"Memento II"? Guy Pearce stars in a movie about a man in deep denial about his past who is forced to question the nature of reality as circumstances lead him to doubt everything he once thought was true. No, we're not talking about "Memento." However, Pearce, who starred in that 2000 groundbreaking exercise in noir amnesia, does revisit similar turf in "First Snow," set for release next month.
"There is almost a partnering of those two films, in a way," Pearce says. "If something really appeals to you, I guess you keep going back there, though you want to disguise it in different ways so people don't think you're just doing the same thing over and over."
"First Snow" casts Pearce as a cocky salesman who's forced to confront past choices after a trailer park psychic tells him he'll be dead by winter. The movie was inspired by an incident witnessed by filmmaker Mark Fergus, who saw his friend emerge pale and seriously shaken after a discouraging session with a New Orleans fortune-teller. Does Pearce believe in clairvoyance?
"I don't think all of this would exist if there weren't some kind of relevance, but I'm very skeptical about those who claim to be the be-all and end-all. I hope somehow there is some energetic force that draws us all together, but wading through the many frauds -- you have to add that to the equation."
Pearce is coming off a critically hailed portrayal of Andy Warhol in "Factory Girl."
"The great thing about playing somebody like Andy is there is a ton of research material to play with," he says. "I latched on pretty quickly to what his insecurities were. Listening to all these phone conversations between him and Bridget Berlin, you could hear how fragile, how sensitive, how clever, how funny Andy was, how controlling he could be, and also how needy. I tried to get to the heart of who he was as opposed to an almost cliched perspective on him, which I think Andy was probably responsible for cultivating."
Pearce will take on another real-life subject later this year when he appears as magician Houdini opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones in "Death Defying Acts." But the Australian actor, who broke into pictures playing a drag queen in "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," says that for him, there's not that much difference between fiction and reality when it comes to creating a performance.
"Yes, you're absolutely mimicking but, funny enough, when I read a fictitious character in a script, I picture him in my head and end up mimicking what I'm picturing in my head anyway. Whether it's looking at real footage about a real person or seeing a fictitious character on the page, at the end, it sort of becomes the same process."
