There are moments in everybody's life where they have to choose. There have been moments where I have had to embrace a painful truth and act accordingly.... I was in a ski resort around the time of the Gulf War, and I had my baby in my arms, and I was by myself, and a man came up to me and called me a Commie cunt and then walked into a bar. I was really shaken because of the extremity of his hatred. I followed him into the bar. He basically just kept laughing at me, he identified himself as a Marine - as if that explained things; I mean, I can't believe Marines are that cowardly, and if he felt that strongly I don't know why he wasn't in the Gulf to begin with, which I pointed out. I didn't say anything particularly astute; it wasn't a satisfying confrontation. He was smug and sitting on his barstool making fun of me and I was standing there shaking with a kid in my arms. Why did you follow him into the bar? Because it was important for me to understand that, to not let him be anonymous. That's what distinguishes a creative person from a noncreative person - curiosity. I really think people divide in two classes, people who want to know and people who don't want to know [laughs]. We're in a culture where we're told not to know. Everything tells you don't ask questions. Every moment that you live you're preparing for death in a way, so that right there is creative. You create this entire life, you buy property, you have children - things that would seem to suggest some kind of permanence and control over your life - and in fact you have absolutely none. I guess because death is so frightening, it certainly is for me, you do spend a lot of your time allowing yourself to be lulled into some kind of complacency, and if you try to stay awake, that is a lifetime experience - to stay awake, and see things and not take things for granted. Whereas complacency kills the artistic impulse. Yes. And people who for one reason or another are very angry have an advantage. One of the things I liked about your performance in Lorenzo's Oil was that within the character's heroism you embraced her unsympathetic side unapologetically. [Laughing.] Read David Denby! He definitely thought it was unsympathetic! That is the challenge. My choice was to not temper it and fight as hard as possible. If your child were in that situation, you'd lose your social graces pretty quickly. I just see her as becoming primal in her clarity in protecting and watching over Lorenzo. One of the things that so worried me about George Miller was that he always talked about these people as Joseph Campbell myth figures and I kept saying, "George, you cannot play a Joseph Campbell hero. Heroism is in hindsight." How do you see the difference in approach between the mother and the father? Michaela is so uncompromising and so pure, the depth of her energy is just astounding. And Augusto had a larger picture and view. They've eliminated a couple of scenes where she has some scientific breakthroughs too, but he was more conceptual. He also was the one who not only maintained his social graces but used them; he's much more politically astute. Not that she can't be, because she was the one writing up all the papers, including his stuff. She's got a mind like a trap. She's so articulate, she's a word warrior; and also, English is not his language. She was a linguist in real life. Yeah, and a writer. He's much more abstract. Why doesn't she resist when he stops her from getting angry with others? Because she was smart enough to recognize that her way, though it possibly was the most honest, most direct, most pure, is not always the most productive. I must say that Nick and I were well suited in that respect, because I do tend to just talk off the top of my head and get passionately involved in things and I'm very uncompromising; Nick is equally passionate, but he definitely is able to be more manipulative - he can withhold things. On the set people were much more frightened of him than of me, I think [laughs], because they never knew quite what was going on with him, and with me you always know exactly what's happening. It was a good match. What sense did you have of the Odones' marriage before the illness? Here was this Catholic woman who had an affair with a married man for ten years and waited for him all that time. There were scenes that were cut, where they talk about when they first met and they were arguing over which Italian poet was the most brilliant. It was a meeting of the minds, a mutual respect. So both you and Nolte directly based your performances on the Odones? Oh yeah. Absolutely. How did you deal with her religion? She seems to lose her faith. She loses her faith through fury, not because she's so stupid to say, "Why me?" There was a scene that I still regret was cut, where we have a big fight before the birthday party about whether or not I feel guilty, and about God. We used her actual words; she said, "Every day I woke up and I thanked God for Lorenzo because he was so perfect and so brilliant, and to think God was standing in wait like a schoolyard bully, waiting to pounce on a five-year-old child-I don't feel guilty, I'm outraged:' She was just furious at God. The three-hour film was extraordinary. You saw them become estranged. At one point she said to him, "Well of course you've got two other children, you can leave - I can't." For me it was important to understand about her religion and how they dealt with that; it would have made their coming together that much more important later. There was another scene where you realize Lorenzo is going blind, because he's got the picture of Omouri and he can't see it and you see her look away. That scene was extraordinary because just when you expect there to be some sentimental moment - Nick comes and you expect her to be all upset - she turns it right away into action and says, "I've been thinking, the only way we found out about that was because I happened upon it by chance. What we have to do is organize a symposium." It was a very short, tiny scene, and I thought, That's a shame, why don't we cut out one of the screaming scenes and have the scene about how she deals with the realization that he's losing his sight? For George, the most important thing was the whodunit of the medicine. Do you feel you could not have played this part as well as you did had you not been a mother? Well, for me personally it was an advantage. I don't know if someone else who hasn't had a child would have maybe drawn upon something else. But for me it was a nightmare come true. On one hand, it made it more difficult, because I have never ever done a part where I've had a child in jeopardy, just because I never wanted that to be anywhere near me. On the other hand, it wasn't much of a stretch to find those moments. I would hope that I would respond completely as she did if one of my children were in jeopardy. In the scene where the doctor diagnoses Lorenzo's condition, Miller keeps you and Nolte together in a two-shot, which must have been much more demanding on a performance level than if he had just shot separate singles. I liked that. It required concentration, definitely. We did a few takes, but not a lot. How do you approach something like that? Listen and believe. That's all. Trying to listen and trying not to give into it - rather than trying to go for something [emotionally] specific. As he was speaking, I was just trying to find an out. Trying to find a way that this wasn't what he was saying. It would be important to believe that the person that he's talking about is somebody who has some emotional resonance for you. What worked for me was to keep trying to find hope - which made me feel more and more desperate. It built on its own. Do you create some sort of private inner reality for a scene like that? I just try to be there and be open and not push too much to have something happen that's not really happening. It helps when you have another actor who's giving you what you need. And then it's just praying that something will happen. It makes you think afresh and reinvent your world from the beginning. You think you've figured out your system of the world - especially by my age, I was so old when I started having kids - but when you have children just to tell them what you believe isn't enough, you have to live it and be able to explain why. I swore I would never say what was said to me, which was, "That's not nice. Don't hit someone, that's not nice." It's as though you were right-handed and you decided to go through the day using your left hand-you suddenly becoming, kind of lazy person - to really see and really hear. Because that's all that acting's about: listening, reacting, you're in your space, hopefully with some interesting part of your personality. And trying not to take anything for granted. Acting forced me to live life in a clearer, ultimately more compassionate way-to be present in my life. What I try to do is go towards that which scares me, knowing that if I'm frightened, I'll have to think on my feet and figure something out. So in other words I can construct my life in such a way by choosing things that will hopefully keep me fresh and not turn me into a caricature. Having children does that. Did having children clarify your understanding of what love is? What unconditional love is. There's a scene in Thelma & Louise where you say goodbye to Michael Madsen and your love for him is very convincing, very genuine-which is rare: it's usually something taken for granted in movies. You seemed to have a real understanding of what loving him meant. That was a tricky moment because why does he leave? Why does she let him go? I said to Michael, "Well, what would make you stay, what would make you go?" He said. "Well, of course if he'd known she had been raped, he would never have stayed with her. [Laughs.] He would have been with somebody else. So of course she didn't tell him." He was talking for the character? He was talking for himself! He was talking for what he understood. He said, "Oh yeah, I could understand that, he wouldn't have stayed then." [Chuckles.] Also, the scene previous to that had been completely rewritten. Originally in the script they were supposed to do a little marriage ceremony and sing songs and fuck, and I felt it was just so unrealistic. Not only would the film lose some of its tension, but also a woman who's just killed somebody because she's remembering having been raped - it's pretty hard to have sex under the circumstances and have it be great. Somehow that would cost us a lot of credibility, ultimately. I said to Ridley, "I will do it, but she'd have to fall apart, she'd have to be nuts to have somebody touch her and take her through that, having been through this." Once we agreed on that, trying to figure out what does happen in that scene was tough and complicated. We had to come up with so much back story. Michael never looked me in the eye, and I kind of incorporated that into the scene when I said, "You remember when we met, you didn't know what color my eyes were. What color are my eyes?"-because he really never focused on me. So in using who he was we came up with the idea that they probably didn't want to get real close, it was more like friends rather than two people who were looking for some kind of intimacy. Did any of your input in the film go towards trying to put onscreen details or aspects of female experience that movies usually overlook? For instance, a lot of business involving makeup and mirrors; or the scene where you're packing for the trip. Well yeah, I really felt that in trying to establish who she was in the beginning, the way Geena packs and the way I pack, you get right away what's happening - putting all that stuff in ziplock bags.... Was that written? No, I came up with that. We were very good with business, both of us. Geena's a very smart woman and we worked very well together that way in coming up with business. And Ridley was very open to that, and obviously valued it, or you wouldn't see it, because you can come up with all kinds of stuff.... In Witches of Eastwick I kept my shoes in a plastic bag-and you never see it. [Laughs.] In Witches of Eastwick I was so disappointed because when they're spitting their cherry pits into the pool and he's floating on the thing and they're having this big confrontation, I had this idea that she gets so consumed with talking to him that she just walks into the water. So they said yeah and copied this costume that I had twice. And then when I saw it - I'm talking and it cuts to him and the entire time I'm walking into the pool they're on Jack, so in the reverse shot, I'm just standing there- And you can't even tell you're in the water. So what was that about? That was an instance where, whatever the bit was, it obviously didn't speak to George the way it did to me. At first I was so depressed because there was no part, and then I thought, Well, what's the advantage of having no part? You can make up whatever you want. So that's what I did. When you say there was no part, do you mean literally? She had the one scene in the beginning and then she disappeared, nobody knew what happened to her. When we started filming there was no part. Since there was no throughline that we could agree on - there was no throughline for my character, it didn't exist in the script - my way of dealing with that was to never read the script, never read all these new pages that were coming in all the time, get there in the morning and try to make each scene work, because I knew they didn't have the faintest idea what they were doing with my character. I just decided I loved [the Nicholson character] the most of any of them, I was the most tempted, because I didn't have any children. And just tried to come up with ideas for each scene to make things work. One of the things you seemed to be working for was some kind of physical awkwardness, as if this woman isn't comfortable with her own body, or with herself. Both. I think it was impossible for her to do anything but play the cello. She was always whispering and could barely get anything out, and when she was with him she was just in a frenzy. In Compromising Positions there's a scene with similar sense of discomfort where you question the murdered man's wife at the health club. Why did you make that choice there? The difficulty in that part· very often if you're the center of a movie that's plot-driven, you have the least interesting part. Everyone around you gets the funny lines and the characterization, you're there asking the questions, the audience is way way ahead of you, so anything you can do to make a scene work or make it funny.... So that's all I was trying to do, just find something to make the scene work, because it was pure exposition. Did Frank Perry give you that, or did you come up with it? That was me. I don't think there are very many directors who come up with that stuff. I think they hire you because that's your job and there are so many other things they have to take care of. So in a comedy, for instance, the comic invention is the actor's work, not the director's? Well, comedy is really hard. A mediocre comedy is really painful, a mediocre love story is just.... A comedy is much more risky than a straight film. It's like giving an interview: you can only be as smart as the guy interviewing you, you can only be as funny as the director or the DP You have a DP who has no sense of humor, it depends on how things are shot. In Compromising Positions there was a scene where Raul Julia comes to the door, I open the door, say something, and slam it in his face. Now for me, what makes that funny is seeing him [from behind her]. Frank Perry for some reason went to the other side, so that killed the laugh. How did your relationship with George Miller change, that you were willing to work with him on Lorenzo's Oil after Eastwick? Were you reluctant to work with him again? Yeah. Cher said in an interview that all three of the women were treated abusively during the Eastwick shoot. I think that's true. But George was abused also. They just about killed him; he couldn't work for five years, they so demoralized him. My theory is that part of the way he tried to maintain some control was to make it as chaotic as possible, which made it even worse from us. A lot of the abuse we took had to do with the fact that we were women and Jack was not, and he had power and we had none. Jack managed to be treated a little bit better, but he still suffered terribly. It was a mess. It went six months; nobody knew what was going on. My initial problem was this business of being cast to play one role and then at the last minute being told, "You're playing something different," which is unheard of. I hold George responsible for that in a lot of ways. A lot of the other problems were from the top, not from him. So did you and Miller have some kind conversation to clear the air before Lorenzo? Well... we didn't really. I basically didn't want him to get into it because it was too painful for me to hear it again, and I just felt what had happened had happened, and it just made me very cautious of him, it made it very hard for me to trust him. But I felt I knew who George was and what his weaknesses and strengths were, so I asked him just to explain to me why he wanted to do this and how he saw it. So I was forewarned about when I could count on him and when I couldn't. He's a very gifted man who cared very, very much about this project and who had more control over this project than he did over Witches. In general, how often are there scenes where you have to supply what isn't there in the writing? Oh, most of the time, because you want to personalize it. You have to make a scene very specific, you have to know what it is in the scene that triggers what [in you], depending on what you're going after. Something very specific is triggered and you have to isolate that, and sometimes adding a word helps. For instance, the last scene in Thelma & Louise: there was a scene written that was so obviously a goodbye scene, and we all felt when we got to rehearsal that it was so on the nose, it was too much to say by that time -"You've been a great friend? "You too, the best." We ended up taking that dialogue and putting it over the chase scene, so we were screaming it, so that it could be thrown away more - the idea being that the last scene should be so sparse, as if they can read each other's minds. How hard was it to sustain the emotional arc of Thelma & Louise? The scene you just mentioned where you and Davis yell all these things at each other as you escape from the police before the end is so emotionally fluid that I thought it could only have been achieved towards the end of the shoot. When I saw Richard E. Grant in How to Get Ahead in Advertising, I thought, What an extraordinary performance, how did he stay at that feverish pitch? His performance was inspirational when I came to do Thelma & Louise. The challenge for me was to be responsible for keeping it together, and it only takes place over four days, so my feeling was, my character never sleeps. Once it happens, she's up, smoking, drinking... and that's why going off a cliff can make perfect sense to you, in that state. She's worked herself up into another place. So what were you trying to express in the scene where you stop and get out of the car in the middle of nowhere? That was not in the script also, that was my idea. I just felt we were screaming so much, every scene had a truck in it or a car, every scene. We were in this incredible location in this national park and I said to Ridley, "It's just an idea"- me not thinking of how long it would take to light this little, silly idea that I had, which was half the night - but I said, "What about if there's just a moment where she stops and the car stops and the music stops and she just gets out?" Like a grace note of some kind. I felt we just needed it. I felt it should be ambiguous; I don't know if it's necessarily to tell the audience she's saying goodbye, if she's seeing things for the first time, or just some private, quiet moment which we've never had up to that point. It was the seed of an idea, and it was completely to Ridley's credit that he took it and gave it the vista and grace that it needed. I babble on and on when I'm working, I don't expect everybody to listen to everything I say - and he did listen and he used a lot of it. How did you approach the emotional logic of Louise shooting the rapist? My feeling was that of course she is reliving her humiliation and the back story that we came up with when she was raped in Texas. Suddenly she sees her friend being humiliated in the same way she was. What I didn't want it to be, which was discussed, was an assassination; I didn't feel she was together enough to do that. When she says, "Buddy, you keep your mouth shut," after he's obviously dead, it shows she's gone a little bit off. Does a scene like that give you any insight into your own violent capability? Was it upsetting to do? Well, it scares me. I wouldn't hold a gun up that close to somebody's head that was even loaded with blanks, I just couldn't do it. So we had to put a cut in it that wouldn't have been there. Anytime I was dealing with a scene with a loaded gun, it immediately heightened my anxiety and tension. Actually, hitting somebody can be quite cathartic, a moment that is almost guaranteed to work. That makes me think of the scene in Atlantic City where you punch your husband, played by Robert Joy, in the stomach and hurt your hand. Yeah, people always do these movie slaps and things where nobody ever gets hurt. In Light Sleeper I was supposed to curse at the gunman, hit him and spit at him, and I could not find a way to do all three things; so we cut the spit. In that scene I wondered whether her reaction to seeing these two gunmen was believable - just letting them have it like that. That was the fun of it. She doesn't understand yet what's really been going on, and so she's just outraged. As she's leaving she starts to understand that they're gonna kill this guy. Also, her way is to bluff her way through sometimes. Violence always happens when you don't expect it, and it's so quick and non-dramatic that I could totally believe she'd go in there and think that they were just posturing and get pissed off. I don't think she really thinks she's in jeopardy. She was just a big fish in a small pond, and she had figured out her world and had it pretty much under control. The only problem was that she never really found partners qualified to give her as much of a run for her money as she gave them - and that was her way of maintaining control. She gives that up to play the game with somebody on her own level. In what area are you most like her? [Chuckles.] We share a sense of humor. And I guess whatever her sexuality is, it must be based in part on something in me. One reason I got the part was that they couldn't find somebody who could speak all those words and still be believable in terms of the sex - and I can't say that I handcuffed a lot of people and read Walt Whitman to them.... Is it that she has a sense of humor about her sexuality? Yeah. We wanted to make sure that Kevin [Costner] and I were people who you would believe would also be good friends, having a good laugh - and then a fuck on the kitchen table. Which is different from it just being all very romantic. What validity for you was there in the Costner character's point that you sleep with these rookies because you're afraid of a real man? Yeah, sure, I think that that's true. Of course, you know, just because a guy's older doesn't mean he's a real man either [laughs]· so I don't know if it was an age thing, but she definitely played the muse, and she keeps Crash's dream alive, too. I played that scene at the end clearly that I was never afraid he was going to leave me - because she was used to being left; the thing that would have broken her heart was him giving up baseball, and that's what she didn't want to hear him say when he comes back on the porch. She's terrified he's going to say it's over and he's going to settle down and be nothing. The richest scene in dramatic terms is the one where you come to confront Costner while he's doing the ironing. It contains an interesting and offbeat series of revealing moments. That was one of the last scenes we did, and it was a scene we improvised and then wrote to answer and deal with a lot of things that hadn't been dealt with. The scene that existed never worked. Originally she loses her accent and you realize all along that she's not really from the South [laughs]. I said, "Ron, you can't do that, three-quarters of the way through the film, it's not about me, you don't have the time to salvage me then and it means everything I've done has been phony." What was the process for fixing that scene? The three of us got together and talked about what was in there. Kevin said, "Let's answer some of the questions," because Kevin's really smart in terms of filmmaking. He said, "What would be some of the things they're gonna say? Let's beat them to the punch and deal with some of this stuff. Why does she dress that way? Does she have a job? Where does she come from? Who is this person?" He started asking those questions. So we improvised a little bit and then Ron went back and wrote it, and then we looked at it, and then he wrote it a little bit more. The scene after that was this long scene, just the two of us in an empty bar where she tells her life story and they seem so intimate that they had to cut it - because they hadn't fucked yet [laughs]. It took the place of a bed scene. Atlantic City was an important film in your career. How did you see your character in that? Well, that's funny because Louis [Malle] and I were together at that time and I had agreed to do that project with him before there was a role, really. A very bad script came to him, and they had the money but they had to spend it by a certain date. I had introduced John [Guare] and Louis, and it was kind of being written as we went along. The tough thing was making sure that her dream was compelling enough: to deal in Monaco is not exactly earth-shattering, and I had to find some way to raise those stakes so that became important; and her journey away from her stupid husband. I had to believe she was somebody who didn't have the options. She wants to know, she wants something outside her experience, and she sees it as her ticket to get out. Monaco embodies for her everything exotic. And I think part of what appealed to Burt was the aspect that he educates her. He was kind of like that, Burt, with me anyway - he always wanted to order you this or have you try that or see this; he kind of played that figure. Did you play her as genuinely attracted to him or manipulating him? Oh no, I don't think she was that in control to be manipulative in that sense. She's always taking care of her husband and her stupid younger sister, and here's a guy who's gonna teach her something, take care of her. When she gives herself to him she's just mesmerized by what he's saying, that voyeuristic thing. You don't ever see him touch me, and Burt couldn't understand how that would work. He thought that in some way it made him really passive, and we had a big long talk about it before he would do it - and then he did it so brilliantly. The Fifties idea of sex scenes and men and women, he should have just taken me and taken my clothes off and thrown me down, and it was always written as her being mesmerized. Like an animal in the headlights was the way I described it. It was my job to discuss it with Burt. Louis wasn't really somebody who talks to actors. On Pretty Baby I had to take care of Brooke [Shields, as her daughter]. He'll do it in the editing, but he doesn't do it while you're working. John Guare's too tactful, so I had to discuss this with Burt. He said, "Nobody's gonna respect me for sitting there talking to her"; he really thought he had to grab her. He was also, I'm sure, so vulnerable because he was being asked to play old for the first time and stick his belly out and whiten his hair. It's one thing to agree to that, but then to actually do it. It's like when I gained all the weight for White Palace, 20 pounds - one thing to agree to it, and then suddenly you have to take your clothes off and you say, "What was I thinking? [Laughs] Am I really gonna do this?" So working with Burt Lancaster was good? He was very vulnerable. He was kind of stuck in a certain period where women are concerned, but he was so generous with me. I found him a very dear man, and if you look at his career he took extraordinary chances with some of his parts. It was quite amazing of him to do Atlantic City at that point of time. I did talk to him every now and then. I'd see something that he did, I'd call him. I called him when I saw Local Hero, I said, "You were so great," blah blah blah, and I hung up and he called me back and said, "You know, I was so shocked by you calling me that I didn't even ask you how you were?" I said, "I'm fine." He said, "After a while people just don't tell you anymore that you're good in things." I'm so glad that I called. People just take those guys for granted, in a way. How did being in a relationship with Louis Malle affect your work? Oh, it's horrible. You can't walk out. They're always the most insulting to the person they know is going to be the most tolerant, so you're in a kind of hostage situation. Normally you wouldn't take any shit. What other directors would you single out as actors' directors? Jonathan Demme. I'm sure it's the same talent that makes him a wonderful parent. He just makes you feel that everything that you could contribute is just so welcome and so appreciated and so smart. So of course in that environment you're very free, you find yourself inspired. And he gives you a very secure structure within which to explore things, so it's not like everything's all over the place and chaotic; he's very analytical. I think that that's important, you can't feel as though everything's up for grabs. Ron Shelton works from the people out. Someone like George works from the outside in. He doesn't even know how to talk - he comes to you and says, "It's just not - you know, with your face - you're kind of rolling your eyes -" You say, "George, don't tell me I'm rolling my eyes." And he says, "Well I mean - it, it's just that - never mind.·" So you say, "What, what?" and then finally you say, "Don't tell me anything!" [laughs]. And then he'll come back and say, "You know, I didn't think the scene was working, but I just saw the dailies and it worked." You think, Well, if you didn't think it was working why didn't you say something? He told me later, "I saw the first cut of Lorenzo's Oil and you're fine in it. I thought that Nick had completely stolen the film, but you're fine in it." And I thought, Now he tells me? What if I was really in trouble - he wasn't going to say anything to me? It's just not where he is. Louis too. If you can cast really well and know how to tell a story and you hire actors who can take care of themselves, for the most part.... That's three-quarters of it. Yeah! Have you ever been in situations where a director did something to provoke or stimulate something in you? Yeah, and I don't appreciate it at all. Way at the beginning of my career, I went to an audition and I was reading with the director, who since has become an acting teacher. And he hit me. He slapped me. That doesn't work for me. Another director, one time, gave me an onion to cut. Now if he'd just said to me, "You should be getting upset in this scene" - he approached me on the dumbest level. I love it when actors do something unexpected, little things here and there. I've done things off-camera where I've done something different to make somebody laugh. All through Pretty Baby I had to talk to Brooke in a little cat voice, and that always made her laugh and lighten up. All my takes off-camera were talking with her like that. Sometimes just changing dialogue a little bit to try to help somebody. Maybe if you're supposed to be really nasty to somebody, you'd maybe be more mean than you would have. Or say something a little bit more personally, that you couldn't get away with on a two-shot. What drew you to Pretty Baby? Just the whole period and the place. Those were the days when I'd do a movie so I could go somewhere. Now I try to not go anywhere. He was a really interesting director and here was a woman who was more a child than her child. I added a line, saying to her daughter, "Do I look all right?" and truly Brooke had been - I mean, you can't get any closer to a whore than someone who's been making commercials since the time they were like eight months old. She was definitely without a childhood at that point. What's interesting about the film is that the person who by our system of morality should have been the victim is actually more together than most of adults. That's what made the film so disturbing to people - that this child was much more of a survivor than anybody else. I wasn't sure your character really had any feeling for her daughter, though. I expected to see at least a moment of doubt in her during the auction of her daughter. But she went through the exact same thing, and it was how she came about her life. It was a house, it was a family, these women all lived together and they had someone who took care of them. It wasn't as if she fell from grace, she was probably born into the whorehouse just the way her daughter was, so she came about not knowing anything different and she was fine and probably thought it was quite beautiful the way they were bringing her out on a tray, it was like a coming-out. You didn't have children then. Could you do it better now? No, I think I was at an advantage because I don't think she was like a mother, she was like a sister. That child was raised by everybody. I actually did spend a lot of time with Brooke, and I'm the oldest of nine kids, so it wasn't as if I hadn't been around taking care of children. Where do you think the need to act springs from in you? It comes more from overcoming this inertia and asking questions. If I hadn't become an actor I would have become a psychologist or something. It doesn't sound as if you're creatively driven or compulsive. No, I don't think I am. I think it's been a means to an end but not an end in itself, even before I had a family. It's not something I dreamt about becoming and then dedicated myself to and struggled for. It happened very quickly, and I thought it was a lark for at least ten or 15 years. I wouldn't even call myself an actress for a long time because it seemed so silly. And then I became somewhat disillusioned with it because, as a woman, you're not necessarily treated very respectfully in the industry. And then Bull Durham changed that, and gave me faith in myself again. My disillusion had to do with working with mediocre people who had mediocre dreams, who didn't particularly feel passionately about what they were doing. I always took parts for some reason that spoke to me, but I may have been trying to make something that was more than what actually existed. Well, you aren't referring to Pretty Baby or Atlantic City or even something like Tempest- Tempest was a frustrating experience, although I like the movie and I like everybody that was involved in it. My perspective and the director's perspective were definitely very different. He [Paul Mazursky] was very limited by his own experience in how he saw women. I actually cut off all my hair hoping to get fired, and when that didn't work I was going to leave the film, and John Cassavetes begged me to stay. It was a very interesting acting exercise, to be there and to be playing a part where you believe you love the guy and the director tells you you don't love each other-and to choose to play everything completely against the way you've been directed, which was basically what was going on on that shoot. Also Gena [Rowlands] was fabulous, she couldn't play anybody petty, and we were set up in a situation that was such a cliché. She was so generous to me that it completely defused all that, made the guys seem like they were the ones who were petty. There's a great scene where the two of you exchange compliments in the nightclub that seems a case in point. She just took that scene, which was written to be very bitchy, and we just played it completely against the way that it was intended. I had the feeling in Tempest you worked less for a characterization and more for a simple use of certain personal qualities that I associate with you, based on looking at a lot of your films - practicality, emotional availability, openness, honesty.... Did you feel your work here was very close to who you are? I felt very inhibited by the perimeters within which I had to function. I felt that she was written as such a whiner, she's constantly asking to get laid, and what I said to Paul was that this character in Shakespeare's play - if you're the mistress of a high priest, certainly there's something more than wanting to get laid happening; you must in some way embrace his vision. The fact that you're with someone who's going into uncharted waters is important. My character was originally written with long hair tripping around on the rocks in high heels, and I kept saying, "A young woman who's been on the road, she's smarter than that, she's not wearing high heels." And that's when I came in with my boots and my hair cut off, thinking that he would freak and that would be the end of it. He did freak, but that wasn't the end of it. What role is the furthest from who you are? Lorenzo's Oil, absolutely. Her whole physicality, the way she speaks, the fact that she's so contained. So that was a difficult aspect for you. Yeah. Did you base that aspect directly on her? Yeah. That is the only thing that you are concerned with, of course - if you borrow someone's terror. They gave us so much, hours and hours of tapes.... Did you see Lorenzo? Yes. They wanted so much for it to be a dignified, true presentation that they talked very intimately about everything. So the positive thing of that is that you have a lot to work with, and the negative aspect is that you have this burden because you want to treat these people with respect and you want them to be pleased with the emphasis that you've given this story. She was very pleased so.... I don't care what David Denby thinks.
Source: http://filmlinc.com
