From The Help to Take Shelter, It's Jessica Chastain's Banner Year

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Saturday, 14 January 2012 15:31

Written by Brad Balfour

When actress Jessica Chastain attended the Sundance Film Festival more than a year ago, making the rounds for the film Take Shelter, she spoke on a panel for The Creative Coalition. The focus was squarely on her co-star Michael Shannon, who had been graced with an Oscar nom -- and hardly on the 30-year-old newcomer.

Boy have times changed. In the span of about a year, Chastain’s profile has risen to the top thanks to the deluge of films featuring this new It Girl and drawing critical acclaim. 

Read more: From The Help to Take Shelter,...

Michelle Williams' Uncanny Turn In "My Week With Marilyn"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Saturday, 14 January 2012 15:29

Written by Brad Balfour

It wasn't enough when the close-cropped blond Michelle Williams spoke with the New York press corps before the the film's 2011 New York Film Festival premiere, so the following Q&A is also culled from her red carpet comments and a session before the official New York opening.

But it was necessary to hear her insights about playing Marilyn Monroe -- she even assilmilating her vocal stylizations -- as a character in the much nominated My Week With Marilyn.

Who knew that when actress Michelle Williams first appeared as the bad girl Jen in Dawson’s Creek, she would have the uncanny good sense to take on roles which offered her real challenges? From a supporting part in Brokeback Mountain to the lead in Wendy and Lucy, this 30-something rose to the occasion.

So now, another year, another Williams’ award nomination.

Last year, her star turn in Blue Valentine, garnered this former small town Montana native various noms; now she’s up for the Best Actress Oscar for playing Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn – a 1950s' chronicle of the making of the Lawrence Olivier-directed The Prince and the Showgirl. Based on the memoir of Brit Colin Clark, who had served as a production assistant and Monroe's sometimes-companion/confidante during the shoot, the film offers a gauzy behind-the-scenes look at the legendary actress, as well as the great thespian Olivier and the era – as being more than a star but also a celebrity came into its own.

Without making her Marilyn simply an "incredible simulation," Williams rendered as authentic a performance as an actor can give of such an iconic chameleon. But given Williams' ever-arching resume, she has developed the chops to validate such an achievement.

Born in 1980, Williams’ strong characterization in Dawson's led to film appearances in the comedic Dick and depressive Prozac Nation before the series even ended.

Since then she was in such quality indie films as The Station Agent, Imaginary Heroes, and The Baxter. But real success happened in 2005 when she starred in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain as a woman who realizes her husband is in love with a man.

That role landed her an Oscar nom for Best Supporting Actress as well as an intro to Heath Ledger who fathered daughter Matilda Rose. They split, and when Heath died, she withdrew only to come roaring back, including this many-nominated role.

Q: What was the most difficult part about channeling Marilyn Monroe?

MW: Maybe letting myself just believing that I could. Previous representations of her were more  [like impersonations so] I felt maybe there was room. That was the first thing that made me think, "Okay, I can explore this."

It was a decision made in the safety of my own home, and I didn't really consider the larger implications of it. It was a very, very slow process.

It started at home with watching movies, listening to interviews, poring over books. [I would] try and mimic a walk, or figure out how exactly it was that she was holding her mouth.

The first big discovery that I stumbled on was that "Marilyn Monroe" was a character that she played, and that [despite] the image that you're most familiar with, there was a person underneath it. That [persona] was carefully honed, but it was artifice -- and it was honed to where you couldn't tell that it was artifice. It felt so real.

It was something that she'd studied, perfected and crafted. So once I discovered that that was a layer, and then finding out what that layer was and then getting underneath it -- it was a long and ungainly process.

Q: It seems almost like this is a multiple role -- you're playing someone who's playing a role who's playing a role. Did you think of it in those terms?

MW: In some way it's not, when you think of them separately. You want to think of them together because they need to adhere. But I don't know how much it helps me to think of them as three separate people because they are, of course, connected.

Q: It's a hard thing to do singing, and then to do it in someone else's voice.

MW: Well, like I said, Marilyn Monroe was a creation, and that creation took a lot of personal work. She also had teachers. Trainers were more common then, professionals who would help make these stars and help develop these talents. So I was -- as she was -- very lucky on this movie to be surrounded and supported by great people.

I had a wonderful man, David Crane, who worked with me every day for a couple of weeks and taught me. I have not sung since I was [about] 10 years old. So he taught me about breathing, how to deliver emotion on lines instead of just [sound].

And then in my ears, I listened to her. It comes up on my iPod all the time, all the Marilyn Monroe. And she was very influenced by Ella Fitzgerald, so I listened to a lot of her music.

Q: For the opening musical number -- which you did so well -- how difficult was it to learn the choreography and then to perform it as Marilyn?

MW: I'm not a singer or a dancer. So, like everything else in this movie for me, they took a tremendous amount of preparation and willingness to start at the very beginning. [I had to be willing] to not know what to do, to make mistakes along the way and to not be hard on myself and to realize that they're a part of the process.

In some ways because of that, when I was able to put the nerves aside, I really felt a tremendous outpouring of joy. I felt like a little girl whose dreams came true for the first time. I was able to tap into what I imagine made Marilyn Monroe so luminous in those singing and dancing numbers.

What I experienced is that when you're in that state, your critical mind has to turn off. There's no room for it because you're remembering steps and lyrics. It's sort of like learning to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time.

And maybe that's what makes those performances of hers so magical -- that she's not thinking.

Q: A lot was made about Method Acting in this movie. What are your thoughts on Method?

MW: I suppose, yeah, whatever works. I'd never done anything that had ever required so much technical know-how. This was the first attempt that I had made, really the first time, that I had actually, admittedly, started from the outside in because I knew that I was going to have a very, very long way to go.

Where I, Michelle, have wound up after 31 years physically is very different from Marilyn. So for the first time, I started externally, which was a switch to me.

Similar to Marilyn, I suppose, I'm not trained. I sort of popped into classes now and then. I read books. I read a lot of books.

I have made some kind of amalgamation, some sort of hodgepodge of my own personal experience, what I know works for me in the moment, what I've learned from other actors.

I certainly don't know what I'd call it, but at the time the people who were driving the Method were actually live in the room, [I think] how exciting would that have been to be directed in class by [Elia] Kazan, to have [Lee] Strasberg by your side.

Now we get secondhand information. It's like the soup of the soup. It's been sort of passed on.

I'm not beyond doing rain dances or throwing the [cards] or whatever. And I'm still experimenting. I'm still finding out what works for me.

That's the reason that it keeps me acting, and keeps me excited. I'm still learning, and those answers change and new information comes in all the time that transforms my idea of how I'm going to do what I'm going to do.

Q: Has Marilyn Monroe influenced you as an actress as well?

MW: She hasn't, to be honest. I had a picture of her in my bedroom when I was growing up, and so I've always had some sort of response to her, but only because of her image. I wasn't aware of her movies.

When I had that picture in my bedroom, I hadn't really seen any work that she had done -- although at that time, I was very interested in the Method. God knows why, but at 12 that's what I was reading about.

I was reading about James Dean and Montgomery Clift, [Marlon] Brando and thus Marilyn, but I didn't know her body of work. Really, I only came to it as a result of taking on this film.

Q: Of her films, which one was your favorite and why do you like it the best?

MW: I wish I could say Prince and the Showgirl. Some Like It Hot -- how can you not? And I also am pretty fond of The Misfits. It was still a shot at a serious part.

Q: How did you and Kenneth Branagh develop the relationship of Monroe and Olivier -- you had to establish that distance between you?

MW: The only distance that we might have kept was because we were both so absorbed in our process. We sat next to each other in the hair and makeup chair and it was like Command Central Number 1 and Command Central Number 2.

We both were kind of married to our computers, headphones in our ears, and constantly watching, listening, absorbing and then going out and doing.

So the only kind of separation [that] occurred is a part of trying to capture somebody who was. And that that requires a certain amount of technical attention.

Q: Was it hard to leave Marilyn behind at the end of filming?

MW: In some ways, something that I like so much about what I get to do is that you never have to leave people behind. There's not a part of my contract that says, "You must abandon your character when you finish shooting." So I get to keep her with me in any way that I choose.

Q: How have you viewed her as a woman from a very different time with very different expectations of women?

MW: I wish that she could experience what I've been able to, which is to work outside of a studio system, to not be bound to playing the same role, to not be a contract player, to not basically have to be on salary and have to take what's given to you.

I wish that [she] could experience choice and independence and exert her sort of creative will, like I feel very lucky to have been able to.

Q: Why do you think the world continues to be fascinated with Marilyn?

MW: Because there's something indescribable about her, even though she's been so examined and so much has been made of her. There's still something mysterious.

Q: There is a difference between the 1950s celebrity culture and today. The film seems to to comment on that. What do you feel is the biggest difference in celebrity culture today versus then?

MW: The internet. It's the acceleration and proliferation of information. It has always existed and it just has more forms to take.

Q: Eddie Redmayne said one of the great things with the whole production was the sense that you shot in the same studio that The Prince and the Showgirl was shot in.

MW: My dressing room was Marilyn's actual dressing room when she was making The Prince and the Showgirl.

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Legendary Actress Ellen Barkin Tries For Another Happy Day

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Saturday, 14 January 2012 15:07

Written by Brad Balfour

Ellen Barkin doesn't have to do much to stay in the media spotlight

Q: You starred in Diner with Barry [Levinson] as director and now you’re starring in this film directed by his son Sam -- serendipity or not?

EB: Yes. I was working with Sam for a week and a half on another project that he had rewritten, and he was on the shoot of a genre movie. It was a big comedy cast, spectacular cast, and there were a lot of improvisational geniuses.

I was sitting in my canvas chair one day and I was in between scenes, so I was in my bad-girl villain costume, and my script was closed on my lap. Sam was sitting next to me.

Now I had spent every day on the set with this man basically as the director-writer, even though he wasn't -- and he had nothing to do with directing the camera because the movie sucks.

My script is closed and I looked down and said, "Wait -- Levinson?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, said, "Are you Barry's kid?" And he said, "Didn't you know that?" I said, "No." So it was amazing.

And what I will say to Sam and to his father's credit -- this makes me cry, because Diner was a very hard thing for me to access -- is both men, at very different points in my life, gave me roles that were so close to the surface of where I was at the time, and so raw and true in terms of the work I needed to do in order to succeed for myself.

That's not lost on me. Diner was my first movie -- I played a supporting role.

Sam gave me like the whole orchestra to play with.

Q: How did this cast come together?

EB: When we started the process about three years ago, I said, "Where do you want to start," and he said, "I want to start at the top of the pyramid, with the matriarch,  your mother."

I said, “Okay… Like in a dream world, then who's my mother?"

He said, "In a dream-dream world?"
 
I said, "Yes."

He said, "Ellen Burstyn."

I said, "Okay. Lets make her an offer."

The script got sent to Ellen, she had a meeting with Sam and within a week was in two days later.

Then the next place that he wanted to go was to the Patty character, played by Demi Moore. He said, "Look, I have to go next to your nemesis, and I need someone who looks like she can kick your ass."

There was some discussion about how meek I thought I was, and I said, "Okay, who's that?" He said, "Demi Moore." I said, "Yeah. GI Jane could do that."

Then he just continued in that way. What was beautiful about it, and why I think this is really Sam Levinson's movie, [was] nobody forced him into any of his choices, nobody asked him to cast some[one], nobody pushed a key crew on him.

He has a 23-year-old composer from Iceland who's never scored a movie that he found on the Internet. That was a bit of a fight. He really was just left alone with all of it. It was an extraordinary experience.

The templates for Sam were Hannah and Her Sisters, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Carnal Knowledge and The Graduate.

Q: You've got these characters moving in and out.

EB: We were really the most functional version of a family as a cast. I feel so comfortable speaking for all of us because we all say the same thing. I think we all had the same reaction.

Everyone had someone to take care of and had someone taking care of them. And when we would shoot scenes, whether you were in them or not, pretty much every actor showed up on the set.

They'd call up and say, "Can someone come pick us up? We just want to come." So when Ezra Miller and Ellen Burstyn were shooting that scene, we were all there. When I was there with Ellen alone in the kitchen, they were all there.

It took us 23 days to shoot the movie, and for 23 days there was a closed set. You weren't allowed in that house if you weren't a functioning crew member or in the cast.

If you were on the crew and you were the set decorator, you were out once shooting began, like your job was done. And it was welcomed, because Sam knew that he was asking a lot of every cast member and he was very protective.

I would say that there is not one person on that cast and crew who at any given moment did not know who their daddy was. That was pretty amazing, considering you've got the fucking Mount Olympus of acting that is Ellen Burstyn and George Kennedy, and then you have a little 13-year-old prodigy genius.

Everybody looked to Sam, who was at once so open and collaborative, and at the other time "Great, thanks for your input. I'm the director."

Q: One thing that's so great about this movie is its rhythm. It has this constant rolling process to it.

EB: When Sam gave me the script the first day, I went right back to my hotel room and I read it. I was really shredded on my bed and I was sobbing with tears and snot, like I don't think I've ever sobbed in life, like it really got me. And then I'd burst out laughing out loud, and emotionally, I literally did not know what to do with myself.

The brilliant film that he directed is exactly the brilliant script that was on the page.

I think it's the experience you have as an audience member. It's life, it's an amazing accomplishment. I do have to say that Sam pretty much across the board got his first choices in terms of his cast, and I think everyone had the same response.

Q: How did this character touch you emotionally in light of where you are now?

EB: In the big picture, I think she is representative of certainly every mother I know, and probably 98% of the population of mothers I don't know.

Susan Smith, I don't know that woman. I do know mothers just like me who only want to do good for their children. They want to do better than their parents, and sometimes, to the point of damaging, they want to protect their children from the outside world.

If you do that too much, you're not giving them enough tools to protect themselves. I think that within that framework, mistakes are made all the time -- big ones, small ones, profoundly traumatic ones -- and you just hope that as they go into adulthood and these mistakes start to resonate in their lives, they do better than you do.

So the idea of giving voice to that, I do think is one of the last taboos in movies. Like we can watch the brilliant Mo'Nique break our hearts in Precious because that mother is abusive, and she cracked my heart open.

And we can watch a caricature of a kind of crazy -- maybe I have the good intentions, but I'm hysterical. But we can't watch [characters] like me, like a mother who wanted to make the right choices, and guess what, I fucked up, more than once.

Q: You were gut wrenching.

EB: Because I do feel that it's really hard. I'm Method trained, and I did have to sit there for three years, and then every day all day, because she never has a scene where it doesn't happen.

George Kennedy, when we played that scene and his first line is "Does the grass look overgrown to you?", he might as well have stabbed me in the heart. I didn't plan it that way, but I thought "Oh wow, I bought the house, I paid for the landscapers, it's my responsibility. He's criticizing me, I'm not taking care of my family right, and they hate me."

I think to some extent everybody in the fucking universe feels unappreciated at some time in their life. Everybody feels like, "Just listen to me; how loud do I have to yell?"

This movie doesn't catch this woman 15 years ago or 22 years ago. It catches her when the milk has been boiling over in that pot for quite some time. So she has lost any ability to filter, to see clearly, to understand the result of her own actions. There's too much pain and too much hurt, and so it's like a baby, just acting out.

I do have to say that there are many ways in which, emotionally, my connections are up there for everybody to see.

There are ways in which this woman is maybe the least like me of any character I've ever played. I understand this idea, but only as an idea, of the host egg female. So the minute you can no longer reproduce, your function in society is negated and you become invisible.

So it was a beautiful and really challenging thing for me. I said, I'm going to become one of those women.

I understand the feminist idea of it, it is not my personal experience. For me, at 57, I have never felt more visible, more present, or more deserving for the first time in my life, of just the fact that I'm here. And I've never felt more listened to. I've been feeling it over the last five years, just when I'm supposed to be receding into the background.

Obviously, when you're 30 years old and you walk down the street, people look at you. Anyone with breasts, men look at you. And when you're over 50, they don't. We all know that. But that does not define me.

I'm right up there with the menopausal power pack. I am like really there, saying no, wait a minute, this thing of my kids are grown, they're on their way, I'm not having any more babies, I've got nothing but me, and yes I will raise my children until the day I die and be there for them, but they are not children, they are their own people.

I am so empowered by that. I feel like, okay, let go, because now it's my turn. And I know it's cliché, but when it was my turn in my 20s and early 30s, I wasn't ready. That's when I was a fucking ghost.

Q: What was probably the most difficult decision that you made in terms of shaping this character and bringing her to life?

EB: I knew I was going to play the part the minute I read it. But the most difficult decision was, obviously, to say if you're going to do this, you're just going to do it, and it's not going to feel good. And maybe you come out the other end having learned something.

Q: What do you think defines the essence of the character?

EB: I think one of my fundamental building blocks was that was I was looking at the ways in which she wasn't like me.

I looked at her character traits, her personality traits. I thought okay, so she's someone who never [has] a moment in her life [when] she's not looking for approval, always looking to see what the reaction of her action is.

I don't have that in me. And I don't know why, because I was not a confident adolescent, I was not a confident young woman. I just never gave a fuck what anybody thought about me, and I don't know why.

I think most actors say this, and maybe that's why you become actors. I wasn't popular, but I just didn't care. I think that this woman is the opposite of that.

So as I started to explore that, I said, "right, so she's like a baby." When a baby takes its first step, the first thing they do after they're not focusing on their feet is they pick their head up and make sure that somebody's seen them, hopefully their mommy or daddy.

A baby breaks a plate and looks around to make sure someone's seen them. I think babies probably wouldn't have temper tantrums, [unless] something's hurting them, [then] they would. But a full-on temper tantrum, that's because somebody's watching.

So this whole movie is some version of a temper tantrum for Lynn. You're catching her at her temper tantrum moment. And I thought, okay, she's a baby pre-the age of reason, and not only under five but under two.

So that's a good jumping off point for me. She didn't look like me, she didn't dress like me, she certainly didn't move like me, and she didn't talk like me, and I think that was something that you said you were so surprised at.

Q: And what about that fight scene with Elliot?

EB: For me, it's her shining moment in the film after that scene, where not only does she try to understand, but actually after what he does to her, what she really has to say by saying the line "That's because they don't know you, Elliot," is that they don't know what a wonderful, vulnerable human being you are. And that's some serious parenting.

Q: Two icons of Method acting -- you and Ellen Burstyn -- are not in scenes together until the necessity of it. Did you two talk much?

EB: Constantly. Acting with Ellen, aside from her guidance, her support, the courage she gave me, was like playing jazz with Miles Davis, and I'll just keep saying it.

All I had to do was follow her and she would bring me there. And there was a moment -- and I don't know, because Lynn has nothing but those moments -- where I just was sitting with Ellen, and yes, our communication was constant.

Q: Did you say, "I'm going to do this in this scene?"

EB: No, but there was the Method kind of talk. There was a moment where I just thought okay, like, it's enough already. [I've] just got to not cry or become hysterical.

I said to Ellen, "You know, I've got to just pull it together for this scene," and she said "Go ahead. Go do it. Now you must hold on to the reality of your character. Not necessarily the scene, but just hold on to the reality of your character. Go do it. He's going to cut after about three seconds because it's not going to work." She was right.