Niki Caro and Charlize Theron
As North Country's trailblazing across US screens extends to Europe, the film's director Niki Caro and Oscar nominee Charlize Theron discuss the emotional and professional highs and lows of working with children, miners and each other
* guardian.co.uk,
* Wednesday February 01 2006
Sandra Hebron: Welcome to both of you, and congratulations Charlize on your Oscar nomination. I guess the obvious place to start is to ask Niki to say a little bit about how you came to work on North Country.
Niki Caro: It came to me, actually. When Whale Rider started to become quite successful in the States, I got offered a lot of projects. Admittedly many of them involved large mammals and small girls.
[Audience laughs]
No, really, they did. And I actually considered one very seriously, I should also say. So I was thrilled when this one came along. It was a script that really shocked me, because it's real and it's recent. This case wasn't settled until 1998. So, for somebody from New Zealand, which is socially pretty progressive, and who's been fortunate enough to grow up as I have, it was a very good project to do to remind myself of how fortunate I am, lest I, or we, become complacent, the loads of us who live in liberal countries and work in liberal workplaces. It was a great film for me to make.
SH: Charlize, at what point did you become involved? And to what extent were you aware of each other's work when you came together to work on this film?
Charlize Theron: I was secretly stalking Niki. And I realised that there were only two choices: prison or being cast in this film. So I'm very glad it turned out to be the second. I'd gone to see Whale Rider, like everybody else, and really fell in love with Niki through that film. And so I stalked her - I was trying to see what she was doing next. We had a mutual friend who was distributing the film and Monster at the time - Bob Berney - and he introduced us at a little cocktail party. Then Niki signed on to do this and I had a hot date with her...
NC: And then my stalking began.
CT: For me, we had instant chemistry. We started finishing each other's sentences and I was just ecstatic to start with her. She was really the person who catapulted me into really wanting to do this.
SH: The note on the front of the film says that it's "inspired by" real events. How closely does the film stick to those real events?
NC: The women who participated in this were so incredibly damaged, not only by what had happened in the workplace, but also by repeated violations by the US judicial system. It really wasn't appropriate for us to use their personal histories - they'd been violated quite enough already. So what "inspired by" means - and it's a really good distinction for me, because I really needed to be good with this - is that when we showed the film to those women, and they were the first people we showed it to, what they saw in the movie was not their own personalities but they absolutely saw their own experience. It was an incredibly moving thing for them to see the film, and their response to it was that they feel this Hollywood movie has given them their dignity back. Of all the amazing experiences I've had on this film, that's one of the most satisfying, for them to say that to me.
SH: Some were very involved in the pre-production and preparation for the film, too, weren't they?
NC: Yes. It was really important to us for this film to have a really high degree of authenticity, and that was the way we did it. They advised us on every detail. It was a really great collaboration.
SH: Charlize, you seem to be someone who likes to do fairly detailed preparation. What did that mean in the context of this film?
CT: For me, rehearsal is just throwing yourself into that environment, surrounding yourself with the people and just living there for a while, becoming a sponge and soaking up the information that this environment and the people are willing to give to you. In this case, these women were so incredibly open and honest with both Niki and I, which is a tremendous thing to ask from somebody who's gone through quite a bit. We show up in their little town and community and say, "Tell us everything" - it's a lot to ask. So it was an incredible gift to me as an actor, and the best possible rehearsal that I could have had was just to be with them. And that meant going to their homes and having barbecues and cookouts, seeing their interactions with their kids and their families. Just to be in that society and that world: that was the best thing that could happen to an actor, to have those tiny little details crawl under your skin and live there for a while. And then hopefully one day while working you can just switch everything off and just hope that it just happens. Because there's nothing worse than trying to make these things happen, or pretend, or manipulate. I've never been an actor who can find a character or a world from sitting in a hotel room, going through a script and reading scenes. I'm kind of like a cow: if you milk me too much, I become really dry really quickly. And it was nice because Niki worked in a very similar way and all of us just wanted to spend as much time as possible there and try to live it. The way Niki shoots is really incredible - this film really felt like we were living it, not shooting a film at all.
SH: Given how tough the subject matter, how would you, when you came off set, return to some semblance of normality?
CT: [indicating a spot on her back] There's a little button that you can switch on and off.
[Audience laughs]
I've always said I'm not a Method actor, but I really am a method actor: my method is to not take it home, and to not stay there. Doing this kind of material is emotionally exhausting, and I don't think you can do it to its fullest if you don't have the energy. For me, I get that energy from being able to turn it off. What I find really helpful is the people you choose to surround yourself with, and we were all really great in that way. We had a lot of fun, which is really weird to say because it's a really intense film and it's a really serious subject, but we had a great time making this film. A lot of people sometimes think that takes the depth out of it or something, but when we worked, we worked really hard, and when we played, we had a great time playing with the locals. They have some great bars in Minnesota. Pool, bowling, ice-fishing...it was good.
SH: Can we just chat a little bit about the other roles. You had people like Sissy Spacek, Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins. They so inhabit the roles that I find it very hard now to see anyone else in them. How easy or difficult was it to assemble that amazing cast?
NC: Some of them were really easy - Charlize was easy, she's a pushover. And others required me to be a little more persuasive. But all of them individually and collectively were really passionate about telling the story and telling it well. It was amazing for me because not only have they collectively made hundreds of films, but also some of the great films, some of the best films ever made. And that can freak a girl out. But they're all such good people, decent human beings with a real commitment to living a life that's quite outside of the industry, which they all do in very different ways, and which I think is why their work is so good. And they were incredibly generous to me. I was so lucky.
SH: You used the word "authentic" a moment ago. Presumably that also meant that there was never any question but that you would shoot on location.
NC: Two-thirds of this film was actually not shot in Minnesota, but in New Mexico. Hopefully you couldn't tell. The film takes place over time and there were certain scenes that needed not to be under about 10 feet of snow. So, we moved our whole operation down. One of the interesting things for me, talking about cultural authenticity, is that the people of the iron range look very different to people from New Mexico. They are predominantly from Scandinavian stock - a lot of the people there look not unlike Charlize: there's a lot of tall, willowy blondes with beautiful skin. So one of the things... I don't believe I'm an indulgent film-maker, I can't be because I'm a low-budget film-maker most of the time. But one of the things that I was allowed to do was to bring extras from northern Minnesota all the way down to New Mexico. Warner Bros' accounting department - God love them - were mystified. Why is she doing that? But the studio was so amazingly supportive and respectful of my creative decisions, and they knew how important that was to me, so they allowed me to do it. There are so many real people in the film, and so many close portraits of real faces, really witnessing and feeling something. I'm really pleased and satisfied to have been able to give a Hollywood film that degree of authenticity.
SH: It sounds like you, working with a major studio for the first time, had a relatively straightforward ride.
NC: Unprecedented, I'm led to believe.
SH: Why do you think that was?
NC: The work was quite good, is the short answer. We made it quite easy for ourselves shooting in Minnesota in the middle of winter, so nobody showed up. And I won't have monitors on the set. I can't stand that, the idea that people will come, bring guests, and treat a film set as a party environment, that just fills me with horror. So they didn't come to see it for a very long time. But the studio, of course they see our rushes online everyday. And I, I'm from New Zealand but I'm not stupid: I know that the first week on a film with an untried director is not about the performance of the actors - because the actors clearly are stellar - it's about the performance of the little girl director. So we shot some really serious stuff in the first week - the union hall scene was virtually her first scene of the film, shot on the third or fourth day of the shoot. We also shot all the beginning sequences of Josey in the house, Woody on ice, all of the high school sequences. So basically, the studio could see the spine of the film in the first week and they were very impressed with the work we were doing. It was wonderful for me because I don't like people looking over my shoulder - it makes me very uncomfortable. I got one phone call from the head of production, about halfway through, a serious guy at Warner Bros, and he said, "I don't know what you're doing, but for God's sake, keep doing it. We love it and we get it that you want to be left alone, so just call us if you need anything."
SH: One of the many things I like about the film is that it deals with character and personal relationships but it's never closed inwards - it's always looking outwards. The film feels very epic in scale at times. And the way in which you use the landscape is something that obviously contributes to that. Can you talk a little bit about the decisions you made on how to use the landscape? And also how the way the film looks - it's not overly Hollywood glossy but it's a very handsome film, nevertheless.
NC: Yes, I'm very interested in both the epic and the intimate, and in how the landscape affects characters. The places we live are informing us all the time. When I got to Minnesota the first time, it was in the summer. I can remember leaving the airport in Duluth, then it was a straight road with trees, and I can remember thinking, "Hmm, this is boring. Can't wait until it gets better." And it didn't get better for days. We would drive for hours in every direction and it was roads and trees, absolutely flat, and I was in a blind panic because I didn't know how to articulate that in a cinematic way. I just couldn't see my way around it. Until one day, we were at another mine, and at another boardroom, having another meeting, and I saw these aerial photographs. And what that place looks like from the air articulates what it is - holes in the ground. That's why it exists, to take everything good and valuable out of the ground, put it on a train and send it somewhere else. And from the air it really looked to me like the thumbprint of the hand of man, if you want to be really lofty about it. And I thought that has to be the way to shoot it. I went up in the air in the wintertime and it was so astonishing. I've never seen anything like it, certainly not on film. And the studio had a concern about me, an independent director, making this film, and the producer Nick Wechsler, who's made a lot of fairly independent films, was concerned that the combination of me and the subject matter would result in a very gritty film. So there was a very conscious decision to make a very beautiful film. Chris Menges, the cinematographer, just does the most beautiful job of photographing and lighting it in a way that never disturbs the relationship between myself and the actors. He was the only DP that I talked to who said, "I can get every light off the floor for you." So I could have a really intimate relationship with Charlize and the others and they could be in an environment where they never had to hit a mark. Chris was such a beautiful operator. It made it feel very real and it's a very pleasant and immediate way to work.
SH: That sounds like a very liberating context for you to work in. How different was it for you to working on other shoots?
CT: It's incredible because, as I said before, that lent itself to a feeling that we were actually living it, instead of being surrounded by light-stands. And I also think it's the only way you can work with kids - that's how Niki gets these incredible performances out of these children. A little five-year-old girl who's never been on a movie set can quickly get fascinated by a light. The first big thing I had to shoot was the union hall meeting, and that really set the tone and made me realise what Niki was doing. She'd filled the room with 300 real miners, who worked in the mines and knew the case, real people. There were no lines scripted for them. Niki had said, "We can rehearse this if you want." This was while I was breathing into a paperbag, hyperventilating and breaking out in hives. But I said, "Let's just do it." So she had three cameras rolling at the same time, and it gives it a documentary feel, which is a really nice way to work because it's frighteningly real. But it never felt invasive, which is really great for an actor.
SH: That sequence is amazing. I think the emotional resonance in that scene...
CT: I hated her for so long.
SH: It is extraordinary to realise that that was one of the first scenes you shot. It's so pivotal to the film.
NC: It was great to begin with a big sequence like that, even though it just about killed Charlize. We had many of the cast there, and it was a great way to introduce the cast and the crew to exactly what this world is, very, very viscerally. It was an extraordinary couple of film-making days for me, and I really value when your directing life collides absolutely with your character's life. That happened to me quite profoundly with Whale Rider, and it happened again with this scene, where as those 300 men walked in, and I was standing on the stage, I was so taken aback, and I thought, "What I'm about to go through is a fraction, but still somewhat like what Josey would go through. This is where I prove that I am equal to this task." They were amazing, these guys, and it was quite historic that they would be so real and so forthcoming with feelings they know so well, and yet be so obedient to me and my first Associate Director Liz [Tan], who's also from New Zealand and smaller than I am. For these guys, some of whom have a pretty prehistoric idea of what a woman should be doing, for them to participate so well in that sort of environment was great.
SH: That must have been a strange intermeshing of the film being made, the subject matter and the people's lived experiences. Charlize, before we open this out to the audience, I just wanted to ask you a more general question. You're moving more into production now, so could you speak a little about the impetus for this and the kind of projects that you're planning to produce?
CT: I started a small company about six years ago and it really just started out doing development. Whenever I took time off from filming, I'd get antsy but didn't necessarily want to go back and do an entire film as an actor. But I got a great satisfaction from working with writers and developing material, and sold a couple of things to some financing entities, and then I'd walk away from it and didn't really think that I was capable of really producing something. It was only when Monster came around [which Theron co-produced], and talking to Patty [Monster writer-director Jenkins], it was just one of those things that kind of happen. I think in a lot of ways it really helped me with my performance in that movie. We shot that film in 28 days and I never had a moment to wallow in what I was doing. I think being that busy on that film was actually something that helped me with playing Aileen, because she's one of those characters that you could get a little lost in. And being a producer and having to change hats really cleared my head, it was a great way of switching off. And I liked it. I want to do it when it feels right, and the nice thing is that I don't have to do it to pay the bills. So I can really have fun with it and make it an incredibly creative experience for myself. I actually just closed a deal with Picturehouse, which is Bob Berney, our friend again. And we're going to do a picture that I've been developing for six years, called The Ice at the Bottom of the World, which is an adaptation from a short story. That's a baby that I've been carrying for a long time so I'm really ready to go and produce that one. It's an ensemble cast so I'll go play a small part in it. Ten years ago, if somebody had told me that I'd be producing now, I'd have laughed in their face. The great thing about this industry is that there are so many extensions, different areas that you can explore to get similar creative satisfaction, without having to be in front of the camera. That's what producing is to me. I really enjoy collaborating, working with people who inspire me, and figuring out how to tell a story.
SH: The other thing is that you actually work very hard. Looking at the filmography, you've fitted in an incredible amount of work in the time you've been acting. So it doesn't surprise me that you're now producing. So it looks like you've got a great appetite for working.
CT: I do, I worked a lot when I was in my early 20s and it was really what I wanted to do. And I'd be on a press junket and everybody would be like "My God, you're working so much." And I'd wonder, do people say that to a bank teller? "You've been counting a lot of money lately." It's a job, and at that time I really wanted to do that. But for the last five years, I haven't done more than two films a year, most years only one. You have no control over when films come out so they sometimes come out back-to-back so it seems like you're working non-stop, but as I've gotten older, I like taking a nice chunk of time off, more than in my early 20s. I was kind of like a locomotive, just charging through. I'd be like, "Yeah! I'm working, oh my God!" Now, I feel like I have a little bit more of a chance to enjoy my life as I do my work.
SH: Let's open it out to the audience now.
Question 1: Given that the case wasn't settled until 1998, why did you choose to end the film the way you did?
NC: It took a very long time for them to go through the American judicial system and it's terribly complicated and not really that interesting. The short answer is, to tell the story, you didn't need to tell it from 1975 to 1998, and so we elected to collapse it around the Anita Hill years. It was really interesting to me that it was the Anita Hill case that really brought the idea of sexual harassment to the American consciousness for the first time and gave it a name. It wasn't the very first time that those words were conjoined, but it was the first time that the wider public became aware of a name for a phenomenon that everybody knew about.
Question 2: I was interested in the fact that in the trial scenes, you focused a lot on the sexual victimisation of Josey rather than the issue of sexual harassment. Was that a conscious decision, and was it a way to make the audience sympathise with her more? I find that a little bit of a conflation of two separate things.
NC: I felt it important because it made the community culpable. Because what was happening to that group of women in a court of law was a violation as insidious as any they had endured in the workplace, and a place that was supposed to protect them. It's fascinating to me that America is a country that prides itself on justice and equality, when these women, their citizens, experience neither. I was also interested in what beautiful girls experience. Josey, as a beautiful teenager, did not receive that kind of violent attention from her teacher because she was brainy. It's a curse, often, for young girls to be able to negotiate using their very potent looks and sexuality. I think violence towards young women in cinema is way too frequent. So it was very interesting for me to have to shoot it myself in a way that made an audience deal with the horror of that without being graphically violent, and without actually seeing anything but a young girl's face, through that window.
Question 3: You've said you worked with a lot of the women from the case on the set. What was their experience after the case was over? Did it actually improve their experience in the workplace? For the women after them as well?
CT: The first night, we had dinner with these women, and one of them had to go on the night shift. She was a truck driver and she was drinking coffee after coffee. So a lot of them still work there. They love these jobs. Legislation has changed the fact that when there is a complaint it has to be taken seriously, but legislation doesn't change how people think overnight. And you really realise this when you're there, that we've come a long way, but we still have a ways to go. And if anything, if this film can open up some kind of conversation about the fact that this is so relevant today, and especially in this tiny community, where it's really not the thing to talk about. I think a lot of women feel shame about this. Many of the women I talked to told me that they were telling me things that even their families didn't know about. I think it validated and gave them the acknowledgment in that community that this was true, it was something that happened to them. But does it still happen? Yes.
NC: That woman Charlize was talking about is in the middle of another sexual harassment case, still dealing with intimidation just from one guy in her workplace.
Question 4: Charlize, congratulations on your Oscar nomination. How do you choose your roles? Would you go for something light, a romcom or something?
CT: I'm not really on the top of the list for that kind of film. I would love to do a comedy. I have a little bit of an ADD problem and I get bored really, really quickly. So a year of doing something that isn't challenging to me, I don't think I could do that. When you commit yourself to a film, it's a lot of work. It's a year of your life, and it better be something, no matter what the genre. If you look at my career, I'm interested in all genres, I don't like sticking with just one. I'd love to do a comedy - but comedy is a really tricky thing - it's personal taste. So I'd love to do it, but I'm really not complaining. It's been good.
Question 5: I would like you to discuss the relationship between Josey and her son, particularly the scene after he discovers the identity of his father. I thought that was a scene that could easily have gone in either direction, but I thought you handled it very delicately. Could you discuss the process, how you came to that?
CT: That was another one of my favourite scenes. I was very scared. My biggest concern, my biggest fear on this film - the one that I drove Niki insane with - was the relationship with the children. I'm not a mother, but I felt that every single thing that she does in this film, she does because of her children. So if that relationship didn't work, there was no weight to anything. What I loved about Josey was that she wasn't that Norma Rae/Erin Brockovich character, the kind that just has the personality. I love those films, but what I love about Josey is that quiet thunder about her, which I thought was very primal. She'd been a flawed mother, and put her children in bad situations because she didn't know how to be independent. The only way she knew how to put food on the table was to be involved in a relationship with a man. So I think when she owns the job and starts realising that all of this is wrong, I think she does that because of that primal instinct for her kids. So I was really scared because working with a 13-year-old is not like walking around with a baby. Obviously, the relationship is very complicated. So I relied very much on Niki, because she had done such a great job with Keisha [Castle-Hughes] who was around the same age. And I also had great kids to work with, I have to say that. You can't make a five-year-old hang off you and pretend, you can't manipulate those kind of things out of them. Niki just has such an incredible organic way of working with children.
NC: It's really embarrassingly simple. You just don't screw with them. They're really smart. We didn't want to hire Hollywood kids - the studio kind of wanted to hire Hollywood kids but I wouldn't. So we hired real kids, and they were perfect just the way they were. They react, very instinctively and very immediately. Charlize doesn't like to rehearse, and I don't like to over-rehearse children, so I had to come up with a way for these guys to bond. So I asked the kids to find out what all of her favourite things were, and to get them, and we would throw a surprise party for her.
CT: It was amazing.
NC: They found out that she likes sushi, so we helped them make some. They trudged through the snow, God love them, in northern Minnesota to a travel agent's to get pictures of South Africa and animals. And chocolate.
CT: Potato chips.
NC: And they decorated the room.
CT: There was a little fluffy dog. And I'd had no idea.
NC: They're such loving children, and they just wanted so much to make her happy. So to have Charlize come in and to see them, and within five minutes, they were just hanging off her, all over her. And they loved her, and she was loving them right back. And that was all I needed to do, to give Charlize a sense of what it feels like to have a child love you, and what it feels like to be a parent. I am one, I'm proud to say, a new one and, God knows, a flawed one. That was just [voice breaks a little] so nice.
CT: I'm crying, too.
NC: Oh God, here we go.
CT: To answer your question, I was very scared of that scene because those scenes tend to be very melodramatic. And I had a great fear and asked Niki if maybe we should cut it, because I loved the [preceding] scene with Sean [Bean] where he explains it to him. That scene just killed me. So it felt like we were just doing it again, and I really didn't understand. And this is where Niki is so amazing. I told her it feels like a double punch. I don't know how to do the scene without it feeling like, what we call in America, a lifetime original kind of television moment. And Niki created this environment - there was a porch light and one camera.
NC:That's why it's really dark.
CT: And we did it a couple of times, and all of a sudden the words really hit me, and also the fact that she had never said those words out loud to anybody, not to her parents, not to her friend. And the fact that she could only do that to her son was incredibly powerful, and all of a sudden I realised that.
NC: And what she's really doing there is allowing him to be a good man. It was really important to me that in telling the story of Josey Aimes and men, that we looked pretty hard at her relationships with the most critical men in her life: her father and her son. And neither of those scenes - the union hall where her father speaks for her or that scene with her son - existed when I got the script, and they came out of those conversations, and really trying to explore those difficult things.
Question 6: There are quite a few expressions of male power in the film: the domestic violence, the sexual harassment, etc. Did it affect the mood on the set?
NC: I think the best way that I can answer is to point to the scene where Josey is being intimidated and attacked by Bobby Sharp, played by Jeremy Renner. And it was really fascinating for us to do that scene, because it wasn't Charlize or me that was disturbed by the content of that scene, but Jeremy was profoundly disturbed, and terribly vulnerable and fragile, because he had to go there, and it's a place that Jeremy Renner does not like to go and explore and to commit to. Of course, because it's horrible. So the shooting of the scene was very interesting because we were looking after him. Yes, welcome to my world. And it's sobering, because Charlize and I knew what that scene was, backwards and forwards. But for Jeremy it was very difficult to understand. And that, I guess, is the evidence that we truly cared about one another and tried to provide each other with support where needed. It was a very satisfying, very loving, very fun set.
Question 7: Why did you get the father to speak at the union hall? Was it for him to show solidarity with her, or was it to demonstrate that it's still a man's world, and they would only listen to another man?
NC: When I got the script, I thought it was great. But I got to the bit where Josey gets to the union hall and she makes this incredibly articulate speech and the film finished. Did you read that draft?
CT: Yeah, that could have been a really great moment and you took it away from me.
[Audience laughs]
CT: It was a very real, very triumphant, punching-a-fist-in-the-air moment.
NC: It was wonderful when Michael [Seitzman] rewrote that and I had Hank speak for his daughter for the first time.
Questioner: I found that really frustrating, that her father had to speak for her.
NC: Oh well, sorry. I'm sorry that it wasn't satisfying for you, but I understand it's satisfying for a lot of people. Certainly for me, this is a man who has never told his daughter that he's proud of her. It's also a man who's not used to getting up and speaking to anybody.
Questioner: But in a way he wasn't listening to her again, because she asked him to let her speak.
CT: But the reality was that none of those men would have let her speak. And he knew that. And for him to be able to walk up there, it's not even as much talking to them, it's really him saying to her, for the first time, "I'm hearing you." You have to understand that every generation worked at the mine: so a lot of these women had brothers, fathers, sons working there, and these men saw their sisters and their daughters being treated this way and they couldn't do anything because they would get fired if they did. But there were the few who stood up, who couldn't take it anymore, and that's represented through Hank standing up there, because he knows all that goes on, he's watched it. As he says to Alice [his wife], he's had to go in with sandpaper to scrape all the horrible words from a locker room. And he's never done anything about that. I think if a moment like that didn't happen between them - not that I'm going to tell you how to feel - but I think that you would have felt that there was an incredible beat missing in that relationship. Because I think that relationship had to get to a place where there was closure between those two. Not that it's a nice little packaged-up final moment, because I think that relationship has gone through so much that if the story continued there'd still be a lot of conflict, a lot of talk. A lot of communication still has to happen in that relationship.
SH: Please join me in thanking Charlize Theron and Niki Caro.
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