3:30-4:15 For Big Talent, Multi-Platform Is the New Multiplex— Learn why action, thriller, and sci-fi stars are migrating to emerging platforms as filmmakers create original, compelling digital productions. From upcoming Vuguru projects The Booth at the End, Nuclear Family, Off Season, and The Millionaire Tour, Dominic Monaghan (The Lord of the Rings), Ray Wise (Twin Peaks), Xander Berkeley (Nikita), Rick Fox (Oz), Kyle Rankin (Infestation), and Christopher Kubasik (The Booth at the End) offer a lively discussion. Marriott Hall 2, Marriott Marquis & Marina

You can also view Dom’s first interview with starDom which took place at the 2004 San Diego Comic Con.

Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd came into our room next, accompanied by an aide who held a tray full of food.

Dominic must not be a morning person. He looked positively huddled in his seat, and rarely looked up at us, even when answering questions. He mostly looked at his food.

One of the reporters in our room was a Japanese woman, and she stared at Dominic’s tray with amusement.

“You eat Japanese food?” she asked.

“Hai,” said Dominic. “Arigato.”

At a certain point during the interview, Dominic tried to separate two pieces of seaweed. The Japanese reporter offered to separate it for him, and he handed it to her.

She handed it back in several pieces, and Dominic bowed a little and said “Arigato!” again.

At another point during the interview, Billy Boyd lifted the cover of Dominic’s rice bowl and snitched several grains. This garnered the first fully awake reaction from Dominic.

Dominic glared at Billy.

Billy opened his eyes widely and innocently.

“That’s nice,” muttered Dominic.

I asked Dominic which of his many cut scenes he most wanted to see in the Extended DVD.

“Any of them, really,” said Dominic, chewing seaweed. “Twelve of my scenes were cut.”

I also asked about the inspiration behind the song Half-fling from the album Pandemoniumfromamerica .

“We’ve started to get questions about that? Amazing,” Dominic said to Billy. “The song is based on an invented language that Elijah and I have. We speak it when we’re tired.” Dominic gave an example, a falsetto squeek that sounded like Chipmunks gibberish.

Dominic denied that the song was an ironic send up of Hobbit life, despite the name. “Viggo named it,” Dominic said.

Dominic also wore a Carbon Neutral t-shirt, and asked that we all check it out.

Billy talked about the difference between Peter Jackson & Peter Weir, and said that with both of them, they were visionary and experimental, etc. etc. Basically, he took the opportunity to praise them both.

Billy also talked about the maturation of Pippin , and the changes he goes through in Return of the King – changes that are spoilers, really, so I won’t go into them here.

Dominic ended by grabbing Billy into a huge cuddle. “I get to spend Christmas and New Year with Billy!”

“Scotland?” I asked.

“The Lake District,” said Billy.

“Will you be hunting again?”

“Perhaps we’ll try fishing this time!”

[ source: TORn ]

Is it strange to get women to scream with the raise of your hand?

I’m a big fan of the ladies so to have them come to me without any real effort is amazing.

Can you explain just how crazy the World Premiere was?

120,000 people on the streets of New Zealand screaming out people’s names and going crazy. It was kind of surreal more than anything else. We lived there for a year and half. You could walk down the streets, it was quiet and no one knew who we were. We were going about our daily lives and then suddenly 125,000 people just [screamed at us]. It was crazy, but we enjoyed ourselves. It feels like home.

Is it possible to prepare yourself for this kind of craziness?

I don’t think you ever truly prepare yourself for millions of people like this. It’s a lot of real craziness. You just get your head around the fact that people love what you’re doing, you know? But it’s all fading away and it’s all coming back again. You can’t rely on it for your own happiness.

Do you think you’ll ever be part of something this huge again?

I don’t know. I think it’s a hard thing to try and get your head around. It was voted the most popular book of the 20th century. To turn that into a film, you’re already going to have a huge fan base. I just don’t think [another project's] going to be as big as all that. It’s okay; you’ve got to enjoy it while it’s happening.

What will you miss the most about the whole Middle Earth experience?

Probably being in New Zealand and hanging out with my friends.

Everyone seems to have fallen in love with New Zealand.

I plan to get a house there and bring up my family there, if I ever have one.

When you think back on shooting, does one particular day spring to mind?

I remember filming the first day on the Lothlorien Flat, which is where the whole fellowship were together for the first day. The nine of us, myself, Elijah, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, Viggo, John Rhys-Davies, Ian McKellen, Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom, all together – the nine boys who defined the fellowship. I looked around and I thought, “So this is it. These are the people that are going to take us through this journey.” And it seemed to make sense to me. It seemed to be a very powerful, strong group of people. I thought, “Well, I’m in the right movie.”

Was there ever a day when you questioned why you’d taken on this commitment?

Never, no. I mean we were tired, we were exhausted, but I never once thought I’d made the wrong decision. How can you? It’s the perfect job.

What do you think about Peter Jackson’s chances for an Oscar this time?

You would hope that it’s quite strong. It’s a cynical world so you just have to keep your fingers crossed. We all hope so. We think he’s a great director; we think it’s a great picture.

Do you have a favorite moment from the trilogy?

I love the scene where Merry and Pippin come back together in the third movie. They’d been away for the best part of two hours. For the strongest friendship in Middle Earth to come back together and to see it onscreen is very strong.

Did you anticipate this level of success for the movies?

I don’t think you can think about how big it’s going to be. It’s hard to put any of this into words. You just enjoy yourself and have a great time and if it’s going to be a commercial success as well as an artistic success then you’ve cracked it.

What was the biggest challenge for you in working on the trilogy?

I think probably the most taxing thing about the whole job was being so exhausted, but we got through it. If the one thing that gets you down is that you’re tired, then it’s no bad thing for a young man.

Now that filming is complete, how does it feel?

It’s great. We’re all different, we’ve all changed, we’ve all grown up a little bit, but we love each other. We all look after each other and support each other. Billy [Boyd] and I went down to Mexico to see Orlando [Bloom] when he was working on “Troy.” We went to see Billy in a play. I went to see Elijah [Wood] in New York when he was filming. We just all look after each other. We care about each other. Hopefully that will continue to happen. We’re a brotherhood, we’re a fellowship – it’s true.

How has life changed for you because of these films?

I live in LA and I read scripts that I might not have read for a long time. There’s a lot more going on. I’m happy and I’m still doing the right things, and I still hold a lot of importance in my family and in my friends.

[ source: about ]

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• Exclusive: starDom San Deigo Comic Con, 24 July 2004 (365)
• Transcript: San Deigo Comic Con, 24 July 2004 (215)

TRANSCRIPT
Evangeline Lilly: I’m sorry, excuse me.

Dominic Monaghan: [rolling eyes] Actresses.

starDom: We’re Lost-TV and DomMonaghan.com, starDom, and we’re here with Dominic Monaghan to talk a little bit about the project…

Dom: Right.

starDom: ..and what he’s doing over there in Hawaii. And uh, things of that nature…

Dom: Well, you know a little bit about Lost.

starDom: Yes. Everybody seems to have some issues. Charlie has some issues.

Dom: Yeah. Everyone has… their uh history…

[Evangeline Lilly walks in front of camera.]

Dom: [rolling eyes] Actresses. Um, you know, we all… we all come to the island with certain things that we have to face, because, you know, we’re now coming to a position where those demons are going to rise up, so it’s an interesting concept, and I’m really excited to see what the rest of the scripts are going to look like

starDom: And I assume it’s obviously going to evolve…it’s television… so it’ll evolve…

Dom: Well, he’ll change. The Charlie that you initially meet isn’t going to be the Charlie you’re gonna end up with, I guess…..you know he has to get off drugs and everything

starDom: He’s gonna run out.

Dom: He’s gonna run out. So he’s gonna… I don’t think he’s going to step up at the moment. He seems to be slightly incompetent at the moment, so that’s something that I think is going to change.

starDom: Charlie’s a musician.

Dom: Yes.

starDom: You’re into music.

Dom: Yes.

starDom: Do the two of you have the same musical taste or is it different?

Dom: I think Charlie’s probably a little bit more on a rock tick. I mean, I love rock music, but I think he’s strictly rock, and I don’t know if he really does too much else. More kind of…. you know, I enjoy rap music and I listen to different, you know, different styles. Charlie’s in a rock band, and I’m assuming that most of his interest … is invariably going to be rock.

starDom: So what are you listening to now?”

Dom: At the moment I’m listening to a lot of DJ Shadow, um DJ Dangermouse, uh, Keane, some Coldplay, um, Lifted, The Postal Service, Dntel, uh, Death Cab for Cutie, a lot of old Van Morrison…

starDom: Oh yeah.

Dom: Love that, listening to, just, I mean, a lot of stuff.

starDom: I was speaking out here briefly with Bryan and he mentioned you guys moved over there.

Dom: Yeah.

starDom: Lock, stock, and barrel?

Dom: Pretty much. I still have a house in LA.

starDom: What do you do about the bugs and the snake?”

Dom: I have a friend at the moment who’s looking after my snake, and my spider is with someone in Santa Monica, so she’s being looked after.

starDom: OK, so what about Gizmo?

Dom: Gizmo is with a friend, and she’s probably going to move permanently, I think I’m going to give her to a guy who lives in North Hollywood. So they get passed around.

starDom: What kind of a snake is it?

Dom: She’s an albino garter snake. She’s called ‘Blink.’

starDom: Blink? They don’t.

Dom: …Exactly!

starDom: Apparently because they don’t.

Dom: Snakes don’t blink.

starDom: So you’re over there surfing.

Dom: Doing a little bit of surfing, yeah.

starDom: Got a favorite surf spot?

Dom: Uh, there’s a place called ‘lighthouse’ which is near Diamond Head that’s kinda cool…… Waikiki I’ve been out a little bit, you know…

starDom: There are a lot of projects that have obviously been put on hold now because you’re going to be over there, and you mentioned you’re going into the studio again with Viggo…

Dom: Yeah, yeah.

starDom: And theatre– any particular theatre role…

Dom: Well, I went to meet with a bunch of theaters in London before I did Lost. Uh, The Royal Court, the National, the Donmar, the Almeida……all these great theatres in London, just to see what was happening this year. And you know, there was some good stuff, nothing that really grabbed me, and I want to get back on stage at some point in London. And, you know, future projects…. I mean, it’s cool, cause I’ll be working and I’ll be on hiatus and I can do a couple films…

starDom: You had also at one point had mentioned a Discovery Channel show, you know, Sir David Attenborough. I think it’s really…How does ‘Sir Dominic Monaghan’ sound to you?

Dom: It sounds good!

starDom: Doesn’t it sound good?

Dom: Yeah.

starDom: Now we’ve got a couple of questions that the fans have: Do you have a middle name?

Dom: Bernard Patrick Luke.

starDom: Really? You’re kidding!

Dom: Nah! I’m named after both my grandparents.

starDom: Bernard Patrick….

Dom: My mom’s father is called Bernard, and my grandfather is called Patrick…

starDom: Can I say that?

Dom: Yeah, I don’t mind. Bernard Patrick Luke.

starDom: Wow, that’s all over the map.

Dom: I know. It’s crazy, huh?

starDom: No wonder you just took two of them………Let’s just take the top two!

Dom: Yeah.

starDom: Your favorite color?

Dom: Now that’s an interesting thing. Cause my favorite color to wear is probably blue. And I like gray. I like painting in reds and blacks…so…it flips…yellow, I’m wearing a lot of yellow…

starDom: Yeah. Whatever your mood is.

starDom: Thank you.

Dom: All right, it’s nice to see you again.

starDom: We don’t want to keep you from your lunch.

Dom: [looks directly into camera] It’s nice to see you!

From Dom's 2008 Exhibit "Happy Accidents"

About Happy Accidents, 03 April 2008
By: The Fragmented Eye

• Exclusive: starDom San Deigo Comic Con, 24 July 2004 (365)

The Fragmented Eye: Would you do a shout-out to everyone at starDom?

Dominic Monaghan: Absolutely. Well, are people listening right now?

TFE: No, it’s being recorded so I can type it up.

DM: In print. Like I said to you when I saw you, it’s one of the few, if only, websites associated with me that I actually check out, ’cause there’s a lot of kind of embarrassing ones out there and ones that, you know, don’t really document the truth. But I really like starDom and I think the photos that you choose are always really good too.

TFE: They’ll be happy to hear that.

DM: I hope so.

TFE: The number one question that they have for you is, you’ve kind of outpriced a lot of your market with your photos, and they want to know if you’ll do a book or a print set or something that they can actually have.

DM: Yeah, there’s definitely a book coming out. I actually sat down and chatted with someone yesterday about a book.

You know, the reason why the photos are expensive is simply the fact that, if you’re printing something as big as the biggest print in the gallery, that’s costing you about five or six hundred dollars just to print one print and then to frame that is close to about seven or eight hundred dollars. Obviously I have to mark up the price because I need the gallery to make some money and I really want this orangutan charity to make some money, too. So, I totally appreciate that the majority of the people would not necessarily be going to be able to spend that amount of money.

But I’m coming out with a book. I think the book is probably going to be called “Happy Accidents” as well. I’m probably going to include about four or five extra prints in the book that you won’t see in the show and probably about seven or eight poems that go with certain photos in the gallery. So, that should be out hopefully by the end of the year.

We’re also talking about maybe moving the gallery, if anyone missed it, moving the show I should say, to possibly New York and then England and then maybe Germany and Spain. So there’s a lot going on with those pictures.

TFE: When did you first start thinking about putting an exhibit together?

DM: I found myself with about five and a half thousand pictures in my iPhoto gallery, and and I just thought, well, I’m going to try to make a file where I can just run that as my desktop and I won’t be embarrassed by some of the pictures that I don’t like. And then it became a mission to find my favourite two hundred pictures, so it went from five thousand to two thousand and from two thousand to a thousand, then five hundred, then two hundred and fifty and it took me about a year and a half to find my favourite two hundred.

And, as I was looking at my favourite two hundred, I thought, there’s some real themes there. There’s themes of people. There’s themes of nature, due to my passion with the natural world. There’s a lot of shots of these things called “happy accidents,” which are my favourite shots. So I thought, well, maybe I’ll put them into categories and then, from there, I showed them to a couple of people at my agent’s office and, you know, Viggo and Elijah and people like that. Everyone said, you know, you should do a show or bring out a book, so it was just kind of a natural progression from there.

TFE: What was the process of putting the show together?

DM: I tried put them in an order that I would like to see them walking around a gallery in terms of theme and in terms of colour coding, so that you’re not moving from a vibrant blue to an electric red. I wanted to see the colour scheme kind of complement the picture that it was next to. I wanted to find a space that was intimate and a place that I could invite my friends.

I just kept looking at these pictures and playing with them and cropping them and working out ones that were good but were too personal or working out ones that didn’t make sense.

Then I met with a guy called David Galgano, who runs the Hamilton Selway Gallery, and I showed him my pictures and he flipped out. He said that he loved them and showed me his space and it was the perfect space for the photographs. And then I went to a digital photography studio in Culver City called DigitalFusion and I worked with a guy called Hugh Milstein and I worked with him for about ten days on the pictures in terms of trying to explain the story that I’m trying to tell with each picture and then from there doing a small amount of tweaking.

You know, a lot of photography students came into the gallery and asked if I’d played around with the pictures a lot and I honestly haven’t. I complemented a few of the natural colors that were in the pictures. I cropped some things out that didn’t need to belong there. I highlighted a couple of things. But for the most part what you see is what you get.

TFE: Let’s talk about about some of the individual photos. Let’s start with eye fragment, because it’s right in front of me.

DM: What? Eye Frag…? Which one?

TFE: Eye fragment?

DM: Oh. It’s called “Eye Frgt.,” because obviously I took out a couple of the words, um, of the letters in “forget.”

TFE: Oh, OK.

DM: The top left hand corner spells out F R G T.

TFE: Yeah. Did you want to talk about that?

DM: Sure. That picture’s about my first year in L.A. My first year in L.A. was a kind of year that I was a little lost and a little all over the place and that picture talks to me about that first year in L.A.

There’s a girl’s eye in the center of the frame who I was spending a lot of time with in L.A. at that point. There’s a lot of stop signs and a lot of directional signs, which was my way of understanding the fact that I was getting lost in a city that I didn’t know.

There’s pictures of my eye, but not directly looking at the camera too much, kind of looking away from the camera and looking in different directions and that’s based on the fact that I was having a hard time looking at my reflection at that point. There is a couple of boom [?] shots of an airline bag cause I was doing a lot of flying, flying on crappy kind of planes at that point. I think… what else is there? That might be it.

Ah, there’s a shot of my toenail painted in red toenail polish. One of my favourite things about that first year in LA was I went down to Mexico. Billy Boyd was making a film called Master and Commander and I went down to Mexico for about six weeks and Billy and I both painted our nails red to show the passing of time. And that was about halfway through that period and you can see that there’s a big gap between where I had originally painted my toenail and where it got chewed on. So, it’s essentially about my first year in LA, which, obviously, there are elements of that that I would like to forget.

TFE:Well, we’ll move on then.

DM:Yeah.

TFE:Well, I have to ask about Christmas Day because I bought it.

DM: Yeah. Where are you going to hang it?

TFE: In my bedroom, I think.

DM: Oh, that’s a little freaky.

TFE: No, it’s not. It’s just the only place I have space.

DM: Well, we’re printing orders today so, hopefully, you should get that within the next ten days or so.

Christmas Day was shot on Christmas Day in Manchester. My parents had gone to bed. My brother was out doing something with friends. And I took all the Christmas lights off the tree and I wrapped them around me ’cause I was kind of bored and I wanted to see what it looked like on the camera and then I ended up kind of laying down in front of the camera and taking pictures. You know, I don’t use a flash that much. I always like to play around with light and I was playing around with a lot of light, a lot of overly-lit kind of fairy lights on my face to see what it looked like and it was just a really great final result, so that’s one of my favorites in the show. I was really happy you bought it.

TFE: Thanks.

TFE:Let’s talk about some of your happy accidents. What about the New York, there’s three in a series?

DM: Yeah. My agent actually bought those. The head of my agency, a guy called Jim Gosnell, bought three of them for the office, which was really cool.

They were shot when we did the Two Towers premiere. We, uh, we were drive [driving] around New York and we ended up getting to a point where we were close enough to the hotel that I knew where I was and I jumped out.

And I wanted to try and capture New York as I always considered it, which was more kind of like Gotham City. I’m a big comic book fan. I’m a big Batman fan. And I’d always associate New York with Gotham City, so I wanted to get the kind of slightly hectic, slightly intimidating, dark skylines with the skyscrapers. You know, we don’t have skyscrapers in England in the way that you guys have skyscrapers and, when you first see them, they’re quite powerful and quite intimidating, so I wanted to try and capture that and have it look a little moody and a little scary, as if you might see Batman at some point in the corner. And there’s a couple of nice shots of the moon in there too, which is another thing I always associate with Batman and Gotham City, too.

So I’m just a big fan of New York. I’ve taken a lot of pictures. There are about four or five pictures of New York that didn’t quite make it into the show. I was going to do a big kind of New York theme but they just didn’t quite make it.

TFE: Salvia?

DM: Salvia. Yeah. Salvia is a drug. It’s an agave root cactus that, I guess, is ingested and kind of causes hallucinogenic visions and stuff. And I’d been reading about it and was kind of interested in it as a kind of hallucinogenic idea.

And I went to a Yankees game and I stood outside with a friend of mine talking about this plant and I started taking pictures of traffic driving by and, like I said, I don’t tend to use the flash and, yeah, I was getting these really amazing shots of these crazy, out-there, hallucinogenic colours and we were having this conversation about salvia and I thought there was some slightly magical thing that was going on whereby the conversation that we were having was actually dictating the colors that I was seeing through the camera lens, so that’s the reason I called it Salvia.

TFE: You have two horses in your show.

DM: Yeah, yeah. Well, the first one that I took was My Ghost Horse, which was in Japan. There was a huge piece of material drying out in Japan. It had been dipped in ink and it was drying out on a clothesline. And I just happened to be sitting there watching it dry, drinking a cup of green tea and I just saw this image of this horse come through and I was kind of astounded by what I saw, so I tried to capture it and it kind of became a lucky kind of a guardian angel type character in my mind.

And then I went to Hawaii to film Lost and we filmed the pilot. And we were in this field and there was a stable, a kind of paddock with a horse, and he looked quite worse for wear. He was very thin and quite moody and wouldn’t really eat too much and he just looked like he was kind of dying, you know. And I wrote a poem about him when I was spending time there about the fact that he wanted to get out and wanted to leave his stable. He didn’t want to run around any more and he didn’t want to eat apples or eat sugar lumps. He just wanted to either be free or die. And I found out a week or so later that I think the horse passed away, so it just seemed like the final time that anyone got a chance to really capture this horse before he kind of passed over to the other side.

That one, the thing with the horse, too, that got bought as well, some of my favourite ones got bought, so I was really happy about that that the ones that I like the most were the ones that seemed to get bought.

TFE: What about your, uh, it’s just called Spider?

DM: Uh, yeah. Is that just the one…?

TFE: Against black.

DM: The one kind of floating in space. You know, I’d just bought a macro lens which shoots very, very small images very close up. I’d been playing around with the idea of negative space, so I wanted to have a lot of negative space and then this kind of planet floating in space but the planet floating in space is a spider.

You know, I’m a big fan of spiders. I think they’re an amazing animal and very successful and deserve our respect. [They] behave in a way that is very kind of zen, you know. They don’t do anything, they don’t waste their time. They do everything that makes sense and then apart from that they just sit and rest and meditate. I wanted to capture this spider kind of floating in space. It was one of my first kind of experiments with my macro lens and, from there, I then took some photos of the ants, [unintelligible] mosquito, and obviously the spider attacking the ant. All three of those were shot with a macro lens.

TFE: They’re amazing, to get that focus.

DM: Yeah. It’s very difficult. It’s one of the hardest things to shoot because you have to be very still. You can’t even breathe while you’re taking the picture because everything’ll shake, so you have to spend a long time getting yourself set and try to get yourself into a position where you’ll be a still as possible and don’t disturb the animal and just, you know, take the shot until you get it.

TFE: Slava’s Snow Show?

DM: Yes. Slava’s Snow Show is a theatrical piece put on by a clown called Slava who used to be in Cirque de Soleil, who then defected and then started his own theatrical piece which is essentially the story of three clowns, slightly melancholic clowns, and it ends with a huge man-made snow show in the theatre. It’s one of my favorite experiences in the theatre ever.

The first time I actually saw it was in Sydney with Orlando and Billy and Elijah and we all went to the show. We were like little kids. We stayed in the theatre for about half an hour having fake snowball fights with each other. And then I went to see it in New York, which is where I captured the photo, and what I was trying to capture was that feeling of joy, that feeling of celebration and of a party that happened at the end of the show.

Actually, my best friend in the world, a guy who I’ve known since I was seven years old, emailed me last night and said that his favourite piece in the show was Slava’s Snow Show, so that was really good, ’cause, you know. I mean, all the pictures in the show have a great meaning to me but some of them mean a lot more than others and Slava’s Snow Show is definitely up at the top of the chart there.

TFE: There’s one called Jim Morrison?

DM: Yeah, I tend to associate birds of prey with Jim Morrison. They have a kind of foreboding coolness and a stealth-like quality to them and I always think about birds of prey wearing leather jacket for some reason. It’s just an image that I’ve always had in my head that they’re so cool, they kind of fly around with Fonzie leather jackets on.

I was in Canada going for a kind of hike and managed to see a hawk, quite a few hawks actually, and this one hawk just burst out of the trees and we kind of startled it out of its roost and managed to get some shots of it while it was circling back around to check us out.

They’re just very powerful animals and I have a lot of respect for them. I didn’t do a lot with that picture apart from just drain out a lot of the natural color and, um, and that was it.

TFE: I have to ask you about your photos of Billy. Do you want to say anything about that?

DM: Well, I’m in love with him, you know. If I was a gay man I would actively pursue him. Billy and I have had a relationship over the years that is one of my favourite friendships that I’ve had. He’s an incredibly charming guy and someone who I always enjoy spending time with and just a very close personal friend and someone who gets me. You know, there’s not a lot of people out there that I really feel get me and Billy got me in an effortless way.

So he’s one of my favourite subjects to shoot. You know, not only is he comfortable in front of the camera when I’m there, but he’s also, uh, he gives something. He exudes something to the camera.

I got a chance to show Billy the show. He’s actually in town right now, so I got a chance to show, give him a kind of private tour of the show. I told him that I was considering calling the show “I’m in Love With Billy Boyd,” just because there’s so many pictures of him.

I think my favorite one is probably the one that says Hobbit. I mean I think that captures a part of Billy that not that many people see. He has a great resonance and a great power about him and he looked very, very cool in that shot.

And then I like the shot called It Must Be Love. It was a black and white shot and I coloured a little yellow bird in the top left-hand corner just to kind of try and hopefully make people smile and laugh, because in the shot itself, Billy and I are at the premiere of the Return of the King in Japan, and we’re just having a great time. We enjoy each other’s company and we’re just smiling and having fun and I wanted that to come across in the photo that we’re both so happy and comfortable in each other’s company.

TFE: What’s the status of your movie with Billy?

DM: We wrote a treatment for the movie and we shopped it around to a few people and it had a kind of organized crime theme and a lot of people had a problem with the organized crime theme. So, we then went back and started rethinking the idea.

But, you know, obviously, in between that, Billy’s had a baby and he’s been busy working in Scotland and I was doing this TV show Lost, so I’ve been kind of a little busy too, so it’s kind of in lieu [limbo?] right now.

But Billy’s in town right now and we spent a little of time talking about what will do next. We’re hoping that, at some point in the future, it will happen. We have great kind of comradery on camera together and, fingers crossed, at some point in the future it will happen.

TFE: One last question about your tattoo or I’ll get kicked.

DM: ‘K, what do you want to know? Which tattoo?

TFE: The new one. You have a new tattoo.

DM: Ah, I do. I do have a new one. I have a new one that says, “Life Imitates Art.”

It’s what I tend to do with my tattoos is, if I have an idea in my head, I tend to roll it around for a year or two before I consider doing anything with it. And I had two things I was going to do and “Life Imitates Art” was the one that kind of stole the show.

I found that, throughout my life, whatever art I’m associated with tends to be showing where I’m at in my life and, you know, this is just a small part of it, but I was leaving an island and leaving a show and leaving a bunch of people that I liked and coming back into a place that I’d not been for a long time. Meanwhile, on the actual show itself, Charlie was leaving the island and leaving a bunch of people that he liked and going to a place that he’d not been before and a lot of uncharted territory. And that was one of the small things.

But, I mean, there’s just, it’s always been that, you know, I surround myself with art. I take pictures. I paint. I write. I find that I have to try to get it out on a daily basis. I tend to have the ability to look at that art in a week or in a few days later or even a few months later and realize that that art is sometimes pre-empting where I’m going in my life or predicting where I’ll end up or sometimes just complementing where my head-space is at, but I can’t see at the time. So, I think that art is a truly powerful medium and I also think that it has sometimes the ability to foresee a potential future for you. I wanted to give my compliments to art in general.

I was just going to write “art,” because I believe in art and I think it’s great and I’m associated with art. But then I thought that I should push it one further. You know, it’s an Oscar Wilde quote and obviously Oscar Wilde had a few great things to say.

And it’s just a phrase that I find myself saying quite a lot to people and giving as a piece of advice. If anyone’s ever in a bad way, I always say that that you should write that down or you should try and paint or you should go do something. You should try and get it out because it shouldn’t stay in your body. You should try to get it out so that you can understand it and you can look back on it in the past.

So, it was just my way of kind of saying thank you to the fact that I’ve been able to tap into that and I’ve been able to use it as a kind of piece of therapy in a way.

TFE: Dominic, thank you so much for doing the interview.

DM: You’re more than welcome. When are you going to post it up?

TFE: As soon as I can, like, decipher it off the tape.

DM: Well, good luck with it and I’ll look out for it and, um, thank you for buying my picture.

TFE: You’re welcome.

DM: And I’m sure I’ll see you around. Take care. Bye.

An audio clip from this interview can be found in the audio section, called Dom talks about starDom.

[ Thanks to The Fragmented Eye for doing such a great interview, Dom for being such a generous interviewee and also thanks to msil for helping with the transcription. ]