"Interviews with co-stars and others 2004 archive"

‘I take great pleasure in mushy melodrama’ by Pratim D. Gupta.

The Telegraph, 18 December 2004

From Istvan Szabo (Being Julia) and Ang Lee (Chosen, The Ice Storm) to Mira Nair (Kama Sutra, Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair) and Joel Schumacher (8mm) to Denzel Washington (The Antwone Fisher Story) and James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted), music director Mychael Danna has worked with some of the best directors in the world. In this exclusive chat over email, Danna tells Pratim D. Gupta about his driving forces, his inspirations and his working style.

l Seventeen years into music, do you still feel as motivated for a new film score as you did when you wrote the music for Family Viewing? What has kept you ticking and your music flowing?

Every project I do, I try to start from a totally blank slate — to reinvent the wheel each time. I watch a new film with an open mind and try to find the perfect and most elegant solution to the question: What kind of music will best serve this film? And if the answer is Persian ney and mid-European medieval ensemble, so be it. I don’t assume anything, but through discussions with the director try to understand why they made this film and what they are trying to say. This does cause me a lot of extra work, as opposed to scoring everything with a standard Hollywood orchestra. But that’s what keeps me excited — pushing into areas that I haven’t already mapped out, learning new kinds of music, working with some of the best musicians from different places and cultures.

l You are highly regarded around the world for producing music that sounds strictly non-Western and has these strains of diverse forms. What have been your major influences? What have you grown up listening to?

I grew up in a suburb of Toronto listening to Western classical and pop music. It was when I moved into Toronto to study music that I was exposed to many other forms. Toronto at that time was experiencing an explosion of immigration from all over the world, and all these cultures were thriving artistically, in a very positive way. So there was a lot of interaction between all these different mini-communities. That was a very formative time for me — hearing all the different kinds of music, especially within the settings of their own traditions, communities, religious and cultural events.

l You have written music both for films and for stage musicals. What is the essential difference in sound, pitch, execution and overall impact?

Films can be much more subtle and I think I’m much more suited for the work I like to do. Live music is exciting to be a part of — there can be some magic moments, but there is something frustrating about the ephemeral quality of theatre for me. I suppose everything is ephemeral really, but I like the illusion of some sort of a longer term record of the work.

l As a music director you have worked with the best in the movie business — from Joel Schumacher to Ang Lee. How do you adapt to the musical preferences of different directors and how different are they in their choice of music?

It is the composer’s job to come to a profound understanding of the director’s film, his motivation, his themes, his sensibilities. Yes, directors are all different, and the same director is even different from film to film! Writing music is only half of the job of a film score. The composer’s relationship with, communication with and understanding of the director is really at the core of the art.

l In the past you have worked for period pieces like Kama Sutra. What kind of homework or research do you usually do to get the sound right?

I do a lot of homework for every film. Not just historic films, because often I choose to use historic music in order to portray a specific theme within a film that may not on the surface have anything to do with the time or place of the music I’m scoring the scene with. In The Sweet Hereafter, the story takes place in the present era in a small town in Canada but the insular nature of the town reminded me of the fact that the village mentality was very timeless — it really had a great deal in common with a village in medieval Europe. Also, the fable of the Pied Piper of Hamlin was woven into the film, and was in a sense an analogy of the present day story. So in a sense, that was the film I was scoring, the medieval fable, (with Persian ney and medieval band), even though we are looking at a modern story of a school bus disaster.

l You have got a lot of Indian music assignments. Have you listened to any Indian musician? Are you influenced or inspired by any Asian artiste, contemporary or otherwise?

Yes, I love Indian music, pop and classical, and I am married to an Indian woman so I am exposed to the latest films all the time! I’ve recorded in Mumbai and also Delhi several times. I’ve worked with Mira Nair on several films. My most recent film is an Indian one too, Water, which I am doing with Deepa Mehta.

l Tell us something about Water. Have you used A. R. Rahman’s songs as reference for your background score? What kind of instruments have you used in this period Hindu film?

The film itself is a lovely piece, a very moving story in the languid and naturalistic style of the early Satyajit Ray films. So I strongly feel that the music for the film needs to be all acoustic, in keeping with the period character of the film, as well as being simple and naturalistic in nature. I just recorded in Mumbai and Delhi with instrumentalists including Anoushka Shankar, Selva Ganesh, Rakesh Chaurasia, Ulhas Bapat, Bhawani Shankar. In fact, I heard the early mixes for Mr Rahman’s songs and I thought the electronic elements were inappropriate for this movie. I hope the final version will have an instrumental make-up more in keeping with the spirit of the film. The songs themselves are his (Rahman’s) usual wonderful work.

l You were slated to do Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black. What went wrong?

Sadly it was a case of a scheduling conflict. It is really very disappointing, as he is such an outstanding director with a brilliant visual sense. Hopefully, next time...

l Are you open to more Indian film offers? Are you comfortable scoring music for mushy Bollywood melodramas?

I take great (if guilty) pleasure in enjoying mushy melodramas.

l Which is the next film assignment you are working on?

Where The Truth Lies with Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a comedy singing team from the 60s and 70s.

Hugh Grant Charms His Way Through "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" by Rebecca Murray.

About.com, 4 November 2004

Not that I'm admitting to having withdrawal pains, but there has been a definite lack of Hugh Grant movies over the past couple of years. In 2003, Grant only appeared as a supporting player in the romantic comedy, "Love Actually." In 2002, audiences, the majority of which were females, were treated to two movies starring Hugh Grant - the critically acclaimed "About a Boy" and "Two Weeks Notice" with Sandra Bullock. And now here it is, practically the final days of 2004, and we're just getting our Hugh Grant fix for the year with "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason," the sequel to the hugely successful 2001 comedy starring Grant, Renee Zellweger and Colin Firth.

So where's Hugh Grant been and what's been keeping him busy? In this interview to support "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason," Grant answers that question and talks about why he returned for the "Bridget Jones" sequel, being known as the romantic comedy guy, and reuniting with Renee Zellweger.

INTERVIEW WITH HUGH GRANT ('Daniel Cleaver'):

Did you have much input into this ”Bridget Jones?“ Would you have come back, no matter what the script had been like?

No, no. I was very difficult. I'm always quite difficult, but I was really impossible on this one. And there was a lot of coming and going about the script and my part.

To begin with, I was not convinced that Daniel Cleaver could ever go into television, a medium he despises. But I got my head around that and did a lot of work on just sort of trying to keep the cleverness of Daniel. I always thought one of the mitigating factors for him in the first film that he wasn't just an a**hole, he was actually quite a clever a**hole. I wanted to try and maintain that. So in things like his presentations to the camera, I just tried to make them relatively clever.

What’s your opinion of sequels?

I don't think they're automatically to be despised. I've seen sequels that are… ”’The Godfather,’ he throws out nervously, racking his brains for another [example].“

“Lord of the Rings?“

I've never seen ”Lord Of The Rings“ unfortunately. I've heard from some children about ”Part 2.“ But, I think it's all right. I think it's all right. Don't you?

The Weitz brothers referred to you as the epitome of romantic comedy actors.

(Laughing) That's incredibly nice of them. I love the Weitzes. What were they making? What have they just done?

“In Good Company.“

Is it about cooking? They always had a crazy cooking film up their sleeves. Is it about vampires? Because they once gave me the worst pitch I ever heard. I couldn't get through it. I said, "Stop, Paul," halfway through it. "This is ghastly." And he still laughs about it. Whenever he e-mails me now, he always says at the end, "Keep thinking about that vampire thing."

What do you do with comedy that other actors don't? What do you feel you have to offer?

I don't know what other actors do. I think in a way there is an upside to me being very difficult, and the thing I'm really difficult about is the script. I won't do it unless I think the script has got there, or at the very least, that my part has got there. And then even when I come to shoot it, I will try 16 different things. But it has become a form of madness, it really has, to the point of sort of meltdown. And on this film, the second day, I had a meltdown. Suddenly there was all this sort of neurosis [that] got to me and I had my first ever full-scale attack of stage fright. It was very alarming for everyone concerned. I had to get to about Take 30 before I could even remember my lines. It was the scene when Colin comes in at the end and challenges me to come out and fight him.

How many days did it take to film your fight scene?

It was one day about this time last year. It was the same approach as the first one, which was just to make sure that it was as crap as we wanted it to be. The key is to stop the stunt coordinator from coming in to make it look like a film fight. We just wanted it to be two pathetic Englishmen scared of each other, throwing their handbags at each other, basically.

Do you think your character, Daniel Cleaver, can change?

Can he change? No. I think short answer is that he can't. Funnily enough, I think that if he has changed, he'd change for the worse, not the better.

You excel at playing a**holes. Where does that come from? Are you ready to give up playing them?

Ummm — it's sweet of you to say that. Now, I quite like it. For years I sat in these interviews and everyone said, ”You're always Mister Nice Guy. Why don't you ever play someone nasty?“ So in fact it's been a relief to be…for the real me to come out more on camera. I don't have any particular burning desire to go back to being cuddly. Not really.

How was reuniting with Renee Zellweger?

Renee is always… What's the big thing about Renee? She's just very redoubtable. I think film acting's just a miserable experience. It's so long and so boring and so difficult to get right, so that what you need above all is incredible willpower and strength of mind.

And she has that. I don't know where it comes from. She's definitely got that. And . . . big pants . . . they're back. You're always slightly nervous when jokes are revisited. It's one thing to revisit a film but entire jokes? But I think we've moved forward a bit.

We’ve heard Renee had a bad reaction to the sun in Thailand.

Oh Christ! She's got this thing that she believes the sun will make her skin come up in boils and peel off her bones. So she's dressed up like Julie Andrews at the beginning of ”The Sound Of Music,“ like a nun [with the] umbrellas and gloves and everything. And it's a nightmare.

Did you give her a hard time?

No, because oddly enough, she was really [sensitive] on the subject. I think she almost felt she was being assaulted just being in Thailand, being so close to the sun. (Laughing) But it does make one slightly want to ask her why [she] lives in Los Angeles.

In ”Bridget“ and in ”Love Actually,“ your onscreen love interest haven’t been twigs.

I remember saying to my agent that the next job I want to do, the next three jobs I do, I want them to be about slightly overweight women. And they did a wonderful [job]. I agree that it's nice that these stories feature that. Because you've heard this before — any man will tell you that we don't necessarily want what we see in Vogue or whatever.

The British tabloids seem to be bent on having you end your bachelorhood. Is it because you're past 40 and they think you should be married? Do you feel the pressure from it?

Ah, I don't feel that pressure. I mean, I feel other pressure from the British tabloids, but I don't feel that particular pressure.

Is it true you’re giving up on acting?

I haven't done very much for about three years. I think I've just done that smallish part in ”Love Actually“ and the smallish part in this film. So I'm sort of semi-retired.

How are you filling your time?

I'm sure I've said to you a billion times that I keep thinking I'm about to write a brilliant script.

Have you written one?

No, I've done bugger-all all year. I feel ashamed of myself.

So basically, when Richard Curtis calls, you seem to be ready to go to work.

Yeah, old friends and things, and this one — that seems fine. But I'm not in a hurry to go and sit in big development meetings and make great, big commercial films. I do have a touch of apathy about that.

How about a role onstage?

Well, it's true that the stage is fun. But I can never justify it completely in my head because although I think it's really fun for the performers, my experience as an audience member is 19 times out of 20 it's purgatory to sit watching a play, I think. I don't know. People keep going more, I think, out of a sense of duty, sort of churchgoing, than out of clever [plays].

Beeban Kidron (film director of "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason"): Me and Ms Jones by Zoe Williams.

The Guardian, 30 October 2004

What does Beeban Kidron, a director with impeccable feminist credentials and a record in gritty documentaries, think she's doing making a Bridget Jones sequel? Having a laugh, that's what. Better, she tells Zoe Williams - emphatically, as is her way - to be a bit radical for a big audience than terribly, terribly right-on for a handful

'It is a great gift to make people laugh' ... Beeban Kidron

Beeban Kidron is a one-woman brass band - all eyebrows and fiery gestures and sudden changes in tempo and delivery. Italics don't even begin to do justice to her emphases, her passion. Everything she says is delivered with more than conviction, with complete credibility. When I say brass band, I don't mean noisy - she isn't - I just mean that she is the kind of person you'd follow into combat, or down a mine.

And that's one of a whole load of reasons that you wouldn't expect Kidron to have directed the second Bridget Jones movie, The Edge Of Reason. From the closing credits of the original, the sequel seemed all stitched up.

With the cast assembled, the director a buddy of the writer, the writer a global success story, and blockbuster status for all of them, you'd think they'd just roll up their sleeves and start over again.

Instead, they drafted in a director with the most flawless feminist pedigree, along with a history of political activism both inside film- making and out.

Besides wondering what made them choose Kidron, more to the point is what made her choose them? Well, she has this pitch of persuasiveness that seems as if it comes from spending a working life trying to persuade people to part with 20 quid to make something that sounds unwatchable but is actually brilliant. What do you do with all that spare charisma when there's more money than you could shake a stick at and the film is so eagerly awaited that it probably doesn't even need adverts? This sounds as if I'm accusing Kidron of selling out, which I'm not, but if I were, she has rather a wry and unarguable answer to that one: "From the moment I went to Hollywood for the first time, I was accused by various people of selling out. So I feel I've done my sell-out films already. I've sold everything! I've sold every piece of soul I ever had!"

Kidron's filmography is surprisingly short, considering how recognisable her name is - you always expect a director (or an actor, or anyone involved in the business, really) to have done two films, to every one you've heard of, that were forgettable, or rubbish, or straight-to-video. Kidron has, mostly, only done ones you remember: Carry Greenham Home, the documentary she made with Amanda Richardson about the women's peace camp at Greenham Common, which she began when she was 20; Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, the television adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's novel that swept the Baftas of 1991; Vroom, the above-average Brit flick that featured breakthrough performances by David Thewlis and Clive Owen; Antonia And Jane, the female buddy movie starring Imelda Staunton and Saskia Reeves; Hookers Hustlers Pimps And Their Johns, a startling documentary with a self-explanatory title; and Murder, the 2002 TV drama starring Julie Walters. Indeed, the only spider in the ice cream is the disappointing Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert clone To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar, in which she got Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes into frocks.

And that's pretty much it. Kidron nods vigorously, mercifully unoffended by what is essentially a really rude question. "Yes, I wish I'd made more films. I wish it was easier to make films I'm interested in. My taste is very, very broad, but the quality, I'm only interested in a certain level of quality. And Bridget is part of that, for me. I think you can sort of look at this slightly odd CV that I have and see where Bridget fits in. It's been the Antonia [And] Jane, To Wong Foo strand, the more comedic of my work. I think it is a great gift to make people laugh, and it shouldn't be underestimated. I mean, I don't mean my great gift [laugh, eyes, fireworks], I mean a great gift in the community."

Bridget is a very funny film. Renée Zellweger, who has been billed since Nurse Irene as the comic actress of her generation, does more than flex her comedy muscles. Here, she flexes them, and then picks up a huge big truck. You could say that about the first one, too, but there's more meat to her this time (no, no, I don't mean the weight-gain thing; the scale of weight-gain has remained the same). Hugh Grant, given more of an unambiguous bad guy role, is able to do comic malevolence in a way that few directors allow him, since they never want to waste his peerless romantic hero shtick. The smaller roles are way more carefully tended, and laugh-out-loud jokes are slipped in at the end of scenes, rather than announced with a big fanfare - this film has enough funny gags that it can sprinkle them about like hundreds and thousands.

Kidron is naturally keen to give all the credit to Helen Fielding, Zellweger ("She's actually a thoroughbred actress, is what she is") and Grant. She goes so far as to have a bit of a moment over Colin Firth: "I've walked down the street with Madonna, and I've walked down the street with Colin Firth, and it was a little bit more ... with Madonna they were a little rougher, but they were all there for Colin. It was amazing. Women adore him. They swoon. Anyway. Stop. If I say anything stupid, you have to cut it out."

But aside from how well the others did their jobs, it's clear she did hers so well because she attacked it with absolute fervour. This wasn't a film taken on by someone who needed a new bathroom - put it that way. Kidron isn't a trainspottery Bridget Jones aficionado - she makes no claims to being the first to discover how funny it was, or being able to quote whole chapters of the oeuvre, but equally there's no part of her that feels as if she's ... not dumbing down, exactly, more unfeministing-down (can I get away with that?) in having taken on the project. "I remember when the first one came out, and this guy on the telly attacked the movie on really pseudo-feminist grounds, you know, that it makes women stupid, it saw them only in relation to their men. I remember turning on him and saying, 'You're wrong. You're wrong. No one thinks of Laurel and Hardy as stupid, or Buster Keaton as denigrated. It is a metaphor for how we feel, it's a realisation of our fear of how we're going to behave.'"

She makes no outlandish claims for the importance of this film, but does insist that, in its way, it is radical. It's radical because its heroine isn't perfect, she isn't graceful, she isn't chaste or even particularly monogamous, and she isn't thin. That last is what everyone fixes on, but the rest is, in the context of what is expected of female leads by mainstream Hollywood and so many other branches of the media aimed at women, just as important. "Now, I don't say it's broadly radical, and I absolutely can see how you could put it in a cultural context and say it is shoring up a number of things, heterosexual, blah, but you know what? The world is so far gone, and women are under such a lot of pressure ... You have a choice in the mainstream media of saying a little thing to a lot of people, or a great many things to many fewer people. It is very, very rare that you can do both."

Kidron views it not with derision but with amused bafflement. "I had breakfast with one of my more intellectual friends - I mean, properly intellectual, a very, very famous man in the world. I was in the middle of shooting, one day off, and he said, 'And how is she doing? I hear she ate 13 doughnuts in one day.' I was absolutely stunned. And I went, 'Antony Gormley O ... B ... E! I cannot believe you are concerning yourself with what Renée Zellweger has for breakfast!' I was flabbergasted."

You'd think, with a sequel, that people would get bored with such a surface detail, but no - everyone still talks about Zellweger's phenomenal eatathon as though she'd been forced to give away a kidney for the sake of her art. I suppose this reinforces Kidron's point that, at this particular time in the trajectory of images of femininity, a message as simple as "It's OK not to be skinny" is radical, and will continue to be, until more people make it, and more often.

Nevertheless, it's probably still not the film Kidron thought she'd be making 20-ish years ago when her first film, Carry Greenham Home, came out. She was still at film school when she made it - indeed, had just gone along for the weekend to try and figure out how to use a camera and ended up staying a year. "Literally, night and day, night and day. I had my 21st birthday at Greenham, by the fire, chanting. It was one of my better birthdays. And I think I had a New Year's Eve going over the perimeter fence. It was one of my better New Year's Eves."

Kidron is uncharacteristically not-that-modest about this venture, which I think is because it's so long ago that she sees it as part of the time, rather than part of her work: "It was a huge, huge act of protest and politics and rage at what was going on in the world. But it was still funny, it was still touching, it was still a version of a documentary, and that's always been my interest. How do you speak to the many? And how are you - not in a compromising sense, but in the most positive possible sense - the acceptable face of what they do not understand or will not tolerate?"

Having said that, she doesn't hold much with self-effacement, certainly not the half-meant, simpering kind, and I think it would be impossible to have been politicised in the era that she was, without winding up way too bolshie and full of vim to affect a "don't mind me" stance about anything. Besides which, it is a brilliant documentary, vivid and funny and sincere to a degree that is actually a bit depressing, since it reminds you that the most you ever see about important protests now is when Ali G goes down to take the piss out of them and ask why they don't have more baths. It reminds you, also, how polarised people used to be about things like this, how a great many people saw nothing at all worthwhile, or worth listening to, about peace protesters, and normal-looking Greenham locals went round with angry faces and badges saying RAGE (Residents Against Greenham ... I can't remember what the E stood for. Maybe eejits).

As distinct, easily, were the battle lines drawn around Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. It's easy to forget the context of this, along with the reaction it drew. Plus, the tragic early death of its lead actress Charlotte Coleman bathes it in nostalgia, rather, and puts it on a cultural par with the children's television series Marmalade - something of which everyone was immediately fond, and remains so.

But this was a time when there were only four channels, and everyone was watching one of them, and the only way to opt out of cultural debate would be not to watch telly at all (whereas now you can just watch Friends all the time). It was also long before the first lesbian kiss on Brookside, before gayness was even a twinkle in the eye of EastEnders, and a good 10 years before Coronation Street caught up. The first scene of same-sex intimacy on British television is what gave it its shock value, and Mary Whitehouse wasn't alone in her crazy talk of depravity. The BBC wasn't too keen on it, either. "I remember that when the executive producer, I can't remember his name, Michael something ... but not Grade [eyes flash with prospect of amusing identity mistake]. Definitely not Grade. But anyway, he stood up, and he said, 'Well, that's not very BBC, is it?' And he walked out, and that was his contribution."

It was phenomenally successful in the mainstream, with all the Baftas and such, and also won every gay and lesbian film-making award going, but Kidron's standing as a resolutely radical and campaigning director, on this front, is complicated. To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar, starring all those quintessentially straight big shots, garnered some serious-minded critiques for not going far enough, not using any gay actors, not showing the reality of being a transvestite in small-town America, all those boxes it would have ticked if its aim had been exclusively political.

As is probably clear by now, Kidron would rather be somewhat political and somewhat mainstream than very political and not mainstream at all. She talks about films "doing their job in the world". When she pantomimishly claimed to have sold every bit of soul she had, it was underpinned by a more serious rejection of the academic/arthouse path through culture, which guards its purity very closely but doesn't reach an awfully large audience. "All these things are cultural conversations. You want to be part of it, you don't want to leave it to everyone else. 'Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'm doing something terribly right on.' I'm not that interested in that. I think we have a broader palette."

In terms of her personal politics, she says she's the kind of person who seems terribly political to the outside world, but who, in the context of her Marxist upbringing, isn't political at all. She isn't the same creature, politically, as the one who made Carry Greenham Home. "The world has changed so much. And my relationship with it has changed so much. I'm older, and I'm a mother, and I've been through many and various life experiences. I lost my father. I'm even married, which I never thought I would be. There are many, many things that have changed my relationship with the world."

And, for half a second, that all sounds like a roundabout way of saying that hoary old Churchill thing about being a socialist until you're 30 because you've a heart, and a conservative afterwards because you've a brain. But, of course, that's not what she's saying at all. "I've been very encouraged by the numbers of young people gathering around the anti-globalisation thing. It's not all thought through, but it's pretty anarchic and it's pretty fantastic and it's pretty loud. And the huge movement against the war, which, of course, should have been heeded, and which, of course, Blair is a criminal to have turned his back on, is also encouraging because, in this time in which we lack community and lack a structure and lack a political education, here is the largest street demonstration in history. So you've always got to look to the facts ... there are very stupid movies, with very stupid women in them, but there are also very intelligent movies, with very intelligent women in them. There is despair about international politics and a despair about domestic politics, but there is a proper, vibrant opposition, and it's not around traditional party lines."

I love the way women in films keep bobbing back up as she talks, regardless of the subject; it's a million miles away from the crass, keep-plugging-the-product stuff you get sometimes when you try to draw a filmy person away from the film. A project can consume terribly energetic, terribly passionate people to the extent that all conversations dovetail with it, at least for a time. Kidron had Bridget Jones absolutely right - it is not the most groundbreaking film ever made, but it breaks enough ground, and it's all done so expertly and charmingly you wouldn't want it to go further.

"So long as I haven't dropped the crown jewels, so long as people think that their Bridget is safe, so long as people know it's still OK to have a big arse and say the wrong thing and not be able to live up to this or that - all these expectations of what being a woman is - and they will still find romance and love and happiness, and all the things you want in a good life, then I've done my job. And maybe if the world was some other world, then it wouldn't be enough, but, right now, I think it's important. I don't want to be grand, but I think it's a little bit important."

Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason is released on November 12.

Being Annette (Bening): A doozy of a diva by Claudia Puig.

USA TODAY, 27 October 2004

In Being Julia, Annette Bening plays a conniving stage diva, a fading star with a tormenting midlife crisis.

Bening's character may have a dalliance with a younger man, but in real life, she's been married to reformed bachelor Warren Beatty for 13 years.

She sums up her middle-aged angst with this melodramatic whinge: "I'm exhausted," she proclaims with a huge sigh. "I feel twice my age, which makes me 90. And bored. Life has nothing in store for me. I feel as if my life has come to an end."

Nothing could be less true for Bening, the actress.

At 46, she may be just about Julia's age, but her stardom is glowing ever brighter, thanks to her inspired performance as a vicious and vulnerable leading lady. For somebody so good at playing duplicitous and calculating, Bening is surprisingly down to earth and easygoing. Articulate and well-read, she's anything but bored. Or boring.

Among the 15 film roles she has played is a gangster's moll in Bugsy, a scheming seductress in Valmont and a con artist/prostitute in The Grifters, for which she was nominated for a supporting-actress Oscar in 1991. Ten years later, she was nominated again for her portrayal of the sharp-tongued, ambitious wife of Kevin Spacey in American Beauty. And while on Broadway doing Coastal Disturbances in 1987, she was nominated for a Tony. She made her first film, The Great Outdoors with Dan Aykroyd, a year later.

The mother of four children, wife of Warren Beatty and a likely candidate for another best-actress Oscar nomination for Being Julia, Bening plainly likes where she is right now.

"I can't complain," she says. "I've tried to take roles with great demands. The difference is that Julia is a woman who's had more life experience, just like I have, so there's a feeling of being able to draw upon more parts of yourself, just because you've been around longer."

And, refreshingly for a Hollywood actress — and unlike Julia — Bening seems to have no qualms about no longer being the ingenue. Age is not her enemy.

"I'm lucky, almost all my family has lived to be very old," she says. "I have one grandfather who lived to be 100. I was always around older people. I think this is a great gift. My mother is not somebody who's troubled by aging. I think that makes a difference."

Her antidote to advancing age? "As long as the mind is active," advancing years are no big deal.

But she's no Pollyanna. She acknowledges that Hollywood may not be as sanguine as she is about the inevitable graying of actors.

"There is enormous pressure on how you look," she says. "And people project all of their ambivalence onto actors about aging."

Bening doesn't share that ambivalence.

"When I look at women, older than I am, in their 50s, 60, 70s, 80s, and I see women that I admire, I think 'Oh, I get it, that's how I'm going to be,' " Bening says. "I'm not scared. I want to be that."

Motherhood comes first

In the meantime, she's happily focused on being a working mom of four children, ages 12, 10, 7 and 4. She has been married to Beatty, once Hollywood's most notorious bachelor, for nearly 13 years. Bening took a break from acting in 2000, after American Beauty, to hunker down into motherhood.

"It wasn't a hard choice," she says. "I had an 8-year-old, a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old and a newborn. There were a couple offers that came along, but they weren't enticing enough."

But then came an offer that did entice: opposite Kevin Costner in the 2003 Western Open Range.

"I'm lucky I don't have to work," she says. "If there's something that comes up, I can say no. 'You want me to go to Timbuktu in February? I'm sorry, I love your project, but no.' As we get older we get smarter, and you learn what matters. But I have huge chunks of time when I'm not working, and my kids are seeing me all the time. I'm involved and in their faces, and they see me doing so many things that other moms are doing. So when I do work, I'm not guilty."

In BeingJulia, Bening has the role of a lifetime as a charming, devilish, mercurial drama queen in a sumptuous film based on W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Theatre. As Julia, Bening gets to slap her passive husband (played by Jeremy Irons) and dally in a torrid affair with a man half her age (Shaun Evans).

"It was hopeless in a way that I find very human," she says. "We've all done that: fallen in love with just the absolute wrong person."

Bening's performance is a revelation in a role that could easily have been over the top. Instead, it's nuanced and oddly sympathetic.

Says Julia screenwriter Ronald Harwood: "She's an actress of great beauty and great gifts. I don't think I've seen an actress interpret anything I've written for the screen as well as she did. She can go from being very bright and lovely to deep depression. You write it and hope for the best, and then you see her bring all this texture and subtext and subtlety. She brings to it such wit, vitality and grace."

Her character's most noteworthy traits are her deep, seductive voice, her biting wit and her girlish laugh.

"She has great passion, and she's flawed as hell," Bening says. "But she does have a capacity for joy: incredible, liberated joy. That's one of the qualities about her that I thought was very important. She's not a noble person. She's just human. She happens to be a diva. But she has enormous capacity to feel."

Bening is grateful for the chance to embody this stage beauty.

In several scenes, Julia gazes into a mirror, ever contemplating, analyzing and plotting.

Director Istvan Szabo (Mephisto) sees it this way: "The tale is set amongst imagined masks and real-life mirrors. The masks are there for eventual revelation, the mirrors are there so we can face ourselves."

British actress Lucy Punch had to face the formidable Bening in the movie. Punch plays Avice Crichton, the ingenue who is Julia's rival for her young lover's affection.

"Like my character, I was impressed and excited and overwhelmed by Annette as an actress," Punch says. "Everything she knew about the character and the era was just really impressive. She was so well informed."

Bening, who majored in theater at San Francisco State University, is serious about assessing her craft. The accolades she accepts graciously, if a bit tentatively.

"If people like the film and the performance, it feels great," she says. "I've made plenty of movies that I cared just as much about that nobody was very much interested in. For good reason, in some cases."

En route to the interview, she called a friend who advised her to "enjoy it, just enjoy" the attention she's getting for the role.

"So, I'm enjoying it," she says, while plucking at her spiky brown hair. But she's just as happy to discuss politics or childrearing as she is acting.

She credits having help and enjoying her chosen profession with keeping things happy at home.

"When you really love what you do, it helps," she says. "Healthy children are concerned with how they're doing. As long as they feel they're attended to, then they're going to be OK. And you know there are moments that things don't work out right and it's a mess. It's an imperfect life and an imperfect process, and you just sort of do the best you can. I think that because they're so wanted, they feel that. I guess I'm hoping that sort of transcends everything."

She acknowledges that meaty roles for women are few and even rarer are juicy comedic roles.

"There's not a lot of writing that lets you be ridiculous," she says.

She cites actresses like Tea Leoni as managing to be funny and beautiful. She calls Rosemary Harris, with whom she stars in Being Julia, "a goddess." Colin Firth, her Valmont co-star, is "so noble and smart as hell." Susan Sarandon, whom she heard speaking about the death penalty after Dead Man Walking, was "very calm, very clear and an excellent spokesman."

Setting aside time alone

She doesn't stint on accolades for her actor/director husband, either. Not too long ago, there was considerable talk about Beatty running for office. Would she be willing to play first lady in real life?

"I don't think he'll ever actually do it," she says. "If he wanted to, I would be supportive of him completely because he's really smart about politics and has a lot of interesting ideas. He's always thinking. But I think he's just too interested in making movies and too interested in his kids."

She recently finished shooting the HBO film Mrs. Harris, an unconventional look at the murder of the Scarsdale Diet doctor that co-stars Ben Kingsley and is scheduled for release this spring.

With such a full life, Bening is determined to carve out private time. So she heads for the trails surrounding their Los Angeles home.

"I find it to be very good for the mind," she says. "I go alone. I don't want to chat. I have people talking to me all the time, so I like to have quiet and solitude. And maybe you can appreciate it more when you have a wonderful family like I do."

"Profile & Interview: Scarlett Johansson" by Carlo Cavagna.

Aboutfilm.com, February 2004

Scarlett Johansson plays a 17th-Century Dutch housemaid in Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Question: Did you grab the part in Girl with a Pearl Earring as soon as it came to you, or did you have to think about it?

Johannson: I had to audition for it. I wanted to do it as soon as the script came to me, but I went in for a reading, and originally didn't have the part, actually, which I was quite upset about. [laughs] But you learn to deal with those things. You do it for so long and you learn to accept that things work out for the better. Then I was shooting The Perfect Score in Vancouver, and Andy [Paterson] and Peter [Webber]—our producer and our director—came, as Peter says, crawling on a gravely floor on his hands and knees with weights on his feet, to fish me back. At first I was like, ”No!“ because I wanted to make sure that it was really so, if he really thought that I was right for the part, or whether it was circumstantial. So, little bit of coaxing, I was like, ”Mmm—okay! I'll play it.“ And that's the way it went.

Question: Had you read Tracy Chevalier's novel before you played Griet?

Johannson: I hadn't. I didn't read it before, and I didn't read it during. I didn't want the first person narrative, I suppose. I just didn't want anyone else's explanation of the way the character was feeling. I didn't want to have the pressure of that. You know, some actors might have, but I don't know, it just didn't seem right.

AboutFilm Question: It's an astonishingly different role from the others we've seen you in. What adjustments did you make in your process and your approach?

Johannson: Well, I don't know that I approached it in any other way than I normally would. Everything you do is different, and you find different chords in every character that you play that strike true with you. But, I didn't have much time. I wrapped Lost in Translation ten days before we started shooting. So I came out of Lost in Translation, and I was like, ”Whoa! Oh my god! What just happened? That was crazy!“ It was so fast. It was so rushed. It was crazy, and a lot of pressure for the time—we could only be in Tokyo for so long. So I basically unpacked my bags, repacked, and left. When I got [to Luxembourg], everybody was really accepting of where I had come from. Everybody knew that I was a little out of my mind, and I was still quite emotionally vulnerable, so I figured that I would just stay that way, and everything would be all right. [laughs] So I stayed that way for another couple months. A lot of things were prepared already when I got there, which was very reassuring. I was handed a mop and a bucket and told to figure out what to do with them. So I had all these props, and I just figured that if I pretended that I knew what I was doing—what brushes were used to dust what mantelpieces and that kind of thing—people would just kind of buy it.

AboutFilm Question: Clearly then, since you had so little time, the British accent that you used to be consistent with the other actors must have already been part of your acting arsenal.

Johannson: Yeah, that's actually a strong point for me. I'm good with dialect. Some actors do it immediately; other actors never quite get it. It's something I've always really enjoyed and something I've always been pretty fast with. At first it was a little bit shaky, and I was taking a lot of line readings from the dialect coach just to get the intonation down, and eventually it became quite second nature, after about a week or two.

Question: You're on a very fast ride now. You're only eighteen, I guess, and you started work at eight? You started as a child and now you're a young woman. Has it seemed crazy, this last ten years? How are you coping with all that, and how have you coped?

Johannson: Well, it hasn't always been crazy. I mean, obviously filming and working has consistently been a part of my life. I've never had a huge break of time when I wasn't working on something or promoting something. There's been chunks of time when I was just in school or whatever, which is nice. This past year has been really insane. It's been quite a whirlwind. I've been really busy, pulled in a lot of directions, but it's great. I really need a vacation, but aside from needing a vacation, it has been so wonderful to feel recognized when you put your hard work into something. I have two films out this year that I'm really proud of and really worked hard on, and so it's okay. I'm just trying to keep my head on straight. I worked this summer on something, and I'm working now, so I'm just in work mode, and that prevents me from going into the Hollywood starlet mode, I suppose.

Question: Who helps you keep your head on straight?

Johannson: My close friends and my family. My parents and my siblings. I don't think I need too much help. I think my head's on pretty straight, and I'm pretty realistic about things. I'm very focused, so that certainly prevents me from going all over the place. I've always been very focused on my career. I think that helps. But, it's good to have people [say], ”Okay, you need a vacation.“ ”I do? Oh yeah, you're right. I think I do.“

Question: How much are you hearing so far about the Oscar buzz around Lost in Translation ? Are you hearing a lot yet? Are you doing things to help with that at all?

Johannson: Yeah, certainly, all of the publicity you do for something is toward— Especially when it comes out this time of year.

Question: But it seems like it's ongoing publicity for that one. The buzz has really increased, and it's been playing for awhile now.

Johannson: People have asked that of me a lot, what if, what if, and that kind of thing. It seems quite unbelievable. There's very few situations where you actually think something like that is going to be a possibility, and I just can't— There's so many things the film should be recognized for—both films—for cinematography, and direction, and writing, that you can't expect something like that. It seems very unbelievable. A couple weeks ago I was trying on dresses, and somebody said, ”Oh my god, that's an incredible dress. You have to wear that to the Globes!“ And I looked at them and was like, ”The Golden Globes?“ And they're like, ”Of course! You have to borrow it. It's amazing! It's made for your body!“ And I was like, ”Uh, I plan on eating Chinese food at home that day, but thanks for the invite. If I'm invited I'll call and let you know.“ So, I guess I take that in stride, that sort of buzz.

Question: You are eighteen years old, and you have been paired romantically on film with someone in their fifties and someone in their forties. And your next film, The Perfect Score, you're playing someone your age. Do you have any opinions about that? Are you excited about finally playing a character more your own age?

Johannson: Well, Greit was my age, and I've always played a few years older. When we did Horse Whisperer I was twelve playing fourteen. In Ghost World I was fifteen playing eighteen. It doesn't make so much of a difference.

Question: But specifically the romantic pairings with Bill Murray [in Lost in Translation], Colin Firth [in Girl with a Pearl Earring], Billy Bob Thornton [in The Man Who Wasn't There], do you have any opinions on that?

Johannson: I think the relationships between the characters are so different. With Billy [Bob Thornton] and I it was kind of a purely innocent sort of thing. With Bill [Murray] and I, my character needs the Bob Harris character to help her from having a total nervous breakdown. She needs his support. Colin [Firth] and I, we have a different relationship. We don't need each other; we want each other. You think that my character could survive anything—she could survive another world war. She's so strong. Colin does not help her come unscathed out of that household. It's her own inner strength that does.

Question: In Girl with a Pearl Earring, Griet was fifteen, sixteen when she first went to work in Vermeer's household. That was a little different from a love affair. It's the interchange between the servant and the master, between the model and the artist. She was intrigued by the art—things an uneducated girl would not have been exposed to. What did you take into consideration as you developed the role?

Johannson: Yeah, those relations are part of the reality of her being in that household. Certainly she's a servant. She's a maid. She's taking care of the cooking and the cleaning and the rearing of the children—all of those things which would be her job—as well as the model in the end. She's forced into that seat. However, it became more apparent to me, the more we filmed, how completely in love I was falling with Colin as the Vermeer character. It became more and more apparent to me that the Vermeer character was this untouchable mysterious man, this genius, and my character was completely longing and obsessive and in love with this man. It was actually physically heartbreaking; that's how apparent it became. [In the scene] when I saw the Vermeer and Catharina [Vermeer's wife] characters together, caressing each other, I was physically pained, in my heart, by that. I definitely think that the love affair for me was the most apparent relation between the two characters. The maid and the model are things that come along with the circumstance, but the other is not physical.

AboutFilm Question: I think that definitely came through, watching the film. Is that how Peter Webber and the other people involved also saw it, or is that a realization you came to on your own?

Johannson: I don't know. I never really talked to anyone about it. I think it's kind of personal, the way you see it. I didn't necessarily want to tell anyone, except for after that one particular scene. I remember it so clearly, it was like, ”And cut! Great! Print! Lunch!“ And I was [mimics hyperventilating] , ”Uu-uh-uh.“ I was totally messed up. Everybody was getting their shit together to go to lunch, and I was not getting my shit together. It was terrible, and I finally went to the lunch table and said, ”You guys, I feel really bizarre. This is very strange. I'm not hungry. I feel weird. I need to talk to somebody about this.“ I think everyone was like, ”Why don't you go to your trailer and lie down?“ And I was like, ”That's a good idea! I will do that! Thank you!“ I went back to my trailer and had a good cry and a nap, and I was fine. But, I don't know, I never really spoke to anyone else about that, because I think it's very personal.

Question: Lost in Translation may not be a biography of Sofia Coppola and her relationship with Spike Jonze, but there are a lot of similarities. In her direction, did you feel any of that coming out when she was directing you—any of her personality, any of her life? Were you thinking about that at all when you were making the film?

Johannson: Well of course, her personality came through when she was directing me. It's not like she [pressed] her director button and changed. Every director is themselves; [they're] not playing a part. But, Sofia wrote this script and I think that the story is very familiar to her. I think that she wrote about herself—experiences that she had as a young girl in her twenties. I think that she found the idea of this very preppie girl, married and well-off, having a mid-life crisis at the age twenty-four, very interesting, and funny. Ironically funny. And so—I don't know, I guess I never thought about it. My whole wardrobe was Marc Jacobs, so [it] was apparent that she had a say in that. She wanted [her] to be cool—her version of cool, and kind of preppie. The character always had long blonde hair, and that was to separate her from the Japanese. I guess the relationship with Giovanni [Ribisi] is similar in the sense that they're both busy. He's busy and focused, and she's floating around not really knowing what she wants, and he doesn't get that. But it wasn't like she said, ”When I was sitting in the room, I was alone and thinking that—“ It wasn't like that; it was very much separate. She didn't have an affair with an older man in Tokyo or anything like that.

Question: What's your relationship with John Travolta in Love Song for Bobby Long ? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Johannson: Well, the film is about a girl that, when we find her, is living in a trailer park in Florida. Within the first four pages of the script, she gets this letter that her mother has died, and she has to go to New Orleans for the funeral. So she makes this trek to New Orleans; she gets there, and she goes to this house that her mother has apparently left her. She hasn't seen her mother mostly her whole childhood—the last time she saw her, she was like eleven. She doesn't even remember her, really. And so she opens the door—it's a disheveled dump, and Gabriel Macht and John Travolta are living there. John Travolta, especially, is lascivious, awful. Everything about him is gross and terrible—he's hysterical. They also apparently have a share of the house. They've been living there for some time, about six or seven years. She's welcome to come stay if she'd like to, but this is the way it's going to be. There's these two really gross awful men walking around the house in their underwear. So she leaves the house, she's all flustered, and she figures, ”What am I going to do?“ She doesn't really have any place to go. So she reads The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and she decides to come back. It's about the three characters living together, forming this very strange kind of family. The Bobby Long character [Travolta] and Gabriel's character are these Tennessee Williams protagonists—they have these lousy pipe dreams about themselves. John is playing a washed up English professor, and Gabriel is his student, and she's this beacon of light in the household, and in turn is learning about the mother she never really knew through the people that knew her.

Question: Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? Do you live at home still? What sort of education have you been able to have, and do you plan to pursue it any further?

Johannson: Well, I don't plan on going any further. I've graduated from high school. I was an honor student. I grew up in New York , was born and raised there. I live in New York partly, and I live in LA by myself partly. And yeah, I was supposed to go to school for film direction this year, but I decided not to go because it didn't really make any sense to me, to go to school for something I've been involved with for so long. The things that I really wanted to go to school for I could [study] separately, like film history and post-production editing.

Question: So you're fairly independent at your age. Would you describe yourself that way?

Johannson: Yeah, I am very independent. I mean, I still need a lot of love and care. But I'm independent; I can take care of myself.

Question: And you're already thinking of starting your own production company and stepping behind the camera?

Johannson: Well, every actor has a production company already. It's just a matter of producing your own films under the label of your own production company.

Question: But some production companies are more in name only. Some are just a power thing, and some are actually really involved in finding projects.

Johannson: Yeah, exactly. I don't know necessarily that I would produce under my own company right now. Producing is not something that I'm thinking about. Directing is something that I will be doing very shortly, trying to figure out what to get my hands on. And I can't imagine writing a script and wanting to direct it and not having a producing credit, because I would want to have a big chunk of power on that end, if I wrote something.

"A profile of "Girl With A Pearl Earring" including an interview with director Peter Webber" by Carlo Cavagna

Aboutfilm.com, February 2004

AboutFilm Question: So, you're an art history major, is that correct?

Webber: Yeah, that's correct.

AboutFilm Question: Did you always have a project like this in mind?

Webber: No, no. I was known for making very different kinds of films on television in England, and the films that the producer knew I'd made wouldn't have led him to believe that I'd be the best candidate for this. My most famous drama in England is quite controversial. It's something called Men Only, and it's a rather shocking—what would you say?—it's rather a shocking exploration of male sexuality. It caused a bit of a stir in England. I'll tell you how it happened. I've worked with [producers] Andy [Paterson] and [Anand] Tucker over a period of years on documentaries and so forth. I got into the office to see someone there, and there was a painting on the wall. It was a postcard or a poster; I can't remember now. And he heard me talking about it. I just felt this tap on my shoulder, and he said, ”Well, why don't you read the script?“ I think he was as surprised as I was. For all that, I'd had a passion for painting, Vermeer in particular, for a long time. I started [to read it]. The first few pages, I was thinking, ”You know, my first movie is not going to be this. It's a bit polite. It's a costume drama.“ [But] as I read through the script, I was falling in love with it. Really, the scene that did it for me was the piercing. The ear piercing. I said, ”You know what? This is not the film I thought it was when I started to read it.“ This has got a fantastic dark undertone. It's got an obsessive romantic relationship at the heart of it. There's cruelty. There's passion. There's interesting stuff about the relationship of money and art. It's about a whole bunch of stuff. I thought, ”Right. This is a film I can make.“ It's not what I was scared of—ending up with something like Masterpiece Theatre, a very polite, Sunday evening, BBC kind of a thing. I was determined to make something a bit different to that, and the material was there to do it with.

Question: Did you study baroque art?

Webber: I did three years at university, so I studied everything from early icon painters to surrealism in the twentieth century. I specialized in my last year in Dutch and Flemish art, as it happens.

AboutFilm Question: The film looks as if Rembrandt was your lighting director. Talk about creating that look.

Webber: [laughs] We had Eduardo Serra, so I think that's possibly even better than having a dead Dutch painter. He also is an art history major, as it happens. He did four years at the Sorbonne. So, we had an awful lot to talk about when we got together. He's worked with Patrice Leconte [the] French director, who's great. I'd seen an English film he had done, Wings of the Dove. And, the great thing about talking to Eduardo was that, although it was obvious that a DOP is going to love making a film about Vermeer, who is the master of light, he was as interested in story and character. That was really important to me, because although it's set against a very beautiful backdrop, if the characters at the heart of it aren't living, then we would have been in trouble. Sometimes beauty can be a trap. The other thing about Eduardo is that he works very quickly, which is a good thing for both director and actors. If he was in [this room], he'd put all his lights outside of that window [indicates hotel room window]. They'd be blasting through. You wouldn't see a light inside, and it would mean, if I was directing this table [indicates roundtable of reporters], that I could put you where I wanted to. A lot of DOPs that you work with, it's like, ”No, they have to hit that spot exactly, and have their head turned like that.“ He just works in a much more fluid, organic way, and it's a dream for both director and actors.

Question: What was your interest in Vermeer before this film started, and how did his work specifically inform the look of the film?

Webber: Vermeer has always been one of my favorite artists. I find that there's a sense of mystery, a transcendence. There's a really fascinating view of femininity. There's a whole array of things that make him a very, very special artist, and an artist who does transcend his times. It was a real challenge to capture some of that in this film. It meant we had to approach things in a certain way. It meant I had to be incredibly restrained. It meant I had to hide myself as a director, and resist the temptation to swirl the camera around and do showy things, and all the rest of it. I think that's all to the good, because what I should be doing is telling a story, rather than showing off and jumping up and down and going, ”Hey!“ There is a temptation, as a first-time director. You want to go, ”A-ah! Look at me! I'm great!“ I had the Vermeer paintings there just to remind me, all the time. You can't make a noisy film about Vermeer. You can't make a fast film about Vermeer. It imposed a fairly rigorous artistic discipline, because if we're going to be true to him, and his world, and the world that Tracy [Chevalier] had evoked for us in her novel, then you have to somehow capture his spirit. And then you begin to understand, as a filmmaker, that there are different ways of approaching things. Everything doesn't have to be quick cut, like MTV. I understand this film won't be for everyone, but I do believe that people who take the time and allow themselves to sink into this world will be taken to a very different and a very special place. That's what makes it distinctive.

Question: Scarlett [Johansson] told us that at first she lost the role, and then she got the role back again. Could you tell us a little about that, and why an eighteen-year-old actress who is really becoming quite the flavor of the year—

Webber: Well now she is. She wasn't beforehand. Way back then, it was just a straightforward conversation between director and producer, where our producer said to me, ”We can't raise the money from this actress.“ Now, I never saw anyone else apart from Scarlett who could do the role. Having seen her audition, she completely blew me away. Business intervenes, sometimes. Especially when you're a first-time director, you're not in a position to get exactly what you want. So it was the happiest day of all when things changed, for a number of different circumstances. We were able to get the financing, and we were able to do it with the cast that I wanted. And so that was it. I went over to Vancouver, and said, ”All right. Can we do this now?“ Scarlett, obviously, [said], ”Right. Well, do you really want me, or what?“ But I laid siege to her. I stayed in Vancouver for a week, waiting. I think that she realized after that, that I was serious. So, from my point of view, there's only ever been one Girl with a Pearl Earring. It's the shitty side to the business. It's like Van Ruijven in this film. Money comes with an attitude. You can't always do exactly what you want, and often compromises have to be made. I'm happy to say that we pushed through that period. We got the right money. We ended up with not Van Ruijven, but with people who understood exactly what we were doing. It was one of the reasons making the film was so interesting, because I could really identify with Vermeer. So that's it. That's the story.

Question: What does Scarlett bring?

Webber: Well, listen. She is an astounding actress for her age. She's got such maturity. She looks like a real person, as well. She's not like one of these ridiculous skinny anorexic waifs. To me, anyway, because I saw an awful lot of actresses, and some of them, you thought should be hospitalized. [They] should certainly eat a hamburger, for godsake. And Scarlett is just passionate, committed, intense, clever, and a great, great actress who can reveal what she's thinking on her face. That's what we needed for the role. She has got this incredible engine. I just felt, if I'm going to take a girl and repress her, put her in a situation where she's not allowed to be herself, you want somebody's who's going to have the energy that will leak out. I don't know anyone else who can do the amount of storytelling she can in her close-up. Her thoughts just run across her eyes. That's really important, in a film where there's precious little dialogue.

AboutFilm Question: Particularly given the painting involved. You're building to that exact moment when she poses and the painting comes to life.

Webber: Yeah, true. The thing is, actually, it's a bit of a trick of the light, I would say, because if you look at Scarlett's face—if you really examine Scarlett's face—she's not the girl. Her eyes are a different color, all sorts of things. But, there is a moment where she transforms herself into the painting, and I just think it's a superb acting moment. And also, you haven't got the two of them side by side. But, she's similar enough. The thing is, it wasn't about doing a look-alike competition. It was finding someone who is a great actor who is close enough. Scarlett just bewitches you, [so] that you buy she's that girl, I think.

AboutFilm Question: Scarlett told us that she didn't read the book at all before or during shooting. You've said you hadn't read the book either. Why is that?

Webber: Not when I first started, no. I deliberately held off reading the book for awhile as well. There's one thing I was scared of. I had the script. I did about eight months work on the script with the writer, to push it—as any director would do. You tend to get a script and you push it toward being the kind of film you want to make. I was worried that if I read the book too soon, I would have a whole load of [extra] knowledge in my subconscious. I had to be sure that the script was doing its work [without that]. Do you know what I mean? So I came to the book afterwards, once we had—I felt—nailed the script. Then I went to the book for the first time and read it, and then we made some final adjustments to the script. It was really holding off until I needed to read the book.

Question: Both the characters are an enigma. Vermeer is a mystery to this day. We haven't even seen all his works; some are lost. Who is this girl in the painting? Nobody knows.

Webber: Nobody, as far as I know, certainly not myself or Tracy Chevalier, are trying to pretend that this is fact. So little is known is about Vermeer, and that's a gift. If you're a storyteller, that is an absolute gift. Because if we were making a film about Rembrandt, we know loads of stuff about Rembrandt, and what ends up happening is you make a biopic. What Tracy was able to do was to use the very few facts that are known. It's true to those few facts. And then weave an imaginative tale around that, and I think in doing so, get closer to the heart of what Vermeer is about than if we had a whole bunch of historical facts. So from my point of view it's a gift. I think there's a real problem if you're making a film—some people have done whether it be about Jackson Pollock or about Picasso—it's difficult for actors, because they have to impersonate a person whose image is very strong in our memories or in our consciousness. It's something that's very tricky, I think. So I for one, am immensely grateful that we know as little as we do. Also it means you can create a certain kind of a film that has a mystery to it, has a certain kind of mood to it, which was the kind of film I wanted to make.

Question: You talked a little bit about money, the financing struggles. If you had unlimited funds, what would you have done differently?

Webber: I wouldn't have done it any differently, actually. I would have paid myself more. [laughs] Because I didn't get paid very much, as a first-time director, in England. If you come out of British TV, they're kind of saying, ”Here's the keys to the kingdom. You are now going to go off and become a moviemaker. If you do really well, then the world is your oyster. But for now, here's ten dollars and just be thankful.“ But joking aside, it's one of those questions that's really difficult to ask. I hired all the people I wanted to. I got the actors I wanted to. For me actually, it was the opposite. I felt like we had a ton of money. I know it's a fairly tight budget by American standards, but you have no idea of how tight the budgets I've worked on TV are. You've got no idea how tight the schedules I've worked are. So this was just the most amazing experience. It was fantastic. I really don't know what I would have done. I would have paid Scarlett more, because she deserved it.

Question: When Griet goes to the butcher's boy [played by Cillian Murphy], do you think that she has any real interest in him, or is it just a means of satisfying the sexual desire she has for Vermeer? I had that impression, but the person I saw it with had the opposite impression.

Webber: Well, let me make a general statement of intent here. What I think and feel about the characters is now irrelevant, I would say. Okay, it's all about me when I'm making it, but then I hand it over, and then it's about the audience. It doesn't matter what my intention is. It's when you're sitting in the cinema seat, and you're watching it, it's what you get. So I could tell you my opinion, but I would say it's only as valid as anyone's. Your friend's opinion is just as valid, I think, now, as my opinion. I think that she likes the butcher's boy. I think the butcher's boy is the person that, if she hadn't had her horizons raised by going into this strange household, she might have felt happy with. But she's a changed person, through going in there, through meeting this amazing, compulsive, fascinating older man. It has changed her. It has changed her outlook on life. It's changed what she wants. So in a way, it's like you can't go home again. So, I think that he's a good looking guy; she has a feeling of companionship toward him, but the reason that she's running off to see him is because she can't consummate with Vermeer. In a sense, there's been a—these are two long words together, I apologize—a metaphorical defloration. She has lost her virginity to Vermeer, in a symbolic way. She's been [worked up] beyond belief. It's reached a such a peak of intensity—I hope we captured that in the film—that it needs an outlet. It needs to come out somewhere. Also, that scene, I think, it's an acknowledgement of how she's trapped within her world. In this day and age, let's be honest, the artist and the model would probably run away together. But, it's a different time, a different place, and what makes this drama interesting is that it's about not getting what you want. We live in a world where you do get what you want all the time—or at least it's easier to get what you want. So, I would say that I agree with you rather than your friend, but I think she's perfectly entitled to her opinion. Once a movie goes out into the world, it belongs to anyone who goes to see it.

Question: But Vermeer had consummated with his subjects in the past?

Webber: Uh— Van Ruijven had, I think. I think Van Ruijven is the person that we intended to hint at having had some dodgy business. We wanted Vermeer to be completely—You know, he's tempted—he's almost tempted beyond endurance. Actually, what I think that he's doing is that the painting—his art—is more important to him, actually, than his sex life. He's using all that sexual energy to put into the painting. If he had walked into that closet when she's taking her cap off, the painting would be over. It's the building up, the yearning that he was using as an artist. Also, knowing the way she was looking at him, he knew that he'd get a certain intensity in the portrait. We wanted to paint a picture of a man who cares about his art above all.

Question: We must have a word about Colin Firth. Women love him, but for anguish and torment—why did you go with him?

Webber: Because he's a great actor. Listen, I didn't really know that he was such a heartthrob until afterwards, to tell you the truth. I have discovered [that] because every time I go to a Q&A, I stand up, and I get two questions for me, and then the third question is [in a high-pitched voice], ”Where's Colin? Where's Colin?“ So, I understand that people want to see him rather than me, and I don't blame them. He's a great actor. He understands reserve. He's very good to work with. He's not got movie star [attitude] at all. He's very straight up. He brings a tenderness to the role. That's an important thing, because it's important that Vermeer sees something special in this girl, and falls for her because of that. Rather than he just sees her, and thinks, ”Schwing!“ and that's it. I think Colin's one of the few actors who is convincing in that way. I think that's one of the reasons that women like him so much. He's not just this incredibly hunky character—it seems like he cares. He seems like he understands. I think that's what it's about.

Question: He's introspective, and it comes through on the screen.

Webber: I think he can do mystery as well. He's not scared about doing less. That's a good thing.

Question: Do you have a favorite scene in the movie?

Webber: Do I have a favorite scene? The ear piercing scene. It was the one that first attracted me to the film, because it has for me all the elements—and also because it worked. I was really worried about whether it would work or not. There's a strange mixture of tenderness and cruelty—I find it interesting and complex, on a number of levels. And I think Scarlett's performance is magnificent. Especially that moment—which was the fourth take—of the close-up where the tear rolls down her cheek. Every time I see it, I'm just blown away.

Question: Is there a painting that does it for you in particular?

Webber: You mean amongst Vermeer's work, or generally? A Vermeer painting, there's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. That's in Rijksmuseum [in Amsterdam], which is one of my favorite paintings ever. But I've got a very wide taste in art. I like Russian icon painters. I like Salvador Dali. It's like music. Sometimes you want to hear Led Zeppelin, and sometimes you want to hear Stravinsky. It just depends.

Question: Are you a collector?

Webber: No! Would I had the money! I collect postage stamps. That's the only thing I can afford to collect! I hope in five years' time. In five years I hope to say, ”Yes, I specialize in Gustav Dore first editions.“

Question: Can you talk about the last scene when the camera pans Vermeer's actual painting of the girl?

Webber: Yes. It's self-explanatory. I wanted to actually make people look at a painting. We don't look at paintings that much. We glance at them. There are some of us who do, who go to galleries and stuff. And I thought, ”Right. I've got the audience there. I've had them for an hour and half. Now is an opportunity to really make them look. Look at that painting!“ Also, I hoped and believed that people would look at it in a very different way. What would have been an interesting experiment, is to show the painting at the beginning of the film, and then at the end of film. But it would have been too much like a pretentious formal experiment. I hope that when people look at it, it's as if—if they know it, they're seeing it with fresh eyes, and if they don't know it, they're getting an amazing artistic experience, because they're carrying with them the emotion of the film. They've understood the girl's journey; they've understood all the different elements that go to create the painting; they understand the role of the patron, the role of money. They understand the intensity of the emotional traffic that might happen between a painter and a sitter. It just seemed to me the only real, true, proper fulfilling ending of the film. And it kind of tickled my fancy I suppose. I did ring up my art history tutor and say, ”There's a good few thousand people who I forced to sit and stare at a painting for a minute and half.“ That kind of tickled my fancy.

Question: They actually allowed you to come in and shoot the painting?

Webber: No. The gallery made a high resolution still, and we then shot it on a rostrum camera. Because there's also practical problems. It would have been an absolute nightmare. It wouldn't have been as good an image, to tell you the truth. To do that properly, we would have had to get a motion control rig in there, all sorts of practical problems. So we went the easy route, but it's just as effective I think. That's a very good rendering of the painting, the one that we used.

Question: Do you always have this much energy?

Webber: Yeah! [laughs] It kind of goes with the territory. You should see me at nine o'clock in the morning. I'm terrible then. I've been worn down by now. Yeah, it's part of what makes me able to do the job. Also, this is my first film. I'm not a jaded old hack yet. Maybe again when you come and see me in five year's time, I'll have my art collection, I'll be here with a big cigar. But, it's really exciting. It's really exciting when you do a piece of work, and people like it, and it gets noticed. I could be sitting at home on my couch in England, and not have distribution for this film, and be miserable. Despite the fact that it can be hard—I've been on more flights in the last months than I've been in the last three years—it's all for a good cause. So, I'll have energy until the film comes out. And then I'll wait with bated breath to see how well it does.

Question: Do you know what you're working on next?

Webber: No. Not yet. The nice thing about this is that there's a few people that have now noticed me as a filmmaker, so I seem to have emerged from the relative obscurity of TV. I'll tell you what, it will be very different. It will be full of dialogue, it will be noisy, it will be contemporary, it will probably be violent, it will just be completely the opposite, because I don't want people to pigeonhole me.

"Girl with a Golden Future" by Annlee Ellingson.

Filmstew.com, 29 January 2004

Despite this week’s Golden Globes snub and lack of Oscar nominations, actress Scarlett Johannson is well on her way to major Hollywood stardom.

When the 2003 awards season first ramped up, one of the names that consistently emerged as the ”It Girl“ of the moment was Scarlett Johansson. Even though at that point, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation was nothing more than a modest word-of-mouth sleeper hit and any mention of her name in connection with Girl with a Pearl Earring would tend to be greeted by blank stares unless a connection to Translation was made.

What a difference a couple of months can make. Nominated for both films by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) (which will be awarded February 15th), Johannson was the belle of the ball at the Golden Globes this past Sunday, looking very much like a young Kim Novak with her shimmering strapless dress and intricately curled hairdo.

Even though she was reported to have been forlorn later on at the HBO Golden Globes after party at Chaya Brasserie in Beverly Hills, with Fox 411 columnist Roger Friedman writing that she told him she felt like a ”big loser,“ Johannson is keeping extremely busy. In addition to this Friday’s teen drama The Perfect Score, Johannson has completed the John Travolta feature A Love Song for Bobby Long and the Helen Hunt drama A Good Woman, and will soon start working on a big 2005 comedy-drama Synergy alongside Dennis Quaid and another fast-rising young actor, Topher Grace (That 70’s Show).

When FilmStew sat down with Johannson last November, much of the focus was on the fact that Translation, Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Man Who Wasn’t There, the Coen Brothers film she made with Billy Bob Thornton, all place her in an implicitly romantic relationship with a man two or three times her senior. But the actress chalks it up to coincidence rather than any kind of career strategy.

”The relationship between the characters are so different,“ she says. “With Billy and I it was a purely innocent sort of thing. With Bill [Murray] and I, my character needs the Bob Harris character to help her from having a total nervous breakdown. She needs his support. And Colin [Firth, her co-star in Girl] and I, we have a different relationship. We don’t need each other – we want each other.“

”And you think that my character could survive anything,“ Johannson adds. ”She could survive another world war. She’s so strong that Colin [as the painter Vermeer] does not help her come unscathed out of the household. It’s her own inner strength that does.“

Given her rising stardom, it’s hard to believe that Johansson wasn’t the first woman cast for the role of Griet. However, director Peter Webber, who previously helmed TV movies, insists she was always his first choice. ”I never saw anyone apart from Scarlett who could do the role,“ he insists. ”[But] way back then, it was just a straightforward conversation between a director and a producer where a producer said to me, ‘We can’t raise the money from this actress.’“

Another It Girl at the time, Kate Hudson, was cast instead, with Ralph Fiennes playing Vermeer. When Hudson dropped out, taking the financing at the time with her, Webber traveled to Vancouver where Johansson was shooting The Perfect Score to convince her she was the one he really wanted all along.

”As Peter says, [he came] crawling on a gravelly floor on hands and knees with weights on his feet and came to fish me back,“ Johansson says. ”At first I wanted to make sure if it was really so, if he really thought I was right for the part or whether it was just circumstantial.“

Webber adds, ”I laid siege to her. I stayed in Vancouver for a week, and I think she realized after that that I was serious. So, from my point of view, there’s only one Girl With a Pearl Earring.“

Well two actually, if you want to be a stickler for details: There’s the as-yet-unidentified girl in Vermeer’s circa-1666 painting, which today hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, Holland, and the actress who plays her in the movie. And, while the latter is not a spitting image of the former, serendipitously they share the same wide eyes and bee-stung lips.

”It’s a bit of a trick of the light, I would say, because, if you look at Scarlett’s face, you really examine Scarlett’s face, it’s not the girl,“ suggests Webber. ”Her eyes are a different color, all sorts of things. But she’s similar enough.“

”It wasn’t about doing a look-alike contest or trying to find an Elvis impersonator,“ he adds. ”It was about finding someone who was a great actor and was close enough, and Scarlett just bewitches you that you buy that she’s that girl.“

More importantly, Webber says, Johansson has the acting chops to pull off a role that requires the repression of the thoughts, feelings and passions of a character in without the benefit of much dialogue. While Chevalier’s book was written in first person from Griet’s point of view, screenwriter Olivia Hetreed wisely eschewed the too-modern voiceover device, leaving it up to Johansson to convey Griet’s inner turmoil almost like a silent movie star.

”Scarlett is just passionate, committed, intense, clever and a great, great actress who can reveal what she’s thinking on her face, and that’s what we needed for the role,“ Webber says. ”She’s just got this incredible engine. I thought if I’m going to take a girl and repress her in a way, put her in a situation where she’s not allowed to be herself, you want someone who’s going to have the energy that will leak out.“

”I don’t know anyone else who can do the amount of storytelling she can in a close-up. You know what she’s thinking. Her thoughts just run across her eyes.“

Those thoughts include Griet’s growing adoration for her mysterious master as her relationship with his work evolves from cleaning his still lifes to mixing paint to sitting for a portrait – a scandalous arrangement hidden from his hysterical wife. Their ardor is never consummated, however, as ultimately Vermeer loves his work above all else.

”His painting, his art, is more important to him than his sex life, so he’s using all of that sexual energy to put into the painting,“ Webber says. ”If he had walked into the closet when she took her cap off [uncovering her hair for the first time in a gesture for Griet akin to undressing], the painting would be over.“

”It’s the building up, it’s the yearning that he was using as an artist,“ adds Webber. ”Also the way she was looking at him, he knew he would get a certain intensity in that portrait, and I think that we wanted to paint a picture of man who cares about his art above all.“

Consummation occurs metaphorically in a scene in which Vermeer pierces Griet’s ear in preparation for the titular piece of jewelry. It’s the moment that caused Webber to reconsider the script as more of a romantic thriller than Masterpiece Theater because of the moment’s ”strange mixture of tenderness and cruelty.“

What’s particularly interesting about this film, and indeed Chevalier’s body of work, is that while Girl With a Pearl Earring is a biopic, it’s an imagined one. The piercing never took place in real life, and Griet likely never even existed.

As Firth says, ”the girl with a pearl earring might have been his daughter.“ Little is actually known about Vermeer, other than a few bare facts such as that he was an art dealer as well as a painter and that he converted to Catholicism to marry his wife. Among his 35 surviving paintings, he didn’t leave so much as a self-portrait.

”Nobody, as far as I know, certainly not myself or Tracy Chevalier, are trying to pretend that this is fact because so little is known about Vermeer, and that’s a gift,“ Webber says. ”What Tracy was able to do was use the very few facts that are known, is true to those few facts, and then weave an imaginative tale around that, and I think in doing so got closer to the heart of what Vermeer was about than if we had a whole bunch of historical facts that we knew.“

”It’s a real problem when you make a film like some people have done, whether it be about Jackson Pollock or about Picasso,“ he continues. ”It’s difficult for actors because they have to impersonate a person whose image is very strong in our memories or in our consciousness.“

”A couple of weeks, ago I was trying on these dresses, and somebody said, ‘Oh my god, that’s an incredible dress. You have to wear that to the Globes,’“ she remembers. ”I looked at them, and I was like, ‘The Golden Globes?’ And they’re like, ‘Of course, you have to borrow it. It’s amazing. It’s made for your body.’ And I was like, ‘I plan on eating Chinese food that day, but thanks for the invite.’“

Although the chaste peasant girl in the painting about whom so much has been speculated is a world and several centuries away from the ultra-contemporary Johansson, the actress who first came to attention off-Broadway opposite Ethan Hawke is planning to paint the town Scarlett.

”Directing is something that I will be doing very shortly,“ she says. Her hair whisked back in a hip ’do the shape of a bicycle helmet, Johansson still seemed at that moment a little bewildered at the attention she was getting for Lost in Translation and Girl With a Pearl Earring. But, as recent events have shown, the actress has in typical form quickly become comfortable with role as well.