Though she's certain she's not a good interview subject, Bridget Fonda talks about everything you could hope for, from doing drugs and shooting nude scenes to growing up a Fonda and falling in love with Eric Stoltz. But whatever you do, don't call her a "hot" actress!
____________________________
When Bridget Fonda decided to come to my house to do this interview I wondered how we'd manage, since the house is currently being remodeled and the only sanctuary is my study, which is so crowded I felt it wouldn't be comfortable for a movie star. But her publicist said Bridget was cool, so I got some cookies, figs, cinnamon and peppermint chips, and placed them within arm's reach of the chair she'd be sitting in. When she arrived, she ignored the goodies I had set out and asked for an ashtray. For the next five and a half hours, smoke was all she needed.
"Please don't write about this," she pleaded after her third cigarette. "My grandmother doesn't like that I do it."
Neither did my dog, but I didn't say that. Instead, I asked her why she does it.
"Off the record?"
"No, on."
"I smoke when I'm nervous," she said. "I get nervous about not being a good interview."
Just like her grandfather, who said that he never liked doing interviews because he didn't have the words. But the truth was, Henry was a good subject--he was honest, he didn't bullshit, and he could be brutal about himself and his family. I told Bridget this and she said she never got to know Henry as an actor, though she feels she relates more to him professionally than she does to her father Peter or her aunt Jane.
Bridget grew up a Fonda from a distance. After her parents split up when she was eight, she and her younger brother lived with her mother in L.A. Her father lived in Hawaii for a while, then moved to Florida, and finally to a ranch in Montana with his second wife. Bridget got along with her new stepmother better than she did the agent/movie producer her mother remarried. Bridget went to Westlake School for Girls, which she says she despised. During the only school play she appeared in, Harvey--which her grandfather's pal Jimmy Stewart had immortalized on film--she got an inkling of her future. "I was terrible in it," Fonda recalls, "but one day in rehearsals I was just fucking around and that's when I suddenly knew that I wanted to do this."
After graduating Bridget went to New York, attended NYU and studied drama at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. In 1986 she auditioned for--and got--a part in the Franc Roddam section of the film Aria. The role had no words and called for her to be nude, but Fonda never blinked or balked. And just like that, she was noticed.
In 1988 she appeared in You Can't Hurry Love and Shag, where she did a sexy dance which was later noticed by David Hare, who cast her in Strapless. She played Christine Keeler's party friend in Scandal, and Mary Shelley in Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound, then went to Italy to play a photo-journalist in The Godfather, Part III. Her boyfriend at the time, British actor/screenwriter Lee Drysdale, directed her in Leather Jackets, which went straight to video. In 1991 came Doc Hollywood and Iron Maze, a film that "never came off on-screen the way I had hoped it would." Then, in '92, came two films which brought her some attention: Singles and Single White Female. This year she's been in Point of No Return, a remake of the French-Italian film La Femme Nikita, and Bodies, Rest & Motion, with her boyfriend Eric Stoltz. Two other films will be out soon: Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha and Camilla with Jessica Tandy. She is currently working on Cop Gives Waitress $2 Million Tip with Nicolas Cage and Rosie Perez.
At 29, Bridget Fonda seems to be a very in-demand actress on the verge of finding that breakthrough film that will help define her the way Klute did her aunt Jane, and Easy Rider did her father Peter. But she has already left no doubt that the Fonda genes have now passed to the third generation. Grandpa Henry would be proud.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: Did you ever wish you had a different last name?
BRIDGET FONDA: No, though I wonder what kind of satisfaction I would have with where I am now if I wasn't part of a family that has done such phenomenal work. I wonder what it would feel like to know that you've made it completely under your own steam. I sometimes wonder if I would be more at peace if I could know I made it by myself, instead of always wondering how many times my name got me in the door.
Q: But, once in the door, you've still got to get cast--and no one's casting Jane or Henry or Peter when you're there.
A: That's what the people who love me remind me.
Q: Was it always something you needed to be reminded of?
A: I always felt that I had to struggle to make people like me in spite of the name. When you're a kid it's very important that you fit in.
Q: And when you're a movie star... ?
A: Being a movie star is not really anything, it's just a title.
Q: What about being a "hot" actress?
A: That's a term I despise, because it scares me. You're hot one second and the next second you're not. It's not a really good way to look at things. I mean, this is my life.
Q: Your next picture is Bertolucci's Little Buddha. What can you tell us about it?
A: I haven't seen it yet, and I'm reluctant to talk about the plot.
Q: How much of it relates to the Buddha and how much is in modern times?
A: Little Buddha is the name of the book which is the story of Prince Siddhartha that is given to my and Chris Isaak's son by these Tibetan monks. So you have modern times and then within the story you can be taken into the past. The part that I was in was in Seattle. I play a teacher. Not too epic.
Q: When you asked Bertolucci what he did when he acted, he told you he laughed a lot. Did you relate to that?
A: Yes, I get quite hysterical sometimes. Giddy. It happened once on Single White Female. It also happened on Camilla with Jessica Tandy. When I started to get the giggles, the director, Deepa Mehta, who has a devilish sense of humor, would encourage it. And Jessica is very, very funny.
Q: What interested you in Camilla?
A: I play a musician with terrible stage fright who has these big hungry dreams. She's got talent, but she is so acutely aware of those who are geniuses that she feels small and not good enough. It's my life, which is why I felt so strongly about it.
Q: Single White Female is the movie that broke the million dollar barrier for you. Did that change your position in the industry?
A: Unfortunately that amount was printed, otherwise I wouldn't say. I was very upset, because nobody likes to talk about money.
Q: Why not?
A: Because money is ugly in and of itself. I never minded telling people how much I made, I didn't care, until I started getting bad feedback. Suddenly it was like you were exposing a part of yourself that people were very eager to chop off, so to speak.
Q: Since you were given the choice of playing the terrorizer or the victim in Single White Female, what made you opt for the less showy victim part?
A: That was a harder part for me to play, because it's mostly reaction. And I'm better at doing than I am at reacting. It was some of the most satisfying work I've ever done.
Q: In spite of--or because of--the fact that your co-star, Jennifer Jason Leigh, was once Eric Stoltz's girlfriend?
A: That wasn't something I wanted to dwell on. She was somebody who did go out with somebody who I'm in love with, yet I got along with her really well.
Q: Didn't you both learn self-defense, so you could duke it out at the end?
A: Jennifer and I wanted to learn as much as we could for the fights. You could have the stunt doubles do it, but then you can't show the faces, and if you can see our faces as they're in the middle of this life-or-death struggle, it's much more powerful.
Q: Are you a natural fighter?
A: I hate fights.
Q: Even with your boyfriend?
A: I get so afraid that it's all going to end.
Q: Are we talking physical or verbal fighting here?
A: I don't get physical. It's verbal. A lot of times I get very defensive, but even if I start a fight I feel like I'm being attacked. It's like having a terrible fever, because I get so upset and so afraid.
Q: You were eight when your parents split up. How much do you remember of when they were together?
A: Not very much. I remember a dinner where my dad pretended to swallow an apple. I remember him skateboarding around the tennis court. I've talked about this with my shrink, wondering if there is something wrong with why I can't remember in detail these things. I've been told that it's my way of dealing with the pain.
Q: How much are you like your father?
A: We have the same sense of humor and we are both sort of cynical idealists.
Q: Didn't you once describe him as Peter Pan?
A: He is Peter Pan, but he has a sophistication, as well as a youthfulness that he will always have. And which I hope to always have, which I thank him for.
Q: After Easy Rider, your father, along with Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson, became a symbol of the youth culture of the '60s, which had a lot to do with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Did you ever turn on with your dad?
A: You're getting into very personal territory. I don't like to talk about something that I
don't know if the other person would talk about. I would never want to talk about my father's drug taking. My warning signals are up, these are the areas that I get burned in. Something personal that involves someone else who I don't want to hurt.
Q: Then let's leave him out of it and stay focused on you.
A: I wasn't given drugs when I was a kid, nothing like that. They were really responsible in that way, but I was always aware of it. It was never a big secret.
Q: Did you ever feel when you were a young teen that you wanted to try smoking grass?
A: Yeah, I did. I went out and did it with kids in the neighborhood. Maybe because it wasn't a big mystery I didn't really ever have anything to prove about it, so I never had a drug problem.
Q: When you were growing up you must have seen a lot of Fonda movies. Do you have particular favorites?
A: The Hired Hand, which my dad did, struck a note in me, as well as the character he played in Lilith. And, of course, Easy Rider. I get a tremendous amount of pleasure out of Jane's Coming Home. With my grandfather, I loved The Lady Eve, The Ox-Bow Incident, Fort Apache, Once Upon a Time in the West and The Grapes of Wrath.
Q: Did you ever talk to your grandfather about acting?
A: Never. I wish I had, but what would I have said? I didn't know anything.
Q: Let's talk about your aunt Jane. There doesn't seem to be an article written about you that doesn't mention how you have tried to distance yourself from her.
A: Which is not true! I have never taken pains to distance myself from her in any way. I guess it's because Jane's famous and a lot of people have a lot of mixed feelings about her. I have spent time with her, though I don't see her much because she's got a life, and I have a life.
Q: If you had the opportunity to interview her, what kind of questions would you ask?
A: I would ask her a lot about acting. She knows so much and I would want to learn all the things that she knows. She's more advanced than I am. Her commitment has been an inspiration to me. It comes out in the quality of her work and the way that she cares enough to take chances.
Q: Now that she's married to Ted Turner, is acting behind her?
A: You want me to guess if she'll come back? I imagine that she would, because it's something that you're so passionate about and you're so good at you could never leave for too long. Jane has done some work that makes it harder and harder to find things that would take her the next step up instead of a couple of steps sideways or a step backward. When you've done something extraordinary like Coming Home, it's very difficult to find other such extraordinary parts.
Q: Do you feel you've made any important pictures?
A: Like Coming Home! No. My idea of important is something that changes you. It seems like I'm still feeling around for something that'll grab me.
Q: There's a quote of yours which attracted media attention: You said you hated aerobics and political protests. The press felt you were taking a direct jab at Jane.
A: I never said that I hated political protests, but it's true about aerobics.
Q: Is that because you have a hole in your heart?
A: I have a hole in my heart, which is a fairly common heart murmur, but it doesn't stop me from doing anything. It basically means that I have to take antibiotics when I have my teeth cleaned or any kind of surgery because there's a possibility that the bacteria will lodge itself within that hole. So in that way it's serious, but you only have to be medicated.
Q: How did you find out about it?
A: I have a third heartbeat. It's like boom, boom, shhh. The doctors knew it from the time I was very small. I went to UCLA every four years and had heart tests.
Q: Did that give you a sense of your own fragility?
A: No, because I was always told that it wouldn't stop me from doing anything that I wanted to do.
Q: So it didn't bother you when you saw your aunt Jane over Christmas a few years ago and she criticized your not having tone in your thigh muscles?
A: Oh dear. And I actually came here saying I'm not going to talk about my family. Yes, we have conversations about that, but we have conversations about everything--about life, about eating, about acting. She always asks me, "Why do you work so much?"
Q: Did you like the way you looked as a teenager, or do you think you have a funny face?
A: Funny face. Not like funny ha-ha, but I don't look like the models.
Q: Is it true that you once considered enlarging your lips with collagen injections?
A: I did for this one part that I was considering about someone who was supposed to be voluptuous, but it fell apart. It was something that I toyed with, but I didn't do it because I'm too scared.
Q: In Singles you played a character who wanted her breasts enlarged. Is that something you ever considered yourself?
A: Oh yes. My first boyfriend had some dirty magazines and you'd see these huge breasts and I felt, gee, is that what they like to look at? In that case, I'm not enough in that area. I'm not anti-plastic surgery at all, but right now, it's amazing what I can do with padding.
Q: What was it like making your first movie, Aria, since you neither spoke nor wore any clothes throughout most of it?
A: I was coming right out of college and I was reading the great playwrights and thinking about things that don't happen in everyday life. Aria just sounded so interesting to me. It was very nice to be able to go into something so out there. I was really excited about it because it's very abstract. And it was interesting for me to not have any dialogue and to be that bold.
Q: The nudity didn't bother you?
A: I liked that it was different.
Q: But you weren't all that crazy about the response, were you? Were you criticized for doing something "pornographic"?
A: The realization that not everybody looks at nudity the same way that I do made me audience-aware, which I wasn't before. For me, nudity is a part of life. I was very comfortable with it. It's a human being stripped. It wasn't exploitative in my mind. Maybe a part of my feeling that nudity is okay was when I was 10 I visited my grandmother in
Mexico and took a life drawing class there, drawing nudes.
Q: When you were a kid, did you feel free with your body?
A: Oh yeah, I ran around naked when I was a kid.
Q: Even after you had breasts?
A: No, [you] get embarrassed.
Q: How do you feel about still photographs taken from movie screen images of
you nude showing up in magazines?
A: Stills can be very dangerous because it isolates a moment, takes it completely out of context, and makes it absolutely about that one image.
Q: Has it happened to you?
A: Yes, it has. It's horrifying to me because it reduces you and your work and it completely annihilates that character that you were playing. I don't allow stills when I'm doing a nude scene in a movie.
Q: Do you ever get weird letters from people who have seen you undressed in a film?
A: Not as weird as some of my friends have gotten, but I get letters like: "We're auctioning things from movie stars, can you send us something, preferably lingerie?" That's strange to me.
Q: Does it make you wary of appearing nude in the future?
A: Yes, it does. There have been many times where I felt, I don't want to be the nude girl in this movie. Not the only one. But there's also another side of me that says, Well, I wouldn't do this not naked because of that. Playing Mandy Rice-Davies, for example, in Scandal --I'm playing a girl who takes off her clothes. If I refuse to take off my clothes why am I doing the role?
Q: L.A. Times critic Peter Rainer wrote that you have everything it takes except that single defining catapulting role. Do you feel that too?
A: That role. I don't know, that's strange. What if that role is the role that defines you so well that no one can see you in any other way after that?
Q: You may not yet have the role of your lifetime but are there films you've seen which you wish you could have been a part of?
A: I worship a film called Black Narcissus. Also, Ball of Fire is a film that I love. It's wonderfully written, funny and romantic.
Q: What is romantic to you?
A: I heard a story not long ago about the way someone proposed to someone else: he put a ring in a bag of M&M's and came in eating them, and he knew she would, and suddenly there was this ring.
Q: Are you very romantic yourself?
A: Very romantic, yeah.
Q: What in your life has moved you romantically?
A: My mom used to take my brother and me on road trips. We would just drive through parks and go visit friends in different states, eating along the way at various diners. That was romantic. I remember wading in some little offshoot of the Colorado River, finding and keeping a stick that had been chewed on by a beaver. Very romantic. And my father's living on his boat in Hawaii was romantic. My grandfather and his painting.
Q: What about the ring in your own M&M's?
A: You mean romantic love? I like to keep those things private.
Q: Ah, c'mon Bridget. What's Eric Stoltz done to brighten your day?
A: Eric sent me beautiful roses, just tons of flowers, on my birthday once. There's that kind of romance. But then there's the other kind, like the way we met. On the first date I couldn't eat. We went for a drive because I wanted to show him the house where I grew up, and it had been torn down. I cried on our first date, which to me is very romantic.
Q: Do you believe in love at first sight?
A: Yes, but love changes a lot. I love a lot of people, but to love someone whom you want to spend your life with, that's really happened just twice. You don't know if it really is, in fact, love at first sight, or if it's infatuation at first sight.
Q: How about lust at first sight?
A: Well, yeah, there's something sexual there, but it might be something else as well. With me, my heart just goes, I drop a lot of weight, I can't eat. It's that kind of thing.
Q: How'd you meet Eric?
A: In 1986 on the Paramount lot.
Q: What did you like about him when you met?
A: He's such a combination of things. Really smart in his wit. And his eyes.
Q: Is it easier or tougher to be with someone who is also in your business?
A: Easier than dating a civilian. With someone else in the same business you have a common ground. Whereas someone who's not, you go off and do a film and the love scenes alone are difficult to deal with. If Eric started doing a love scene with somebody... I thank God I'm an actress, because then I know... it's hard for me anyway, but I know, well, okay, that's what they do, that's what I do, it's not real. But I cannot imagine if I wasn't an actress and I saw up on the screen the person I love with someone else who's fantastic and beautiful and I have followed her life in the magazines and she's just so exciting. It's hard. So it really helps to be in the same business. And if you have a shared passion for it as well, that's the bonus, because you can be excited about the same things for your life together.
Q: So if it's better to be in the same business as your boyfriend, what about doing love scenes with him, as you did in Bodies, Rest & Motion?
A: There's never any risk of really exposing yourself in a love scene because you don't have any freedom. You're in a room with 60 people! I didn't even know it was going to look like it did. I was with Eric doing the press junket and a couple of women said: "What about the most outrageous oral sex scene, the greatest cunnilingus scene in film history?" And I thought, What? I had no idea! Although I shouldn't say that, because Eric likes to say, "Yes, we were really having sex." He likes to toy.
Q: Do the two of you toy with the idea of marriage?
A: Everybody keeps proposing for us.
Q: Your father has said that he thinks you want to have a baby. Do you?
A: I do. I want to have kids, but I don't want to have them right now. All my friends are having babies and I'm seeing them everywhere. However, when I have a baby I don't want to go right back to work and I'm still absolutely obsessed with work.
Q: What do you dream about at night?
A: My dreams aren't very literal.
Q: What about your nightmares?
A: I have nightmares, but I never wake up screaming. I'm usually driving down a hill in my dream, and I can't control the car. I think it's because I had a '65 Dodge van that would run away with me like a horse, the accelerator would stick and I would have to throw the gears. It was just awful. It would go like it had its own mind. So I have these dreams of driving where there was always something that I just couldn't see, though I never crash.
Q: Let's talk about the making of The Godfather, Part III. Did Al Pacino ever make you laugh during the shoot?
A: Al was fantastic. He would come up to me and say, "Bridget, have you gotten anything, any pages? What's going on, do you know anything?" I'd say, "No I don't, do you?" and he'd say, "No, I don't. By the way, how was your Christmas?"
Q: Was much of your role in that film edited out?
A: There was only one scene that was cut because it was leading to a scene that was never shot between myself and Al. The way it was explained to me was that the story was already very convoluted and there was no way that they were going to put this scene in. See, the whole time I was in Italy making The Godfather, Part III, Francis Coppola was trying to figure out the story. He'd say, "I have an idea about what to do with your character." One idea was that I would be tied to a jukebox and thrown off a cliff! That was my favorite. I would giggle about those things with Don Novello and George Hamilton, who I had a wonderful time with.
Q: Before Coppola replaced Winona Ryder with his daughter Sofia, were you ever considered for that part?
A: I read for that part originally. Personally, I loved Sofia. There's a softness in her.
Q: Was it a softness in you that writer/director David Hare saw when he wanted you for Strapless? Or was it that sexy--Hare once said obscene--dance you did with a Confederate flag in Shag?
A: I never thought it was obscene. Actually, when I look at it now I can't believe that I did that. I had no idea when I was doing it what it would look like. On the page all it said was: "She does a little dance." So I made it up. It was playful when I was doing it. But it is kind of sexual.
Q: How playful was it to work with Roger Corman in Frankenstein Unbound?
A: He's pretty twisted, but he's a very smart man, a wonderful dinner conversationalist, who happens to make movies like A Bucket of Blood. Which I love! It was a chance to work with somebody who is really a cult filmmaker.
Q: And you got to do a lobotomized version of Mary Shelley to boot.
A: I felt like such a fool. There I was, reading all this stuff on Mary Shelley, falling completely in love with her, and then I got on the set and realized this has nothing to do with Mary Shelley. She's just there looking kind of cute. But I should have known going in. I was an idiot to think that I was going to get a chance to do Mary Shelley justice.
Q: How much of a perfectionist are you?
A: I am a perfectionist. I don't know why. I have a fear of doing anything wrong, and I make a lot of mistakes. Maybe it's from watching films that are so beautiful, films that last, where every moment is constructed perfectly. That's why I feel in acting you don't ever want to blow a moment. Which creates a lot of pressure and can stifle you. So I put a lot pressure on myself. I have to let go.
Q: What frustrates you most about yourself?
A: My inability for my body to do what my mind imagines, in all areas, athletically or creatively. My hand-eye coordination; my imagination. I wish I had the ability to remember everything. I wish I had a photographic memory. Every person I know has an "If only." It's a wish list.
Q: What is on your "If only" list?
A: Oh boy, I have a lot. If only I could just have my hair be its natural color in a film. If only it could be healthy instead of all this dyeing. If only I had a little curl to it. If only my hands weren't getting so dry. If only I had oilier skin. If only I had smaller feet--I wear a size eight. If only I had better toes. If only I was somebody better and smarter. I feel like I've been given some rudimentary tools and I wish I knew how to use them better.
Q: Who's your favorite writer?
A: Lewis Carroll and William Faulkner. I can quote you all of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." I like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw. I'm a big fan of Cornell Woolrich and some of Ray Bradbury. There was a story Bradbury wrote about a place where the sun only comes out once every hundred years and these schoolboys lock this kid in the closet on that day when everything blooms. It was so perfect, it said so much about mankind.
Q: Would you like to act with your father and your aunt?
A: Yes I would, very much.
Q: Anything in development?
A: Things have been discussed.
Q: Which do you prefer, New York or Los Angeles?
A: Portland. I grew up in L.A. and I lived eight years in New York. You kinda need both. If I wasn't in the business I'd live in a totally different place.
Q: Any other parting wishes?
A: I always leave interviews feeling terribly dissatisfied. I wish I was better at it.
_____________
Lawrence Grobel interviewed Robert Evans for the August and September issues of Movieline.