B Y..M A X..M I C H A E L S
AMANDA BROOKS stars in her first lead role as Sarah in the new fantasy thriller DRAGON WARS now playing around the country. She was born in New York and educated in England. After graduation from the prestigious UK prep school Bryanson, she immediately pursued a career in acting. Three years ago, she moved to Los Angeles to take on the film industry. She can be seen side by side on-screen with major league actors in films including the Jodie Foster thriller Flightplan, William Katt's drama River's End and now Korean director Hyung Rae Shim's Dragon Wars. We had the honor of getting a one on one interview with Hollywood's newest rising star...
So, Amanda, what has been happening in your life recently?
"I’ve been in Boston for the last week and really all over the place for the last two weeks."
What are you filming in Boston right now?
"The Bachelor 2 with Kate Hudson and Dane Cook. That has been really great fun…he’s great fun, he’s really funny."
So what’s going to happen in the next few days? Do you have premier’s to kick off or have you already done that?
"The DRAGON WARS premier, which is kind of my first red carpet event. I’m a little nervous. I mean I’ve worked a lot, but this is the first film that I’m in the lead."
Your first as the spotlight star?
"I guess so, yes."
Along with Jason (Behr).
"Yes, along with Jason."
So, Amanda, what has been happening in your life recently?
"I’ve been in Boston for the last week and really all over the place for the last two weeks."
What are you filming in Boston right now?
"The Bachelor 2 with Kate Hudson and Dane Cook. That has been really great fun…he’s great fun, he’s really funny."
So what’s going to happen in the next few days? Do you have premier’s to kick off or have you already done that?
"The DRAGON WARS premier, which is kind of my first red carpet event. I’m a little nervous. I mean I’ve worked a lot, but this is the first film that I’m in the lead."
Your first as the spotlight star?
"I guess so, yes."
Along with Jason (Behr).
"Yes, along with Jason."
You were born in New York, how long did you live in America before making the move to England?
"I was born in New York…my dad’s American and my mum’s British. So I was born in New York; and my dad scored music in movies and was a writer and produced and director for a few things. I sort of grew up seeing that stuff and being around it. Then when my parents split up I moved to England with my mother and my brother and lived there for a while. I came back to New York for a while. I moved back and forth until I moved to L.A. about four years ago."
Which do you prefer?
"God, that’s so hard. I love London, it’s a great city but you need to be very rich to live there. I love L.A. right now because I love to be able to be outdoors. You just can’t beat the weather and the sounds of life. The money you earn here is great and there’s the beach and hiking and things that don’t cost money to do. So in that respect I love it. New York’s intense and it’s crazy but you feel like you’re missing something. Boston is cool, it reminds me a lot of London. I like it, it’s a little greener."
What first got you into acting?
"What first got me into acting? My mum would say I’ve been acting my whole life. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that (laughs) …I sang a lot as a kid, music was sort of my big thing. And my dad being a composer that was where I was initially; my natural gift was that I had a great voice. So I was doing a lot of stuff musically growing up as a kid. But I was always involved in the theatre and school plays. I got a scholarship for music to my boarding school. I was always singing and acting and it was all very much intertwined. And my step-father’s family are all very much involved in theatre and are big actors in England. I’ve been around that industry…but I’ve always just loved to perform. The music side didn’t fulfill me when I got older, whereas with acting I was just really able to sink my teeth into characters and roles, and much more deeper and profound scenarios. I bring myself into that. I’ve led a fairly non-conventional lifestyle. I haven’t seen my father in fifteen years and my mother is still in England, and I’ve been living sort of on my own for some time. I think I had to grow up quite quickly and the result is definitely a sense of empathy. That has allowed me to understand a lot of different things. And as an actor you can bring that into your work to give you a much larger understanding. When you’ve lived and experienced quite a lot at a very young age. It just makes me feel so alive. What other business can you do where you get paid to, live, learn, experience things like Africa and learn about an entire new culture. It’s like you get paid to just become a much more worldly individual that you can then relay that to the rest of the world."
It is really is intertwined, music and acting. I mean I’ve only done one track for one project and that was a song I just finished called "Stiletto" with Tom Berenger and Mike Levine. And was very different from anything from D-War to Bachelor 2. Everything else I’d done in American, or Southern, or Cockney accents. And with music it’s been a huge help giving you an ear with that area of the brain when you’re brought to resonate in a way that I think I’ve been fortunate enough…I mean I’ve been to the United States, obviously you can tell. But accents come more naturally to most because of that background in music. Just teaching you how to use your voice properly, which I sound quite husky right now (laughs). You know it’s about taking deep breaths and with working long hours it’s important."
How did this role kind of fall into your lap?
"It didn’t fall at all, I auditioned. I drove downtown and auditioned. I remember reading the script and I was so fascinated. It was something completely different from anything that I had ever read. It was from a great imagination. A great mind which attracts me to working with actors, writers, directors. Also there hasn’t been a really great fantasy film…you know from Labyrinth, Princess Bride, Neverending Story, and those are some from my own childhood.
I love fantasy, and there hasn’t been one of those great fantasy films that for a child which is so important to have. So I was intrigued when I read the script. The costume director, Christine Shieks, had me go meet with the director and producers who showed me a short clip of part of the making of the film and the CGI, and I was just blown away at what they had managed to create.The role was something I though I could really work with. It’s a young girl who’s pretty much an orphan. She’s seventeen years old, she feels very set apart from people and her friends because she knows she’s different. And she has an emblem of a dragon on her and she really doesn’t know where it came from. She’s been having nightmares and dreams and people think she’s crazy. She ultimately has a destiny and she has to do the right thing and sacrifice herself. And if you look into that deeper that’s something very prevalent in my life: feeling a little bit different from people, and not having a traditional upbringing, and all those things. So the role to play happens to be a really good heroine. The young kids will be able to look up to her as something really important, now especially. And I’ve got the opportunity to work with Robert Forester; and work with blue screen which I had never done before. And the director, his passion was just infectious."
Hyung Rae Shim has been called the George Lucas of Asia, so have you seen any of his other films because I’m not familiar with him? And were you intimidated to work with such a renowned talent?
"I’ve seen some of them yea. When we were in Asia we were followed around everywhere and he’s very well known in that part of the World. Um…intimidated, no; nervous, apprehensive, a little bit. Excited a bit more. I was really well taken care of: I mean Jason, and Robert Forester, and the director all took really good care of me. I was very protected. And I mean I was doing lots of stunts and I actually borderline fractured my thumb. In the scene where I was in a mental ward smashing on the door to get out my adrenaline was rushing so much I didn’t realize how far I was getting into it. And I looked down and it was all a bit wonky and blue. The only scary thing was doing something new where nobody spoke English, you were a little bit nervous. A you’re dangling in the air and you’re looking over and hoping they’re not on a break. But it was so much fun and the adrenaline was so much. We were running around downtown with tanks, and soldiers, and it was just non-stop. Just completely different from anything I’d ever done since I’d done more dramatic pieces."
That’s something I was wondering about. I know Jason has done some shows like Roswell where there was a lot of special effects and I’m sure blue/green screen. And the director’s been brought up as the Lucas of Asia, and I know a lot of Lucas films have come off as cold to fans because it’s just a couple of guys in front of a big blue screen. Did you find that a challenge?
"Yes, you’re acting to nothing. It’s not easy, especially when it has to be big reactions. You have to imagine there’s a twenty-eight thousand foot dragon coming to eat you…and you’re standing in a room in Seol, and it’s minus five degrees, and you’re looking at a blue screen, and it’s five in the morning, and you’re trying to really sell it."
What did you do to get yourself to that point to pull it off realistically?
"You really have to, as they say, "try acting dear boy." You have to use your imagination, and in that sense the director and I, especially due to the language barrier, it was a little bit difficult. You just have to really, really use your imagination as best you can. And that was what we had been shooting for quite some time, plus some of the stuff when we were in Korea was on the set. And you’ve got these people dressed up and you’re lying on the sacrificial stone… the set is very much surreal and fantasy like. It wasn’t like we were just standing at the groves in Los Angeles. If you can work against nothing, then hopefully it’s a great training skill for when you can work with something."
Did you have translators on set or were you working through some language barriers?
"We had a translator and he was able to translate to us. And the DP as well we spoke to a lot. So you just find ways to make it work. The director is really passionate and I was really invested, my heart and soul was really invested. At the same time I was shooting that I was also shooting Flight Plan with Jodie Foster so I was working every day for about two months. And a lot of people would have been quite drained by that, but I was so excited to be part of D-War. It really felt like a family, we all really loved what we were doing and loved being there. That’s something that no studio ... nothing can buy it. It’s the accumulation of the passion of the director and the actors and the people. It was really a joy to go to work, I was exited to go to work every single day. I was tired at the end of every day, but again I was really happy to go back, and I really wanted to give every take my all. And I was just so invested in the people and we all worked super hard to make it the best we could. It’s a really nice feeling of togetherness when you have that."
Where did you guys primarily film at?
"Downtown L.A."
Was any of it filmed over in Asia?
"Yea, we were in Korea just outside Seol for about a week."
That sounds exiting. Had you ever been to Asia before?
"No I had never been there. I’d like to say I got to see some of Seol, but we really didn’t. We landed and I was brought straight to hair and make up. You know we were working pretty much non-stop. So I really didn’t get to see much of Seol, but there’ll be another chance."
So what’s next…?
"I literally, just last night wrapped the Bachelor 2 with Jason Biggs, Dane Cook, and Kate Hudson. We’ve been in Boston filming that. And right before that I finished filming the Last Home with me and Tom Berenger, and Michael Beihn, and William Forsyth. So next on the agenda might be week to catch up on some rest and then straight to the next project. I haven’t even stopped to think about it. Watch some bad television and do some laundry (laughs). There’s lots of things in the pipeline."
