"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
Subscribe To Weekly Newsletter!

AN INTERVIEW WITH:
LAURA DERN
by Peter Sobczynski

August 20, 2003

If you pick up your copy of the new Martin Scorsese DVD set (and if you are a film fan, I presume that you have already done so) and go to the disc of 1974’s "Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore", you will catch the screen debut of a young Laura Dern. Since that debut, she has worked steadily over the years, balancing quirky off-center films (such as "Blue Velvet", "Wild at Heart", "Rambling Rose" and the where-the-hell-is-this-DVD? "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains" with more mainstream fare like "Jurassic Park". Currently, she can be seen in the new film "We Don’t Live Here Anymore", in which she plays a housewife in the middle of a game of sexual musical chairs involving herself, her husband (Mark Ruffalo) and their best friends (Peter Krause and Naomi Watts).

THE INTERVIEW

You described "We Don’t Live Here Anymore" as being a love story about people stuggling towards an awareness of each other...

Well, any human relationship is interesting for an actor to play out and discover and explore but this idea of being a partner to another human being is endlessly fascinating because all of us are trying to figure it out. I don’t know why but movies in the last twenty years have been more interested in the easy, happy-ending approach to partnerships while in the Seventies, we had a lot of films that explored human behavior in a relationship. I was really excited to have this opportunity and when I read it, I assumed that it was going to have the Hollywood ending-he would leave the wife and go off on this affair of his and they would go off into the sunset. When I met John Curran, I discovered that his point-of-view was that the film was about a love affair between this husband and wife and that aspect was about trying to find one’s voice through a crisis in a relationship and coming back together after a crisis. I thought that was such a great point-of-view and it was something that I hadn’t seen or been able or be part of.

Even when I first read the Andre Dubus short story, I got this sense that the audience was having the same experience as Mark Ruffalo’s character in that there is a bit of amnesia regarding the last decade-we enter the film in the throes of this affair, which I think can be the case that when you are in the throes of an affair, you forget the ten years you’ve done with this other person in the marriage and why you would want to save it-and that the audience has to play catch-up along with him and where he is in his life.

Does it make things easier or more difficult for you as an actress to play a part with a literary basis-something that you have done in films such as this one, "Smooth Talk" and "Wild at Heart" among others?

I think both. I think what is great about it is that if you don’t have all the information at your fingertips, there is another resource and sometimes it will fill in blanks about the character for you by giving you hundreds of more pages to get information from. I think that if it is extremely famous, it can also be very daunting. If someone proposed to be an opportunity to play Blanche DuBois, for example, it would be terrifying because it was done so perfectly and it is in everyone’s mind what she is like and who she is-you would have to wipe all of that away from people in order to create a new experience. The interesting thing about novels is that it has all been left to our imaginations-we are just creating a version of it.

In this case, it was fantastic, although I had to find a balance because I didn’t read a good portion of one of the stories until after we finished shooting because there was so much detail of the affair between Edith and Jack that I thought it was stuff that my character wouldn’t know about and so I didn’t want to know too much. I tried to just take what my character would know and use it.

Were you familiar with Dubus and the stories before siging on to the film?

I had read a little bit of his work before but I had never read these stories. Interestingly, I found the writing to be brilliant and sad and the women were very interesting and multi-faceted and all of those interesting things but not passionate. Fromwhat I had read of his, it seemed like there was a lot of disassociation or intellectualism of experience. Terri was such a remarkable character to read from him-from the little experience that I had with his writing-because she was so fiery and authentic and in-your-face and that was new to me from his writing. A lot of that was expanded upon by Larry Gross, the screenwriter, but so much of it was from Dubus. I don’t know if this is true but some say that a lot of Terri was based on his own wife and because that was his most intimate relationship-the person he got to know the most-she was the most forthcoming about her different colors.

As an actor, how do you and the other actors go about creating an intimacy level while shooting that allows everything to seem real?

Well, this movie came together very quickly-John Curran had three weeks for pre-production and 30 days to shoot, which I have never seen. I have been on movies that cost $2 million to make like this but even on "Citizen Ruth", we had seven weeks. This was crazy-no rehearsal time or any time to meet each other. We basically got there to read through the script and a few days later, we were filming. I find that to be an enormous feat for any filmmaker to have achieved that. I was really lucky because I had Mark and he is one of the most genuine, authentic, egoless, funny, thrilled-to-be-working guys you will ever meet in your life. He bartended his butt off while trying to get a job and he really is just thrilled to be there. He is such a willing participant for making it feel honest and right. I think we both come from similar studies of acting and have similar goals in mind. That really benefitted both the movie and us in terms of us finding a connection and working by the seat of our pants without any rehearsal.

Also, it was an interesting challenge and one that we quickly learned about from Larry Gross and John-John really wanted humor in this and we had to find humor in this story. We realized it was the humor of familiarity, the humor of the redundant fight. What you usually do as an actor and you see you have eight fight scenes-you don’t want to bore the audience and so you had better find a way to make them different. This movie begins in the middle of a fight and it is the same fight they have had for six years and if there is humor for the audience, it is that uncomfortable thing of realizing that you have been the person and you have argued over the exact same things over and over again. In a way, Terri starts at a fever pitch and de-escalates as she becomes clearer and clearer about things.

In a way, the work that you and the other actors are doing here is closer to a theatrical performance than a film performance-most of the scenes only involve two people and go on for several minutes without a break or a cut. Is it difficult to adjust to a performance situation where it is literally just two people in a room?

It is a rare privilege. Mark had come from a lot of theatre and he said it felt almost completely like doing a play and he loved it for that. Also, we had scenes that were never less than six to eight pages long and these were big pieces. If John had been interested in breaking them down in terms of coverage, it would start to feel more like a movie but they really let us just do the master, It was the first time where we would do many, many takes of the master because they might use it like Altman would. That made it very theatrical as well as having just a couple of locations and four characters. What is really exciting about something like that as an actor is that your director is focused on getting the behavior and getting the performances. On a lot of other films, even ones that I have done that are very character-driven, you have a helicopter shot and a bunch of extras and it is very easy to lose focus and later realize that you walked away with only two takes when your actors might have potentially discovered other things down the road but there was no time. Even though it was crunched, we did have the luxury on the focus being these people in the room.

In your career, you have gone back and forth between big-budget studio films and independent films-a spectrum ranging from "Jurassic Park" to "Citizen Ruth". For you, is there any real difference between the two anymore or have the two essentially merged together?

I do feel that they have come together in terms of the kinds of films that are made-independents sometimes do action-thrillers for the 15-year-old audience that they are trying to target and there are big Hollywood movies that are authentic human dramas or comedies. That is where the line is blurred for an actor looking for good work and to work with an interesting director. There are a lot of new venues for filmmakers to do what they want to do and that is what is exciting to me as an actor. But I also think that times are changing dramatically, and I am very excited to be hopeful about this; because of gentlemen like you, audiences are hearing about small independent movies and because of critics and journalists, these performances and films are being seen enough so that they don’t have to compete with huge ad campaigns in order to get seen and get more play.

The exciting change is that whatever change you are effecting is working-$100 million has been made so far on "Fahrenheit 9/11" and that is the greatest news in the world to me. Whatever anybody’s point-of-view is politically, "Super Size Me", "The Corporation", all these documentaries are coming out and people are seeing them and there is now a potential for big money. That means there is an audience in this country that is interested in questioning things and being questioned. An engaging experience of escaping will always exist but it means that it isn’t just a few of us going to a small, independent movie like "Thirteen" or "Monster". People have access to these films and they are charged to see them in theatres. The last couple of years have been exciting-people are ready to educate themselves and ask questions and feel things in a different way. We’ve been hit in more ways than one in this country and it has awakened the culture differently.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2004 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
Peter's Film Review Archives