The real wiper man
A film about rain and windscreen wipers sounds as dull as ditchwater. It's anything but, its jovial star, Greg Kinnear, tells Declan Cashin
LIGHTBULB MOMENT: Greg Kinnear stars with, Lauren Graham, top left, in Flash of Genius, about the inspiration and subsequent downfall of the man who invented windscreen wipers
Friday March 20 2009
Greg Kinnear is a laid-back guy. In fact, when I first meet him, he's so laid-back that he's practically horizontal. Walking into the suite in London's Soho Hotel, I find the actor dressed casually in jeans and a black zip-up top, lying back comfortably in his chair, boot-bedecked feet propped up on the table, his face hidden behind a copy of the latest edition of Vanity Fair.
He slowly rises to his feet to greet me, apologising in his drawling accent that he's recovering from a heady mixture of jet lag and a sleeping pill-induced slumber the night before. Luckily, he quickly becomes more animated when he hears my accent.
"Ireland, huh?" he asks. "I've never been, but I worked last year with Brendan Gleeson [on Paul Greengrass' forthcoming thriller Green Zone]. What a remarkable guy, hell of an actor. He keeps saying, 'Come on over, you have to visit'. But I haven't yet. But, believe me, I will take him up on it. Brendan mightn't realise that when you extend an offer to a Kinnear, we can hold onto them for years!"
Before any squatting in the Gleesons' guest bedroom, however, the amiable star must do the rounds for his new movie Flash of Genius, which tells the surprisingly engaging true story of engineer Robert Kearns (Kinnear), the inventor of the 'blinking eye' windscreen wiper that would eventually be used by every car in the world.
Automotive giants like Ford and Chrysler embraced Kearns' invention, but then dumped him and took his creation without crediting him for it. Kearns suffered a breakdown, and became a man obsessed, initiating an epic legal battle -- at a terrible personal cost -- to get his work acknowledged (Kearns died in 2005).
Kinnear is the first to admit that this movie isn't an easy one to sell. "The movie's director Marc Abraham forwarded me this email that he got from a big screenwriter friend of his," he says, reaching languidly for his BlackBerry and scrolling through the mails.
"I'll read it for you. It goes: 'Hey. Saw the movie on the plane, really enjoyed it, great job. But how was it ever pitched to a studio? I imagine it went something like this...
Writer: It's about the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and the court case that later consumed his life.
Studio head: Mmm hmm, and does he have any super powers?
Writer: No.
SH: Oh I get it. He builds his own metal suit and fights crime because he's an inventor?
W: No
SH: [uncomfortable silence] Erm, does he fly or see the future?
W: No, it's just about the guy who invented the windshield wiper.
SH: No, I heard you the first time. I just can't fucking believe my ears. Please get the fuck out of my office'."
Kinnear laughs and continues: "I didn't read the script for the longest time because it was originally called Windshield Wiper Man. But when I did crack it, I was hooked. It's a hell of a battle.
"Bob Kearns was a really flawed guy who sacrificed a lot in order to see this through, and he drags the audience, somewhat begrudgingly, on this journey. I think it's really unsettling to a modern viewer. We live in a culture that's all about 'take the money', but here was a guy who was fighting about principle, and with that comes some big, ugly stuff that we don't always want to see."
Kinnear also sees an urgent topicality to the 1970s-set tale. "Suddenly we're finding malfeasance everywhere in these huge corporations, and to see the story of a real guy challenge that, at huge cost and against great odds, is very timely." (By a cruel irony, industry watchers believe Flash of Genius was hurt at the box office in the US because it debuted just as the banking system collapsed last autumn).
Kinnear himself came late to the movie business. The 45-year-old first grabbed America's attention in 1991 as the wise-cracking host of the E! Channel's Talk Soup, where he spent three years slagging the very business in which he is now a player.
He then launched his own late-night gabfest, Later with Greg Kinnear, but within a year, was looking to move full-time into the world of acting. He got his big break playing opposite Harrison Ford in the late, great Sydney Pollock's Sabrina (1995) and the comedy Dear God (1996).
From there, Kinnear's acting career quickly gathered momentum. He bagged an Oscar nomination for his role as Jack Nicholson's gay neighbour in As Good As It Gets, and continued to ply his comedy trade in the likes of You've Got Mail, Nurse Betty and the superhero spoof Mystery Men, which has since gained a cult following having flopped on its initial release.
In recent years, however, Kinnear has veered towards more edgy, indie work, often playing characters with confident, sunny surfaces that mask barely-subterranean insecurities and despair. Think of arguably his best performance to date as Hogan's Heroes actor Bob Crane in Autofocus, or as the down-on-his-luck dad in the massive sleeper hit Little Miss Sunshine.
So do those roles offer a glimpse into the real Greg Kinnear: classically handsome on the outside, all dark and twisty on the inside? The actor responds in his by-now customary chilled-out tone.
"I probably challenge myself in more ways than people realise. I have fights with myself like everyone else. I'm attracted to that in characters. For some reason, it comes easy to me to spot and then play the guy who is being squeezed and pushed to the brink, but keeps up a front that everything is hunky dory. It definitely keeps it interesting."
Kinnear is certainly a busy actor, having made nine movies in the past three years, but he remains curiously under the radar, relegated to the 'what's-his-face?' category rather than full-blown name recognition.
"I'm probably better known in the US, I guess," he says with a momentary hint of defensiveness in his voice. "But I don't trip over myself to try stay out in front of the audience. The less they know about me, the better I can be at my job." He pauses before adding in that laid-back voice: "I'm most comfortable quietly sitting in the back of the room."
- Declan Cashin
