Interview by Shawn Adler / Intro by Thomas Chau

Despite a career which included numerous television roles and an education at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Clive Owen did not earn his recognition until starring in a series of Internet short films for BMW cars. Since then, his career has reached new heights, as he has gone on to star in such films as "The Bourne Identity" and "Beyond Borders" opposite Angelina Jolie. This summer, he can be seen as the legendary knight known as Arthur in the Jerry Bruckheimer produced "King Arthur." Below is what Clive had to tell Cinema Confidential about the movie.

Q: I've heard so much talk of "Closer" -

CLIVE: So have I. It was a gift. It was a gift. It was an incredible cast and a fantastic writer. I loved it from start to finish.

Q: And Julia Roberts isn't that bad -

CLIVE: Julia Roberts is fantastic. She's an absolute pleasure to work with. I loved her in the scenes I did with her. She's very easy. I was hugely impressed considering that she's possibly the most famous, the most successful actress in the world with how lovely and easy she was. It was a
treat.

Q: Was it a relief to go from a big production like this to something like "Closer"?

CLIVE: Yeah, it is. I'm love mixing it up. I love to do different things. I was very excited to do this film. I hadn't done one of these big, historical movies. I was really thrilled to be asked to do it. After that, I went straight to Mike Nichols on a theater-based piece with fantastic dialogue. It's two actors in a room talking. It's like worlds apart. I just loved it. That's the beauty of my game, how varied and interesting it is. I just love it. I just came from Texas where I've been working with Robert Rodriguez ["Sin City"] which is another thing altogether. It's pretty wild.

Q: Who do you play in that?

CLIVE: You have to know the book. It's an extraordinarily wild vision that Frank Miller has created there, but I play a character called Dwight in the one that I did. It's on three books that he's going to turn into one movie. The one that I did was Benecio del Toro and Rosario Dawson and Britney Murphy. But again, he's hugely impressive, Robert Rodriquez.

Q: How did you get involved in that?

CLIVE: I got a call saying, "Robert Rodriguez wants you to do 'Sin City.'" "What is that?" "It's based on a graphic novel. He's sending you a five minute test that he did to show you how it's going to look. He's going to write you a little note and send you the book. When you've read it, talk to him." I read it and we talked about it. He told me that Benecio was going to be in it who I'm a huge fan of. It's great.

Q: What's the most demanding thing for this movie?

CLIVE: It was horse riding. It was a big deal because I've ridden a bit, but not very well in movies. In fact, I had one experience where I got put on a horse that was way out of my league. And it was pretty scary. That was on this movie.

Q: What happened?

CLIVE: I was just given a horse that was too difficult for me to deal with. So my history wasn't that great.

Q: Did you get thrown?

CLIVE: I did, actually, yes. You [have to] realize how quite powerful and dangerous they can be. So, I was in denial and these guys never asked me if I could ride. For sixty or seventy percent of that script, I'm on a fucking horse. We went through all the negotiations and I just had this thing in the back of my head going, "You're not dealing with this. You're in a denial. Face up to it. You can't ride a horse." So, this is absolutely true, literally, the day the deal was done, that day, they said, 'It's all signed. You're doing the movie.' I went up to Jerry's office and I said, "I have to get on a horse tomorrow. There is no time to be wasted," and this was two months before we even went to Ireland.

Luckily, they were already gearing up in choosing where the horses were going to come from and all of that. So they put me in touch with a guy who I am so grateful was around on that movie for me because he taught me from scratch. I walked into the stable and he had a little one saddled up, ready. I rang him and said, "Treat me absolutely as a novice. Then we'll build it up from there." So I looked at this little fat, almost donkey, and I said, "Listen, mate, if I had my way, I'd stay on that one forever. So you suit me up when you think that I'm ready and I will be guided by you. If you say that I'm ready for the next stage, I'll just go on it because if I have my choice, I'm staying on this one."

Within a very short period of time, I'd walk in and there was a saddle on a bigger one. So, in the end, after a very short period of time, I was on pretty big, powerful horses, and he taught me so brilliantly that by the time that we came to the movie, I was pretty fearless. I would never say that because I've been around people who are seriously good with horses, and so I'd never say that I'm a great horseman, but I would be unafraid about going on most horses. I'm pretty fearless. He's relaxed me, completely relaxed me on horseback. In the end, I was doing things in that movie that if you'd had told me at the beginning I would be doing, like riding at pretty serious speeds and noisy extras wielding weapons and was totally, totally sort of oblivious to any danger or fear. It was really all down to being so well taught. I'm so grateful to that guy.

Q: When you were running around on horseback, I thought that was extraordinary.

CLIVE: A lot of the times the stunt guys, said that the amount of stuff we'd done, they'd never seen. That usually, we'd be doubled for. We'd all put time in. That stable was based outside of London. So months before that film started, we were already preparing and knowing that the main characters were going to be on horseback for a lot of the movie. It's all a credit to them because each of us had a stunt double horseman who was guiding us with our horse. One of his main jobs apart from doubling was just to see us through that we needed. So I would have my guy go, "Okay, Clive," and we'd talk it through.

Q: He'd show you exactly what to do?

CLIVE: And he would be able to see what I was doing and say, "Okay, what you need to do is that you need to do this and you need to do that. And the horse is going to do this." I was so grateful to this guy. You also get very attached to the horse.

Well, of course the difficult thing for me was that I was often the fucking lead horse. I'm leading the guys and horses follow in packs. If one guy goes, they'll go with it, but I'm the guy that's got to take the first one into the smoke and fire and they're not dumb. So it did take effort and they saw me through brilliantly so that I was in control of that horse and getting it to do these things.

Q: Did you get into researching this character? Did you know about King Arthur?

CLIVE: Not really. I mean, everyone seems to be from England. But really it's children's storybooks. It was movies. I didn't know that much about the story. It's still the fabric of your upbringing really. You play with castles and knights. But in terms of the actual story, I didn't know that much.

Q: What kind of research did you do then?

CLIVE: I just pinched all of [David] Franzoni's. He'd done a lot. And then as soon as I agreed, we got on the phone together, and he talked me through. He said, 'This is why I've done this version which is where it comes from. This is why I've taken this approach.' I was very surprised because he also gave me a lot of the traditional myths that he'd looked into. I was very surprised at how elusive the whole thing was. I thought that it'd be more substantiated than it was. But the actual myth took so long to develop and there were huge gaps of hundreds of years, and they said, "Well, it could've been that guy, and it was this castle that we think might have had,"' and so gradually that myth sort of solidified.

Q: Did you have a favorite King Arthur movie?

CLIVE: Well, one that sticks is "Excalibur." It's just so vivid. It was just such an extraordinary visual movie. It made the world seem to be a really scary place, dangerous and scary - which I imagine at that time, it very possibly was. That really stuck with me when I saw that movie.

Q: That's what you captured here too -

CLIVE: I think that traditionalists won't like it, but the fact that he set it during the collapse of the Roman Empire was great. I thought that that whole, again I spoke to someone who was very up on the whole period of the Romans pulling out of Britain, and they said, "You've got to try and imagine that it's like any big modern city just suddenly dissolving like chaos. They just left and everything went." That's how someone described it. They said, "You've got to imagine how crazy it was," and that's the backdrop of the movie, a turbulent world.

Q: Are you going to be the new Bond?

CLIVE: It's all rumors. It's never been substantiated in any way whatsoever. It keeps rearing itself up. I think that to be perfectly honest, Pierce has been a great Bond. I think that he's reinvigorated that whole franchise. He's made a ton of money for that company. He's doing another one and they should just back him and say, "Pierce Brosnan is our man and he's doing a great job." That's what I think.

"King Arthur" opens in theatres July 7th.