Juliette Lewis: Juliette of the Spirit

I can see Woody standing there with his glasses fogging, getting an earful of Juliette's vocabulary. What she does manage to get across, however, belies the fractured diction and the exasperation of trolling for the right word. Tired of hearing the same questions about the likelihood of being intimidated by A-list stars and big name directors, she recently slam-dunked The New York Times by responding: "I'm not scared of people who are excellent at what they do."

To me she admits, "Yeah, people look at me as cocky and arrogant when I make a statement like that." Then she offers me some water instead of more maple-syrup coffee. Water in a coffee cup. "I'm supposed to be all scared and frigid and not be able to do my job because these people are so great and I'm nothing. That's the viewpoint that people can relate to."

Elevating Juliette to the level of bitch-goddess, however, is missing the point. What's infinitely more intriguing is the subtext in her New York Times zinger: If you're gonna be scared enough to swallow your retainer, it may as well be of something really bad. Not long ago, Juliette completed a film that she'd just as soon forget about. When she recalls the experience, it sounds like she'd rather spend an hour and a half in that little doll house with Max Cady than screen this picture.

"Just to sum up the director: He would forget to say 'action' and 'cut.' Even in looping this guy was fucking up. My acting at times has been raw--no direction. And I hate to have to fall back on the director. I'd like to be totally independent to where I don't have to depend on the director or anybody to help me get there into the role. See, when you're working with a bad director, you have to do what they say and you end up with really, really bad acting. The only consolation, after looking bad up on screen, looking terrible, is to do more, a lot more, to cancel it out. The people that you care about, the smart people, will hopefully recognize bad directing as the cause--they'll see the blocking is wrong."

During the filming of this dreaded movie, Juliette got a call from the producer ("a cool guy, someone I really enjoyed working with"), imploring her to warm up to the director, who said he felt intimidated by her. "You intimidate them because they expect a social relationship--which is fine, but these aren't people I'd be friends with in my life. So why should I, like, pretend? I'm not cold. And I'm not like a trouble girl who plays all these mind games, either. I'm just coming there to do my job, not, like, all this hanging out."

Juliette is showing me what it's like when there are no forgetful directors to blame for her lousy performance, when she's just plain bad all on her own. Her body goes rigid with artificial good posture; her pupils dilate with self-consciousness, the way people on the street look when they have a minicam stuck in their face. "It's like, you're totally watching yourself. It ends up being the worst bad-acting there is. The beauty actors--the women and guys just being beautiful--they actually are just watching themselves. But sometimes you're just bad. You're like this--" She puts up an imaginary wall between us. "You don't really connect. I did a little of it during Cape Fear."

"Like when?"

"Well, he obviously didn't use those takes."

Of her performance in the 1990 TV movie "Too Young to Die?" director Robert Markowitz said, "Juliette has no vanity." When you watch her in Cape Fear, it's hard not to agree. Okay, she shows more shoulder than a Victoria's Secret catalog and winds up in her panties with papa bear Nick Nolte groping for a hug (Scorsese resurrects kitsch!). But look at her when she's crying.

"You see a lot of girls cry and they look beautiful," says Juliette. "You could have sex with them while they're crying." You would not be inclined to snuggle up to Juliette shedding tears in Cape Fear. She works her face into unflattering contortions and grimaces that offset the verboten sexual allure of her character. All of the coquettishness dissolves into unarrayed agony.

"I think it's an ability to be ugly and unattractive. I think I can be beautiful, with all the little [she does a bit of makeup and preening pantomime] stuff. And I can be ugly. Michelle Pfeiffer can't be ugly. The thing is, I want to do characters. And not all girls are pretty. But it's not just outside pretty anyway, because all people are attractive--but that's another story. I wanna play characters. The rest is really boring. It's either the confident girl, or the girl-girl. The thing is, you get people who say, 'I'm a character actor.' Then you see it and nothing's really changed but the outfit."

It's been well chronicled how the thumb-sucking scene in Fear was De Niro brainstorming while Scorsese rolled cameras. Juliette insists she wasn't fazed when she suddenly found De Niro's thumb between her lips. "If it would've, I would've stopped him. Nothing really surprised me. For that scene, it worked and that's what counts. If he would've punched her in the face, I guess that would've fit, too...

"It's weird, because when I was working on Cape Fear--you're playing terror every day for a month--I didn't think it would do anything to me. But you're doing these little segments of fear every day, where you can get fucked in front of your father and your mom and you're gonna be made to do all these sexual things and then you're gonna die. When I came home I kept thinking that people were following me for about a month. Now I have a gun next to the bed."

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