Tim Roth: As messy as life is, it's a window to escape from

A young man enters the bar and meets with Sam Shepard, Christopher Walken and Al Pacinon. That's Tim Roth. The year is 1990, and the actor is in New York for film shoots “Jumpin at the Board” a grim movie about drug abuse. Roth, who planned to take a quiet beer while watching American football, finds himself in conversation with Walken and Shepard.

I said to myself: What the hell did I get into? It was totally random. ”

When he left, Shepard promised to write a role for him in his next drama.

It wasn't the first time Roth was in the right place at the right time, and it wouldn't be the last time for him.

This appointment was not held at the time that Roth played Van Goghun in Robert Altman's “Vincent & Theo”, just before the comedy with Gary Oldman at “Rosencrantz & Guildenn are Dead” Tom Stoppard that was hit in the festival circles. In New Yorker, critic Pauline Kael described Roth's acting as “a form of kinetic download”.

Instead of returning to London, he decided to investigate Los Angeles. But like his meeting at a Manhattan bar, chance again took action. Her name was Quentin Tarantino, the movie was “Reservoir Dogs”, and that changed everything.

We came to my apartment after one night at the bar and read every scene with all the characters. We had a good time and gave me the role”, Roth says. I was very lucky. He gave me a window, and I jumped. ”

When Shepard called about the role at the new Broadway show, it was all too late.

I couldn't do it”, Roth says. I always regret losing that chance. ”

We've been sitting on a porch in Langham in a long time, in an old Hollywood hotel that has served the rich since the 1930s.

It's the outside of a Hollywood scene”, Roth explains. There are some people living here, but you never see”.

You can see in the 57-year-old wine actor “Ononce upon a Time in Hollywood” His fifth film with Tarantino, which speaks of the murder of the Manson Family (cult group that killed director Roman Polanski's pregnant wife in 1969, Sharon Tate v.j.). They play popular names in the movie, like: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Al Pacino and Margot Robbie.

I think there's 100 random characters in”, Roth says, but he doesn't want to go into detail.

In the meantime, he goes on to serial “in Star”, a modern Western that started the second season, where Roth plays cop Jim Worth.

After many U.S. roles, it is a pleasure to hear Roth use his true accent, unchanged by decades of California living. Although the city is now swarming with the British, it says that things were very different in 1990.

By the time I got here, there were no English actors, except Gary (Oldman). He set the bridge for me”, he says.

Roth rarely forgets to give gratitude to his heroes and mentors, such as actors Ray Winstone and John Hurt; former teachers, screenwriters and directors Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Barrie Keeffe, who says how they gave him his career. He is grateful that he grew up in the 1970s, in London, when a generation of writers responded to Britain's post-industrial fall with deep socialism. It was this world he knew. Thus, with the role of racist “skinhead” in the film “Made in Britain”, he was able to nail the nihilism, anger, and violence of white working class men because he had experience in how wrongdoers behave in his high school. He recalls daily unrest, children running through windows, street battles...

I hated that time, because every day I was fighting”, he says. I didn't know how to fight “

Punk was on the horizon; the uprising was in the air. Roth was part of the “Rock movement against Racism” and group “Students against the Nazis” He threw stones at the protest Marchs, together with his father.

When Trevor ( Tim Roth character in “Made in Britain”) throws the bricks into the window of the Pakistanis' house shouting “I am British”, this looks like the origin of a history of social desigration that prompted the results of the 2016 referendum.

I understand why Brexit happened because Trump happened in America I get what's at his roots”, he says.

His father was an immigrant who moved from New York to Liverpool. Roth is thinking of making a movie based on his history.

He was from Brooklyn, which was difficult once, and he had a bad family”, he says. THE “did the wrong thing and were deported. When my father was 11 years old, he worked at brick factories in Liverpool, but moved to Kent where he worked in field”.

At the age of 17, Roth Senior was flying with bombers during World War II.

“was a good man, but a mess because of his life and war”, Roth says. But no matter how irregular your life, however complicated, should be, there should be a window to climb and that window he gave me”.

Driven by abuse, Roth's debut as director was at the “The War Zone”, a movie about despair, which analyzes the influence of incest, its destructivity, its poison... Roth wanted to show how abusers make victims accomplices in their abuses.

“They're directors and you're the actor; the lion for them, keeps their secrets”, he says.

It's been 20 years since Roth made it “The War Zone”. Has he thought about running another movie?

He's been taking on a scenario for King Lir that Harold Pinter wrote about, while he can run a movie in Mexico based on a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The family has given me the blessing”, he says.

Roth does not think to live again in Great Britain, but it is clear that his childhood contributions to a working class still determine his career choices. The Tarantino report, however, has defined his life in the United States more than once. He was in Sundance for the premiere of the film “Reservoir Dogs”, in 1992, where he met Nikki Butler (the woman he lives with today). A year later, the two were in Belize, where Roth played in the film of Nicolas Roeg, “Heart of Darkness”.

We were married; in a jungle near the”, he says.

When Roth leaves to meet the woman he still calls “missus”, a group of friends continue to order margaritas. It is one afternoon, and the sun shines. The atmosphere is festive.

“It's a strange world”, Roth says with his London accent... again in the right place.