Actress Zoe Kazan "Explodes" with "A Behanding" - Zoe Kazan, p.2

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 02 June 2010 12:13

Written by Brad Balfour

Q: Is it easier to go from a play to a play, or from a play to a movie then to a play? For some people it's easier to break it up. Once your chops are down and you're going play to play, is it easier to get into that mindset? What works for you?

ZK: I did three plays back to back in the 2007, 2008 season, and that was a mistake, I shouldn't have done it. I was so tired by the end of it. By the third play, which was Come Back, Little Sheba, I had very little appetite left for it.

It was the only job that I've ever done that felt like a job, and it's not the fault of the play, I love that play, and I had a great cast around me and a really good director, and I'm still proud of my work in that show, but I wasn't curious anymore, I was just tired.

I'll never do that again; I might do two plays in a season, but not back to back and definitely not as much. I think it's easier to go from a play to a move to a play because it's a different way of working and you can kind of get your appetite up.

Q: You grew up in Venice, California; I find Venice an interesting bohemian enclave. Do you feel that was helpful? If you had been more in the high-speed LA, Beverly Hills world it would have changed you?

ZK: I do. I think my parents did a very smart thing. Especially the neighborhood I grew up in, in the 1980s, early ‘90s, when I was a really young kid, it was such a sheltered way to live. It was not a very affluent community then, and there were a lot of artists.

I was not raised in any way like an LA child. When I got older and went to high school I was exposed to more of that but my parents were very careful about the way they raised us and were really determined that we were going to be like those kind of kids.

Q: It feels like you've done a million movies before you did this.

ZK: I did a lot of movies that didn't come out for a while, so I don't know because I can't remember at what point that was.

Q: So do you like working on big mainstream films or the indie ones?



ZK: Everybody needs those mainstream ones. I love going to the movies and watching a big cushy movie. I really like getting the big cushy paycheck too, but that's not an issue. Everybody has to do some for the money, but I definitely prefer a smaller scale. Especially coming from a theater background, and because my parents are in the industry, the values I grew up with were values of collaboration and doing something all together. 



On the big budget movies you're always squirreled away in a massive trailer and alone, then you're brought to set and have to look perfect and all of that. That's not really what I got in it for.

I love not having a trailer, just being thrown into bathrooms to change and being with your costars all the time and not having a thousand people fussing over you. It seems much more conducive to the work to me.



Q: Of the recent characters that you've played, which ones do you think are closer to you?
 


ZK: Well, it's funny because, with It's Complicated, Nancy [Meyers] is a screenwriter and a director, my mother's a screenwriter and a director. Her husband's a screenwriter and a director, my dad's a screenwriter and a director, she has two daughters who went to private schools in LA who are friends with people I know; I went to private schools in LA.

There's a lot of overlap between us, and then in some ways there's none. Nancy lives in this perfect world where everything's from Shabby Chic and looks really beautiful and I grew up in this kind of grungy Venice world with my parents and there was never a lot of money thrown around.
In some ways our values are really similar and I totally got who that character was, and in some ways I'm like, "Why remodel that kitchen?"

So when Nancy met me she was like, "You're my girl; you're exactly who I wrote on the page," and I was thinking that's not who I am at all. So it's all about perception.

I feel like probably of all the characters I've played, I don't really feel like I've played someone close to myself on film. I did this play, Things We Want, at the New Group and I feel like that character is probably the closest I've ever played to myself. Even though she's a concert pianist so we have nothing in common that way, she's an artist and her psychology was closer to mine.

But definitely between The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, this one, or Happythankyoumoreplease that was at Sundance, all girls who are very different from me.

Q: What drew you to the role of Ivy?

ZK: I auditioned for Brad [Bradley Rust Gray, director] almost four years ago for another movie he was making, and he didn't end up getting to make that movie right away. I didn't get cast in it, but he remembered me and I remembered him.

About a year and half after that he called and said, "I want to make a movie with you," and I remembered him because I loved his movies so much in the first place.

I said, "Okay. What's it about?" and he was like, "I don't know. I haven't written it, I have no idea what it's going to be about. I have an idea but I can't tell you about it. Do you want to do it?"

I was like, "Yeah, I do." So we started meeting and have these epic walks around Manhattan. We'd walk for hours. I was doing Come Back, Little Sheba at the time and I actually got bronchitis from walking around with him and had to miss a show. So I blame him for that completely. Like in the middle of January and February these massive eight-hour walks and we would talk about love and life and how we grew up and just kind of getting to know each other, almost like a blind date.

Then I went away to shoot Me and Orson Welles, and when I got back he had a script and he said, "Read it, and if you want to do it, let's do it."

I loved it. Ivy is so unlike me in so many ways, so I was really surprised that he had written this character because Brad's worked mostly non-actors before and written characters very close to the people themselves so they could play them. I was really excited that he had written something so different from myself for me. But it's funny; it was hard for me to talk about Ivy while we were shooting it. We had a lot of shorthand, like he'd come over and be like, "No, no, no, no, no. The way you're breathing isn't right."

We both had a picture of her in our heads and knew what we were aiming for, but we didn't have a lot of coherence talking about her, and it's only been afterward when I look at the movie that I realize what her qualities are. When we were playing it was all much more unconscious.

Q: Did you relate to your character's sense of detachment given that you went to college and had the whole college experience?

ZK: A detachment from home?

Q: Or a detachment from what's going on. Being home on break is a weird situation.

ZK: It is a weird situation. Brad and I talked about that. There's this movie, Café Lumière, that we looked at a lot. There's a moment where she comes home in that movie and she falls asleep on the couch, or lies down on the floor, and we thought about that, about what it's like when you come home and it's sort of your home but it's not your home anymore. She's definitely in that liminal space between childhood and adulthood where she doesn't quite belong there anymore but it's still the only home she has.

Brad and I talked about that and about wanting to capture that feeling. But I'm an actress and I think that there is some truth to the stereotype that comes along with that. I'm very emotional and I have very easy access to my emotions, and I hesitate to say it because I'm sure my family is going to laugh at me, but I think I burden other people with my emotions sometimes, like "Take care of me."

Ivy is not at all like that, she's incredibly self-contained, and some of that feeling of detachment that you get in the movie comes from that. She does not want to be a burden to anyone and she doesn't want her illness to be a burden to anyone. So when the breakup happens she keeps that to herself, she doesn't even tell her friends, and I think there's a kind of strength in that, and I think there's deep loneliness in that. I also think it would be much better for her if she had more access to self-expression.

Q: Did you study about epilepsy?

ZK: Yeah, I did. I don't have a chronic illness but I know people who do and I didn't want to dishonor anybody by doing it wrong. Not just the epileptic seizure itself, but also the psychology behind having something that you have to take care of and that way of taking care of yourself. So I actually read a lot of parenting books for parents who have children who have epilepsy because I wanted to think about the way that she had been raised, especially because her mother's a single parent and I feel like Ivy's taken on a lot of the burden of parenting herself because of that. And also we watched videos of seizures online; not on YouTube, although a little bit of that, but a lot of those are hoaxes.

There are videos on medical sites about epilepsy; diagnostic videos basically. We looked at those and we looked at the brain scans of what happens to the brain during the epileptic seizure, and I practiced it at home. I was really anxious about doing the whole thing because it's so out of your control when you do it and it seemed like such a big part of the movie that I was going to have to tackle. I was really freaked out about it and finally I thought, "This is silly. I've just got to do one, and if I do one then I've done one and I don't have to worry about it anymore."

I was lying in bed and my boyfriend was in the other room brushing his teeth and I was like, "Baby, can you come in here?" So he comes in the room with a mouthful of toothpaste and I was like, "Watch this. Tell me if it looks real."

I do the seizure, and he's standing there with his toothbrush, and I open my eyes afterward and ask how I looked and he was like, "Never do that again! Are you crazy?" And I was like, "But did it look real?" and he was like, "Yes it looked real! You're freaking me out!" And I was like, "Sorry, brush your teeth. Go spit." But I practiced it that once and then I didn't practice it anymore, and we did two 15-minute takes.

Q: It's not like you can go ask an epileptic, "Hey do a seizure for me."

ZK: Yeah, exactly.

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