by Frank Garcia

Commanding attention and serving as the catalyst that propels the plot of 13 Ghosts, Oscar® winner F. Murray Abraham stars as Cyrus, a wealthy, but eccentric industrialist who has an obsessive, life-long interest in the occult. He is determined to capture ghosts.

On a very cold night at an automobile junkyard, Abraham laid face up on top of a junked car, decked out in a black tuxedo and he looked very dead.

The young Matthew Lillard, playing the psychic Rafkin, ran up frantically and discovered the body. He's stunned and shocked to see that Cyrus is dead. Lillard moaned and gnashed his teeth and he's joined by Embeth Davidtz, who's playing Kalina and she, too, became distraught at the sight of Cyrus' death.

Behind the scenes, a remote suburban region is blanketed in darkness, except for an area with a gigantic, bright spotlight hanging in mid-air, its light stabbing through the blackness and illuminating the junkyard. A camera crane swooped down and captured the proceedings under difficult weather conditions. Director Steve Beck repeated the scene numerous times in an attempt to get "just the right take" here at a graveyard for ghosts. Astonishingly, Abraham remained absolutely still on the car between camera setups. For him there was no rest between takes. His concentration was total. In this scene, he's dead. The only betrayal of this illusion was the fact that his breath was visible between takes. When the camera began rolling, Abraham made a greater effort to minimize his breathing.

"This is the beginning of my third week," says Abraham who has an illustrious film and theater career. In 1984 he won an Academy Award for Best Actor in Amadeus, playing court composer Antonio Salieri opposite Tom Hulce who had the title role. "I'm just having a wonderful time. It's an interesting thing that I'm very comfortable with this material and I don't know why. Maybe it's because I did MacBeth. It's coming along very quickly. It's a lot to do with the amazing special effects. The thing that's so exciting about the work is that the special effects people are so good. If you avoid looking at them until the moment of the performance, it's pretty sharp.

"But the best thing is the discovery of the character as performed. That's the best part of the work. It's how it comes off the page and the things that you discover. You find out you're completely wrong in the head, but then you replace with something much better. All the stuff that you visualized that was going to work so beautifully, that you discover is trashed, so you jump to something else. It's the surprise that I really love about this. The difficulty is capturing the surprise on film. That's kind of ghost-like, spirit-like. When that kind of thing inhabits you as an artist, that's spiritual. I think creativity is spiritual. I absolutely believe that."

Recent film and television performances by Abraham includes Finding Forrester (2000) starring Sean Connery, and Noah's Ark (1999), a TV mini-series, but his first love has been performing in the theater. He's appeared in a wide variety of London, Broadway and off-Broadway plays, including James Goldman's Tolstoy, Shakespeare's King Lear and Tony Kushner's Angels in America. But SF fans will recall him under the makeup as the villain Ru'afo in Star Trek Insurrection (1998). He also had a role in the French/Italian feature The Knights of the Quest (2001) which starred Edward Furlong.

"Originally, this man I'm playing playing was extraordinarily more complex," notes Abraham. "His arguments were that we are able to tap into the 'eye,' the Ocularist, the 'eye of hell.' He would do the world a great service by using this boundless power, this God-like power to end war, famine, disease. That was one of my great speeches at the end of this movie. That's one of the reasons I was so interested in it. The questions became philosophic. 'Are you allowed to do these evil things in order to accomplish good?' A delicate question. That's all been cut. Because what you have, instead is a four-hour movie!

"That's what interests me about Cyrus. Any of the great roles I've done, power seems to be intrinsic. I've played Mephistopheles, Faust, searching for power. Much like Mephistopheles is Cyrus. People like Cyrus desires power. I don't know why they want it so. It seems to me it implies a hugely superior intellect which separates them from most of the populace. And that loneliness drives them to something else. [They have a desire for] some kind of control over their own destiny.

"So what we have done is touch on it lightly and discuss myself as God... [and] anyone who does that deserves to be punished. And I think I'm severely punished!"

To help him withstand the grueling, freezing temperatures for the junkyard scene that he must perform in, Abraham dons a heated wetsuit underneath the tuxedo. "It's cold. And they also have wind machines. And the windchill factor really makes it cold," he says. "But that contributes, you see, if you don't think positively about these things, you're finished! If you can't use what's at hand, you might as well go into another business! What happens is that it begins to make your whole frame tremble from the cold."

Abraham was passionate in discussing Sean Hargreaves' art direction achievements in the construction of the glass house. "I thought it was a magic place! I was attached to it. It was my house. I think it was great! I've never seen a set like that my whole life." He heartily agreed that such a construction was "imagination made practical." "That's exactly right! And make it seem real to the audience. It's an expression of this character's will!"

And like co-star Tony Shalhoub, he too, had difficulty navigating his way around the place while working there. "I kept bumping into walls!" he laughs.

Asked if he liked ghost stories, Abraham replied enthusiastically, "Yes! They're the best. There's nothing like a ghosts story. They're universal. Everyone likes a ghost story. It captures people's imagination. It's ancient. It's mythic. It's part of our DNA. There's something in there that's psychically a part of us because everyone responds so instantly."

As an illustration of just how universal ghosts are, in the cultures of the world, Abraham recalled a moment, almost 20 years ago while visiting China to film Marco Polo (1982). "This was before China opened up. It was really quite new to the west. Many children absolutely screamed with horror when they saw us because they hadn't seen people from the west - white skinned people. And to them, white people are ghosts. Ghosts are always white, so they really thought we were coming for them. Ghosts are universal."

When it was time for him to return to being a power-mad megalomaniac, Abraham departed with a final quip, a reference to "his" unusual residence, "I tell you, it's really expensive to get those windows cleaned!"