Our intrepid reporter travels to Italy to talk to Susan Sarandon about what's needed in romantic relationships, why her kids don't watch her movies and where she puts her hands during sex scenes.
___________________________
When I was asked if I'd travel to Rome to interview Susan Sarandon, I said, "Are you kidding? I'd interview anybody if it meant a trip to Italy." While that's mostly true, it's no reflection on my admiration for Sarandon.
With over 30 films since her 1970 debut in Joe, she is one of Hollywood busiest actresses, one of its most versatile, and perhaps the most outspoken. Certainly she-along with here companion since 1988, Tim Robbins - made more headlines for her speech about the plight of HIV positive Haitians on the 1993 Oscar telecast than all the ink she received each of the three times she's been nominated for an Academy Award (for Atlantic City, Thelma & Louise and Lorenzo's Oil). She could yet cop the prize; give her time. Sarandon is one star who seems to be finding better parts as she matures, and this year along she has three possible shots with roles in the client, Little Women and Safe Passage.
When I showed up at her hotel suite, I noticed right away that Sarandon looks much younger in real life than she does on-screen. What I discovered as we talked is that she's more relaxed in person--easier, quicker to laugh--than she often seems in interviews.
MARTHA FRANKEL: First things first. Pronounce your last name for us, since I've heard it pronounced quite a few different ways.
SUSAN SARANDON: It's Sarandon, like abandon.
Q: I'm thrilled to be in Rome, but why are you here?
A: My daughter [Eva, nine] came to see her father [Italian director Franco Amurri] and then after she was here for three weeks, we joined them. Tim and I and the boys [Jack Henry, five, and Miles, two] went to visit a friend in Ravello, then we went to Sardinia and hung out. and then we came here.
Q: You've been with Tim Robbins since making Bull Durham in 1988. Are you two getting married? That's what all the papers in America are saying.
A: I can't believe they're interested. I can understand why people are interested in Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie, but why would they care about me and Tim? First of all, I would never give a great party when I had to chase around a two year old. So I would wait until everyone could have a good time. That's my answer.
Q: Speaking of children, women I know found it heartbreaking that in The Client you played a recovering alcoholic who doesn't have contact with her own children.
A: It's always much more interesting to play ambiguous characters. I know that all these guys like |Arnold] Schwarzenegger and [Sylvester] Stallone always play these heroes who are heroic from the moment you see them, but for me it's much more interesting to play an ordinary person who, under some circumstance, in spite of all her pain and damage and frailty, does an extraordinary thing. And really, that's everybody. As I tell my kids. "Making mistakes is your job in life. You're supposed to make mistakes. You're supposed to learn from them and you're supposed to go on until you die. Make them faster than I made mine, but you will definitely make them."
Q: And try not to make them in public.
A: I never thought of that, but that's another good advisory.
Q: You were the oldest of nine children, right? What was your role in the family?
A: I was the mother of everybody. And it took me a long time to understand that I didn't have to mother every guy I was with. When I stopped doing that, things got better. When I became a mother, all of these things I had been practicing with grown men made sense, because this was the right time to do it.
Q: Much has been written about how you've given motherhood a good name. Which I don't really understand...
A: When I had my daughter, people said to me, "You're not gonna be independent, you're not gonna have your freedom, you're not gonna have all the time you're used to.'' And I thought back on my life and thought, that was freedom? It's been a nightmare. I've had enough freedom to last two lifetimes.
Q: Why is it that people cannot deal with actresses when they get older, and they feel they have to write them off as mothers or...
A: Maybe it's because we're such a young country that we haven't resolved the issue of our mothers, and so many men trade in their women for younger versions. It seems to be all right to have sex with very young women, but not with someone you own age. Of course, the minute that a woman's with somebody younger ...
Q: Like you and Tim?
A: Yes. which I don't even think about. It only exists in the United States. Because here, in Italy, they saw White Palace as a movie about class, not age. In other countries they allow women to be so many more things, and motherhood doesn't suddenly end it for you.
Q: Can your children watch any of your movies?
A: My kids don't want to watch any of my movies! They tried--Eva watched about 30 seconds of Lorenzo's Oil-- forget it, that was it. They've gone with me when I've done "Sesame Street," so they watch that. For two seconds they expressed an interest in Bull Durham and we started to think about it, but we're not ready for that yet.
Q: When you first started making films, it seems like you were always photographed naked or making love...
A: Not true. If you look back on it, my first love scene was with Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger. In Atlantic City, there are those scenes where I'm rubbing lemons on my breasts, but that's just a voyeuristic thing. And in Pretty Baby, I don't have a love scene and I'm not completely naked. I just show my breasts.
Q: Didn't Playboy say something like you had the best tits in the movies?
A: "The celebrity breasts of the summer." Which made me wonder what was coming in the fall! There are people who have taken off their clothes and done a lot more. In White Palace, there was an incredibly sexual scene which I was very nervous about,..
Q: The blow job scene?
A: [Laughing] Yes. What happened in that scene was a complete diagram of what the rest of the movie was about. Every beat of that scene was very clearly designated. I think it's very hard to be naked in a scene and not be upstaged by your nipples. People don't even hear what you're saying for the first 30 seconds if you're standing there nude, so it has to be for some very specific reason. And you have to know what the scene is about. I remember when we did that scene in White Palace, I was always saying things like, "But how could I be doing that because, really, where are my hands now?"
Q: Don't get me started on this. I go crazy when I watch sex scenes, because they don't have to worry about straining their necks or choking or...
A: Exactly. Thank God Jimmy Spader was such a great person to work with. All these actors who don't mind being unsympathetic are, to me, really the best in the business. Whether it's Jimmy Spader or Chris Walken or Tim Robbins or Jack Nicholson or Robert De Niro or Harvey Keitel, these are the guys who have some depth. The ones that are afraid to have a bad side are just boring.
Q: Let's talk about The Hunger, which lots of men still adore because of that love scene between you and Catherine Deneuve.
A: They changed the ending, which was supposed to be that I die and she lives--that I don't want to be transfused without my permission. For me, it was about whether or not you choose to live forever, if it's a life of addiction. Well, they decided that my character was very likable and that I should live somehow, after setting up every convention for me to die. But I had a great time with both Catherine and [David] Bowie, and I adore Tony [Scott, the director].
Q: What about The Witches of Eastwick? You had originally been offered the rote that eventually went to Cher...
A: Yes, in hindsight I'm proud of myself that I took an absolutely humiliating experience and turned it into a fairly decent performance. I was given my role very shortly before we began shooting.
Q: I wondered whether, considering Jack's rep, the three of you worried who Nicholson thought was the best kisser.
A: Believe me, I was more worried about learning the cello. I learned a lot from Witches of Eastwick, more to do with life lessons than acting. I learned a lot about the business, I learned a lot about blaming yourself for being taken advantage of, and how destructive that can be. And then I worked with [director] George Miller again, so what can I say?
Q: Okay, you're just a glutton for punishment. Lorenzo's Oil, which Miller also directed, is probably the most depressing movie ever made.
A: I knew the story of Lorenzo and I had been in awe of Michaela [Lorenzo's mother] and had been interested in that story for so many years, even before George Miller found it.
Q: Could you believe how hard the critics were on Nick Nolte, how they harped on his accent?
A: No, I don't understand. He, in fact, sounded exactly like the character. I thought it was an incredibly brave performance, to conquer the science and to make it live was remarkable. It was a very dry script.
Q: I know some women who do not believe that Thelma and Louise died at the end of Thelma & Louise.
A: What do they think happened when the car went over the cliff?
Q: I think that there are some women who really felt empowered by those two women, who saw something in them that they'd like to see in themselves. They just couldn't bear that after finally finding their own strength, they had to die.
A: Well, it's a movie convention, a heroic convention, and before I agreed to do it, I said, "I wanna know that I do die, right? You're not gonna have me in Club Med at the end, are you? If the studio tests it in the Valley, you're still not gonna change this, right?" And Ridley [Scott, the director] said, "All right, there's a chance that Thelma [Geena Davis's character] won't die. We'll see when we get there. But you will definitely die, whether you push her out of the car or whatever, you will definitely die at the end.'"
Q: Because jail would have been worse for that character?
A: Yeah, absolutely. And it's like Jules and Jim or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Again, it's a movie convention. The challenge was to make suicide an exhilarating experience. You have to set that up within some kind of heroic context or it won't work. That was a question from the very beginning that worried me. And when I asked for the scene in the desert where Louise gets out and it's quiet and she's just staring and you don't know what she's thinking, but you feel that she's made her mind up. I thought that scene made it clear.
Q: Didn't you convince Ridley to do the scene where Louise trades away her jewelry?
A: Yes. I had lots of ideas, but he bought those two. It's like she was beyond all of the stuff, she just needs to be pure now, and she is kind of getting ready for some kind of rite of passage. I felt that it was my duly to literally and figuratively drive the movie, that I was the one that had the moral crisis, that I was the one who'd killed the man and therefore it had to come to some kind of reckoning. And so, at that point in the film, just to have that little grace note... being an ex-hippie, I liked the ambiguity, not having any dialogue.
Q: I interviewed Geena Davis right after Thelma & Louise, and she was completely floored over all the backlash that was hitting the film.
A: Clearly it had nothing to do with the reasons that people talked about, because it is not male-bashing. The body count is nothing compared with movies where people are killed for much less reason. All I can say is that I never anticipated any of it, either the positive or the negative response. I never expected it to be so strong. I've gotten mail from men who were so moved and I know that it is a film that went over really well in, for instance, black neighborhoods. They knew exactly what was coming down, they were two steps ahead, and they didn't seem to be threatened.
Q: You mentioned testing movies in the Valley--what do you think of test-screening films?
A: Sometimes they test things and they don't trust the audience. Two people in a test group say, "Was he related to her or what was happening there?" And they go, uh-oh, gotta put in a voice-over, because they always want to appeal to the lowest common denominator to get those extra bucks. Does that mean that [the actor is then] beholden to have sex with animals if they decide that they should put it in afterwards? I don't know legally what the test of that is.
Q: I don't know either.
A: You know what they'll do? They'll just take you from another film, like they did in Forrest Gump, and then they'll make up the footage.
Q: What do you think about that? That's scary, isn't it?
A: I think we're gonna have to start patenting ourselves or something, or owning our images. A lot of actors are talking about it already. Because clearly it's something to be dealt with. I mean, it's a clumsy version in Forrest Gump, but it's a beginning, and it will get better, and then they can do away with us completely... I think that they should just stop breaking our hearts and they should dictate from the very beginning who they want to be in the film and what they want to have happen, so at least, when you make a movie, you won't be so devastated when they call you in to reshoot the whole thing.
Q: Have you been on movies that have been reshot because of the test screenings?
A: Yeah, absolutely.
Q: Like what?
A: White Palace. We shot the ending that was in the book, which is: she sits down, they look at each other, and you don't know what's gonna happen between them. But Pretty Woman had just come out, and they were thinking, "If we could only get him to marry her and they could have a big laugh." Jimmy [Spader] and I, we fought and fought, trying to keep our characters intact, but we did two reshoots on that. On Sweet Hearts Dance, that was a different problem, in that Don Johnson kind of threw the script out. So what happened was we had to do a month of reshoots at two different times to put back things that had been taken out.
Q: They didn't put back enough.
A: What?
Q: I just can't imagine how much they would have had to put back to make Sweet Hearts Dance into anything coherent.
A: The real mistake with that movie was that I thought it was about one thing, and they decided it was about these two guys who were never gonna grow up, a male-bonding thing. And who cares about that?
Q: Really, we get to see assholes like that everyday.
A: So, yes. I think the screenings and the discussion groups are terrible. The interesting thing is when they leave the discussion group, and you go out to dinner with all the suits and your agent and everybody else, no one agrees with what just came down in the discussion group. Everyone already has their opinion and they use the discussion group to rationalize it.
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.
__________________________________
Martha Frankel Interviewed Patrick Stewart for the November 1994 Movieline.