Susan Sarandon: On Movies, Men and Motherhood

Q: Do you watch your movies?

A: No, sometimes I don't even see them at all. I don't think I ever saw the final cut of Compromising Positions. I don't think I saw the final cut of The Hunger, actually. I think of them in terms of the experiences I had on them. Atlantic City, Pretty Baby, they were both great experiences. Pretty Baby was the first lime I played a mother.

Q: She was some mother!

A: Yeah. I think there's all different kinds of mothers, because the disturbing thing in that movie was that the child was in better shape than any of the adults. And if you're gonna do a movie about child prostitution, that's not the way you're supposed to progress. I always thought that if I was ever going to do a book about the making of a movie that was such a disaster, I would choose Pretty Baby. So many things happened on that film.

Q: Come on, tell.

A: That was at a point when Brooke Shields's mother was not in great shape, and so at one point I was asked to take custody of her, to take responsibility, whatever the legal term was, for the shoot, because her mother had ended up in jail [one night]. Brooke went away for a weekend and didn't come back on time. One of the guys who was an extra suddenly got picked up for rape. It was crazy. The crew didn't know who Louis Malle or Sven Nykvist was, so they were always rolling their eyes. A lot of them had come off of action films. I think it was the only time I've ever worked on a set where you couldn't get a non-alcoholic beverage out of the cooler.

Q: It's so disturbing to watch. Everything it says about lusting for pre-pubescent girls...

A: Well, I stayed with Brooke all the time. Her conditioning was probably the closest thing to being a hooker that you could get to. She'd been a professional child from the time she was six months old. It was crazy. And she wasn't really naked in the film...

Q: Oh yes, she is really naked.

A: No, no, we had stuff around her [points to her crotch]. She's topless, but she was never nude on the bottom. I was there all the lime, even when I wasn't working, to be with her. Brooke's a good girl.

Q: So what's Kevin Costner like to work with?

A: He was incredibly generous with Tim and with me. And I don't think either of us would have gotten those parts [in Bull Durham] and Ron Shelton wouldn't have been directing, if Kevin hadn't stood by us.

Q: And Tim wasn't your lover then, was he?

A: No. The thing that pleases me (about Bull Durham] is that there's so many professional athletes who say that's their favorite movie.

Q: Yeah, they're all hoping that they're gonna find a smart, sexy, Tunny lady like you.

A: No, I think it's because there's a spirit--not because of my character-- that really touches why people play sports, and it made me understand it. It was just a joy to read that script. Kevin was brilliant, and nobody plays assholes better that Tim.

Q: Were you one of those little girls who loved Little Women?

A: I did not read the book as a girl. I loved the Katharine Hepburn movie. That really impressed me. The confluence of people who did this movie made me want to get involved. I did it for my daughter, really. It's certainly not a career move, but I wanted her to have this thing, this story, to remember.

Q: In Safe Passage, you play a woman at a real crossroads in her life, trying to decide if being a mother is enough.

A: One of the reasons I did Safe Passage is that my character is this woman who had her children early, and when they're grown, she takes a look at her life and she's not too happy with what she sees. This woman's at the point of her life where she could become bitter. [She and her husband) have gotten to the point where she wants to do something else, he laughs at her, and she throws him out. It's not very psychological, which is the thing I really liked about it. They don't talk about "their space."

Q: Do you think of yourself as a romantic?

A: Yeah, definitely.

Q: Well, there goes my theory then.

A: What's your theory?

Q: My theory is that the couples who work it out--really work it out--do so because they have real expectations. They don't believe in Prince Charming, they don't believe they have to save each other.

A: Oh no, I don't believe that either. I think the concept that there's one person who's gonna make you whole, this Gibran kind of thinking, is so detrimental. I don't think it's the other person's responsibility to make you whole at all. It's the other person's responsibility to make you laugh, to give you a dance now and then, to read the newspaper and tell you about things you don't have time to read about, to introduce you to music you don't know, to tell you when you're full of shit, to fight fair, to be good in bed, to say, "Come on, let's go have an adventure" when you've become a little bit of a stick in the mud. But it's not their job to make you whole, and until you ate whole. I don't think you can really enter into a relationship with somebody and have it work. The test for me of a great romantic relationship is how productive you are during the relationship.

Q: Well, all of yours must have been great then, because you have done so many movies over the years,

A: [Laughing] You don't need somebody who's gonna keep you up till four in the morning and you don't even know why you're fighting. You don't need somebody who you're gonna go to a party and you're worried about that they're gonna get jealous, laid, drunk, stoned, or turn up missing. I like to go to a party and go my way and let somebody else go their way, and you meet up or you don't meet up and then you go home together and nobody feels bad about it. That's the perfect description of life, too-- the party of life. I've been very lucky to find someone. We've been incredibly productive since we've been together.

Q: It's doubtful, but if they ever let you be a presenter at the Academy Awards, which, if you ask me, they won't, what would you do?

A: I've been a presenter many times before.

Q: That was before you gave your speech about HIV positive Haitians.

A: I don't know what I would do if they asked me again. But that was an emergency situation. I felt it was morally irresponsible not to take advantage of that opportunity, because I had already been arrested, and there were now men and women lying in a hunger strike in the middle of a field in Guantánamo who would rather have died than continued the life that Amnesty International and a number of other organizations were declaring inhumane. And Clinton had made a promise and reneged upon it, and you have the largest audience in the world...

Q: It was in the air then. Isn't that the night Richard Gere said the thing about Tibet?

A: They were constantly going on about Sharon Stone's lack of underpants and Jaye Davidson, and doing alt kinds of things off the record. The fact that there were probably, I don't know what percentage of HIV positive people sitting around in that audience... It was very, very difficult. I don't regret it, but it was very, very hard for me to break form as a good Catholic girl who's supposed to finish conversations and keep everything flowing smoothly.

Q: You looked like you were hyperventilating.

A: Right, I could hardly breathe. Afterwards, dealing with the shit that came down, was wild. Also, they had gotten wind something might happen. So they were in the wings saying, "Don't do anything, don't start it." But you know this was a very special circumstance. It's not something that I just do lightly or do every single time. And, in fact, those people got out the next day. I know that the outcome was positive, at least for the Haitians.

Q: Well, grade, Susan.

A: Prego.

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Martha Frankel Interviewed Patrick Stewart for the November 1994 Movieline.

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