Shooting Star
The Big Issue December 2001

Ewan McGregor plays a soldier in the first blockbuster of the 'war against terrorism' Blackhawk Down. He talks to Rupert Mellor about battlefield movies, the new patriotism and the next installment of Star Wars.

As celebrities go, there's nothing much you can teach Ewan McGregor. Running in lightning succession through a series of poses for The Big Issue's photographer-moody studio portrait, slouched in doorway, crawling cat-like along corridor- McGregor never loses his focus for a second, all the while keeping the assembled media types raucously entertained. "There's a great Alexander Technique thing, " he drawls over one shoulder, "where you crawl with your back and neck absolutely flat, which is exactly how a baby crawls. It's amazing, makes you feel two inches taller. Lovely to do, too. Although it makes you fart." He sighs theatrically. "One so seldom has the time for crawling and farting these days." If 30-year-old McGregor is on ebullient form, it's small wonder.

Five years after he auditioned for the part of Mercutio in Baz Luhrmann's take on Romeo and Juliet, the Australian director's decision to cast him as Christian in Moulin Rouge has sent McGregor's star ballistic. "It's very exciting. You can feel it. Moulin Rouge has done something for my career that my other films haven't. I feel like there are no limits now to what might be available to me," he says, absenting himself for a moment to absolute the behind of his other crowning achievement of the year, seven-week-old Esther Rose. McGregor's next blockbuster touches down on January 18. Teaming Oscar-hot director Ridley Scott with Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of Top Gun and Armageddon, Blackhawk Down is an ambitioius ensemble piece based on the true story of the disastrous US raid on Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. McGregor joined the cast, which unites Josh Hartnett, Tom Sizemore, Ewan Bremner and Sam Shepard, early this year. "Ridley Scott, Dougray Scott and I were on Barry Norman's film review show at the end of the last year, where, having seen a couple of the films between us, we pretended we'd seen them all and spoke about them all at great length.

During the show, not realising that Blackhawk Down was already sitting at home in a big pile of scripts, I made a quip to Ridley, "You've got tw great Scottish actors here, maybe you could use them." Ridley said, "Well, you never get back to me." "I thought, 'What the f***'s that about?" "Son after that I was due to fly to Honduras to make the TV documentary Trips That Money Can't Buy. The day before I left, a brown envelope arrived. No letter, no explanation, just a copy of Mark Bowden's book Blackhawk Down." On the plane, McGregor opened Bowden's extraordinary account of the 22-hour firefight between 140 US Rangers and a furious armed moB of thousands of Somalis, spun from interviews with eyewitnesses from both sides. He was still reading when he touched down in Honduras. "I had to remind myself constantly that this wasn't fiction, that this had really happened, to real characters. It boggled my mind, how a man can operate under such conditions.

So one morning in the rainforest I got on the satellite phone to my agent Lindy, to tell Ridley that whatever the part was, I wanted it." In preparation, 35 of the cast were packed off for army training. Keen to "have the story told right", the US military offered the film's producers an unprecedented level of assistance, firstly arranging for the actors to train with the vry regiments that fought in Mogadishu in 1993. And while co-stars Hartnett and Ewen Bremner laughed off the week's training as "lightweight" compared to the full-on boot camp they underwent before shooting Pearl Harbor, the Blackhawk Down cast still found their limits.

"They didn't shout and scream at us like at real boot camp, but they left us in no doubt that we were a sack of sh**, " says McGregor. "At the end of the week, we had a 'Come To Jesus' PT session. A three-mile run, complete with all the singing stuff, to the edge of a forest. In the forest was a mile-long assault course over barbed wire and through pipes and ditches, and then another run, uphill, in thick mud, to yells of 'Suck it up! Suck up the pain!'

At the end of that, guys were throwing up to the left and right. I just felt, 'Halleluia.' I'd come to Jesus, believe me. Then someone shouted 'Form up! Over here!' In a clearing were two injured guys on stretchers, boxes of rations, five-gallon drums of water, and boxes of weights to represent ammunition. We had to split into two teams and carry all that gear the whole way back." The shoot, which took place between April and June this year, saw McGregor return to the Moroccan city of Rabat, where in 1993 he shot his first-ever big screen appearance, a one-line role in Bill Forsyth's Being Human. Primarily a rull-on recreation of a terrifying street battle, Blackhawk Down's unflinching realism nixes any conventional character development in favour of throwing men and some of the world's most destructive hardware together in a truthful picture of the chaos of modern urban warfare. Military machinery and a large pyrotechnic team ensured the mayhem on-set felt just as real. "Our jobs really were purely to react as our characters, about whom by now we knew a great deal, to the completely explosive situation around us, which took the ego out of the acting in a brilliant way. Most important, though, was to do justice to the men who fought that day. I met soldiers who'd been there, and men who's held their best friends as they died. The task was to make them and their families proud of what they did." McGregor certainly picked an interesting time to play soldiers.

Since production finished in August, the movie's depiction of modern US forces at war with rebel Muslim forces has taken on controversial new significance. Unsure after the events of September 11 how to handle this newly-hot potato, the film-makers considered delaying the movie's release for the sake of sensitivity to the current political climate. In the end, the distributor pulled th release forward, sparking speculation that it was moving to meet a cresting wave of American patriotism. "The idea that September 11 might be some kind of selling point makes my blood go cold. That's a horrible idea, and I really don't think that's why they're bringing the date forward. I think they're doing it purely to qualify for the Oscar nominations. Personally I don't have any qualms about the film's content. It represents a separate, real-life situation, I think brilliantly. It's no more or less relevant after September 11. If anything, at a time when it's very easy to be very gung-ho and demand revenge, Blackhawk Down at least shows us what we're expecting of the young soldiers we send to do that job for us. I can't help but think of that- some of the men I met and worked with are on the ground in Afghanistan right now.

"I get why America is at war with the Taliban, but I'm not sure how I feel about the rights and wrongs of it, perhaps because it wasn't my country that was attacked. There's a line in the flim when the right-hand man of the wanted Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aiddid is captured and questioned by General Garrison. Aidid's man says 'What do you think will happen if you capture Aidid? Do you think we will stop?' And, you know, just put Bin Laden's name in there instead of Aidid and you've got a very interesting question." As the war on terror rolled out, McGregor was uncharacteristically, deep in downtime at home in London. He's now six months into an eight month sabbatical from acting that he booked in after a brush with burnout. Afflicted with a workaholic streak that runs through the whole family, McGregor was so hungry for the opportunities afforded by the spectacular showcase that was Trainspotting in 1996, he subsequently devoured 10 movie roles in two years. At one point, he finished work on the set of Little Voice at 9pmonly to be picked up for the first day on Rogue Trader at 6am the following morning.

"Time off this year was very much a conscious decision. I was making a film when my first daughter Clara was three weeks old, and it was a nightmare. This time around I was free to help my wife Eve out through the second half of the pregnancy, look after her a bit. And now I've got my new baby, I'm having a really happy time with my family, and it looks like lots of good stuff is coming in. But I'm not filming again til March. First, I'm looking forward to a family Christmas in France, probably at our flat in Paris."

Conspicuously absent from McGregor's conversation is Star Wars, episode two of which, The Attack Of The Cones, he filmed earlier this year. Famously inspired at Perth Odeon as a lad of seven by uncle Denis Lawson's role as X-wing pilot Wedge Antilles, McGregor's response to landing the pivotal role of Obi-Wan Kenobi turned from initial boyish delirium to open disappointment about the plodding, effects-centric filming process. Now after a quite word from Mr Lucas' people, he opts for a chastened silence. "It's for the best," he smirks.

"Moving swiftly on, sometime next year, I'm doing a Ted Demme film called Nautica with Heath Ledger. And I start shooting my next film Young Adam in March in Scotland, with director David MacKenzie. It's based on the first novel by Alexander Trochy, a very dark and cold but rather erotic book. It tells of an educated man who opts out in the oppressive 50's and goes to live on a barge on the Grand Union canal, which they used to run coal and iron ore between Edinburgh and Glasgow. In the background there's a murder trial going on, and we discover that the girl who was found in the Clyde was carrying his child. There is some nice proper acting to be had in it, it's really tasty stuff." Not a lot like Star Wars then? "Luckily not. Er, I mean no. No, it's not." Blackhawk Down is released on January 18.