Strange Homecoming : Local Graduate Finds Success in Films

When Jean-Marc Barr was a senior at Mission Bay High School in 1978, the theme for the school’s homecoming dance was “Hollywood.”

“We came in an old Rolls-Royce . . . and the whole school was lined up right here, along the doors, like in a Hollywood opening,” the 27-year-old actor said Monday evening as he toured the grounds of his old high school. “We were late, because I locked the keys in the car, and (my girlfriend) was supposed to be at this homecoming dinner.”

Barr, who now lives in London, is in San Diego this week visiting his family and helping Weintraub Entertainment Group promote the film “The Big Blue,” in which he co-stars with Rosanna Arquette. The movie opens Friday nationwide.

Barr left San Diego after high school and attended Humboldt State University in Northern California and UCLA before moving to Paris to study philosophy and cinema at the Sorbonne. He said he worked in many stage productions in Europe before landing his first film role, that of a Canadian soldier in John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory,” which was nominated for a best-picture Oscar this year.

He has been back to San Diego since, but this is the first time he has come home as the star of a movie about to open here. Barr, who kept repeating how weird it felt to be seeing old hangouts like the high school and the beach at Sunset Cliffs where he used to body-surf, said he won’t attend the class of ‘78’s 10-year reunion, because he will be in Europe promoting “The Big Blue.”

To tell the truth, said Barr--who was both the captain of his high school football team and the winner of his class’ Outstanding Student award--he’s not sure he would attend even if he could.

“I probably would’ve gone” to the reunion, he said as he walked across Mission Bay High’s football field, then quickly changed his mind and said maybe he wouldn’t have.

“It’s so scary to go back and see all your friends married, and then try to explain to them what you’ve been doing.”

In “The Big Blue,” a love story with about half the world’s most gorgeous waterfront scenery as its backdrop, Barr plays a diver who is more comfortable hanging on to the fins of dolphins than being in the arms of Rosanna Arquette, the lovesick American insurance agent who follows him around the world.

The film, directed by Frenchman Luc Besson, is based on a real character named Jacques Mayol, who once held the world record for free diving--a dangerous sport in which divers plunge straight down into the sea without breathing apparatus.

Mayol, now in his 60s, once set a world record with a dive of more than 300 feet. In “The Big Blue,” Barr’s character gets drawn into a desperate and potentially lethal competition with his boyhood friend.

Despite the confidence that underlies his constant eye contact and easy joking, Barr said he was surprised he got the role in “The Big Blue.”

“This was my first lead role,” he said. “When I went for my screen test, the people I was up against were people like Mel Gibson, Nicolas Cage, Matthew Modine. I wasn’t intimidated. I just didn’t think I had a chance.”

“When they offered me the part, I lost my legs,” he said.

Barr got them back fast enough for the nine months of shooting in locations along the French Riviera, in the waters off Sicily, Corsica, the Virgin Islands, the Bahamas and Greece, in the mountains of Peru and the Alps, and in Paris and New York.

He learned free diving so he could do all of his own stunts for the movie.

“We dove for four months under the water--25, 30 times a day to 120, 130 feet without breathing,” he said. “We were in the south of France, and it was just me, the director, (actor) Jean Reno and the guy to pull the weight. We took a weight and prepared for 3 minutes--hyperventilating, breathing--and you go down. You give yourself time. It’s a very spiritual thing.”

The pull of the sea was sometimes as strong for him as it was for his character, Barr admitted.

“You feel like you could stay down there forever. There’s no one around. The boat that you were on is about this big now,” he said, measuring roughly an inch with his fingers. “The people you’re with are about this big now. Your name doesn’t mean anything down there. There’s no telephone bills, there’s nothing. And a lot of people actually just swim away because they’re so seduced by it.”

Barr almost joined those people during the filming.

“They almost had to come down and get me because I just didn’t want to come up,” he said. “You know, you might be depressed one day, you might not feel like it’s worth it anymore, and you just want to stay down there. It’s just much happier.”

Such risks did little to dampen Barr’s enthusiasm for the film, which his 25-year-old sister, Nicolette Barr, helped edit.

“Every individual has a link with the sea, something very mystical, something very deep, and they really can’t communicate it in words,” he said. “Whereas ‘The Big Blue’ does that.

“We all came from the sea, you know, in the process of evolution. All this film is doing is just showing this kind of magic.

“You learn a lot about the dolphins, too,” he said. “We have a lot to learn from those guys. They don’t know what aggressiveness is about. All they do all day is they eat, they play, they make love about five, six times a day, so you can see why they’re smiling all the time. They’ve really figured it out.

“I really made out on this deal. I got to touch the dolphins, I got to touch Rosanna Arquette, and I got paid for it.”

If Barr sounded a little flip, he said, it was because he was tired. He has been on a promotional tour for the movie throughout the United States and had spent the night before helping an actress who had apparently had a bad reaction to drugs at a party he attended.

“This was just a young girl,” he said. “I didn’t even know who she was. She mixed something, smoked pot and drank. She just went, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying.’ You know, you’re trying to comfort the poor girl--’You’re not dying’--and you’re walking her down the street.

“I’ve seen many people go through that. I guess the first time they smoke, they get really paranoid. But you know, she cut her hand a little because she hit a window.”

Barr hasn’t exactly followed a direct route to success as an actor. In addition to playing football in high school (he was a lineman on offense and a linebacker on defense), he was a member of the wrestling team. During the summers, he body-surfed and hung out at Sunset Cliffs, and worked at the seminary at St. Brigid Catholic Church in Pacific Beach. For a while, he said, he hoped to become a priest.

He said his cross-cultural perspective--his mother is French and his father is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel--might have had something to do with his leaps from Humboldt State and UCLA to the Sorbonne and finally London’s Guild Hall School of Music and Drama. At Guild Hall, he started out doing Shakespeare on stage.

“I was lucky because I had a European influence and I had an escape hatch,” he said, adding that he might otherwise have followed his father’s example and joined the Air Force.

Besides his role in “Hope and Glory,” Barr had supporting roles in Brian Gilbert’s feature “French Lesson,” the TV movie “Going for the Gold: The Bill Johnson Story,” and Richard Avedon’s commercials for Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume.

Europe is a place Barr mentions repeatedly and longingly, particularly when he considers his future in acting.

“I’m trying to build the bridge between the two continents in terms of my acting,” he said.

Upcoming projects aren’t definite yet, he said, but ideally “in the next role, I’m going to kick them in the back of the head to show them that I’m not an angel.”

“With this picture, I don’t know if I’ll make movies in America (again),” he said. “I’m not the type of guy that they need, because I’m picky and I don’t really need the money.”

In the meantime, Barr’s past as a football player in San Diego has already followed him to London, where he now lives.

“We used to play Lincoln High School” in Southeast San Diego, Barr said. “I was the same age as Marcus Allen, and we’d always play each other. So I was in London, watching the Super Bowl when the Raiders were in a few years back. I turned on the TV and there you see Marcus Allen. I about flipped.

“He won Most Valuable Player, this guy you played with in high school. You know, it’s so weird.”