Interview with Buried star Ryan Reynolds

A version of this article appeared in Empire magazine sometime last year...

You are Ryan Reynolds, and your life is pretty damn sweet. You're 33, Canadian by birth, prolific in Hollywood, but resident in New York's Upper East Side, where you live with your wife of two years, movie babe Scarlett Johannson*. You get scripts pretty much every day, some for action films, like 2006's Smokin Aces, some for romantic comedies, like 2008's Definitely Maybe, and ever since last year's cameo on the Marvel blockbuster Wolverine, men, woman and children have been stopping you on the street, asking, “Hey, Ryan, what's the latest on the Deadpool movie, man?”

Then one day you get a script that you really ought to bin. There's no Sandra Bullock to spark with. In fact, there's no co-star at all. You have to fly to Barcelona, leave your wife behind and spend 12 hours a day, for three weeks solid, in a wooden box where you will be short of breath, snagged by splinters, choked by dust and gagged by sand. Your props will include a Zippo lighter, a mobile phone, a light stick – and nothing more. There will be no cutaways, just you, in a coffin, for 90 minutes. Are you ready for your close-up, Mr Reynolds? Why, thankfully for us, it seems you are.

The project is called Buried, an intense, Iraq-set thriller in which Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, an American contractor who has been kidnapped by native insurgents and wakes up in a crate, six feet below the ground. Via the mobile that has been buried along with him, Conroy receives a message that his captors want a ransom, and so he begins a tense race against time, calling family, friends, employers, anyone, before the battery – and the available air – runs out. It goes beyond minimal, but in the hands of Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes, Buried is a thrilling, claustrophobic experience that rivals Alfred Hitchcock's single-set classics Rope and Lifeboat for both tension and invention.

“I read the script in about 30 minutes,” Reynolds recalls, taking a break from the New Orleans set of his latest studio movie, The Green Lantern. “And then I read a letter that Rodrigo had written to me, which was an explanation of sorts of how he would actually shoot this movie.” He laughs. “The letter turned out to be longer than the script! But it was an example of his passion for the project, and he explained in an incredibly verbose way – which is what you need to do for a movie like this – how he intended to make the impossible happen. The impossible being, spending 90 minutes in a coffin with a single, solitary character and keeping a sustained tension throughout.”

Even so, Reynolds did not take the bait straight away. “I'd be lying if I said I immediately wanted to do it,” he admits. “I needed some convincing, because it seemed so impossible. But when I thought about it, the risk, if there was any at all, was minimal. If it didn't work, then there'd be pats on the back for everybody for trying. And if it did work, it would rival a Hitchcock movie, even at his peak. It's something that's inventive and unusual and entirely outside the wheelhouse of typical Hollywood films. So it was kind of a win-win situation either way. But it was an acting challenge for sure. I did as much homework as I could do before I showed up in Barcelona, and off we went.”

When he landed, Reynolds had only one request: that there would be no rehearsal. He wanted to keep the energy and spontaneity of Conroy's situation, and, as a result, some scenes were shot with just one take and no back-up, something he'd never done before. “There were so many factors in making this movie that I'd never encountered before,” he says. “But what I truly wasn't prepared for was losing my taste for ever complaining on a film set ever again. I don't want to overly romanticise it, but it was extremely intense, and it was extremely lonely, and it was extremely difficult. If you think about it: spending 12 hours, for 17 days straight, having a panic attack...”

The intensity of the shoot soon took its toll. On top of being homesick and a little jet-lagged, Reynolds was soon to add insomnia to his list of ailments. “I couldn't come down every night,” he sighs. “I'd get home and I'd just feel like I was suffering some bizarre form of post-traumatic stress disorder, if that ever existed on a film set, and I just couldn't really get my shit together. So it was really difficult. When I left there, I was a bit warped for a while, and it took some time to get come back to earth. I'm on my sixth month of shooting Green Lantern right now, and the worst day on this set doesn't come close to the best day on Buried. Like I said, I will never complain again on a film set, and if I do, I give everyone permission to apply their gloved hand to my cheek. Solidly.”

Did this state of disconnect helped him find Conroy's pain? “Oh, absolutely,” he enthuses. “In every way. It so informed the character. It helped in almost all aspects. It was just so lonely. And I think you kind of see that on the screen. You feel – you have to feel – that this guy's utterly alone, and even when he does connect with people, in America, on the phone, he's reaching these bureaucratic robots. The only person he ever actually connects to, from his family, at least in the first three-quarters of the film, is his mom, and she's out to lunch as well. So no matter where this guy turns, he's met with this vacuum of loneliness that never seems to go away. Mix that with the sustained tension throughout the film and you're riding in your seat.”

This goes some way to explaining the star's role in selling Buried, but key to its success – and whatever you may think of the result, it does work – is Cortes's imaginative staging. “We had six or seven coffins,” says Reynolds, “and each served a different purpose, each one had a different name. Some of them had Spanish names – I forget them now – but I do remember that one of them was called The Joker, and there was literally NOTHING funny about it. It was a coffin that split in two, that we used for a very tricky 360-degree shot, And then the other ones, y'know, they would be missing the top, say, or just the bottom where my feet would be, or a side panel. There was another coffin that had entirely rotating walls. So there will be shots in the film where you can't quite figure out how we did it – which is, in fact, because the walls are actually moving.”

Despite all the contraptions and ingenuity, however, the basic set remained a wooden box. A rough, unforgiving wooden box. “It was bizarre,” says Reynolds, “because I think I sustained more injuries on this movie than on any action movie I've ever done, even though I was working in a tiny, confined space the whole time. Basically, it was like wearing a sweater made entirely of wood, sand and blood. A very roomy, uncomfortable sweater. But you can't not get pretty beat up in there. I mean, I'm really hard on the coffin too. They had to find ways to make sure I could never physically break out of it, because when I'm pressing against the walls or trying to push up against the roof of the coffin, I'm actually doing it with every ounce of energy I have, otherwise it's gonna look fake. So I got pretty beat up. But nothing that was too lasting.”

Reynolds downplays his onset injuries, so I later called his director, the sharp, witty Cortes, who paints a much darker picture. “Ryan went back to LA with his back bleeding,” he tells us. “His fingers were fried by the Zippo too, because it was so hot. It's OK for lighting a cigarette, but not for holding onto for several minutes at a time. But he never complained, Even about the sand. We threw at him tons of sand.” He laughs. “And it wasn't just the sand, which is scratchy and grazed his skin – his beautiful Hollywood skin! – but also the dust. He coughed dust. He blinked dust. It was very, very tough for him, because it's a very, very tough role.”

The actor, though, was not cowed by the experience, heading straight into training for The Green Lantern, which was practically the length of a movie shoot in itself (“I think the auditions for Green Lantern cost about as much as Buried cost in total,” he reflects). But Reynolds can see himself doing another movie like Buried one day, another film, like 2007's little-seen metaphysical drama The Nines, that proves his willingness to stretch and take artistic risks. “In a movie like Buried,” he says, “you're gonna connect to an audience in a much richer way than perhaps you would with a superhero movie or a blockbuster. So I think it's important to mix things up, to keep 'em guessing, to some degree. But at the same time, what's strange is, they all feel like the same process. I leave this $1m set in Barcelona and I step onto the $200m set in New Orleans – and I'm seeing the same problems: there's not enough time, there's not enough money. I just find it funny that once you're into the nitty-gritty of the film...” He laughs. “It's the exact same experience!”

* Well, at the time of writing, this used to be the case...