The award-winning actress who made her mark at the edge of the mainstream talks about Jungian dream work, bonding, nurturing and the possibility that Jurassic Park will be the hit that lets her demand $5 million a picture.
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"Secrets, darlin', secrets," Laura Dern purrs while leaning over a corner table at a deserted restaurant that's so redolent of late-night cigarettes and broken hearts that it could stand in for Rick's in a postmodern version of Casablanca. Dern looks radically unlike the whiplash-figured life force she played in Wild at Heart, which won her plaudits, or the heart-rending love-seeker of Rambling Rose, which won her an Oscar nomination. Today, clean-scrubbed and luminous in black, she suggests a '50s small-town sweetheart trying to come off as a wild, fine bohemian. Just now, she's telling me about the projects she and Jonathan Demme have been hatching together since the two came that close to doing The Silence of the Lambs with each other. "They're all about rather heroic, devastating characters," she says, "about emotional and sexual injustice, things that are so blatant and horrible in this country. I'm fascinated by what we bury, things we're scared to know about ourselves. We're so complex. My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I'm fascinated by Jung, by dream work. If you're an actress or writer, you work with your dreams, where all these different characters and qualities, the man, the girl, the rapist, the victim, are inside all of us. That's what I want to make movies about. Secrets. Mysteries."
The mystery of Laura Dern starts with something as cellular as the physiognomy she inherited from her parents, actors Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern. From her faraway gaze up to her patrician forehead, the young Hope Lange or Eva Marie Saint sector of her face, she's an open book. Innately, unshakably nice. A Sandy, a homecoming queen, a smart, standby kind of girl who would let you borrow her homework. These are the qualities for which Peter Bogdanovich surely must have cast her as the blind girl who falls in love with the disfigured kid in Mask, and for which David Lynch cast her as the girl for whom the robins sing through the murk of Blue Velvet. Travel the bridge of her nose down to the flaring nostrils that are spooky Bruce Dern, then south to those lips for a mocking sneer, a randy, cartoon grin, and you're in noir-land, where things are edgy, calculated. Never precisely any one thing. The more she reveals, the more gets withheld. You go to her. Or don't. Such contradictions may not make her the girl who lands the hit pictures, but they ensure that some of the ones she's in will be worth watching years from now.
Secrets? Mysteries? Dern teems with them. Some deep, others deeply superficial. We met a couple of times in Los Angeles and delved into some of the former, but, for right now, I'm more interested in one of the latter, which is: Why is a 26-year-old, who gravitates toward such off-road stuff as the sweet, down-homey Rambling Rose, about to be seen screaming her head off at special-effects dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg's summer megabuck movie for nine-year-old boys?
Jurassic Park, which puts Dern in the company of Richard Attenborough, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill, is set on a Club Med-meets-Disneyland island where genetically engineered dinosaurs freak out and chomp the human visitors. Now, it's one thing for the then unknown Jessica Lange to get pawed by King Kong or Sean Young to make goo-goo eyes at Baby, but why this for Dern now? "Richard Dreyfuss told me, 'Get ready, because this is the hardest work you'll ever do.' It isn't about Academy Awards or about delving into the deepest emotional core, but, now that it's over, I think it's the hardest part I've ever done in my life. Mostly, I'm glad I did it, because I wanted to have fun. I wanted to work and there wasn't anything out there that, to me, seemed courageous in terms of going in a whole other direction. I thought, I've never been in an adventure movie.' So..."
It's one thing to do a commercial-minded adventure movie. It's another to do a big-budget dino movie. "I assume it probably will be a huge movie because kids will go nuts for the creatures and everything," she concedes. "I mean, it's not Pretty Woman in terms of it being a one-woman story, but it can be hot and commercial and cute. I certainly wouldn't mind if Jurassic Park turns out to be commercially successful and somebody says, 'Hey, you were in a box-office hit and if you want to do another movie, we'll give you five million dollars to make it.' Whether this is the movie that does that, I don't know."
In order to do Jurassic Park, Dern slipped out of a showy role in James L. Brooks's I'll Do Anything, opposite Nick Nolte, and got herself out of the offbeat Benny & Joon (she was replaced by, respectively, Joely Richardson and Mary Stuart Masterson). When she bailed from Benny & Joon, some people thought her move was significant. She'd just done the play Brooklyn Laundry, in which her co-stars were Glenn Close and Woody Harrelson, who were, according to gossip, romantically coupled. Then, according to more gossip, Harrelson and Dern grew close. After the play, Harrelson was set to play Dern's brother in Benny & Joon. But he left the project--and then, so did Dern. Hmmmmm. Any connections? Shaking her head no, with a trace of a grin, she answers, "On Benny & Joon, a sweet script with great intentions, my agents were trying to negotiate, but it just didn't work out." Truth or secrets?
Anyhow, it takes some doing to imagine the Method-trained, finely tuned, sincerely feminist, ecologically and metaphysically minded Dern grooving to the experience of playing monster bait. Especially (or is it particularly?) for Spielberg, in whose movies creatures with breasts are relegated to tasks like dodging interplanetary aliens or sprinkling pixie dust. So, did Dern find her director a raving chauvinist? "I have a pretty delicate Richter scale for that," she says, set ting her chin and looping back her hair behind her ears, "and I heard those things and I almost expected it. I have friends who worked with him and say they had a very difficult time. But, I'll be 26 in a few weeks and Steven's taking out a group of us to dinner to celebrate while we're meeting the press in New York. I wouldn't pursue a friendship if he was unkind to me or disrespectful. My only real problem was having the 'woman's role' in an action-adventure movie. I was battling that, but Steven was battling right along with me. He'd say, 'I don't want a screamer. I've had that in other movies and got attacked for it. Be who you want to be.'"
Here Dern goes off on a tangent about her director: "I told Steven he is the most twisted filmmaker I've ever worked with. He makes David Lynch look like a day at Disneyland. We'd be shooting scenes and he'd say, 'Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do this instead?' and come up with something outrageous and sarcastic. That's why he's got to do his 8½, because he's much more out there than David. As actors, we all worked hard to bring our own kind of stuff to it. Whether that works or not, I don't know." She adds, giggling, "Okay, I was concerned that the role was a stereotype."
Dern's concern was that the part (for which other willowy blondes Robin Wright and Daryl Hannah were also apparently considered) might reiterate the movies' standard take on "brainy" women. Does she come off like the vinegary, repressed shrink Ingrid Bergman played in the '40s in Spellbound, or the vinegary, repressed, self-destructive anthropologist Sigourney Weaver played in the '80s in Gorillas in the Mist? "Well, I do have glasses in the movie," she admits, laughing. Then she digs out of her handbag a pair of specs and adds, "but I actually wear glasses in real life. I worked with paleontologists and found they were into meditation and spiritual reading. It was very much about, 'Let's learn how we destroyed ourselves before, so we don't do it again.' But it's always a battle when you deal with women's instincts and women's sexuality. In Rambling Rose and Wild at Heart, I also had ongoing battles. The character in Jurassic Park, as originally written, had a very specific dilemma, and Steven, the writer and I worked very hard to make sure that it changed."
Changed from what to what? "From someone groping for seed," she snaps wryly out of a corner of her mouth, "to someone who wants to be a nurturer. Amazingly, I want to be a mother. I read much more men's consciousness-raising stuff, like by Robert Bly and all, but I think Camille Paglia and Susan Faludi are both right. Yes, men and culture have done a number on us, but we've also done it to ourselves. So, within the confines of the movie, I just made sure that I'm strong, independent, scientific, intellectual and feminine, welcoming my body as a gift I've been given to nurture. Not wimpy when I'm afraid, but not Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, either."
Dern manages to sound terribly serious about a movie in which she screams so much her voice gave out during the looping sessions. Her stories are peppered with words like "synchronicity," "nurturing" and "evolved." And, oh yes, "bonding." "Don't forget, we were stuck in a hurricane in Hawaii together," she offers, "and had to all stay in a motel room together for a couple of days. No food, no water. It was scary. We didn't know what was going to happen. The morning after, Steven, Jeff Goldblum and I walked through the ruins and we really felt bonded. So maybe that kind of experience created a gentler, more open relationship with Steven. He was very honest in sharing with us his frustration about his complete loss of control. He couldn't protect his crew, he couldn't protect his sets. And Spielberg had a lot of fear about it, getting everybody out. He said to me recently, 'I felt more bonded with you guys than I have in a long time with people on a movie.'"
Yet the bonding that reporters most gleefully seized on reputedly involved Dern and co-star Jeff Goldblum (whose ex-wife, Geena Davis, by coincidence, was in A League of Their Own, which Dern had once been attached to). And, while she insists she wants to keep her current relationship private ("It's too complicated," she explains, wincing), I ask her what Jeff Goldblum is to her, exactly? "My favorite friend," she answers instantly. "I love him. He is hilarious, brilliant, wonderful and we spent a great deal of time together and loved hanging out in the movie. Jeff, Sam [Neill] and I are like The Three Musketeers. But Sam is married, so Jeff and I were left hanging out for the gossip rags. Since the movie finished, we've spent a lot of time together. During the movie, I heard gossip about us, about other people, about fights, and how I hate so-and-so. Anjelica Huston and I ran into each other and shared unbelievable gossip about each other that went around the various casts and crews."
While we're talking gossip--and her friendship with Goldblum--what's with Dern's reported predilection for romantic entanglements with such coworkers as Kyle MacLachlan (Blue Velvet), with whom she had a four-year relationship, Vincent Spano (HBO's After-burn) and director Renny Harlin (who produced Rambling Rose)? "I resent ever being stereotyped," she asserts, bringing herself up to full height in her chair. "When I read things like, 'She always sleeps with her leading men,' or, 'She's spiritual and nice,' or, 'She will always play this or that kind of part,' or, 'She's the bad girl,' I'm like, 'Oh, pleeeeease.' I'm all those things. I've been hurt by some rather explicit articles that say I always sleep with all my leading men. Which is very far from the truth. I always fall in love with qualities of people I work with. Making Rambling Rose, I fell in love with Lukas Haas, Robert Duvall, my mother; I fall in love with the family that I work with. Yes, I've dated people I've worked with and yes, I've dated people who want to do business with me and I've dated people I've never worked with. I pay psychiatrists a lot of money to help me figure all that stuff out and they haven't gotten it all together, so how could somebody else? And if anybody out there figures it out, call me and let me know."
Laughing dryly, Dern folds her napkin with a finality that makes me wonder whether she's about to clam up on the subject of relationships. Some secrets she wants to keep, you know. But then, she continues, terribly earnestly, "I haven't been in that many relation ships. I've just been in longer relationships than my friends. I lived with someone for quite a long time and did various movies while we were together and, obviously, seeing other people never had been an issue. I've never really dated. Loving someone casually is something I never do. I feel everything very deeply."
One of the persistent rumors, reported in magazines during the shooting of Rambling Rose, concerned director Harlin, with whom Dern had been involved. According to these stories, Harlin arranged with his lawyer to withhold monies owed to Dern. To make matters thornier, Harlin fired his lawyer who, married to Dern's agent, apprised his wife of the deal. "Unfair," Dern declares of the rumors. "We were all trying to make this sweet film, trying to work together. Even if it were true, I wouldn't want to know at that point. God, I hate that kind of stuff. Renny and I are fortunate, because our relationship is based on friendship more than anything. Our relationship has always remained very loving and kind. When I won the Golden Globe recently [for Afterburn], he was the first to call and send a telegram. We went through a movie together where the basic relationship was professional and friend-oriented. But I hear this and read this kind of stuff all the time. I mean, did you read how David Lynch left Isabella for me? That we were best friends and how devastated she was? Isabella is one of my three best girlfriends in the world and David and I are great friends. But some people actually thought it was true."
How would she say that the press has treated her? "I have an ego, I admit it," she says, toying with a lemon wedge on her teacup saucer. "I love to win awards, to get a good review. Overall, I feel lucky that the press has been very gracious and respectful to me. As far as reviews, if people review movies earnestly, great, although, I'll admit it's difficult because it's me that one is critiquing. To the critic who says, 'I hate the way she looks and I don't want to see her on the screen,' I say, 'First of all, you're not talking about my work. Secondly, how will I ever be different?' It brings up issues of men not liking you, childhood stuff. It's hard not to be vulnerable to it."
Are there any qualities that the men in her life have shared? "They're creative. Artistic. Bright. Funny--that's a big one for me," she says. "Tall, too. Almost everyone I've been with had very open eyes. Exposing eyes. I'm affected by people's sensitivity in their eyes." So, how am I doing, I ask her? "Very well," she shoots back, giggling. "You have an open, warm quality in your eyes--kind, loving. Very important. You meet some people and you can't see them when you look in their eyes. I could never be with a man like that. Something very important for me is someone who embraces who I am. What my body is. Embraces my strength, my creativity. Someone once said to me that we stay in a negative relationship until we learn what abuse feels like and you can say, I don't want this anymore.'"
She utters this with such palpable sincerity, with such a sense of been-there-done-that, that I ask whether any of her relationships have been particularly messy. "Oh, I've suffered terribly," she says, hammily clamping her hand to her forehead, feigning a swoon. Then, turning serious, she explains, "I've never been in a relationship where someone was abusive, physically. I'm not into beating. But emotional abuse can be so subtle, you don't even know it's coming. There was a time when I was feeling that someone was being unkind to me. It took me a long time to realize it, because it came in the tiny comments where my stomach would turn so subtly, then, days later I would realize that, although he was being loving and kind on the surface, he was being inappropriate. A definite issue of mine is having trouble realizing that your needs must be allowed to come before the other person's. Emotional abuse is the place where we deal with parental issues that come up for us, too."
Dern comes by her introspection honestly. Her family tree includes a former governor of Utah (her paternal great-grandfather), poet Archibald MacLeish (her paternal grand-uncle) and playwright Tennessee Williams (her mother's cousin). Her parents met and sparked in New York during a successful 1959 off-Broadway revival production of Orpheus Descending. Bruce Dern, with his aristocratic, East Coast prep-school background, and Diane Ladd, an earthy Southerner who had worked as a model and dancer before her stage success, deeply wanted a child. Their first born, a daughter, drowned tragically in a swimming pool at 18 months. Doctors told the grief-stricken parents that Ladd could not bear any more children.
While Ladd, who promptly prescribed herself herbs and vitamins, was pregnant with "miracle baby" Laura, as doctors called her, she and Dern were shooting the biker flick Rebel Rousers, co-starring Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton. The couple parted ways shortly after Laura's birth and, while Ladd traveled to work, her mother would stay with Laura in Santa Monica, California. Dern stayed away. Ladd remarried five years later to a stock-broker, moving Laura to New York, where she lived with two stepbrothers and a nanny on 95th Street. When that marriage ended, they returned to California. "I'm sure I have made choices in my life that are from my upbringing," Dern says diplomatically. "Things that my parents have done, I wouldn't do. Just intellectually, they're not my cup of tea."
As a five-year-old, Dern debuted in an episode of her mother's soap opera, "The Secret Storm"; by seven, she was getting noticed on the big screen, slurping ice cream for Martin Scorsese in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. By nine, against her mother's best advice, she was studying with the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and by 11, her agent--whom she sought out and pursued--was sending her out for such roles as the 19-year-old centerpiece of Foxes, which Jodie Foster, her senior by four years, won. Dern landed a smaller role in that film. A year later, anxious to have with her father something of the closeness she and her mother enjoy, she confronted him, saying, "I need a dad." Since then, their relationship has slowly grown closer.
At 13, she played the role of a skunk-haired punk-rock groupie in a Lou Adler movie, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains. By 16, she was studying at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Back in America, during what she calls "that whole John Hughes period," in which she tested for The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles (yet apparently turned down St. Elmo's Fire), she struck people as out of the mold. She prepared for her role in Teachers, as a 16-year-old impregnated by a teacher, by checking herself into an Ohio abortion clinic pretending to be pregnant. She walked into director Peter Bogdanovich's office to audition for Mask with a cane and dark glasses and, having boned up for the gig by studying with a blind girl at the Braille Institute, stayed "blind" until she won the role. She was on her way to study child psychology at UCLA when Joyce Chopra thought she was ideal to play Smooth Talk's hot-to-trot teenager to whom insinuating drifter Treat Williams croons, "I'm your love... I know all about you." She quit school, but got encouragement by winning for Smooth Talk and Mask the Los Angeles Film Critics New Generation Award.
She made her next big impression in her fateful connection with David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan on Blue Velvet, and later played the atypically sexy, strange siren in Lynch's Wild at Heart. Wild, indeed. As if her history weren't wild enough, her first roommate was Marianne Williamson, best-selling author and chief mouthpiece for her doctrine A Course in Miracles. "The thing that Marianne, as a friend, has continued to help me with," she says, "is trying to learn that mistakes don't exist. You make choices and some hurt, some don't, but you always grow. I've never looked back on a relation ship and said, 'Why did I ever get involved with that person?'"
Dern sounds so studiously self-scrutinizing, so enchanted with discovering herself as she goes along that it must have been particularly galling for her when Spy magazine busted her for giving out suspiciously identical quotes during publicity interviews for Wild at Heart. Specifically, the numerous quotes that compared the experience of working with David Lynch and Nicolas Cage to taking trips to Jupiter and Pluto. "I've had dinners with directors who saw that, too, and made jokes about it," she admits, laughing. "I thought it was hilarious. I didn't take it as an insult. Everything I did during the movie was in character. I answered as Lula."
Is she telling me she's a Method interviewee? "No, no, I'm spontaneous," she protests, looking bruised. "In other interviews, I am obviously myself. I know people who are represented by either agents or managers who talk about how their representation helps them prepare for things. I've never prepared. I wasn't raised by people who did that. My parents, as you've pointed out, are very much just who they are."
Dern doesn't reveal secrets easily. She warms slowly, constantly appraising. "I caught a very successful actress whom I really respect on Jay Leno," she says. "And I could tell she was very nervous and came across as really resentful and bitchy. I thought, 'Her fear is so great that she's playing "Hey, I'm better than you" as her defense mechanism.' I've made a commitment to be honest, like, if I'm on a talk show to just say, 'Hey, you know what, I'm really nervous,' rather than to hide something. As actors, we try so hard to be authentic. I like to be somewhat authentic, hopefully, in interviews and in life."
Can she be somewhat authentic on the subject of her ambitions, particularly those related to the possibility that she might finally land a Julia Roberts- or Demi Moore-sized hit? "I have a negative connotation about ambition," she admits. "If ambition is something manipulative, stepping over whomever or doing whatever it takes to get fame and fortune, I hope I don't have much of it. The only thing I never wanted was an overnight hit, but to keep developing myself, as a person and an actor. If one movie made my career, how do you move away from it? Do I want the ability to do what I want? Absolutely. Do certain actresses, if they're huge box-office successes, get the pick of the litter? No question. So, sure I want success so I can make movies that mean something to me, that mean I can stretch myself as an actor, a writer, a director. I'm writing and directing a short film, The Gift, and I think that's ambitious. But will I be devastated if I don't get a good review? No. I try to be healthy about that. Do I want to win an Academy Award? Yes. I'm human."
Human enough to plan an acceptance speech for the night the cameras kept cutting to two-shots of her and her mother, sitting side by side, both Oscar nominees for Rambling Rose? "The Golden Globes came first and I thought Jodie Foster would win for The Silence of the Lambs," she recalls of the award Foster snaked. "About a week before the Academy Awards, I got to thinking again, 'Jodie was in a huge film, Susan Sarandon was in Thelma & Louise, another huge film,' and I knew my movie was not seen by a lot of people so I thought: don't worry about it. Then, I showed up as the dark horse in the picks of the oddsmakers in Vegas, then in TV Guide and, when the L.A. Times did their thing, I thought, 'My God.' My press agent advised me not to waste the opportunity, through nervousness or whatever, to thank all the people involved so I wrote down all the names. But, there I was sitting with my mother and Jonathan Demme was sitting behind us. Later, we went to one of the parties, then went home and talked about who said and wore what."
Odds are it won't be Dern's last trip to the Oscars. Still, it can't be fun doing critically applauded work in movies few have seen. "Let's say that my agents were very glad when Steven decided on me to do Jurassic Park and I decided to do it," she responds. "For whatever reason, I'm usually hired because a film director really likes my work, not because I'm the choice of a studio executive or because of an agent pushing me. Catch me on a good day and I may be tortured because I'm not reading any good scripts. Catch me on another and I've gotten five offers and I just don't know what to do. In the last couple of years, when the choice has come down to me and other actresses, they're people mostly in their late thirties. I really love that."
Among the movies with which Dern's name has been briefly associated are At Play in the Fields of the Lord, a role about which she felt uncomfortable and which Daryl Hannah got instead, and Robert Altman's Short Cuts. "I see the faults of Wild at Heart, say, which I never expected to be a huge movie. Yet, as I travel around the world, I've met more people who consider it one of their favorite movies. I adore Judy Davis and think of her as this artist who reads Kafka and watches obscure, fascinating movies like 8½. A friend met her and passed on to me that she is a great fan of Wild at Heart and I thought, 'Wow.' When I ran into Mel Gibson, he started quoting me Wild at Heart dialogue. Some of the same people who said to me when I did Blue Velvet, 'Why did you do that horrible film?' later told me, 'Oh, it's my favorite.' I think those movies will be around for a long time."
And so, we think, will Dern, although this instant, she's got to run. There's work to do on her 30-minute short cowritten by Emily Haas, mother of her Rambling Rose co-star Lukas, a project she says is "about a woman's struggle through a breakup." She's also due for a meeting with her agent on several roles for which she's being considered while Jonathan Demme completes his project to work with her on theirs. Should she ever manage to get a few weeks or months off, she plans on "making myself a better person, whether it's through yoga or kick boxing or emotional work, dream work, therapy, dealing with my heritage. Things that went on with my grandmother are things I'm still dealing with."
But, if Dern gets her way, don't expect too many Jurassic Parks to turn up on her resume. "Even the comedies I want to do are out of the norm. The projects I'm pursuing most have harsh realities that have to be explored. I want to show people's complexities because, by reducing each other to stereotypes and assumptions, we limit ourselves as a culture. Too many people are bruised. Too many people are dying. Maybe if we become aware of these things as a culture, the planet can start shifting a bit. I'm proud of anybody who takes on themes, ideas, feelings that aren't necessarily the norm." After a moment, she adds, "You know, our secrets."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Johnny Depp for the April issue of Movieline.