DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
Tim Roth I’m Dave Davies in for Terry Disgusting, that’s down this week. Our visitor, actor Tim Roth, might be best known for his tasks in Quentin Tarantino films, including “Tank Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction,” wherever his try to deprive a customer-led to a memorable confrontation with Samuel L. Jackson’s character.
Roth is English, and he is appeared in over 100 shows and TV shows on both parties of the Atlantic. He’s presently featuring in the Amazon line “Jar Star,” and he stars in a brand new movie focused by Francois Girard called “The Song Of Names.” Roth plays Martin Simmonds, an Englishman who grew up in the 1930s and the daughter of an audio publisher. On the eve of Earth War II, the household needed a 9-year-old keyboard prodigy – a Jewish kid from Poland – and nurtured his talent. But he was concerned about his family back in Poland, which the Nazis overran.
In the 1950s, Martin’s dad uses a fortune to set up a coming-out show for the violinist, at the same time 21, who strangely does not show for the show and disappears. In this scene decades later, Martin has tracked him down. Clive Owen performs the violinist. They’re in the front seat of a minivan, speaking for the first time in 35 years. Roth’s character Martin says first.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “THE SONG OF NAMES”)
TIM ROTH: (As Martin) You have number [expletive] strategy, do you? Why did you get it done?
CLIVE OWEN: (As David) I’m not sure you’d understand. You know, when I forgot the Sacred One, it needed him four decades to find me. It’s taken you 35 – not bad.
ROTH: (As Martin) Yeah. Effectively, your Lord did not punish you, but probably I will.
OWEN: (As David) Oh, so may he, in time. Blessed be his name.
ROTH: (As Martin) My father set everything he had into you, you ungrateful bastard – Hebrew lessons, club mitzvah, violin. He treated you like a well-liked daughter for 12 [expletive] decades, and then you only buggered down without a word. He believed you’re lifeless, Dov. He lost everything that night. And two months later, he dies together with your name on his lips.
DAVIES: And that’s our visitor, Tim Roth, in the new movie “The Song Of Names.” Tim Roth, pleasant to FRESH AIR – good to own you.
ROTH: Thank you.
DAVIES: What appealed to you about this position, this challenge?
ROTH: Effectively, actually, when they brought it in my experience, it had been about two Jewish people, and my character was Jewish. And so it’d be good to be a private conversation in a sense. And I talked to the maker and the manager and – only to provide my quick reaction to the script. And I thought that it might be intriguing if one side of the equation was not Jewish and so – did not realize that neighborhood, and it had been a puzzle to him. Then when he began to discover that and solve that, we could get the audience along – the audience that was not of a Jewish faith along with him on that type of trip and that type of – that discovery.
And they only – they got on that. So I thought, well, these men, you know, are thrilled and exciting. And the story was beautiful. It’s just a love story in one – in a single regard, it’s only a love story between these two guys, these two guys, over three subsections of life.
DAVIES: You know, this story is all about beautiful audio. Still, it is also quite definitely about the Holocaust since the precise answer to the puzzle of this violinist’s disappearance is connected to the Holocaust and the importance of recalling people who perished and honored them.
