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| Alessandro Nivola as Aleksei Sytsevich in JC Chandor’s Kraven The Hunter. |
In the fourth instalment of my conversation with Alessandro Nivola before he headed off to the Venice International Film Festival to promote two world premières of films that he is in, we discussed his role as Aleksei Sytsevich (aka Rhino) in JC Chandor’s Kraven The Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson with Russell Crowe, Christopher Abbott, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger. Working again with Chandor after A Most Violent Year, David O Russell casting him twice (American Hustle, Amsterdam), Alan Taylor’s The Many Saints Of Newark, John Woo’s Face/Off, Joe Johnston’s Jurassic Park III also came up.
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| Alessandro Nivola with Anne-Katrin Titze on Aleksei Sytsevich, aka Rhino: “I'm the main antagonist to Aaron Taylor-Johnson's character, who is this other Spider-man villain called Kraven. And I am scary. ” |
In Venice, Alessandro was the lucky charm: Pedro Almodóvar won the Golden Lion for The Room Next Door (adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through) starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton with John Turturro, Alex Hogh Andersen and Esther McGregor, and Brady Corbet won the Best Director Silver Lion for The Brutalist (co-written with Mona Fastvold), starring Adrien Brody with Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Stacy Martin, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird, and Isaach De Bankolé.
From Long Island, New York, Alessandro Nivola joined me on Zoom for our end of summer conversation.
Anne-Katrin Titze: You told me a while ago that David O Russell was the only director whom you ever worked with twice. This is no longer the case! Now there is JC Chandor.
Alessandro Nivola: Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. Ha! That streak has been broken. Maybe it's a good sign I haven't alienated everybody I've worked with.
AKT: A Most Violent Year was a very, very different film than Kraven The Hunter, judging from the trailer. I could not believe my eyes and would not have guessed that it was a film by him, nor you. It is something new, isn't it for you?
AN: Yeah, I mean, I certainly have never done a Marvel movie before. I've really made very few big blockbuster films at all. I guess this is probably only the third one. I've made other studio films, but they've been dramas. The Many Saints Of Newark, Face/Off, Jurassic Park III - these are probably the the only three action blockbuster kind of films I've ever made.
So in that sense it wasn't sort of typical, but the way that I approached it and the way that I worked with JC on it was the same way that I work on every role. It was all about character. And when you see the film, it's really just a a great character.
AKT: You look scary in the trailer!
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| Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Sergei Kravinoff (aka Kraven) with his father Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe) |
AN: Yeah. Well, he's, I mean, I'm the villain. I'm kind of the main villain of the movie. Although in a way, we're all, technically, we're all villains from the Spider-man comics. But for the purposes of this story I'm the main antagonist to Aaron Taylor-Johnson's character, who is this other Spider-man villain called Kraven. And I am scary.
Also there's humour in it. It's quite a dynamic role you'll find when you see it. With these films it's always the challenge to understand what the tone of the movie is. And each of these different Marvel movies has a slightly different tone, and some of them are very self-aware and and tongue-in-cheek, verging on being silly or absurd. And others are very, very dark. I guess, like the kind of DC ones, like the Batman movies, are extremely serious and intense.
And this movie, I would say, is somewhere in between and it has a lot of different shades tonally. But my role, my character, really kind of embodied the tone of the whole movie pretty well in terms of there being both something absurd about him and funny at times, but also scary. And I don't think anybody in the film is kind of commenting on the movie. The characters are committed to the reality of their own story and that was something that I think JC felt strongly about. He didn't want the whole movie to be winking at the audience.
AKT: There's been a lot of winking recently.
AN: Yeah, I think he just felt that wasn't how he wanted to tell it. The movie is obviously action-packed and very exciting that way, but it also has a kind of groundedness to it. It's not a lot of people flying around in capes and stuff. Even the action itself is kind of grounded in it, just pushing the limits of reality. But for my purposes it was, I guess I'd liken it to playing a Bond villain.
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| Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola with The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott) |
Because it really was a character who had an interesting psychology and back story and it was grappling with certain themes of male impotence. I play a kind of Russian oligarch, kind of crypto currency farmer who ends up waging a personal vendetta against the whole Kraven family for reasons that are established early in the movie.
I was able to base the whole character on a a friend of mine and Emily's, who is a Russian poet named Philip Nikolayev, who's a brilliant poet and whom Emily had met back when she was 17 years old, and had spent a year living in Moscow, and had fallen in love with another Russian poet who's since passed away, named Denis Novikov. Philip Nikolayev was one of his close friends, and he had many years ago come to America and has been living up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaching at Harvard.
Emily at the time that I was preparing to do this role was preparing to write a script about this time of her life when she was in love with Denis and living in Moscow and so Philip started coming to the house a lot from Cambridge and we started spending a lot of time with him, and I just decided that I was going to base the whole character on him. And so I used his voice as the voice of the character and for the first half of the movie the whole look of the character. My hair, everything is based on him.
AKT: The Marvel universe meets the Harvard poet!
AN: You'll see it, it works!
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| Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) with his brother Dmitri Kravinoff (Fred Hechinger) |
Read what Alessandro Nivola had to say on Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, his grandfather Costantino Nivola’s relationship with Le Corbusier, the Nivola family life on Long Island and Italy, the Coco Chanel connection for him with his wife Emily Mortimer (soon to be seen in Dougal Wilson’s Paddington In Peru), and Paul Giamatti and Yale.
Read what Alessandro Nivola had to say on The Room Next Door.
Read what Alessandro Nivola had to say on Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.
Kraven The Hunter is in cinemas in the US and UK.
