EON Magazine interviews Gary Sinise

The online webzine EON Magazine has interviewed one of the stars of M2M, Gary Sinise has some interesting comments about his character development in the movie. 3.11.00

GARY SINISE EXPOUNDS ON HIS COLLABORATIONS WITH BRIAN DE PALMA ON MISSION TO MARS AND JOHN FRANKENHEIMER ON REINDEER GAMES

By JEFF BOND 

Gary Sinise has appeared everywhere from Broadway to the Wild West (THE QUICK AND THE DEAD) to the jungles of Vietnam in FORREST GUMP. He also has a penchant for doing the big things twiceÑhe's played two famous politicians (Harry S. Truman and George Wallace), and with MISSION TO MARS, he's going back to space after playing another ill-fated astronaut in APOLLO 13. 

He's also keeping the theme of pairs going by having two major films in release this March, the action thriller REINDEER GAMES from director John Frankenheimer and MISSION TO MARS from another behind-the-camera legend, Brian De Palma. 

MISSION TO MARS takes Sinise and a crew of affordable stars (including Don Cheadle, Tim Robbins and Jerry O'Connell) to the Red Planet, where a momentous discovery is made and where Sinise's character, astronaut Jim O'Connell, makes a momentous decision to go even further. 

While Sinise had some helpful background from his work on APOLLO 13, MISSION required additional work for an actor who prides himself on doing extensive preparation for his roles. 

Gary Sinise and Jerry O'Connell examine the DNA of M&M's in Mission to Mars

"In any one of the characters that I've played, you've got to try and understand the point of view and what makes them tick and what's brought them to a certain place, and what is it in their being that would allow them to do what they do in the movie," Sinise explains. "Luckily, we're doing a movie about astronauts and we had astronauts available to us, and I picked their brains as much as I could, especially Story Musgrave." 

Having worked on APOLLO 13 also helped since he had already done a bulk of the research going in to MISSION TO MARS. 

"I do what I have to do as an actor and other actors are different," he notes. "Some don't do anything, some just do a little bit, and they might be just as good as me in a certain performance. But I have to do what I have to do to try to be believable." 

Sinise acknowledges that his character takes that One Small Step a few giant leaps further than most regular folks might choose to. 

"Without giving away the ending of the movie, the choices that my character makes are very pure and very spiritual, and you have to be able to see something much greater and much bigger than the individual in order to accept the fact that he would do something like that," Sinise says. "But then again, any individual who had the exploratory nature that he does and the discoverer nature that he does, placed in that situation, might think that was the only choice to make." 

But he's less certain that he would take the same step himself given the chance. 

"If I had taken the time to get there to begin with, I might decide to take the whole journey," he says. 

Despite his extensive preparation for the role, Sinise acknowledges that there were certain aspects of his character that made his job easier. 

"One of the advantages of cinema over theater is that in the movies you can do a lot with very little because you're so magnifiedÑit's a forty foot wide screen and a close up look can do what a monologue does on stage," the actor says. "You can express things just in the way it's cut and the way you look." 

For his character of Jim McConnell, Sinise explains that he is an internal character and he's "not out there all the time expressing himself and fighting for his thing." 

"When he has something to say, he says it, but he keeps his emotions in check," Sinise adds. "You learn more about what the camera can do the more you do it, and I think I know more now than I did five years ago, but there's a lot I still haven't done in film." 

Sinise is sensitive to some suggestions that his MISSION TO MARS character isn't fully fleshed-out on screen, particularly after its pointed out that his female costar, Connie Neilsen, seems to recover from an onscreen disaster a little too quickly for believability. 

"You never know what gets cut from a film," Sinise smiles. "There was stuff for me and Connie, and for whatever reasons they made the choice to cut some of that and get the story moving. Connie did have some moments after the death of her husband where she reacted appropriately, the way you would think she would react, and Jim McConnell had some moments where he riled things up a bit, but what can you say?" 

With MISSION TO MARS opening, Sinise faces some competition with himself in REINDEER GAMES (also in theaters), in which he plays a villainous character for veteran director John Frankenheimer. 

"I worked with Frankenheimer on GEORGE WALLACE the first time and we had a wonderful relationship and a great collaborationÑhe's a fantastic director," Sinise says. "What I love about working with John is his interest and respect and admiration for the actor and the process of acting. If you look at all the actors he's worked with and the movies he's done, it's all very character-driven work. Yeah, he's done some action movies, but they are character pieces as well. He's really into character-driven drama. He's also made thirty four movies and 150 television shows and they're all dramatic in nature, good writing and storytelling, not full of special effects and this and that. He's really centered on the acting process, and you rehearse with JohnÑyou spend the first two weeks rehearsing and he watches what you're doing and he works with that and decides how he's going to shoot based on that. " 

For Frankenheimer, Sinise observes "that's his style and for an actor and that's really appreciated" and as for De Palma who he worked with once before in SNAKE EYES Ð it's a whole other tact. 

"De Palma is very differentÑhe's a visual stylist, and I think what turns him on is moving the camera in different