GUY PEARCE PUTS ON WARHOL FACE

It was one challenge for Guy Pearce to sound like Andy Warhol in Factory Girl, but looking like the pop silk screen artist was another matter entirely. Guy worked with a make-up artist to transform his chiseled unblemished complexion into Warhol’s less distinct features and almost albino coloring.

Guy talks about what he saw when he looked in the mirror and there was Andy.

“It’s quite fascinating to look in the mirror and go, ‘where did that go. What’s happened to that?’ It was quite a long and complex process for the make-up artist. On some level the bone structure of my face is not too dissimilar to Andy’s anyway but we had a good starting place but it was really highlighting certain areas. I think Andy didn’t have such great skin so it was really about making it look a lot more textured and of course really pale because Andy had hardly any pigment in his skin, he was almost albino, strange looking guy.”

Guy played Andy Warhol during the sixties when he was making underground films and shooting screen tests of his Factory movie star wannabes. On set Guy would actually be shooting the video during these recreations which turned out to be another way he could study Warhol.

“I actually did a lot of videoing on the film which inadvertently became like a prop because Andy himself used to film a lot of stuff. Everything you see in the behind the scenes DVD was shot by me because I was the guy with the video camera. So I videod myself first before we shot anything and really just kind of looked at that and tried to let that sit in my mind as just another element as far as feeling confident whether we were in the right place or not.”

Guy and Sienna Miller who plays Edie Sedgwick visited the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh which currently houses 273 films and 228 four-minute screen tests. The museum also holds the Andy Warhol video collection with almost 4,000 videos including Fifteen Minutes and Factory Diaries as well as unfinished narrative dramas and outtakes.