, really, a lot of the work I’ve been given the opportunity to do, but Dark City will always hold a special place in my heart because I believe that, creatively, it approaches what I consider to be cinema, which is the highest art form of film making.
FURTHER READING KARANLIK ŞEHİR/DARK CITY by Turkish film critic Rüstem Yurteri (writing right here on Medium)
See Rüstem’s other article: “Fact or Fiction?” using HBO’s hit series The Wire to illustrate why wholehearted art leads to wholehearted living
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