Sleepwalking Through Real Life
by Jay S. Jacobs
PopEntertainment.com > Feature Interviews P to T > Charlize Theron and AnnaSophia Robb
Copyright ©2008 PopEntertaiment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: March 21, 2008.
Though she has lived a rather glamorous life – born in South Africa, travelling regularly to Europe and the US, becoming a top actress in films like The Cider House Rules, The Italian Job and In the Valley of Elah – lately, Charlize Theron has shown a fascination with the less glamorous side of the human condition. That was dramatically shown in her Oscar-winning role as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the drama Monster – which was also Theron’s debut as a film producer.
Just like on Monster, Theron has taken on the dual role in Sleepwalking. She toiled behind the scenes to put the film together and get the money to get it made. She also took on the supporting role of Joleen – a conflicted woman whose life is a series of guys and legal problems. When her latest lover is arrested for growing drugs, Joleen and her daughter Tara are homeless again. They stay in the decrepit apartment of her soft-spoken and shy brother James (Nick Stahl of Terminator 3 and Sin City). Then, after a few days, Joleen just leaves without a word, leaving her brother to raise her daughter – despite the fact that he had neither the experience nor the money to care for an eleven-year-old girl.
For the vital role of the daughter, the filmmakers knew they had found their perfect fit with AnnaSophia Robb. Though the young actress was best known for lighter fare – stuff like Bridge to Terabithia, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Because of Winn-Dixie – Robb quickly proved that she could handle the deep emotional requirements of the role.
A couple of days before Sleepwalking’s New York and Los Angeles opening (and a little over a week before its wider national release), Theron and Robb met with us at the Regency Hotel in New York to discuss the movie.
We just got finished talking to Nick, and he was telling us that the temperature at some of the sets were 50 below, which makes me think there must have been a lot of love for this project. What attracted you to this material?
Charlize Theron in Sleepwalking.Charlize Theron: You know, it’s really hard. I like to read a lot of material. A lot of stuff gets submitted through the company. I really just enjoy the process of reading through material. I think a lot of my decision-making process comes from – it just either emotionally happens or it doesn’t. I’ve many times had scripts sent to me where people [who] I really respect their opinions say, “It’s an amazing piece.” You read it and it is an amazing piece – but there is no chemistry there. This [screenplay] stayed with me. I liked it. It felt like real people. It didn’t feel like a watered-down version of a dysfunctional family. I thought it was ballsy. I thought it had great wit. I thought it was incredibly real, but incredibly hopeful at the same time. That hope is something that I am very attracted to. It’s the one thing that we all have in common, no matter where we come from [or] what our circumstances are. We all have hope.
Do you look at scripts now both as an actress and a producer? Do you look at them from two different perspectives? This script, you may love it as an actress, but as a producer do you think, “How will we ever sell this?”
Charlize Theron: It’s interesting, the producing aspect. I don’t really compartmentalize the two. You don’t read something and go, “I love this. I’m going to produce this.” (laughs) It’s a much longer process than saying yes to an acting role and then two months later you’re on set doing it. Somebody has already done all that work. We have a lot of material. Development is really just a fancy word for basically just saying we’re praying and hoping. You have a lot of stuff that goes through that development process. This industry is really changing nonstop as far as financing aspects of independent filmmaking. You’re always meeting with new financing entities. You’re always let them know what you have. They look at it. If they’re interested they might step in and you get lucky. Then for me, another element of that is really the cast. I don’t want to just go make something. I want to work with people that I really want to work with. I love this, but it took us a year-and-a-half to two years to get a financier to jump on board and step up with the money that we needed. Then Nick [Stahl] came on, which was great, but I knew this story was going to work with the dynamic of Tara and [James, the character played by] Nick. No matter how great Nick was going to be, we needed to get a young girl that could emotionally carry the same amount of weight. That’s tricky. It is heavy material for a child. You can’t pretend your way through it. So when AnnaSophia came in and played with us for day, that’s when I fully committed to it. I knew we had the money and the talent to pull it off.
AnnaSophia Robb in Sleepwalking.AnnaSophia, would you say this was your most adult role? You’ve mostly done kids’ films before…
AnnaSophia Robb: Yeah. It’s my first adult film. Thankfully, this is my first real strong adult film and Charlize was there to help me, support me and talk to me and…
Charlize Theron: Beat you up.
AnnaSophia Robb: Yeah beat me up. (smiles) Just curse me out. (They both laugh) She was just there for me every day. She made a very comfortable environment, so I felt safe. I felt open to try anything and everything. We wanted to make a good movie. I wanted her to push me. I’m thankful for that, because it made me not scared to do heavy material. To be able to get down into those dark places but then come back up. Everytime there was a scene like that, she was there for me. I think I’m going to be a healthier actor because of this.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned when you’ve done a movie as both an actress and producer?
Charlize Theron: The first time we produced was on Monster and that was a really incredible experience, so it set the bar really, really high. But the one thing I walked away from in that experience that I really wanted again was this incredible partnership with everybody in making a film. That kind of collaboration where you don’t feel like you’re shooting a film, you’re basically just documenting. That was how Monster felt, and that was how this felt. That’s what makes it not compartmentalized for me. It’s not like this-this-this-this and then oh my God, now I’m in front of the camera. It’s a creative process. All we’re doing all day long is discussing and debating: who these people are, what the world is, how to make it authentic. You’re just constantly in that, so that when you put the wardrobe on and you walk up on the camera, you can roll and shoot. Then, when we’re done, we’re done. I took that from Monster. That’s how I really enjoy making films. I hope to continue doing that.
Do you have any recent films which inspired you?
Charlize Theron: There were a lot of great films this year. I really loved Julian Schnabel’s film (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). I really loved the Coen Brothers film (No Country for Old Men). I loved There Will Be Blood. I thought the Marion Cotillard was just absolutely brilliant (in La Vie en Rose) and I really loved the film as well. I was just – wooh! Loved that, loved that. I walked out of the theater and was like: Yeah, let’s go to work! I was really, really happy for her. There were a lot of great films. I really loved Sean Penn’s film, too – Into the Wild. That, wooh… amazing – really amazing.
Nick Stahl, AnnaSophia Robb and Charlize Theron in Sleepwalking.Do you have an affinity for characters with tough and grim backgrounds? You come from a very different place.
Charlize Theron: I think what you’re referring to are Monster and North Country and this. All those characters come from the same economical stature. The one thing that I learned – and maybe that I have in common – is when you come from a harsh landscape you become incredibly resilient. I think that makes you feel they’re kind of in the same world there. But I’ve been doing this for fourteen years and I’ve made close to thirty films. If I’m going to have to start saying no to good stories just because there is some correlation there somewhere, I’m not going to be working as an actor very soon. (laughs) The understanding comes from – I have a real obsession with human behavior. I love reading about it. I love observing it. I like asking questions about it. I’m fascinated by how we function as human beings. I think all actors secretly have that. It’s interesting for us to go and try and find the empathy within that adversity – to try and find the authenticity of that person, or the flaws, the beauty and the hope. It’s a great gift, if you’re into that thing.
There’s that scene when you’re driving away from the house where your boyfriend is busted and you roll down the window and flip the police off. It really seemed faithful to the character. Was that in the script, or did you just do it?
Charlize Theron: It was in the script. But I was supposed to originally be mad and I was like: no, I can’t see that. It’s a moment of glory – her flip off to authority. But I also thought it was important to show that this was a woman who was quite reckless. She didn’t really understand any sense of responsibility. There were all these little signs that we had to get across in the first fifteen minutes of the film – that showed somebody very conflicted and making a really horrible decision [to leave her child]. In our society [it] is very unforgiving and should be. At the same time, [we were] just showing the openings. The moment where she says, “How old do I look?” You see a woman who’s very insecure and feels like the only thing she really has to give is what she has physically. She doesn’t really think a lot about herself. Where she says to the guy: “Tell me you love me – even if it doesn’t mean anything.” You find all these little moments that give you some kind of an idea that something’s not quite right. At the same time, it all comes down to empathy.
AnnaSophia, you had some scary scenes with Dennis Hopper. What was your impression of him? How terrifying was the slap?
AnnaSophia Robb and Dennis Hopper in Sleepwalking.AnnaSophia Robb: When I first met Dennis, well first of all, he gave Charlize a big hug. Then I was like, oh, well, he’s all good. (laughs) He has such a presence and he is such a kind man. He has so much to offer as an actor. We had a read through and I just saw this man as a mean, nasty old man who had been abused before and that’s why he acted like this. I found so much more to that, just talking about why he did this thing this way and thinking about where his wife had gone – all these different questions brought up that I had never thought about. I was just so in awe of him. How he was excited about the work he was doing and really thinking about his character. It wasn’t like he was just coming on to be on the shoot for eight minutes. He was really investing in the character.
Charlize Theron: You know we actually paid him a lot of money. (Both laugh)
AnnaSophia Robb: Okay, well that makes sense now. After every take, no matter if it was a really dark one or it was tense but not extremely emotional, he would always say: “That was a good take,” or “Are you all right?”
Charlize Theron: He didn’t physically hit her, really. Tell about the little trick he taught you.
AnnaSophia Robb: He had a glove and he’d take it off and he’d just use the fabric.
Charlize Theron in Sleepwalking.As a producer, what went into deciding that he should get the role?
Charlize Theron: I feel incredibly blessed because when I read, I do imagine faces and actors who would be really brilliant in certain roles. I’ll never forget the first time I read it. The opening scene with the dinner was written beautifully. There was an incredible amount of charisma that this guy needed to have. When I think of that kind of really conflicted [person] – you just don’t know what you’re going to get, so charming that you want to hug them but you’re kind of scared – Dennis Hopper just comes to mind. He’s so good at doing that. I got the dream cast I really hoped for. As a producer, it’s always a little bit tricky, because you want to work with the people you really feel are right for the role. Who are going to inspire you – who I want to surround myself with and work with. At the same time financiers want to have some kind of guarantee. What is considered a guarantee in our business today – there’s this idea that some actors are more bankable or more of a box-office draw than others. It’s a very tricky thing as a producer to find that medium where you can get the right guy for the right draw – instead of just getting somebody because they’re kind of hot at the moment. It’s just too much work for me not to do it with the people I really, truly believe are right for the role – that I want to make it with.
Anna Sophia, what’s one thing you learned from working with Charlize?
Charlize Theron: (mouths silently) Nothing. Nothing.
AnnaSophia Robb: (laughs) Yeah, really nothing. I would say just having…
Charlize Theron: (teasing, threateningly) Watch it…
AnnaSophia Robb: The passion for all the projects that we’re doing. Just loving what you are doing.
2008年9月12日星期五
2008年9月6日星期六
Out of Africa
She grew up in a hick town in apartheid South Africa. Now, having won an Oscar, Charlize Theron is a national hero. She tells Emma Brockes about racist guilt, playing a serial killer - and the shooting of her father by her own mother
* Emma Brockes
* The Guardian,
* Friday April 2 2004
* Article history
Nelson Mandela and Charlize Theron
Charlize Theron wipes away a tear after meeting Nelson Mandela (Photo: Getty)
Since winning the Oscar for best actress last month, Charlize Theron has had some great times and some not so great times. She has, for example, been presented to Nelson Mandela ("he's like a grandfather to me") who with embarrassing good grace told her she had "put South Africa on the map". She has toured and drawn crowds like Eva Peron. She has weathered a range of responses to Monster, a biopic of the prostitute serial killer Aileen Wuornos, culminating in the love of the Academy and the dismay of her Afrikaans aunt, for whom no aspect of the film was untroublesome.
1. Monster
2. Release: 2003
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 18
5. Runtime: 111 mins
6. Directors: Patty Jenkins
7. Cast: Bruce Dern, Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci
8. More on this film
And then there have been the interviews; for example this, from a South African newspaper last month: "Interviewer: Aileen Wuornos killed lots of people and your mum killed your dad, so that must have helped you get into role. Theron: No. They're completely different."
I happened to be in South Africa during Theron's victory tour and people were choked by her success, not only out of parochial pride, but because in a country where violence against women is endemic, Theron and her mother are held to be examples of ones who got away. Five years ago, the actress fronted a controversial anti-rape TV campaign which so enraged elements of the macho culture (or "28 stupid men" as Theron puts it) that it was taken off air, before the courts reinstated it. All of which makes it so jarring that the Hollywood PR machine has tried, and almost succeeded, in recasting Theron as an American star in the traditional mould; that is as a woman with no politics, no ethnicity and no history predating her last big hit.
Theron recalls how, when she was announced as the lead in Monster, a whisper went round LA along the lines of "how sad that this poor woman's life is going to be Hollywoodised and played by [shallow American starlet] Charlize ". If it weren't for her insistence on telling the truth - "always be honest, that's the way I was raised," - Theron might have relaxed into this identity like the hick actresses of the 1930s, who checked their real names and backgrounds at the studio door.
This, however, is not Theron. She is smoking when I walk into the room and staring beadily through a fortress of make-up. While her American accent is flawless, her cadences are a little too bright, her colloquialisms too studied to be anything but the consequence of taught-by-TV English. "I was raised in Afrikaans," she says. "Benoni is an Afrikaans town and nobody there spoke it, so I had barely any knowledge of English and a very heavy South African accent. When I went to auditions, the feedback was always, 'Great, but can you come back and do an American accent?' So I thought I'd better learn how to speak like an American. And I did it from watching television." She rolls her eyes. "It's great to be bilingual, but it's shit to have a language that you can't use anywhere else. All those 'ccchhhs'."
When she first moved to America as a model, her nationality was the cause of deep embarrassment. It was the one thing that threatened to capsize her. When a friend in New York advised her to hide where she came from, she took it to heart. "He should never have said it because it was such a bad thing for me. I started feeling insecure. I started feeling that every time I was around a black person I had to kind of over-explain that I wasn't a racist. You know? That went on for about two years and then I thought, know what? This is so ridiculous. I know I'm not racist, so why am I doing this?"
I ask about Benoni, a town 20 miles east of Johannesburg where her parents ran a construction company. "It's a farm community," she says. "Small farms. I loved it. The only thing it suffers from is that everybody gossips. Sure, I could've grown up a hick. But my mum was so active in the arts that she taught me about imagination and freedom of thought. Nothing was ever forced on me. Like, I'm eight years old and the priest is telling my mum, 'You have to tell your daughter to come to church.' And she's saying to him, 'She's right there, tell her yourself. I'm not doing anything.' So I was never a hillbilly."
Was it emotional going back? "Very emotional. You're reminiscing and thinking of all of, of all of those things." Those things included her mother Gerda shooting her father in self-defence when Theron was 15. She clears her throat. "I spent some time in some Aids orphanages, which was very emotional."
In less able hands, Monster might have been what Theron calls a, "a glorified, MTV-cool, lesbian, serial-killer cheese-fest". She came to the script with no knowledge of Aileen's trial and execution, but with a conviction that the death penalty is morally wrong. "It's sickening how it's used for political ends. These people are just pawns for politicians like Jeb Bush." In Patty Jenkins she found a director who was less interested in making a bankable film than in making a true one, that is one which reflected the difficulty society has with women who kill. The violence in Monster is so real that cinemagoers wince with every thump - it highlights how stylised most other movie violence is.
A tedious amount has been made of the fact that Theron, messing directly with the order of the universe, bulked up for the role and spent hours in make-up being generally uglified. But the physical stuff was nothing compared to the emotional demands which required her, in one scene, to simulate being beaten, raped and tortured as Wuornos was, before turning on her attacker and killing him. She says it isn't a role she could have taken on a few years ago. "It would have ruined my life. It took me a couple of years to get to a place where I could teach myself to do that kind of material."
Her role model in this, as in most things, is Gerda. Theron's mother, who now lives in Los Angeles, was different from the people she grew up around. She was blonde where her siblings were dark; tall where they were short; and dissatisfied with the narrow range of options presented to her as the youngest child of the family - to stay at home and take care of her mother. While Theron's aunt finds nudity in films destabilising, Gerda's reaction to her daughter's film roles has always been "cheers!"
"She was very talented," says Theron. "She was a gymnast, good in sports. But it was never encouraged. Many times it was taken away from her. All the other kids left and she had to stay home." At the age of 19 she rejected the role and left. Years later, says Theron, the days on which Gerda visited her mother were the only ones guaranteed to put her in a bad mood. "I felt the impact of her background in the way she raised me. Everything that she didn't have, she wanted to be able to give to me. I could say anything, like 'ice-skating!' and the next day she would make sure that it was nurtured. By 19, when she fucked off, she was like, 'Now I want all those things I never had in my life.' She became very well read. She had a vast knowl edge of international travel. I got that gene from her, the looking at a map and wondering what was out there."
Theron was 16 when she left South Africa for a modelling job in Italy. She was tough by then, although it wasn't an attitude she was grateful for. She didn't cry, or ring home for help, or panic when the money ran out. "I really didn't have a choice in the matter," she says. "And this was the one thing as a child that really upset me - the way my mum dealt with things. Now, obviously, I see that it's made me into who I am and enabled me to take care of myself. But at the time ..."
Theron remembers a particularly difficult period at boarding school in Johannesburg. "My friends and I would get into trouble, and on Monday morning all of their parents would be there in the principal's office, explaining why their daughters had done this terrible thing. And I would be sitting there thinking, 'OK: no mother, father - dunno where he is - I'm going to have to defend myself. And I'd get on the phone to her and be like, 'YOU ARE THE WORST MOTHER IN THE WORLD! And all the teachers think so too because you NEVER SHOW UP.' And she was like, 'What do you want me to do? You got yourself into trouble, get yourself out.'"
For a long time Theron interpreted it as her mother not caring. Now she sees it differently. "It taught me that if I fuck up, I'm going to have to sort it out myself. There is no running-to-mum to fix it. At one point, somebody stole my ruler and she was, 'Well then steal it back!' She always said, you have to take care of things yourself."
Theron's father wasn't solely responsible for this attitude, but it is implied. I ask if he was mostly absent while she was growing up. "Not all the time. But he was a bit of a vagabond. He had a constant need to disappear. Sometimes it would be for a couple of days. His side of the family lived close to Namibia, so if he disappeared for longer than that then we knew that it was because of the long drive there and back. It was part of his personality. Some people just have to get away sometimes to deal with things."
Was he always drinking? "Um." She picks at the arm of the chair. "Yeah. Uh. Yeah. No. I mean, he didn't always. My mum told me the other day that when she married him he had completely stopped drinking because he knew he had a problem. But it's what everybody did in South Africa. It wasn't like he was the odd one out."
Theron says that she was never herself assaulted. Is she glad that he is dead? "God, no. No, no. I so wish he was around. I wouldn't wish something like that on anybody. Nobody deserves that. It was very, very sad what happened. I wish he'd been happy. I wish ... I wish they'd divorced years and years before, because I think he would have been a happy man. I think my mum would've been a happy woman. But it wasn't the done thing and so they were miserable."
On her trip back to South Africa last month, Theron met up with her former school friends in Johannesburg. Most of them are married, some on their second marriages and, although Theron is seeing Irish actor Stuart Townsend, by their standards she's a long way behind the curve. It was nice, she says, sitting with them, chatting in Afrikaans while her American friends stared. Only occasionally was the myth of uniformity broken. "So what is Keanu Reeves like?" exploded one of her friends, appealing to Charlize the star, the Hollywood creation. "Please," she begged, "don't do that. It's odd."
* Emma Brockes
* The Guardian,
* Friday April 2 2004
* Article history
Nelson Mandela and Charlize Theron
Charlize Theron wipes away a tear after meeting Nelson Mandela (Photo: Getty)
Since winning the Oscar for best actress last month, Charlize Theron has had some great times and some not so great times. She has, for example, been presented to Nelson Mandela ("he's like a grandfather to me") who with embarrassing good grace told her she had "put South Africa on the map". She has toured and drawn crowds like Eva Peron. She has weathered a range of responses to Monster, a biopic of the prostitute serial killer Aileen Wuornos, culminating in the love of the Academy and the dismay of her Afrikaans aunt, for whom no aspect of the film was untroublesome.
1. Monster
2. Release: 2003
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 18
5. Runtime: 111 mins
6. Directors: Patty Jenkins
7. Cast: Bruce Dern, Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci
8. More on this film
And then there have been the interviews; for example this, from a South African newspaper last month: "Interviewer: Aileen Wuornos killed lots of people and your mum killed your dad, so that must have helped you get into role. Theron: No. They're completely different."
I happened to be in South Africa during Theron's victory tour and people were choked by her success, not only out of parochial pride, but because in a country where violence against women is endemic, Theron and her mother are held to be examples of ones who got away. Five years ago, the actress fronted a controversial anti-rape TV campaign which so enraged elements of the macho culture (or "28 stupid men" as Theron puts it) that it was taken off air, before the courts reinstated it. All of which makes it so jarring that the Hollywood PR machine has tried, and almost succeeded, in recasting Theron as an American star in the traditional mould; that is as a woman with no politics, no ethnicity and no history predating her last big hit.
Theron recalls how, when she was announced as the lead in Monster, a whisper went round LA along the lines of "how sad that this poor woman's life is going to be Hollywoodised and played by [shallow American starlet] Charlize ". If it weren't for her insistence on telling the truth - "always be honest, that's the way I was raised," - Theron might have relaxed into this identity like the hick actresses of the 1930s, who checked their real names and backgrounds at the studio door.
This, however, is not Theron. She is smoking when I walk into the room and staring beadily through a fortress of make-up. While her American accent is flawless, her cadences are a little too bright, her colloquialisms too studied to be anything but the consequence of taught-by-TV English. "I was raised in Afrikaans," she says. "Benoni is an Afrikaans town and nobody there spoke it, so I had barely any knowledge of English and a very heavy South African accent. When I went to auditions, the feedback was always, 'Great, but can you come back and do an American accent?' So I thought I'd better learn how to speak like an American. And I did it from watching television." She rolls her eyes. "It's great to be bilingual, but it's shit to have a language that you can't use anywhere else. All those 'ccchhhs'."
When she first moved to America as a model, her nationality was the cause of deep embarrassment. It was the one thing that threatened to capsize her. When a friend in New York advised her to hide where she came from, she took it to heart. "He should never have said it because it was such a bad thing for me. I started feeling insecure. I started feeling that every time I was around a black person I had to kind of over-explain that I wasn't a racist. You know? That went on for about two years and then I thought, know what? This is so ridiculous. I know I'm not racist, so why am I doing this?"
I ask about Benoni, a town 20 miles east of Johannesburg where her parents ran a construction company. "It's a farm community," she says. "Small farms. I loved it. The only thing it suffers from is that everybody gossips. Sure, I could've grown up a hick. But my mum was so active in the arts that she taught me about imagination and freedom of thought. Nothing was ever forced on me. Like, I'm eight years old and the priest is telling my mum, 'You have to tell your daughter to come to church.' And she's saying to him, 'She's right there, tell her yourself. I'm not doing anything.' So I was never a hillbilly."
Was it emotional going back? "Very emotional. You're reminiscing and thinking of all of, of all of those things." Those things included her mother Gerda shooting her father in self-defence when Theron was 15. She clears her throat. "I spent some time in some Aids orphanages, which was very emotional."
In less able hands, Monster might have been what Theron calls a, "a glorified, MTV-cool, lesbian, serial-killer cheese-fest". She came to the script with no knowledge of Aileen's trial and execution, but with a conviction that the death penalty is morally wrong. "It's sickening how it's used for political ends. These people are just pawns for politicians like Jeb Bush." In Patty Jenkins she found a director who was less interested in making a bankable film than in making a true one, that is one which reflected the difficulty society has with women who kill. The violence in Monster is so real that cinemagoers wince with every thump - it highlights how stylised most other movie violence is.
A tedious amount has been made of the fact that Theron, messing directly with the order of the universe, bulked up for the role and spent hours in make-up being generally uglified. But the physical stuff was nothing compared to the emotional demands which required her, in one scene, to simulate being beaten, raped and tortured as Wuornos was, before turning on her attacker and killing him. She says it isn't a role she could have taken on a few years ago. "It would have ruined my life. It took me a couple of years to get to a place where I could teach myself to do that kind of material."
Her role model in this, as in most things, is Gerda. Theron's mother, who now lives in Los Angeles, was different from the people she grew up around. She was blonde where her siblings were dark; tall where they were short; and dissatisfied with the narrow range of options presented to her as the youngest child of the family - to stay at home and take care of her mother. While Theron's aunt finds nudity in films destabilising, Gerda's reaction to her daughter's film roles has always been "cheers!"
"She was very talented," says Theron. "She was a gymnast, good in sports. But it was never encouraged. Many times it was taken away from her. All the other kids left and she had to stay home." At the age of 19 she rejected the role and left. Years later, says Theron, the days on which Gerda visited her mother were the only ones guaranteed to put her in a bad mood. "I felt the impact of her background in the way she raised me. Everything that she didn't have, she wanted to be able to give to me. I could say anything, like 'ice-skating!' and the next day she would make sure that it was nurtured. By 19, when she fucked off, she was like, 'Now I want all those things I never had in my life.' She became very well read. She had a vast knowl edge of international travel. I got that gene from her, the looking at a map and wondering what was out there."
Theron was 16 when she left South Africa for a modelling job in Italy. She was tough by then, although it wasn't an attitude she was grateful for. She didn't cry, or ring home for help, or panic when the money ran out. "I really didn't have a choice in the matter," she says. "And this was the one thing as a child that really upset me - the way my mum dealt with things. Now, obviously, I see that it's made me into who I am and enabled me to take care of myself. But at the time ..."
Theron remembers a particularly difficult period at boarding school in Johannesburg. "My friends and I would get into trouble, and on Monday morning all of their parents would be there in the principal's office, explaining why their daughters had done this terrible thing. And I would be sitting there thinking, 'OK: no mother, father - dunno where he is - I'm going to have to defend myself. And I'd get on the phone to her and be like, 'YOU ARE THE WORST MOTHER IN THE WORLD! And all the teachers think so too because you NEVER SHOW UP.' And she was like, 'What do you want me to do? You got yourself into trouble, get yourself out.'"
For a long time Theron interpreted it as her mother not caring. Now she sees it differently. "It taught me that if I fuck up, I'm going to have to sort it out myself. There is no running-to-mum to fix it. At one point, somebody stole my ruler and she was, 'Well then steal it back!' She always said, you have to take care of things yourself."
Theron's father wasn't solely responsible for this attitude, but it is implied. I ask if he was mostly absent while she was growing up. "Not all the time. But he was a bit of a vagabond. He had a constant need to disappear. Sometimes it would be for a couple of days. His side of the family lived close to Namibia, so if he disappeared for longer than that then we knew that it was because of the long drive there and back. It was part of his personality. Some people just have to get away sometimes to deal with things."
Was he always drinking? "Um." She picks at the arm of the chair. "Yeah. Uh. Yeah. No. I mean, he didn't always. My mum told me the other day that when she married him he had completely stopped drinking because he knew he had a problem. But it's what everybody did in South Africa. It wasn't like he was the odd one out."
Theron says that she was never herself assaulted. Is she glad that he is dead? "God, no. No, no. I so wish he was around. I wouldn't wish something like that on anybody. Nobody deserves that. It was very, very sad what happened. I wish he'd been happy. I wish ... I wish they'd divorced years and years before, because I think he would have been a happy man. I think my mum would've been a happy woman. But it wasn't the done thing and so they were miserable."
On her trip back to South Africa last month, Theron met up with her former school friends in Johannesburg. Most of them are married, some on their second marriages and, although Theron is seeing Irish actor Stuart Townsend, by their standards she's a long way behind the curve. It was nice, she says, sitting with them, chatting in Afrikaans while her American friends stared. Only occasionally was the myth of uniformity broken. "So what is Keanu Reeves like?" exploded one of her friends, appealing to Charlize the star, the Hollywood creation. "Please," she begged, "don't do that. It's odd."
Beauty in the beast
From South African dorp via fashion plate to serial killer seems an unlikely route to an Oscar, but it could happen when the award for best actress is revealed
* Harriet Lane
* The Observer,
* Sunday February 22 2004
'You're just so... pretty.' This is a line which is key to the love story at the heart of Monster, a line whispered by Christina Ricci's character to Charlize Theron, the odds-on favourite for Best Actress Oscar thanks to her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Theron is a gorgeous girl in the finest showstopping Hollywood tradition, possessing the sort of old-style, trumpet-voluntary va-va-voom that has prompted admirers to compare her looks with those of Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. It's a beauty we now see has been something of a liability. Monster, in which she plays a woman whose physical appeal has been brutally knocked out of her, has given Theron one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to break free of it.
It's a sign of the priorities of contemporary Hollywood that only ravishing people are allowed to play grotesques - or even the faintly plain. Think Gwyneth Paltrow in her fat suit for Shallow Hal; Renée Zellweger shovelling away Krispy Kremes for Bridget Jones; Cameron Diaz and her latex zits in Being John Malkovich; Nicole Kidman's preposterous proboscis in The Hours. Evidently, cinema audiences prefer ugliness to be purely cosmetic: a special effect - like alien spacecraft or battlefield explosions - skimming over the familiar, dependable perfection beneath. And, since Zellweger and the rest never stop reminding us that they spend as long putting on the weight and nurturing those spots as the rest of us do trying to get rid of them, there's an element of cruelty, too: a hint of turning the tables.
Theron's performance in Monster doesn't follow the usual route. When Nicole Kidman wore the Nose, she couldn't help brandishing it in the direction of the Academy: look, look, see the things I'll do for my Art! But when Ricci's character Selby says, 'You're just so... pretty,' Theron's coup has been to dismantle everything we think we know about her, to show the sweetness of the comment penetrating all of her character's reserves, all her defences, taking root and starting to grow. It's a dangerous moment. You can imagine the temptation is there for the audience to giggle. But it doesn't happen.
Of course you know, in a practical sense, that Theron is there beneath the brown contact lenses, the false teeth, the shaved eyebrows, the sprayed-on tattoos and freckles, the latex mask (quick-set by a hairdryer on 'high', to sand away those cheekbones and weather up the complexion) and the extra two stone of weight - and yet it is almost impossible to find her. Salon.com's critic says the shock of Theron's performance comes with the realisation 'that she has put herself completely in the service of her character - given herself over to be used, subsumed. Theron has mastered the carriage and the speech patterns to play Wuornos... and with the prosthetics, she has the right all-around look. But it takes more than actorly craft to be able to pour yourself, as she does, into the body and mind of a person none of us would want to be. It's as if she's liquefied her own soul.' The New York Daily News agreed: 'This is no circus-stunt performance. Theron not only transforms herself, she takes on the swaggering mannerisms, juiced-up anxiety and pent-up-rage speech patterns in this role of a lifetime.'
The two films made about Wournos by the British documentary-maker Nick Broomfield concluded with the arrest of several police officers who were cutting deals to sell their stories to Hollywood. It's not yet clear whether any of them were involved with Monster, an out-of-nowhere critical success which Theron herself produced after reading Patty Jenkins's first screenplay. Wuornos - abandoned by her mother, raped by her grandfather, inducted into prostitution at nine - was a highway hooker in south Florida who robbed, stripped and shot seven clients in 1990 before being turned in to the FBI by Selby, her girlfriend.
The case attracted a huge attention. As well as exciting tabloid vitriol, Wuornos took on immense political significance and her case was championed by women's groups when she claimed in court that she killed in self-defence. Later, on the eve of her execution by lethal injection in 2002, she told Broomfield that every murder was premeditated.
For fans of Theron - who had never before produced a movie and was best known for playing bright and bubbly in guff like Sweet November (opposite Keanu Reeves) and Mighty Joe Young (opposite a 15-foot gorilla) - taking on a project like Monster looked a little bit like biting into a cyanide capsule. Still, Theron had her own compelling reasons for taking the risk. 'It's what I've been dying to do with my career,' she said. 'The work I've been doing the last couple of years is not really what I wanted. If you're not careful, you get typecast. I was getting stuck.' But this is only half the story. Monster had a more personal resonance than she had so far cared to admit.
Theron was born 28 years ago in a small 'dorp' near Benoni in Gauteng, South Africa. Her Afrikaner parents Charles and Gerda farmed and ran a heavy-haulage business. Theron's story had always been that her father died in a car crash when she was 15, but several years ago Time magazine reported that, when drunk, abusive and armed, he had been shot by Gerda in self-defence (the case never came to court.) 'The terrible thing is that everybody in South Africa has a gun,' Theron told TV's Diane Sawyer a month ago. 'That's just the lifestyle there. And when those things are around, [when] people get irrational and emotional and drunk, terrible things can happen.'
Theron had always called herself 'a mama's girl'. Long before the truth came out, she told an interviewer: 'We were friends from away back. We had to be. We were the only ones there for each other. I felt like her protector.' Gerda now lives near her daughter - who is dating the Irish actor Stuart Townsend, her co-star in the upcoming Head in the Clouds - in Los Angeles.
For her part, Gerda always had ambitions for her daughter: ambitions to get her out of Benoni and, if possible, out of the country. She encouraged her daughter to enter a modelling competition which led to a year in Milan: 'Waitress cash,' Theron dismissively called her wages. 'It was not for job satisfaction.' There were also childhood ballet lessons which paid off with invitations to join a Johannesburg dance company and the Joffrey Ballet in New York. In Monster, that training is right up there on screen, the 12 years of dance informing the overwhelming physicality of her performance.
After a bad knee injury and a pep talk from Gerda, Theron gave up ballet (nowadays, she disarms journalists by wolfing down cocktail onions and remarking, 'That was very Swan Lake') and arrived in Los Angeles, renting a room in a fleapit hotel on Fairfax called, appropriately, The Farmer's Daughter, while chasing her dream of getting into acting. One day, throwing a hissy fit in the foyer of a bank - a teller refused to cash a cheque - she was approached by John Crosby, a talent manager who had also worked with Renee Russo and John Hurt. Crosby sent her to Ivana Chubbuck, an acting coach, and to key casting agents. 'Without a casting agent locking on to you - especially a beautiful female at the beginning of a career, and Charlize has such classic, Hollywood-in-its-heyday looks - it's very tough,' Crosby has said. She dumped him without much ceremony a few years later, once her career had started to take off.
There were always clues in movies such as Devil's Advocate and Woody Allen's Celebrity that Theron was a neat little comedienne, but for a while it looked as though it was going to be her fate to play the ornamental girlfriend in fluffy crowd-pleasers. Not long ago, reports were coming in about the roles which had just slipped through her fingers: Roxie Hart in Chicago, snatched up by Zellweger; the lead in Sweet Home Alabama, which went to Reese Witherspoon. These sorts of leaks usually spell the end of a movie career - who wants tainted goods? - but Theron obviously decided to look elsewhere; to make her own luck. Will it hold out for next week's Oscar?
Charlize Theron
DoB: 7 August 1975 (Benoni, near Johannesburg, South Africa)
Fiancé: Stuart Townsend (her co-star in the forthcoming film Head in the Clouds)
Parents: Charles (who died when she was 15) and Gerda
Career: Trained in ballet, model in Milan, actress
* Harriet Lane
* The Observer,
* Sunday February 22 2004
'You're just so... pretty.' This is a line which is key to the love story at the heart of Monster, a line whispered by Christina Ricci's character to Charlize Theron, the odds-on favourite for Best Actress Oscar thanks to her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Theron is a gorgeous girl in the finest showstopping Hollywood tradition, possessing the sort of old-style, trumpet-voluntary va-va-voom that has prompted admirers to compare her looks with those of Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. It's a beauty we now see has been something of a liability. Monster, in which she plays a woman whose physical appeal has been brutally knocked out of her, has given Theron one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to break free of it.
It's a sign of the priorities of contemporary Hollywood that only ravishing people are allowed to play grotesques - or even the faintly plain. Think Gwyneth Paltrow in her fat suit for Shallow Hal; Renée Zellweger shovelling away Krispy Kremes for Bridget Jones; Cameron Diaz and her latex zits in Being John Malkovich; Nicole Kidman's preposterous proboscis in The Hours. Evidently, cinema audiences prefer ugliness to be purely cosmetic: a special effect - like alien spacecraft or battlefield explosions - skimming over the familiar, dependable perfection beneath. And, since Zellweger and the rest never stop reminding us that they spend as long putting on the weight and nurturing those spots as the rest of us do trying to get rid of them, there's an element of cruelty, too: a hint of turning the tables.
Theron's performance in Monster doesn't follow the usual route. When Nicole Kidman wore the Nose, she couldn't help brandishing it in the direction of the Academy: look, look, see the things I'll do for my Art! But when Ricci's character Selby says, 'You're just so... pretty,' Theron's coup has been to dismantle everything we think we know about her, to show the sweetness of the comment penetrating all of her character's reserves, all her defences, taking root and starting to grow. It's a dangerous moment. You can imagine the temptation is there for the audience to giggle. But it doesn't happen.
Of course you know, in a practical sense, that Theron is there beneath the brown contact lenses, the false teeth, the shaved eyebrows, the sprayed-on tattoos and freckles, the latex mask (quick-set by a hairdryer on 'high', to sand away those cheekbones and weather up the complexion) and the extra two stone of weight - and yet it is almost impossible to find her. Salon.com's critic says the shock of Theron's performance comes with the realisation 'that she has put herself completely in the service of her character - given herself over to be used, subsumed. Theron has mastered the carriage and the speech patterns to play Wuornos... and with the prosthetics, she has the right all-around look. But it takes more than actorly craft to be able to pour yourself, as she does, into the body and mind of a person none of us would want to be. It's as if she's liquefied her own soul.' The New York Daily News agreed: 'This is no circus-stunt performance. Theron not only transforms herself, she takes on the swaggering mannerisms, juiced-up anxiety and pent-up-rage speech patterns in this role of a lifetime.'
The two films made about Wournos by the British documentary-maker Nick Broomfield concluded with the arrest of several police officers who were cutting deals to sell their stories to Hollywood. It's not yet clear whether any of them were involved with Monster, an out-of-nowhere critical success which Theron herself produced after reading Patty Jenkins's first screenplay. Wuornos - abandoned by her mother, raped by her grandfather, inducted into prostitution at nine - was a highway hooker in south Florida who robbed, stripped and shot seven clients in 1990 before being turned in to the FBI by Selby, her girlfriend.
The case attracted a huge attention. As well as exciting tabloid vitriol, Wuornos took on immense political significance and her case was championed by women's groups when she claimed in court that she killed in self-defence. Later, on the eve of her execution by lethal injection in 2002, she told Broomfield that every murder was premeditated.
For fans of Theron - who had never before produced a movie and was best known for playing bright and bubbly in guff like Sweet November (opposite Keanu Reeves) and Mighty Joe Young (opposite a 15-foot gorilla) - taking on a project like Monster looked a little bit like biting into a cyanide capsule. Still, Theron had her own compelling reasons for taking the risk. 'It's what I've been dying to do with my career,' she said. 'The work I've been doing the last couple of years is not really what I wanted. If you're not careful, you get typecast. I was getting stuck.' But this is only half the story. Monster had a more personal resonance than she had so far cared to admit.
Theron was born 28 years ago in a small 'dorp' near Benoni in Gauteng, South Africa. Her Afrikaner parents Charles and Gerda farmed and ran a heavy-haulage business. Theron's story had always been that her father died in a car crash when she was 15, but several years ago Time magazine reported that, when drunk, abusive and armed, he had been shot by Gerda in self-defence (the case never came to court.) 'The terrible thing is that everybody in South Africa has a gun,' Theron told TV's Diane Sawyer a month ago. 'That's just the lifestyle there. And when those things are around, [when] people get irrational and emotional and drunk, terrible things can happen.'
Theron had always called herself 'a mama's girl'. Long before the truth came out, she told an interviewer: 'We were friends from away back. We had to be. We were the only ones there for each other. I felt like her protector.' Gerda now lives near her daughter - who is dating the Irish actor Stuart Townsend, her co-star in the upcoming Head in the Clouds - in Los Angeles.
For her part, Gerda always had ambitions for her daughter: ambitions to get her out of Benoni and, if possible, out of the country. She encouraged her daughter to enter a modelling competition which led to a year in Milan: 'Waitress cash,' Theron dismissively called her wages. 'It was not for job satisfaction.' There were also childhood ballet lessons which paid off with invitations to join a Johannesburg dance company and the Joffrey Ballet in New York. In Monster, that training is right up there on screen, the 12 years of dance informing the overwhelming physicality of her performance.
After a bad knee injury and a pep talk from Gerda, Theron gave up ballet (nowadays, she disarms journalists by wolfing down cocktail onions and remarking, 'That was very Swan Lake') and arrived in Los Angeles, renting a room in a fleapit hotel on Fairfax called, appropriately, The Farmer's Daughter, while chasing her dream of getting into acting. One day, throwing a hissy fit in the foyer of a bank - a teller refused to cash a cheque - she was approached by John Crosby, a talent manager who had also worked with Renee Russo and John Hurt. Crosby sent her to Ivana Chubbuck, an acting coach, and to key casting agents. 'Without a casting agent locking on to you - especially a beautiful female at the beginning of a career, and Charlize has such classic, Hollywood-in-its-heyday looks - it's very tough,' Crosby has said. She dumped him without much ceremony a few years later, once her career had started to take off.
There were always clues in movies such as Devil's Advocate and Woody Allen's Celebrity that Theron was a neat little comedienne, but for a while it looked as though it was going to be her fate to play the ornamental girlfriend in fluffy crowd-pleasers. Not long ago, reports were coming in about the roles which had just slipped through her fingers: Roxie Hart in Chicago, snatched up by Zellweger; the lead in Sweet Home Alabama, which went to Reese Witherspoon. These sorts of leaks usually spell the end of a movie career - who wants tainted goods? - but Theron obviously decided to look elsewhere; to make her own luck. Will it hold out for next week's Oscar?
Charlize Theron
DoB: 7 August 1975 (Benoni, near Johannesburg, South Africa)
Fiancé: Stuart Townsend (her co-star in the forthcoming film Head in the Clouds)
Parents: Charles (who died when she was 15) and Gerda
Career: Trained in ballet, model in Milan, actress
2008年9月5日星期五
Against Type
Against Type
by Hilton Als
The former dancer and model Charlize Theron, who stands five feet nine inches tall in her stocking feet, was in town recently to promote the new film “Monster,” in which she plays the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was executed by lethal injection in 2002 for murdering seven men. The chance to play against type (as Wuornos, Theron wears oversized prosthetic teeth, brown contact lenses, and heavy makeup simulating freckles, sun damage, and a lifetime of booze) is what attracted Theron to the material. “I mean, I could have gone on forever—well, at least another ten years—as ‘that girl,’ ” Theron said over lunch. Dressed in dark trousers and a black V-necked sweater, and wearing a pendant around her long white neck, Theron, who is twenty-eight, was the very image of the roles she has played in the past, in such movies as “Reindeer Games” and “The Italian Job”: blond, intelligent, ambitious women capable of detonating a bomb at a moment’s notice. “But what’s the point of going on in those kinds of parts if it doesn’t mean anything?” she continued. “My cup was filled, but I had to turn it over and make everything spill out and look at the mess in order to make me different.” After ordering a Coke and a bowl of tomato soup, she tore off a corner of the Times and wrapped her gum in it. “I’m a real classy date,” she said.
“Honey, Aileen couldn’t get arrested,” Theron went on. “Wait. That came out weird. Of course she got arrested—a lot—but she couldn’t turn her life around. She was always trying to get away from prostitution. She tried to join the Army, but they wouldn’t take her because she was deaf in one ear. Still, she never lost her hope—her belief—that there was something better out there.” Though Wuornos dreamed of being a star of one sort or another, Theron didn’t; she grew up on a farm in Benoni, South Africa, where she spoke Afrikaans (“When I came to the States, I barely spoke English”) and studied ballet. “There weren’t a lot of movies out there,” Theron recalled. “So I danced. I remember this travelling circus would come through town, and I remember how much I loved how free the people looked, becoming someone else. All those feelings! And in a character! That looked like a pretty cool thing to me. So after I’d had fourteen broken toes and been taking eight hours of dance a day, my mom said, ‘You like to tell stories. Get out of here and tell them.’ So I jumped on a plane to L.A. I was eighteen years old. I didn’t know one soul. I worked as a model. I didn’t have a green card. Otherwise, I would have been a waitress.”
When Theron was fifteen, she saw her mother shoot and kill her father—an abusive drunk—in self-defense. “I think one of the reasons Patty”—Patty Jenkins, who wrote and directed “Monster”—“clicked with me and I with her is that we both grew up on our own, and fast,” Theron said. “No regrets. And never whine. What’s the point? Patty had such a hard time, wanting me to be in this film.You know, there’s money out there for true-crime movies—if you want to shoot them for a hundred thousand dollars in Romania, with Romanian actors. After I signed on, we could get a somewhat bigger budget. ‘Monster’ cost five million to make, plus we had to shoot it in four weeks. Poor Patty! People were, like, ‘You better not make Charlize Theron ugly!’ Fuck that. I didn’t work on Aileen from the outside in. After I read the writing she did in jail, she was in my body, and I was in hers.” Just then, Theron’s assistant arrived: she had a photo shoot to get to. When a lunch companion suggested that she might not want to take the Halle Berry route should she be nominated for an Oscar for “Monster,” and win—soul-searching performance followed by a turn as a Bond girl—Theron threw her head back and howled. She motioned to her assistant to write this down: “Note to self. Do not become Halle Berry.”
by Hilton Als
The former dancer and model Charlize Theron, who stands five feet nine inches tall in her stocking feet, was in town recently to promote the new film “Monster,” in which she plays the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was executed by lethal injection in 2002 for murdering seven men. The chance to play against type (as Wuornos, Theron wears oversized prosthetic teeth, brown contact lenses, and heavy makeup simulating freckles, sun damage, and a lifetime of booze) is what attracted Theron to the material. “I mean, I could have gone on forever—well, at least another ten years—as ‘that girl,’ ” Theron said over lunch. Dressed in dark trousers and a black V-necked sweater, and wearing a pendant around her long white neck, Theron, who is twenty-eight, was the very image of the roles she has played in the past, in such movies as “Reindeer Games” and “The Italian Job”: blond, intelligent, ambitious women capable of detonating a bomb at a moment’s notice. “But what’s the point of going on in those kinds of parts if it doesn’t mean anything?” she continued. “My cup was filled, but I had to turn it over and make everything spill out and look at the mess in order to make me different.” After ordering a Coke and a bowl of tomato soup, she tore off a corner of the Times and wrapped her gum in it. “I’m a real classy date,” she said.
“Honey, Aileen couldn’t get arrested,” Theron went on. “Wait. That came out weird. Of course she got arrested—a lot—but she couldn’t turn her life around. She was always trying to get away from prostitution. She tried to join the Army, but they wouldn’t take her because she was deaf in one ear. Still, she never lost her hope—her belief—that there was something better out there.” Though Wuornos dreamed of being a star of one sort or another, Theron didn’t; she grew up on a farm in Benoni, South Africa, where she spoke Afrikaans (“When I came to the States, I barely spoke English”) and studied ballet. “There weren’t a lot of movies out there,” Theron recalled. “So I danced. I remember this travelling circus would come through town, and I remember how much I loved how free the people looked, becoming someone else. All those feelings! And in a character! That looked like a pretty cool thing to me. So after I’d had fourteen broken toes and been taking eight hours of dance a day, my mom said, ‘You like to tell stories. Get out of here and tell them.’ So I jumped on a plane to L.A. I was eighteen years old. I didn’t know one soul. I worked as a model. I didn’t have a green card. Otherwise, I would have been a waitress.”
When Theron was fifteen, she saw her mother shoot and kill her father—an abusive drunk—in self-defense. “I think one of the reasons Patty”—Patty Jenkins, who wrote and directed “Monster”—“clicked with me and I with her is that we both grew up on our own, and fast,” Theron said. “No regrets. And never whine. What’s the point? Patty had such a hard time, wanting me to be in this film.You know, there’s money out there for true-crime movies—if you want to shoot them for a hundred thousand dollars in Romania, with Romanian actors. After I signed on, we could get a somewhat bigger budget. ‘Monster’ cost five million to make, plus we had to shoot it in four weeks. Poor Patty! People were, like, ‘You better not make Charlize Theron ugly!’ Fuck that. I didn’t work on Aileen from the outside in. After I read the writing she did in jail, she was in my body, and I was in hers.” Just then, Theron’s assistant arrived: she had a photo shoot to get to. When a lunch companion suggested that she might not want to take the Halle Berry route should she be nominated for an Oscar for “Monster,” and win—soul-searching performance followed by a turn as a Bond girl—Theron threw her head back and howled. She motioned to her assistant to write this down: “Note to self. Do not become Halle Berry.”
Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend Talk 'Battle in Seattle'
Anti-globalization gets lost in the war on terror, and the star and actor-director aim to bring it back to the fore.
By Karl Rozemeyer
On December 10, 2006, singer-actor André Benjamin of Outkast fame donned a cardboard turtle suit and joined a group of fellow "protesters" on the streets of Seattle. Seven years before, tens of thousands of real demonstrators had descended upon the Seattle Convention Center and surrounding hotels to protest the actions of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The turtle-clad demonstrators — whose costumes highlighted the plight of turtles killed by shrimp nets — joined other anti-globalization vocalists and rallied against the leaders of the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank in sometimes violent clashes with police. Benjamin's participation in the re-enactment of the events of November 30, 1999, was for Battle in Seattle, a feature film by first-time helmer Stuart Townsend (perhaps best known for his role as Lestat in Queen of the Damned that stars an ensemble cast including Woody Harrelson, Michelle Rodriguez, and Martin Henderson, as well as Townsend's long-term girlfriend, Academy Award–winner Charlize Theron.
While several documentaries have been made about the civil unrest that unfolded in Seattle against the WTO Ministerial Conference, this is the first time the topic has been adapted for a major motion picture. Theron and Townsend, who have had limited box-office success with their previous collaborative projects Trapped and Head in the Clouds, are hoping that Battle in Seattle will connect with Hollywood's current interest in films inspired by political events. At the Toronto International Film Festival, Theron discusses the importance of making films like In the Valley of Elah and Battle in Seattle, while Townsend reveals the difficulties of directing such an ambitious project on a $10 million budget.
What was the genesis of this project and why this issue?
Townsend: I first started thinking about doing this film in 2002. And I remembered the event in 1999, but barely. I didn't really gain any knowledge or insight into the WTO or what the protesters were protesting about. I just saw the violence with the anarchists and the riots and stuff. And then I was reading a book about globalization by Anita Roddick called Take It Personally, and in the book there were photographs of the violence in Seattle. And they just really captured my imagination. So I went on the Internet and started looking to see what the Battle of Seattle was and I saw a story instantly. I thought it was really cinematic and visual. And the more I started researching the story, the more and more I was amazed at how little I knew about the event, and I asked myself why. So I thought it was a story that needed to re-remembered in a way. And it kind of started from there. I could see it in my head, so I decided I wanted to actually direct it and make a movie rather than give it to someone or act in it.
And this is your directorial debut. Was it intimidating approaching a project of this nature?
Townsend: I didn't look at it as intimidating, no. I really just loved the story and I decided not to even think about a defeatist attitude. I am going to try to make this. Hopefully I can do it. Maybe I can't. If I fall on my face, then I fall on my face. But I really felt passionately about the story.
Charlize, you are here at the Toronto Film Festival for Battle in Seattle as well as In the Valley of Elah. They are linked by their strong political overtones. Are these projects that you actively seek out for that reason?
Theron: No, I am interested in people, and I think we find ourselves in really interesting circumstances right now. At the end of the day, I am really drawn to good stories and the circumstances in both of these happen to be very socially relevant right now. But it is not an agenda of mine. It is not something that I really seek out, but it is always nice when you can do something that you really believe in and know that is going to be a part of your legacy.
Battle in Seattle has a large ensemble cast. How did you attract some of the actors to the project, such as André Benjamin (André 3000)?
Townsend: I wrote the character of Django. He is the sunshine of the film. He has got the funny lines and lightens the film. A couple of the things he says draw a big laugh. I think it is nice if you are making a film that can be serious at times and violent at times but that can also be humorous and emotional at times. He provides that aspect. I wanted someone with energy and charisma. I saw him perform with Outkast years ago and it was one of the best concerts I had ever seen. I was [impressed by] the energy of that guy. And I knew he was acting and so I got the script out to him and he loved it.
Do you think that the issues surrounding the World Trade Organization have gone a bit off the boil perhaps because there are so many other political issues that the world is facing right now, but the WTO issues still deserve attention? Is that one of the reasons why you thought this film should be made now?
Townsend: That is exactly one of the reasons. In effect, the War on Terror and the war in Iraq have taken all the coverage for the last few years, and it has taken a lot of heat off a lot of the other issues which I think are more important. I don't want to eat genetically modified food. I don't want to breathe dirty air. There are a lot of issues that the WTO deals with as well as institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank — and rightly so. [Many people] around the world were suffering because of either laws that they were enacting or money that they were lending. The focus was really on them, and unfortunately the War on Terror has taken the focus off these institutions. In a way, it so happens that the Seattle meeting did derail the WTO. It is still floundering. They are still trying to get this Doha Round [which aims to lower world trade barriers] together, but I do think that these are issues that won't go away. They will be around long after the war in Iraq.
This brings to the fore a much larger issue: At that time American society — at least in Seattle — felt galvanized enough to voice their dissatisfaction. Six years have passed and approval of the war in Iraq is at its lowest rating…
Townsend: Well, that is another point, and why I think the film is relevant now. This was an event where people from all walks of life — labor unions, environmental activists, teachers, farmers, religious groups, animal rights activists, everybody — came together. Young, old, from around the world. I think that is a good story right now about unity, rather than about division. People are galvanizing against the war. Thirty-six million people protested the war in Iraq, the largest protest in history, but it gets marginalized by the mainstream media. They do interviews with the dumbest people they can find who aren't even there to protest for the right reasons. And [they are the only ones] they interview. And, now, ever since Seattle, you cannot get within ten miles of the leaders that you are protesting at any of the G8 summits. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Syndey, they just spent $600 million dollars with 350,000 police and that is in part because of Seattle. Because Seattle was the one and only time when they stopped [the convention], and it was filled with people saying that another world is possible. And that hasn't gone away.
This touches on some of the elements of In the Valley of Elah as well. Do you feel the U.S. government is suppressing a lot of the information that is coming out about the war? Do you believe that people are not vocal enough about it?
Theron: Oh, I think it is very evident that when you turn on the TV, and you see men in well-pressed suits in air-conditioned buildings telling us how the soldiers are doing in Iraq. I very rarely see a soldier talking about what is happening in Iraq. I think that is what In the Valley of Elah was really about: giving the soldiers a voice. But that film really is saying we can sit and debate the war, whether we should have gone or not, until everybody is blue in the face, but you cannot really make a movie about that because you will still have a divided audience. But let's take the facts: We are at war, and those [soldiers] are not coming back [soon], and the government isn't giving them the tools to go back into society and function as normal human beings. And they are not [given the tools] because there is no pressure. There is no knowledge about what happens to American soldiers once they come back from war. This happened in Vietnam. It is happening in Iraq. More people died committing suicide coming back from that war [than were killed during the Vietnam war]. What do you expect when you send a 19-year-old boy or girl into a situation like that and [they] have to witness all that stuff? And then bring them back and not expect them to have some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder? Then we get little glimpses, like what happened at Walter Reade, and all of a sudden everybody goes: "Wow! Really?" But as Stuart was saying, there is very, very little independent press out there. The ones that are out there need some more support. There are very few places that Middle America can go to actually get the truth. And I think this is such a great medium, making films, to put that forward in an entertaining way. All of us can have smart little political conversations but at the end of the day Battle in Seattle and In the Valley of Elah really deal with human beings who are in those circumstances and giving them a voice and saying: "This is really what happened." Because we are getting very, very little in the media and in the press.
Where did you shoot Battle in Seattle? The logistics of recreating the event must have made you think twice about embarking on the project?
Townsend: We shot it in 29 days which was pretty intense. We shot it mostly in Vancouver with two days shooting in Seattle. It was difficult because it was a small budget so there are only so many streets you can close down that you are able to get for the [right] price. So often we would have one street and shoot down it and then we would get a hold of another set of actors and shoot down it and then we would get a whole lot of other actors and cross shoot it. You get creative.
Did you have to get special permission from the city of Seattle?
Townsend: They had just done new tax breaks and they want film. The head of the Seattle Film Commission was great. I was surprised. I was a little worried because you have to have police there helping you with traffic. And they were all cool. I started talking to one of them and she started telling me about the Police Chief who they used to call Captain Kangaroo. I was like: "Wow! I didn't know any of this." And she was like: "Yeah. I was here. I was up on that building right there. And it was a mess." It was really kind of interesting. I think they were excited about it — maybe not the police. A lot of extras who came were people at the event. Some of them even brought their own turtle costumes that they had used eight years ago.
Now that you have cut your teeth on this film, is directing something you would consider returning to?
Townsend: Yeah. I really loved making this movie. It is a lot of work. I don't think I could do something just for the sake of doing it like I have done with acting, where I wanted to work or I needed money so I jumped into something for a few months and jumped out. Directing takes like two years of your life, so you have to really want to tell the story.
By Karl Rozemeyer
On December 10, 2006, singer-actor André Benjamin of Outkast fame donned a cardboard turtle suit and joined a group of fellow "protesters" on the streets of Seattle. Seven years before, tens of thousands of real demonstrators had descended upon the Seattle Convention Center and surrounding hotels to protest the actions of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The turtle-clad demonstrators — whose costumes highlighted the plight of turtles killed by shrimp nets — joined other anti-globalization vocalists and rallied against the leaders of the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank in sometimes violent clashes with police. Benjamin's participation in the re-enactment of the events of November 30, 1999, was for Battle in Seattle, a feature film by first-time helmer Stuart Townsend (perhaps best known for his role as Lestat in Queen of the Damned that stars an ensemble cast including Woody Harrelson, Michelle Rodriguez, and Martin Henderson, as well as Townsend's long-term girlfriend, Academy Award–winner Charlize Theron.
While several documentaries have been made about the civil unrest that unfolded in Seattle against the WTO Ministerial Conference, this is the first time the topic has been adapted for a major motion picture. Theron and Townsend, who have had limited box-office success with their previous collaborative projects Trapped and Head in the Clouds, are hoping that Battle in Seattle will connect with Hollywood's current interest in films inspired by political events. At the Toronto International Film Festival, Theron discusses the importance of making films like In the Valley of Elah and Battle in Seattle, while Townsend reveals the difficulties of directing such an ambitious project on a $10 million budget.
What was the genesis of this project and why this issue?
Townsend: I first started thinking about doing this film in 2002. And I remembered the event in 1999, but barely. I didn't really gain any knowledge or insight into the WTO or what the protesters were protesting about. I just saw the violence with the anarchists and the riots and stuff. And then I was reading a book about globalization by Anita Roddick called Take It Personally, and in the book there were photographs of the violence in Seattle. And they just really captured my imagination. So I went on the Internet and started looking to see what the Battle of Seattle was and I saw a story instantly. I thought it was really cinematic and visual. And the more I started researching the story, the more and more I was amazed at how little I knew about the event, and I asked myself why. So I thought it was a story that needed to re-remembered in a way. And it kind of started from there. I could see it in my head, so I decided I wanted to actually direct it and make a movie rather than give it to someone or act in it.
And this is your directorial debut. Was it intimidating approaching a project of this nature?
Townsend: I didn't look at it as intimidating, no. I really just loved the story and I decided not to even think about a defeatist attitude. I am going to try to make this. Hopefully I can do it. Maybe I can't. If I fall on my face, then I fall on my face. But I really felt passionately about the story.
Charlize, you are here at the Toronto Film Festival for Battle in Seattle as well as In the Valley of Elah. They are linked by their strong political overtones. Are these projects that you actively seek out for that reason?
Theron: No, I am interested in people, and I think we find ourselves in really interesting circumstances right now. At the end of the day, I am really drawn to good stories and the circumstances in both of these happen to be very socially relevant right now. But it is not an agenda of mine. It is not something that I really seek out, but it is always nice when you can do something that you really believe in and know that is going to be a part of your legacy.
Battle in Seattle has a large ensemble cast. How did you attract some of the actors to the project, such as André Benjamin (André 3000)?
Townsend: I wrote the character of Django. He is the sunshine of the film. He has got the funny lines and lightens the film. A couple of the things he says draw a big laugh. I think it is nice if you are making a film that can be serious at times and violent at times but that can also be humorous and emotional at times. He provides that aspect. I wanted someone with energy and charisma. I saw him perform with Outkast years ago and it was one of the best concerts I had ever seen. I was [impressed by] the energy of that guy. And I knew he was acting and so I got the script out to him and he loved it.
Do you think that the issues surrounding the World Trade Organization have gone a bit off the boil perhaps because there are so many other political issues that the world is facing right now, but the WTO issues still deserve attention? Is that one of the reasons why you thought this film should be made now?
Townsend: That is exactly one of the reasons. In effect, the War on Terror and the war in Iraq have taken all the coverage for the last few years, and it has taken a lot of heat off a lot of the other issues which I think are more important. I don't want to eat genetically modified food. I don't want to breathe dirty air. There are a lot of issues that the WTO deals with as well as institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank — and rightly so. [Many people] around the world were suffering because of either laws that they were enacting or money that they were lending. The focus was really on them, and unfortunately the War on Terror has taken the focus off these institutions. In a way, it so happens that the Seattle meeting did derail the WTO. It is still floundering. They are still trying to get this Doha Round [which aims to lower world trade barriers] together, but I do think that these are issues that won't go away. They will be around long after the war in Iraq.
This brings to the fore a much larger issue: At that time American society — at least in Seattle — felt galvanized enough to voice their dissatisfaction. Six years have passed and approval of the war in Iraq is at its lowest rating…
Townsend: Well, that is another point, and why I think the film is relevant now. This was an event where people from all walks of life — labor unions, environmental activists, teachers, farmers, religious groups, animal rights activists, everybody — came together. Young, old, from around the world. I think that is a good story right now about unity, rather than about division. People are galvanizing against the war. Thirty-six million people protested the war in Iraq, the largest protest in history, but it gets marginalized by the mainstream media. They do interviews with the dumbest people they can find who aren't even there to protest for the right reasons. And [they are the only ones] they interview. And, now, ever since Seattle, you cannot get within ten miles of the leaders that you are protesting at any of the G8 summits. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Syndey, they just spent $600 million dollars with 350,000 police and that is in part because of Seattle. Because Seattle was the one and only time when they stopped [the convention], and it was filled with people saying that another world is possible. And that hasn't gone away.
This touches on some of the elements of In the Valley of Elah as well. Do you feel the U.S. government is suppressing a lot of the information that is coming out about the war? Do you believe that people are not vocal enough about it?
Theron: Oh, I think it is very evident that when you turn on the TV, and you see men in well-pressed suits in air-conditioned buildings telling us how the soldiers are doing in Iraq. I very rarely see a soldier talking about what is happening in Iraq. I think that is what In the Valley of Elah was really about: giving the soldiers a voice. But that film really is saying we can sit and debate the war, whether we should have gone or not, until everybody is blue in the face, but you cannot really make a movie about that because you will still have a divided audience. But let's take the facts: We are at war, and those [soldiers] are not coming back [soon], and the government isn't giving them the tools to go back into society and function as normal human beings. And they are not [given the tools] because there is no pressure. There is no knowledge about what happens to American soldiers once they come back from war. This happened in Vietnam. It is happening in Iraq. More people died committing suicide coming back from that war [than were killed during the Vietnam war]. What do you expect when you send a 19-year-old boy or girl into a situation like that and [they] have to witness all that stuff? And then bring them back and not expect them to have some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder? Then we get little glimpses, like what happened at Walter Reade, and all of a sudden everybody goes: "Wow! Really?" But as Stuart was saying, there is very, very little independent press out there. The ones that are out there need some more support. There are very few places that Middle America can go to actually get the truth. And I think this is such a great medium, making films, to put that forward in an entertaining way. All of us can have smart little political conversations but at the end of the day Battle in Seattle and In the Valley of Elah really deal with human beings who are in those circumstances and giving them a voice and saying: "This is really what happened." Because we are getting very, very little in the media and in the press.
Where did you shoot Battle in Seattle? The logistics of recreating the event must have made you think twice about embarking on the project?
Townsend: We shot it in 29 days which was pretty intense. We shot it mostly in Vancouver with two days shooting in Seattle. It was difficult because it was a small budget so there are only so many streets you can close down that you are able to get for the [right] price. So often we would have one street and shoot down it and then we would get a hold of another set of actors and shoot down it and then we would get a whole lot of other actors and cross shoot it. You get creative.
Did you have to get special permission from the city of Seattle?
Townsend: They had just done new tax breaks and they want film. The head of the Seattle Film Commission was great. I was surprised. I was a little worried because you have to have police there helping you with traffic. And they were all cool. I started talking to one of them and she started telling me about the Police Chief who they used to call Captain Kangaroo. I was like: "Wow! I didn't know any of this." And she was like: "Yeah. I was here. I was up on that building right there. And it was a mess." It was really kind of interesting. I think they were excited about it — maybe not the police. A lot of extras who came were people at the event. Some of them even brought their own turtle costumes that they had used eight years ago.
Now that you have cut your teeth on this film, is directing something you would consider returning to?
Townsend: Yeah. I really loved making this movie. It is a lot of work. I don't think I could do something just for the sake of doing it like I have done with acting, where I wanted to work or I needed money so I jumped into something for a few months and jumped out. Directing takes like two years of your life, so you have to really want to tell the story.
Charlize Theron
Charlize Theron
Women in Hollywood 2005
By Fred Schruers
Photographed by Gilles Bensimon
There was a respect for nature that I was taught at a very young age. It was just the three of us, and we were real farmers [in Benoni, South Africa]. We never bought from butchers or anything, and whatever we would do would last us a year. It was the circle of life, which I’ve always loved about farm life.
I think when you say “farmer” or “farm community,” you think of a naive, Daisy Duke kind of character. But you can come from that environment and have a great deal of culture and intelligence. It wasn’t like I sat in on every conversation, but we read newspapers and knew what was going on in the world.
I always felt like I had a partnership with my mother, and that I never had to rebel against anything. There was a certain amount of responsibility that was given to me as a gift: “You’re smart, use that; be your own person, go explore, go and live a complete, full life.”
And there was a certain amount of discipline that came with the way I was raised. You didn’t break things that were not yours; you didn’t wreck a room. My mom and I watch this Nanny 911 show together, and I said to her, “I’m so calling the authorities on you for how you raised me.” Then I think about it and I’ve just got to say, there was a boundary that always made me feel safe. I really always knew from a very, very early age—that’s wrong and don’t you ever do that again. And God, I was spanked. I was more than spanked—I was whipped. Definitely. [With] whatever was around.
I went to school one time with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse engraved in welts on my thighs from a hanger that my mom grabbed that had all these little Disney cartoons cut out in it. It boiled down to respect—my mom was taking care of everything and running a business at the same time and there were never any nannies or anything like that. She was doing laundry and cooking three meals a day and—I remember it so vividly, I came home from school, and she said, “Change your uniform before you have lunch.” And I was like, “Oh, I’ll just take a quick bite of this tomato soup.” And I drizzled it all over. She was busy ironing, and she had all the hangers stacked up. It was so quick—a couple of swipes on the thighs. I remember going to school and showing off my war wounds to my friends.
I think that that’s different than beating a child, which shouldn’t happen, or spanking a child unnecessarily. But let me tell you, at that age I knew I was wrong—because I was for sure not washing my own clothes; my mom was doing that. Then look at the relationship I have with her today. That’s a testament for my whole argument right there.
[When Theron was 15, her mother shot and killed her father, who was physically threatening them.] It’s really fascinating to see what people will do when they have to make a split-second decision that could change everything in their lives. You start to realize that you were just really blessed and lucky to have somebody like my mom who made that decision, and it did save our lives. But it happens all the time, and it just depends on where you are in your life. And how much you’re willing to fight to live.
When I did the promotion for Monster, everybody was saying, “I can’t imagine. . . . ” And I was thinking, “Really? Really, if you were in those circumstances, you can’t imagine?” It’s so hard for people to see themselves doing something as horrible as [serial killer] Aileen Wuornos did. It’s so easy for us to say, “Oh, God, I can’t imagine.” But if you do imagine it and get yourself to that place, I think anybody is capable of doing anything. And capable of surviving anything.
I think all of your experiences mold you into the person that you are. It would just be naive to think that my life didn’t imprint emotionally how I shuffle the cards in emotional situations in my future. I never wanted something like that to happen in my life. It’s not something that I hang on to; it’s something that obviously is there, that I in my own way of therapy, through my work, have dealt with and stayed healthy about. But it’s not something that controls or haunts my life.
I read a really interesting book called I Have Life: Alison’s Journey about a woman in South Africa [who survived a rape and a brutal stabbing attack]. She said, “Now that you’ve been given this gift of life, you’ve got to go and live it. You can’t sit in the past and stay there.” And so for me and my mom, it’s been tough because at the same time we were trying to move on, we always have to still deal with it. I gave my mom the script of Monster to read. She called me back and said, “I absolutely think that this is such a heartbreaking story. So fascinating, such a great tale of human nature.” And that was what we talked about. We’ve really moved on in our lives.
When I think about the life that I went about living from the age of sixteen to nineteen or twenty, I don’t know if I could do it again. It was basically like backpacking. [Theron, who was studying ballet, also started modeling as a teenager; her work took her to Europe and New York City.] I had the same suitcase that entire time with the same clothes, and I just went from one country to another, never knowing where I was going to end up. For me, it was all about, I’ve been given this chance to see the world. At that age, you just kind of think, well, it’s going to work out. When my career as a dancer ended, I had to look into why I liked it so much. And it was really bottom-line storytelling; I wanted to tell stories. Acting just seemed like another natural venue for that.
[The cheap motel she checked into when she first moved to Los Angeles] was not the worst place I’ve ever stayed. I was like, “Look, I can see the Hollywood sign”—that’s all I cared about. And I think that’s why today I’m such a sheet snob, because for years I had to sleep on horrible, dirty sheets.
I knew early on that there’s a thing called typecasting. I wasn’t stupid. I just wanted to grow as an actor—to get some versatility in there. I know for a fact that on my deathbed That Thing You Do! will be one of my fondest memories. All of it—the kids that [Tom Hanks] chose, all of us together, and with him at the helm being such a friend to us.
The whole process of [getting her breakthrough role in Devil’s Advocate] was one of hell—no pun intended. I remember traveling to New York several times, sometimes on my own dime, to screen-test. I read [in L.A.] with Keanu Reeves, like, five times, and then they started screen-testing, like, ten actresses. Then they had to re–screen-test all of us. It was three months, [and I thought], “If I go through all of this and don’t get this film, I’d better be walking away with some immense [new] strength.”
So when I got it, I still felt like, “Oh my God, I’d better not screw up because they’ll just fire me and get one of those other girls!” You’re not just on your toes, you’re hanging from a very thin wire and you’d better not let go. But then it was great because it was working with amazing people like Taylor Hackford and Al Pacino and Keanu—people who force you to stay at a certain place. Pacino was in the process of editing Looking for Richard at the time, and he was doing a play. It was like, “Could you do any more? Are you baking cookies too?”
Acting is easy when you work with somebody who considers you a partner. Then it’s a joy. Some directors are really good at that partnership, and others are not. Part of why I love this job so much is because it is collaborative—you enter a world and everybody’s involved; it’s not just about you and it’s not just about the director. When I find myself in a situation where that nest is really small and only this selected few are allowed in there, I don’t function very well.
Reindeer Games was a great example of choosing a film purely because of the director, John Frankenheimer. I think that he was just an incredible filmmaker; The Manchurian Candidate to me was a perfect film. Anyway, I did that movie because I really wanted to work with him. And sometimes that’s not enough.
The Yards was probably one of the hardest films for me emotionally, and James Gray is very much that director who just will not stop until he knows that he’s pushed you to the ultimate—almost right over the edge. Which is what you want, but at the same time, it was emotionally a very difficult film to make. He doesn’t leave anything untouched. You’re basically shoveling out your innards.
The body is such a great vehicle to tell a story, one that gets neglected. Or when people do use it, they get criticized. When you do something like Monster or what Nicole Kidman did [in The Hours] or what Halle Berry did [in Monster’s Ball], then all of a sudden people go, “Well, that’s just a trick to win an Oscar.” But what people forget is that that’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re not supposed to look like or be ourselves. I think Johnny Depp said it really well: “If you serve roast beef constantly, you get bored.” I’m a fan of brave actors who can celebrate that—Sean Penn is one of them, and Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet.
With Aileen Wuornos, it was actually very simple. She was somebody who was five three but couldn’t show that she was five three and a woman on the street. It’s funny, but about a month before I said yes to the film, I went to the aquarium in Long Beach, and it was incredible to watch blowfish [expand]. And there was a blowfish aspect about Aileen—her entire life she had to kind of make sure that people knew she was there, not to mess with her.
Aileen didn’t have the luxury of being emotional—to sit in a back alley to cry about her life. For an entire month, I was playing somebody who held onto those things so deep and so hard. And then all of a sudden, in the last week, I had to show emotion. To break through that wall really took some time. I remember it started to rain and everybody was kind of packing up, and I sat in the alley with my manager and good friend, J.J. Harris, and I just couldn’t stop crying. I had an uncontrollably emotional leak for Aileen.
[After wrapping Monster] I had to go and do Head in the Clouds [opposite her boyfriend, Stuart Townsend], which I was really happy about because it disciplined me to actually let go [of Aileen]. Whereas if I’d come home, I would have really taken my time, I think, before I said goodbye to that completely. But even though I showed up in Montreal and I was like, “Oh, everything’s great,” I didn’t understand why I was drawing the curtains and I didn’t want to get out of bed and I was depressed. It was good to be around somebody who knew me. So that [I knew] I wasn’t losing my mind—somebody who could say, “You just had a really intense experience, and it’s going to take some time, and that’s okay.”
Even when [it seemed that no one wanted to distribute Monster], we didn’t go, “Well, maybe it’s a piece of shit.” Maybe sometimes we did—depending on the hour. But we did somehow believe that we couldn’t compromise and we couldn’t make the cuts everybody was suggesting to water it down.
I don’t think [Monster director Patty Jenkins and I] ever really [congratulated each other on the film’s success]. Everywhere we’ve gone, we’ve been like, “Are you serious?” Even when I was holding an Oscar and I looked at her, we were like, “How did this happen?” We knew when we were working on the movie that no matter what, even if it went straight to video, it was something special for us. We just didn’t know how many other people would think that it was special.
I watch movies and I love to see how people decided to say a specific line or how much to give in an emotional statement. There’s never a right or wrong answer, and it’s great to go to work and have the freedom to throw those kinds of human possibilities around. And as a storyteller, to actually think, how much do you want to give away right now? Acting really is like a big poker game, isn’t it? When do you show your cards? Because we don’t want to know everything up front, do we?
My favorite kind of rehearsal is where you’re obsessively talking about the story a month or two months prior to shooting the film. Where you’re not necessarily doing scenes, but there’s a constant communication about this world—I’m talking about stuff that’s not even in the story—so that there’s an understanding of where all of this takes place. Because then the subconscious can take over.
On Aeon Flux [a sci-fi adventure due in December, in which Theron plays the 25th-century assassin of the title], we had a lot of those kind of rehearsals. Then we shot for nine days and I had the injury—I slipped doing a back handspring and landed on my neck—and we had seven weeks off, which was a really great time for me to do a lot of internal work.
[When I hurt myself], I had already trained for five months so it wasn’t the first time I’d felt some severe pain. I lay down for a second and I thought, it’s a spasm and it will go away. And it just got worse. Our medic said, “We should have an X-ray and really make sure.” An hour later I lost all feeling in my hands and feet, and I kind of thought, that’s probably not good.
Even after I knew that it was a herniated disk, I took four days off. I was in the hospital for three days getting all these treatments, and then I just didn’t want to give into it. Six days later I went back to work; I had the brace on and I thought, “We’ll just do all the acting stuff. I’ll wear the brace in between takes.” I really couldn’t move my neck. Then I was on set for two hours and I lost all sensation in the right side of my body and that’s when we did some neurological tests. There was a lot of nerve damage. I talked to my doctor in L.A. and he really put things in perspective for me: (a) you’re lucky, because the disk didn’t slip far enough to touch or compress your spinal cord, but (b) you have to know that if you have any bad bump, that disk just needs to move two millimeters and you could be paralyzed. I went, okay, I have to come home and heal from that.
[Shooting Aeon Flux] was such an out-of-body experience. It was the biggest movie in every sense that I’ve ever tried to tackle. And it was completely foreign to me. A friend of mine who educated me on the whole Aeon world [the film is adapted from a 1990s MTV animated series], told me that she went onto the website and that the fans are a little bit disappointed that I’m not wearing the original outfit. And I thought, how could a human actually wear that—and shoot in it? I mean, it was a cartoon! Seriously, it would be an NC-17 film—what she had was a couple of strings and a patch of fabric. We had a really great costume designer who understood how far to celebrate the original, but with something that we knew that I could do a lot of the stunts in without strangling myself. And exposing all my bits.
Even in the original, Aeon’s a very dark girl, and in every way. Her dominatrix aspect is a quality of someone who’s tired of being looked upon as just a woman who should listen and do as the government says. And she uses everything in her body to fight that. I’m going to be completely honest: If I had a choice between seeing a great dramatic film versus something that has science fiction in it, I’d probably go and see the dramatic film. I grew up watching Kramer vs. Kramer or Sophie’s Choice versus [seeing] Star Wars. It’s like a gap—I always think of it that way, like there was a giant generation gap by the time things came to us in South Africa. I just didn’t grow up with those kind of films, and I think it left a mark on me somehow. The funny thing is, when I am forced to go and see them with a friend or something, I actually quite enjoy them.
I was in production for almost a year with Aeon Flux and then went straight into North Country [a drama, directed by Whale Rider’s Niki Caro, based on a true story about a Minnesota miner who in the early ’90s filed a class-action sexual harassment suit against her male coworkers]. What I love about the film is that it’s about a community, its social structure, and its people. And as Niki said, it happened in their community but it could have happened, and did, anywhere. Everywhere. You kind of find yourself in the middle, going, who do you really stand with? Sure, women should have the right to work here, but at the same time these men have families to feed. That kind of struggle is always interesting.
By the time Josie [Theron’s character] got to the mine, the women working there had become numbed to [the harassment]—that was partly why they didn’t side with her. They didn’t even think it was wrong anymore. They just dealt with it. Josie wasn’t a superstrong character; she wasn’t one of these women who walk into a room and own it. That’s why it was so fascinating that she ended up standing up against all of these people.
There are stories out there that I really feel should be told. I started a production company [Denver & Delilah Films—named after her two dogs], and it wasn’t like, “Oh, I just want to develop things for myself.” If something came along that was right for me . . . but at the end of the day, it’s just things that I’m interested in. We’re in postproduction right now on Our Song, a documentary about the Cuban hip-hop movement. I think people don’t know that this kind of alternative lifestyle exists in Cuba—it’s the youth movement, the future of Cuba, people trying to change their society. We tried to veer away from being too politically heavy, because these kids rap about these things. You don’t have to underline anything. And we’re in development on the life story of the late Edward Bunker, a crime novelist, a great character actor—he was Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs—and a [criminal]. He was, like, seventeen when he went to San Quentin. He was deemed to be a lost cause, and he found himself, and found an art form to express himself. It’s just a great redemption story.
We have another project, Ice at the Bottom of the World, that I bought the rights to about six years ago. The author, Mark Richard, wrote the script. It’s about a family reuniting in a very witty and unsentimental way—but very hard-hitting; it deals with euthanasia. So hopefully that will be my next thing, and after that, we’ll see. I can’t plan that far ahead.
It is really important to stop sometimes and go and live life a little bit, just to have something to draw from. I’m at that place right now where I feel I’ve kind of emptied my resources. There’s a giant world out there, and I sure want to see it all. I live with a man [Townsend] who’s a traveler at heart; we both just love throwing some backpacks together and really living life in whatever situation we find ourselves in.
I’ve been very blessed. I could never get jaded or blasé about that. I know I’ve been extremely lucky. I also feel like I have been given this great gift, which is what pushes me to not just take it for granted. It’s really given me this kind of hunger to go and challenge myself to be even better at it.
Women in Hollywood 2005
By Fred Schruers
Photographed by Gilles Bensimon
There was a respect for nature that I was taught at a very young age. It was just the three of us, and we were real farmers [in Benoni, South Africa]. We never bought from butchers or anything, and whatever we would do would last us a year. It was the circle of life, which I’ve always loved about farm life.
I think when you say “farmer” or “farm community,” you think of a naive, Daisy Duke kind of character. But you can come from that environment and have a great deal of culture and intelligence. It wasn’t like I sat in on every conversation, but we read newspapers and knew what was going on in the world.
I always felt like I had a partnership with my mother, and that I never had to rebel against anything. There was a certain amount of responsibility that was given to me as a gift: “You’re smart, use that; be your own person, go explore, go and live a complete, full life.”
And there was a certain amount of discipline that came with the way I was raised. You didn’t break things that were not yours; you didn’t wreck a room. My mom and I watch this Nanny 911 show together, and I said to her, “I’m so calling the authorities on you for how you raised me.” Then I think about it and I’ve just got to say, there was a boundary that always made me feel safe. I really always knew from a very, very early age—that’s wrong and don’t you ever do that again. And God, I was spanked. I was more than spanked—I was whipped. Definitely. [With] whatever was around.
I went to school one time with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse engraved in welts on my thighs from a hanger that my mom grabbed that had all these little Disney cartoons cut out in it. It boiled down to respect—my mom was taking care of everything and running a business at the same time and there were never any nannies or anything like that. She was doing laundry and cooking three meals a day and—I remember it so vividly, I came home from school, and she said, “Change your uniform before you have lunch.” And I was like, “Oh, I’ll just take a quick bite of this tomato soup.” And I drizzled it all over. She was busy ironing, and she had all the hangers stacked up. It was so quick—a couple of swipes on the thighs. I remember going to school and showing off my war wounds to my friends.
I think that that’s different than beating a child, which shouldn’t happen, or spanking a child unnecessarily. But let me tell you, at that age I knew I was wrong—because I was for sure not washing my own clothes; my mom was doing that. Then look at the relationship I have with her today. That’s a testament for my whole argument right there.
[When Theron was 15, her mother shot and killed her father, who was physically threatening them.] It’s really fascinating to see what people will do when they have to make a split-second decision that could change everything in their lives. You start to realize that you were just really blessed and lucky to have somebody like my mom who made that decision, and it did save our lives. But it happens all the time, and it just depends on where you are in your life. And how much you’re willing to fight to live.
When I did the promotion for Monster, everybody was saying, “I can’t imagine. . . . ” And I was thinking, “Really? Really, if you were in those circumstances, you can’t imagine?” It’s so hard for people to see themselves doing something as horrible as [serial killer] Aileen Wuornos did. It’s so easy for us to say, “Oh, God, I can’t imagine.” But if you do imagine it and get yourself to that place, I think anybody is capable of doing anything. And capable of surviving anything.
I think all of your experiences mold you into the person that you are. It would just be naive to think that my life didn’t imprint emotionally how I shuffle the cards in emotional situations in my future. I never wanted something like that to happen in my life. It’s not something that I hang on to; it’s something that obviously is there, that I in my own way of therapy, through my work, have dealt with and stayed healthy about. But it’s not something that controls or haunts my life.
I read a really interesting book called I Have Life: Alison’s Journey about a woman in South Africa [who survived a rape and a brutal stabbing attack]. She said, “Now that you’ve been given this gift of life, you’ve got to go and live it. You can’t sit in the past and stay there.” And so for me and my mom, it’s been tough because at the same time we were trying to move on, we always have to still deal with it. I gave my mom the script of Monster to read. She called me back and said, “I absolutely think that this is such a heartbreaking story. So fascinating, such a great tale of human nature.” And that was what we talked about. We’ve really moved on in our lives.
When I think about the life that I went about living from the age of sixteen to nineteen or twenty, I don’t know if I could do it again. It was basically like backpacking. [Theron, who was studying ballet, also started modeling as a teenager; her work took her to Europe and New York City.] I had the same suitcase that entire time with the same clothes, and I just went from one country to another, never knowing where I was going to end up. For me, it was all about, I’ve been given this chance to see the world. At that age, you just kind of think, well, it’s going to work out. When my career as a dancer ended, I had to look into why I liked it so much. And it was really bottom-line storytelling; I wanted to tell stories. Acting just seemed like another natural venue for that.
[The cheap motel she checked into when she first moved to Los Angeles] was not the worst place I’ve ever stayed. I was like, “Look, I can see the Hollywood sign”—that’s all I cared about. And I think that’s why today I’m such a sheet snob, because for years I had to sleep on horrible, dirty sheets.
I knew early on that there’s a thing called typecasting. I wasn’t stupid. I just wanted to grow as an actor—to get some versatility in there. I know for a fact that on my deathbed That Thing You Do! will be one of my fondest memories. All of it—the kids that [Tom Hanks] chose, all of us together, and with him at the helm being such a friend to us.
The whole process of [getting her breakthrough role in Devil’s Advocate] was one of hell—no pun intended. I remember traveling to New York several times, sometimes on my own dime, to screen-test. I read [in L.A.] with Keanu Reeves, like, five times, and then they started screen-testing, like, ten actresses. Then they had to re–screen-test all of us. It was three months, [and I thought], “If I go through all of this and don’t get this film, I’d better be walking away with some immense [new] strength.”
So when I got it, I still felt like, “Oh my God, I’d better not screw up because they’ll just fire me and get one of those other girls!” You’re not just on your toes, you’re hanging from a very thin wire and you’d better not let go. But then it was great because it was working with amazing people like Taylor Hackford and Al Pacino and Keanu—people who force you to stay at a certain place. Pacino was in the process of editing Looking for Richard at the time, and he was doing a play. It was like, “Could you do any more? Are you baking cookies too?”
Acting is easy when you work with somebody who considers you a partner. Then it’s a joy. Some directors are really good at that partnership, and others are not. Part of why I love this job so much is because it is collaborative—you enter a world and everybody’s involved; it’s not just about you and it’s not just about the director. When I find myself in a situation where that nest is really small and only this selected few are allowed in there, I don’t function very well.
Reindeer Games was a great example of choosing a film purely because of the director, John Frankenheimer. I think that he was just an incredible filmmaker; The Manchurian Candidate to me was a perfect film. Anyway, I did that movie because I really wanted to work with him. And sometimes that’s not enough.
The Yards was probably one of the hardest films for me emotionally, and James Gray is very much that director who just will not stop until he knows that he’s pushed you to the ultimate—almost right over the edge. Which is what you want, but at the same time, it was emotionally a very difficult film to make. He doesn’t leave anything untouched. You’re basically shoveling out your innards.
The body is such a great vehicle to tell a story, one that gets neglected. Or when people do use it, they get criticized. When you do something like Monster or what Nicole Kidman did [in The Hours] or what Halle Berry did [in Monster’s Ball], then all of a sudden people go, “Well, that’s just a trick to win an Oscar.” But what people forget is that that’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re not supposed to look like or be ourselves. I think Johnny Depp said it really well: “If you serve roast beef constantly, you get bored.” I’m a fan of brave actors who can celebrate that—Sean Penn is one of them, and Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet.
With Aileen Wuornos, it was actually very simple. She was somebody who was five three but couldn’t show that she was five three and a woman on the street. It’s funny, but about a month before I said yes to the film, I went to the aquarium in Long Beach, and it was incredible to watch blowfish [expand]. And there was a blowfish aspect about Aileen—her entire life she had to kind of make sure that people knew she was there, not to mess with her.
Aileen didn’t have the luxury of being emotional—to sit in a back alley to cry about her life. For an entire month, I was playing somebody who held onto those things so deep and so hard. And then all of a sudden, in the last week, I had to show emotion. To break through that wall really took some time. I remember it started to rain and everybody was kind of packing up, and I sat in the alley with my manager and good friend, J.J. Harris, and I just couldn’t stop crying. I had an uncontrollably emotional leak for Aileen.
[After wrapping Monster] I had to go and do Head in the Clouds [opposite her boyfriend, Stuart Townsend], which I was really happy about because it disciplined me to actually let go [of Aileen]. Whereas if I’d come home, I would have really taken my time, I think, before I said goodbye to that completely. But even though I showed up in Montreal and I was like, “Oh, everything’s great,” I didn’t understand why I was drawing the curtains and I didn’t want to get out of bed and I was depressed. It was good to be around somebody who knew me. So that [I knew] I wasn’t losing my mind—somebody who could say, “You just had a really intense experience, and it’s going to take some time, and that’s okay.”
Even when [it seemed that no one wanted to distribute Monster], we didn’t go, “Well, maybe it’s a piece of shit.” Maybe sometimes we did—depending on the hour. But we did somehow believe that we couldn’t compromise and we couldn’t make the cuts everybody was suggesting to water it down.
I don’t think [Monster director Patty Jenkins and I] ever really [congratulated each other on the film’s success]. Everywhere we’ve gone, we’ve been like, “Are you serious?” Even when I was holding an Oscar and I looked at her, we were like, “How did this happen?” We knew when we were working on the movie that no matter what, even if it went straight to video, it was something special for us. We just didn’t know how many other people would think that it was special.
I watch movies and I love to see how people decided to say a specific line or how much to give in an emotional statement. There’s never a right or wrong answer, and it’s great to go to work and have the freedom to throw those kinds of human possibilities around. And as a storyteller, to actually think, how much do you want to give away right now? Acting really is like a big poker game, isn’t it? When do you show your cards? Because we don’t want to know everything up front, do we?
My favorite kind of rehearsal is where you’re obsessively talking about the story a month or two months prior to shooting the film. Where you’re not necessarily doing scenes, but there’s a constant communication about this world—I’m talking about stuff that’s not even in the story—so that there’s an understanding of where all of this takes place. Because then the subconscious can take over.
On Aeon Flux [a sci-fi adventure due in December, in which Theron plays the 25th-century assassin of the title], we had a lot of those kind of rehearsals. Then we shot for nine days and I had the injury—I slipped doing a back handspring and landed on my neck—and we had seven weeks off, which was a really great time for me to do a lot of internal work.
[When I hurt myself], I had already trained for five months so it wasn’t the first time I’d felt some severe pain. I lay down for a second and I thought, it’s a spasm and it will go away. And it just got worse. Our medic said, “We should have an X-ray and really make sure.” An hour later I lost all feeling in my hands and feet, and I kind of thought, that’s probably not good.
Even after I knew that it was a herniated disk, I took four days off. I was in the hospital for three days getting all these treatments, and then I just didn’t want to give into it. Six days later I went back to work; I had the brace on and I thought, “We’ll just do all the acting stuff. I’ll wear the brace in between takes.” I really couldn’t move my neck. Then I was on set for two hours and I lost all sensation in the right side of my body and that’s when we did some neurological tests. There was a lot of nerve damage. I talked to my doctor in L.A. and he really put things in perspective for me: (a) you’re lucky, because the disk didn’t slip far enough to touch or compress your spinal cord, but (b) you have to know that if you have any bad bump, that disk just needs to move two millimeters and you could be paralyzed. I went, okay, I have to come home and heal from that.
[Shooting Aeon Flux] was such an out-of-body experience. It was the biggest movie in every sense that I’ve ever tried to tackle. And it was completely foreign to me. A friend of mine who educated me on the whole Aeon world [the film is adapted from a 1990s MTV animated series], told me that she went onto the website and that the fans are a little bit disappointed that I’m not wearing the original outfit. And I thought, how could a human actually wear that—and shoot in it? I mean, it was a cartoon! Seriously, it would be an NC-17 film—what she had was a couple of strings and a patch of fabric. We had a really great costume designer who understood how far to celebrate the original, but with something that we knew that I could do a lot of the stunts in without strangling myself. And exposing all my bits.
Even in the original, Aeon’s a very dark girl, and in every way. Her dominatrix aspect is a quality of someone who’s tired of being looked upon as just a woman who should listen and do as the government says. And she uses everything in her body to fight that. I’m going to be completely honest: If I had a choice between seeing a great dramatic film versus something that has science fiction in it, I’d probably go and see the dramatic film. I grew up watching Kramer vs. Kramer or Sophie’s Choice versus [seeing] Star Wars. It’s like a gap—I always think of it that way, like there was a giant generation gap by the time things came to us in South Africa. I just didn’t grow up with those kind of films, and I think it left a mark on me somehow. The funny thing is, when I am forced to go and see them with a friend or something, I actually quite enjoy them.
I was in production for almost a year with Aeon Flux and then went straight into North Country [a drama, directed by Whale Rider’s Niki Caro, based on a true story about a Minnesota miner who in the early ’90s filed a class-action sexual harassment suit against her male coworkers]. What I love about the film is that it’s about a community, its social structure, and its people. And as Niki said, it happened in their community but it could have happened, and did, anywhere. Everywhere. You kind of find yourself in the middle, going, who do you really stand with? Sure, women should have the right to work here, but at the same time these men have families to feed. That kind of struggle is always interesting.
By the time Josie [Theron’s character] got to the mine, the women working there had become numbed to [the harassment]—that was partly why they didn’t side with her. They didn’t even think it was wrong anymore. They just dealt with it. Josie wasn’t a superstrong character; she wasn’t one of these women who walk into a room and own it. That’s why it was so fascinating that she ended up standing up against all of these people.
There are stories out there that I really feel should be told. I started a production company [Denver & Delilah Films—named after her two dogs], and it wasn’t like, “Oh, I just want to develop things for myself.” If something came along that was right for me . . . but at the end of the day, it’s just things that I’m interested in. We’re in postproduction right now on Our Song, a documentary about the Cuban hip-hop movement. I think people don’t know that this kind of alternative lifestyle exists in Cuba—it’s the youth movement, the future of Cuba, people trying to change their society. We tried to veer away from being too politically heavy, because these kids rap about these things. You don’t have to underline anything. And we’re in development on the life story of the late Edward Bunker, a crime novelist, a great character actor—he was Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs—and a [criminal]. He was, like, seventeen when he went to San Quentin. He was deemed to be a lost cause, and he found himself, and found an art form to express himself. It’s just a great redemption story.
We have another project, Ice at the Bottom of the World, that I bought the rights to about six years ago. The author, Mark Richard, wrote the script. It’s about a family reuniting in a very witty and unsentimental way—but very hard-hitting; it deals with euthanasia. So hopefully that will be my next thing, and after that, we’ll see. I can’t plan that far ahead.
It is really important to stop sometimes and go and live life a little bit, just to have something to draw from. I’m at that place right now where I feel I’ve kind of emptied my resources. There’s a giant world out there, and I sure want to see it all. I live with a man [Townsend] who’s a traveler at heart; we both just love throwing some backpacks together and really living life in whatever situation we find ourselves in.
I’ve been very blessed. I could never get jaded or blasé about that. I know I’ve been extremely lucky. I also feel like I have been given this great gift, which is what pushes me to not just take it for granted. It’s really given me this kind of hunger to go and challenge myself to be even better at it.
2008年9月4日星期四
'Sleepwalking': A Family Affair
'Sleepwalking': A Family Affair
Charlize Theron, Nick Stahl and Dennis Hopper discuss family, abuse and hope.
By Deborah Day
Sleepwalking explores a dysfunctional working-class family and its abusive history. Joleen Reedy (Charlize Theron) is a crass, pot-dealing single mother and sister to barely-functional 30-year-old James (Nick Stahl). The siblings have long since escaped the Utah farm of their abusive father Frank (Dennis Hopper) but they haven't quite escaped the damage he's inflicted. When she loses her boyfriend and her home, Joleen skips town and leaves her surly 12-year-old daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) with the "sleepwalking" James, who after some failures as a caregiver, eventually develops quite the familial instinct.
SPOLIER ALERT: The cast reveals some of the film's plot twists during their conversations below.
Charlize Theron
Joleen's daughter seems like she has a very active dream life, one that you don't necessarily always see onscreen.
Theron: I've done a lot of research on children who have never met a parent, whether it's the mother or the father, and there's beautiful innocence with children where their imagination always tends to go to a positive place, and the older they get, the more it goes to a negative place. [Adults] always expect the worst to happen. Whereas with kids, especially around her age, there's always this hope, there's this idea, that the parent that's missing is the answer to everything. [Younger children] don't care, they just want to know who their parents are then they know their own legacy and identity. [Tara's father] had no face. She had no idea who he was. And I think that was something that really drove Tara, because when things went bad at home there was always this hope, well there's this man out there and I don't know what he looks like but he's the answer to the problem here. He's the answer that will fix all of this. Most people who come from a lot of trauma tend to live in a very fantasy-orientated world. And when we developed the story, that was an element that we always hung onto. We actually had sequences like that in Monster. Aileen Wuornos very much lived in a fantasy world. You go to a fantasy place because it's the thing that gives you hope. And I think children do it more because their imaginations are still so raw.
It seems like Joleen's mother is missing from the picture.
The back story was pretty much that when she was around things were OK. And this is another thing that I've researched. When there's an abusive parent, things are OK if the other parent that's there is not abusive. Things started going really bad for Joleen and for James once their mother passed away. There was no solace anymore coming from anybody. And so we always had a back story that [Joleen was] around Tara's age when she lost her mom.
The allusions to her losing her mom are subtle.
It's always tricky when you deal with three generations of a family. At one point we really opened up the storyline of her father. And then when we started watching the movie, we realized you have to stay focused within a certain amount of characters, otherwise it can become very melodramatic. So to bring up my character's mother who we never see... we decided it should be about Tara so let's focus on her father. So it was just the idea of him — this idea of romance, this idea of a young girl meeting a man and wanting to run away with him. We're not saying if this was a good man or a good idea or anything like that. And we decided to do the same thing with my mother so we could maintain the focus on the main characters.
That said, [Tara's father] almost becomes a palpable presence in the room at the dinner table when her grandfather starts talking about him.
Theron: The thing that breaks Tara is the unexpectedness of hearing somebody talk about her father, this faceless man. But with Nick [Stahl] it was a little trickier because he came so wounded to that scene that we needed to show how [his character James] has gone through this trauma, just like Tara. I kept saying to [Nick]: "This is your dad, no matter what he's done to you, you still want his approval." And when you look at the dialogue, the subtext is "Look at me, Dad. Be proud of me. Look at what I've accomplished." And that might be the thing that's going to fix everything. That will make it all OK. So that was a really — I mean for me it's a heartbreaking scene, because it's the [father's] denial that just kills me. I think we're always hoping that our parents will approve of us.
Your film roles are so diverse. As an actress, do you seek out that diversity on purpose?
No. I wish I could say that there's a recipe, but there really isn't. I'm very much driven by material but I'm also very much driven by who I'm going to work with. If I'm going to go and do something like Hancock [Theron's upcoming movie about a homeless superhero, co-starring Will Smith], a) I need to feel like the material is going to carry, b) I absolutely love working with Will Smith. I think he's a phenomenal talent. We worked together in The Legend of Bagger Vance, and so that felt like going back to family. And the material was really challenging for the two of us. But I don't really live in a genre-driven mindset. And I think things kind of come to me; it's really very organic because this industry is so unpredictable. I think it's naive and somewhat egotistical to think that you can control the box office and that you can control what people are going to like. Time after time I have seen movies whose buzz starts to hit and the industry decides this is the big one for this year. And then it comes out and nobody gives a damn. I think that's the magic of filmmaking. I've learned very early on that since you can't control what's going to happen at the box office, the one thing that you can control is doing things that you really want to do. Not because you think it's going to be a hit and not because you think you're going to win an Academy Award. Boy, you're just going to live a life of disappointment. It's sometimes a little harsh when you work on something that you really believe in and it doesn't perform at the box office, but at the same time, you walk away with the satisfaction as an actor that you went and did something that you really wanted to do. That's the only thing you have control over at the end of the day. Michael Caine said this to me when I did Cider House Rules with him. He said, "I have at least 10 memories of every single one of the movies [I've made]. And when I'm on my death bed, I will remember those moments and I won't be able to tell you what any one of my movies made at the box office." And then you start to realize that life is important, and that you're going to go and dedicate yourself to 2 years onto a project, you better have some good memories. You better enjoy it.
One thing that I really appreciate about this role is Joleen's humanity. It is reminiscent of some of the other characters you've played.
Well, the human condition, especially as a female, is what interests me. I think female characters can be very black and white. And there's not a lot of room for the gray area, and I think that's problematic within our society. We want to believe that our women are nurturers. It's the Madonna-whore complex: we either want to see our women playing mothers, girlfriends, pretty wives, or we want to see them play prostitutes. I think women are the most complex human creatures and yet men get to play all those complex, conflicted roles. Directors and men's studios are sometimes concerned that if you play a female like that, the audience isn't going to like it. But you know what? Some people aren't necessarily likeable but if you play them truthfully, the best you can hope for is not sympathy but empathy and understanding. And if you're willing to show the pretty with the ugly, well that's a human being. That's all of us.
Have you thought about what happens to the characters after the credits roll?
When you're exposing an audience to a family that's deeply wounded and dealing with stuff that's not going to be fixed overnight, you can't then give them an end in the third act that ties everything up with a little bow. We never wanted Joleen to all of a sudden be a great mother, well-dressed and not loud, embarrassing and obnoxious. [Her relationship with Tara] was definitely going to have to evolve. And it's the same with James: I didn't necessarily want to see him go to jail, even though he commits a crime. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to go; he did something illegal. But there was a feeling at the end of this movie: life is hard but you do have choices, free will. It doesn't mean that once you make that choice, everything is going to work out great. When James is driving down that road at the end, visually says that anything can happen. The road, symbolically, was him making a choice. And after watching the movie, I really just wanted to wish him good luck.
Dennis Hopper and Nick Stahl
The relationships in this movie are so complex, especially the father-son relationship. The killing scene is very much defined by the shot of Frank standing over his kneeling son.
Stahl: Telling him not to get up, with his eyes on the ground. You actually came up with that on your own, didn't you? The shovel and all that?
Hopper: Right. Actually killing [my character] with the shovel.
Stahl: Took it to another scary place. That was scary, too.
Hopper: Actually first we shot the death scene inside the house. And we went back and did a re-shoot. And we decided to do it in the barn, with a shovel. We all came up with various ideas and we put it together and it worked. The concern of the scene was that we protect AnnaSophia, who's 12 years old. She's a wonderful actress and was gung ho about it — we were probably overprotective. We blocked it out really well and tried to make our dramatic moments, and Nick and AnnaSophia were both really professional and really wonderful moment-to-moment actors.
Did you talk about back story any? Because there's not a lot of that about their relationship in the movie. You just see the repercussions.
Stahl: We didn't really talk too much about it.
Hopper: No, because it was written well — we knew our characters.
Stahl: You got a sense of their history. His abuse towards Tara was probably the exact same as it was towards Joleen. And the moment of him with his head bowed, looking at the ground, that encapsulates our relationship, encapsulates me being completely submissive to him. I've had the life sucked out of me a little bit. I think that was pretty understood in the writing. We didn't even go into details of my character's childhood.
Hopper: It really wasn't important. We focused on understanding the moment in our scene, rather than what had happened in the past. Because [my character's children] ran away from my abuse 10 years before. And in the scene with the killing, a switch is flipped [in James] and that's what causes him to attack.
Stahl: Yeah, he just snaps. He's pushed to the point where it's life or death.
Hopper: He wasn't going to see Tara be abused. He wasn't going to take it. And my [character is] saying to him, "I'm gonna break you. You think I can't break you? I'm gonna break you like I broke every horse on this farm." And him finally saying, "You never broke me," and coming out of this repressed thing, this fury. I think unfortunately a lot of murders come out of that place. And it's rather tragic for the person doing it, because the person doing the killing has actually been abused to the point that there's no other thing for them to do.
I was hopeful that he was going to turn himself in and get a good lawyer.
Stahl: Yeah, I don't think it matters as much, what happens to James, because what's really happened to him is that he's been set free of something. So whether he ends up in prison or not, he's finally living life for the first time in a way. And that's what's important.
Hopper: What is your line about sleepwalking, that you say to Tara in the truck?
Stahl: Before I was walking around like I was asleep. And now it's a new life. She woke me up.
Over the course of the film, James becomes more and more of a father figure to Tara.
Stahl: I think that's why it is so scary for him, becoming a father figure when his own was so abusive. He doesn't know what a healthy parent-child relationship is. I think ultimately he's a kind person. Different people react different ways to violence. Some people who get treated violently become violent themselves. And others just become weak and timid and I think James would fall more under that category.
Do you think the loss of his wife maybe made Frank bitter?
Hopper: I didn't dwell on it. But I think after the mother died, he probably changed. And this man has worked his entire life. I didn't think of him as a bad guy when I was playing him. I thought of him as a guy who had to run this ranch and there weren't going to be any loafers around, you know? Working a farm like that is a really, really tough life. And so I never play these guys as thinking they're bad guys, because they think they're correct in what they're doing. He only knows how to do things his way. And that becomes abusive if people don't do things his way, too. And if it takes violence to get them into shape, all right. I'm sure he's the kind of guy who says, "A velvet touch is fine, but a punch in the mouth is a lot quicker". I've known a lot of people with that kind of sensibility. I was raised on a wheat farm in Dodge City, Kansas and it's a tough life.
So any plans to do a role with the velvet touch?
Hopper: I hope I'm going to direct a movie this year some time. That's what I really need to do.
Charlize Theron, Nick Stahl and Dennis Hopper discuss family, abuse and hope.
By Deborah Day
Sleepwalking explores a dysfunctional working-class family and its abusive history. Joleen Reedy (Charlize Theron) is a crass, pot-dealing single mother and sister to barely-functional 30-year-old James (Nick Stahl). The siblings have long since escaped the Utah farm of their abusive father Frank (Dennis Hopper) but they haven't quite escaped the damage he's inflicted. When she loses her boyfriend and her home, Joleen skips town and leaves her surly 12-year-old daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) with the "sleepwalking" James, who after some failures as a caregiver, eventually develops quite the familial instinct.
SPOLIER ALERT: The cast reveals some of the film's plot twists during their conversations below.
Charlize Theron
Joleen's daughter seems like she has a very active dream life, one that you don't necessarily always see onscreen.
Theron: I've done a lot of research on children who have never met a parent, whether it's the mother or the father, and there's beautiful innocence with children where their imagination always tends to go to a positive place, and the older they get, the more it goes to a negative place. [Adults] always expect the worst to happen. Whereas with kids, especially around her age, there's always this hope, there's this idea, that the parent that's missing is the answer to everything. [Younger children] don't care, they just want to know who their parents are then they know their own legacy and identity. [Tara's father] had no face. She had no idea who he was. And I think that was something that really drove Tara, because when things went bad at home there was always this hope, well there's this man out there and I don't know what he looks like but he's the answer to the problem here. He's the answer that will fix all of this. Most people who come from a lot of trauma tend to live in a very fantasy-orientated world. And when we developed the story, that was an element that we always hung onto. We actually had sequences like that in Monster. Aileen Wuornos very much lived in a fantasy world. You go to a fantasy place because it's the thing that gives you hope. And I think children do it more because their imaginations are still so raw.
It seems like Joleen's mother is missing from the picture.
The back story was pretty much that when she was around things were OK. And this is another thing that I've researched. When there's an abusive parent, things are OK if the other parent that's there is not abusive. Things started going really bad for Joleen and for James once their mother passed away. There was no solace anymore coming from anybody. And so we always had a back story that [Joleen was] around Tara's age when she lost her mom.
The allusions to her losing her mom are subtle.
It's always tricky when you deal with three generations of a family. At one point we really opened up the storyline of her father. And then when we started watching the movie, we realized you have to stay focused within a certain amount of characters, otherwise it can become very melodramatic. So to bring up my character's mother who we never see... we decided it should be about Tara so let's focus on her father. So it was just the idea of him — this idea of romance, this idea of a young girl meeting a man and wanting to run away with him. We're not saying if this was a good man or a good idea or anything like that. And we decided to do the same thing with my mother so we could maintain the focus on the main characters.
That said, [Tara's father] almost becomes a palpable presence in the room at the dinner table when her grandfather starts talking about him.
Theron: The thing that breaks Tara is the unexpectedness of hearing somebody talk about her father, this faceless man. But with Nick [Stahl] it was a little trickier because he came so wounded to that scene that we needed to show how [his character James] has gone through this trauma, just like Tara. I kept saying to [Nick]: "This is your dad, no matter what he's done to you, you still want his approval." And when you look at the dialogue, the subtext is "Look at me, Dad. Be proud of me. Look at what I've accomplished." And that might be the thing that's going to fix everything. That will make it all OK. So that was a really — I mean for me it's a heartbreaking scene, because it's the [father's] denial that just kills me. I think we're always hoping that our parents will approve of us.
Your film roles are so diverse. As an actress, do you seek out that diversity on purpose?
No. I wish I could say that there's a recipe, but there really isn't. I'm very much driven by material but I'm also very much driven by who I'm going to work with. If I'm going to go and do something like Hancock [Theron's upcoming movie about a homeless superhero, co-starring Will Smith], a) I need to feel like the material is going to carry, b) I absolutely love working with Will Smith. I think he's a phenomenal talent. We worked together in The Legend of Bagger Vance, and so that felt like going back to family. And the material was really challenging for the two of us. But I don't really live in a genre-driven mindset. And I think things kind of come to me; it's really very organic because this industry is so unpredictable. I think it's naive and somewhat egotistical to think that you can control the box office and that you can control what people are going to like. Time after time I have seen movies whose buzz starts to hit and the industry decides this is the big one for this year. And then it comes out and nobody gives a damn. I think that's the magic of filmmaking. I've learned very early on that since you can't control what's going to happen at the box office, the one thing that you can control is doing things that you really want to do. Not because you think it's going to be a hit and not because you think you're going to win an Academy Award. Boy, you're just going to live a life of disappointment. It's sometimes a little harsh when you work on something that you really believe in and it doesn't perform at the box office, but at the same time, you walk away with the satisfaction as an actor that you went and did something that you really wanted to do. That's the only thing you have control over at the end of the day. Michael Caine said this to me when I did Cider House Rules with him. He said, "I have at least 10 memories of every single one of the movies [I've made]. And when I'm on my death bed, I will remember those moments and I won't be able to tell you what any one of my movies made at the box office." And then you start to realize that life is important, and that you're going to go and dedicate yourself to 2 years onto a project, you better have some good memories. You better enjoy it.
One thing that I really appreciate about this role is Joleen's humanity. It is reminiscent of some of the other characters you've played.
Well, the human condition, especially as a female, is what interests me. I think female characters can be very black and white. And there's not a lot of room for the gray area, and I think that's problematic within our society. We want to believe that our women are nurturers. It's the Madonna-whore complex: we either want to see our women playing mothers, girlfriends, pretty wives, or we want to see them play prostitutes. I think women are the most complex human creatures and yet men get to play all those complex, conflicted roles. Directors and men's studios are sometimes concerned that if you play a female like that, the audience isn't going to like it. But you know what? Some people aren't necessarily likeable but if you play them truthfully, the best you can hope for is not sympathy but empathy and understanding. And if you're willing to show the pretty with the ugly, well that's a human being. That's all of us.
Have you thought about what happens to the characters after the credits roll?
When you're exposing an audience to a family that's deeply wounded and dealing with stuff that's not going to be fixed overnight, you can't then give them an end in the third act that ties everything up with a little bow. We never wanted Joleen to all of a sudden be a great mother, well-dressed and not loud, embarrassing and obnoxious. [Her relationship with Tara] was definitely going to have to evolve. And it's the same with James: I didn't necessarily want to see him go to jail, even though he commits a crime. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to go; he did something illegal. But there was a feeling at the end of this movie: life is hard but you do have choices, free will. It doesn't mean that once you make that choice, everything is going to work out great. When James is driving down that road at the end, visually says that anything can happen. The road, symbolically, was him making a choice. And after watching the movie, I really just wanted to wish him good luck.
Dennis Hopper and Nick Stahl
The relationships in this movie are so complex, especially the father-son relationship. The killing scene is very much defined by the shot of Frank standing over his kneeling son.
Stahl: Telling him not to get up, with his eyes on the ground. You actually came up with that on your own, didn't you? The shovel and all that?
Hopper: Right. Actually killing [my character] with the shovel.
Stahl: Took it to another scary place. That was scary, too.
Hopper: Actually first we shot the death scene inside the house. And we went back and did a re-shoot. And we decided to do it in the barn, with a shovel. We all came up with various ideas and we put it together and it worked. The concern of the scene was that we protect AnnaSophia, who's 12 years old. She's a wonderful actress and was gung ho about it — we were probably overprotective. We blocked it out really well and tried to make our dramatic moments, and Nick and AnnaSophia were both really professional and really wonderful moment-to-moment actors.
Did you talk about back story any? Because there's not a lot of that about their relationship in the movie. You just see the repercussions.
Stahl: We didn't really talk too much about it.
Hopper: No, because it was written well — we knew our characters.
Stahl: You got a sense of their history. His abuse towards Tara was probably the exact same as it was towards Joleen. And the moment of him with his head bowed, looking at the ground, that encapsulates our relationship, encapsulates me being completely submissive to him. I've had the life sucked out of me a little bit. I think that was pretty understood in the writing. We didn't even go into details of my character's childhood.
Hopper: It really wasn't important. We focused on understanding the moment in our scene, rather than what had happened in the past. Because [my character's children] ran away from my abuse 10 years before. And in the scene with the killing, a switch is flipped [in James] and that's what causes him to attack.
Stahl: Yeah, he just snaps. He's pushed to the point where it's life or death.
Hopper: He wasn't going to see Tara be abused. He wasn't going to take it. And my [character is] saying to him, "I'm gonna break you. You think I can't break you? I'm gonna break you like I broke every horse on this farm." And him finally saying, "You never broke me," and coming out of this repressed thing, this fury. I think unfortunately a lot of murders come out of that place. And it's rather tragic for the person doing it, because the person doing the killing has actually been abused to the point that there's no other thing for them to do.
I was hopeful that he was going to turn himself in and get a good lawyer.
Stahl: Yeah, I don't think it matters as much, what happens to James, because what's really happened to him is that he's been set free of something. So whether he ends up in prison or not, he's finally living life for the first time in a way. And that's what's important.
Hopper: What is your line about sleepwalking, that you say to Tara in the truck?
Stahl: Before I was walking around like I was asleep. And now it's a new life. She woke me up.
Over the course of the film, James becomes more and more of a father figure to Tara.
Stahl: I think that's why it is so scary for him, becoming a father figure when his own was so abusive. He doesn't know what a healthy parent-child relationship is. I think ultimately he's a kind person. Different people react different ways to violence. Some people who get treated violently become violent themselves. And others just become weak and timid and I think James would fall more under that category.
Do you think the loss of his wife maybe made Frank bitter?
Hopper: I didn't dwell on it. But I think after the mother died, he probably changed. And this man has worked his entire life. I didn't think of him as a bad guy when I was playing him. I thought of him as a guy who had to run this ranch and there weren't going to be any loafers around, you know? Working a farm like that is a really, really tough life. And so I never play these guys as thinking they're bad guys, because they think they're correct in what they're doing. He only knows how to do things his way. And that becomes abusive if people don't do things his way, too. And if it takes violence to get them into shape, all right. I'm sure he's the kind of guy who says, "A velvet touch is fine, but a punch in the mouth is a lot quicker". I've known a lot of people with that kind of sensibility. I was raised on a wheat farm in Dodge City, Kansas and it's a tough life.
So any plans to do a role with the velvet touch?
Hopper: I hope I'm going to direct a movie this year some time. That's what I really need to do.
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