FILM COMMENT HOME
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BUY THE NEW ISSUE!
ART & INDUSTRY BY AMY TAUBIN:
NEW: FATIH AKIN'S HEAD-ON AND DANIEL BURMAN'S LOST EMBRACE
ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
SIGN UP FOR
E-NEWS
READ MARCH E-NEWS
FORUM
ARCHIVE
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
WALTER READE THEATER
FILMLINC.COM HOME
COMING IN March/April 2005:
Dustin Hoffman
Bulle Ogier by Gary Indiana
Hirokazu Kore-eda by Chuck Stephens
Amitabh Bachchan by David Chute
Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl by Kent Jones
And much more
SUSAN SARANDON INTERVIEWED BY GAVIN SMITH
a Film Comment online exclusive
How does having children affect your creative processes?
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.
on to page 3
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
online only home
