How Greg Louganis Inspired Prometheus
From the outtakes of our June 2012 interview with Michael Fassbender:
Greg Louganis dominated the world of competitive diving in the 1980s, winning four Olympic gold medals, but even though he became one of those rare athletes whose fame at the time transcended their specific sport, he is still perhaps an unlikely reference for a thirtysomething actor raised in Ireland. Michael Fassbender can only explain it like this: sometimes when he is reading a script over and over, things just appear in his head. “A bubble comes out,” he says. “A lot of what I do would be intuition. For some reason I got this visual image of Greg Louganis walking toward the end of a high diving block.” Once the notion had entered his mind, it would not leave. “And I’ve learned to recognize those gut instincts and go with them more often than not. Time and experience allows you to recognize that they’re things you should pay attention to.”
It is not as though Fassbender knew a huge amount about Louganis. He remembers as a child seeing Louganis on TV at the Olympics, and that his mother Adele said Louganis was amazing, and Fassbender remembered that Louganis banged his head on the board once or twice. But that’s about it. As we speak, Fassbender even has to Google Louganis’s name on his iPhone to check whether Louganis is alive or dead. But there was something about the way Louganis walked as he took those last few steps before taking a dive that had stuck in the young Fassbender’s head and it was that which had resurfaced as he read the Prometheus script and mused on how one should best convey the movements of someone who is not human but wishes to appear so. “This economy of movement,” he says. “Total efficiency. If you’re going to move your hand, it’s for a reason. I thought it would suit the character of a robot—everything is totally relaxed, until you need to pick something up and move it over here.”
Louganis, incidentally, is very much alive. “I am stunned, I truly am,” he says when told of this surprising turn of events. “I’m like really really flattered stunned, amazed. I think it’s awesome.” He says that it took other people to point out to him that his physical movement as he prepared to dive was so specific. “I did what I did but I wasn’t fully aware of what I was doing,” he says. “It’s meditation in motion. You watch predatory animals, like a game cat, going after its prey, there’s no excess energy expended. It’s that kind of focus. There’s no excess. Everything is going toward what your goal is.” Of course it’s hard not to notice that the athlete who Fassbender has instinctively chosen as an inspiration for his latest character turns out to be someone who talks about his path to the moment of performance in a way that is strikingly similar to how Fassbender describes what he himself does. “You do the training,” says Louganis, “but once you get there you have to let all of that go and trust your body to do what it was trained to do. Because there’s no thought. There’s just doing it.”
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