Ashley Judd: Steel Magnolia
Q: Would you also like to direct?
A: You bet. No doubt about it. I'd say next year. Definitely. For some of us it's a very natural evolution. I like responsibility, I like being comprehensive. I have both diffused awareness and problem-solving capacities, and it's just the vortex for a person like me. It's such a great repository for all of one's resources, energies, talents, abilities. I can't wait.
Q: Would you like to follow the path of Jodie Foster?
A: I've never met Jodie Foster. She's extremely admirable. [But] I don't look at other people, because I have to go to bed and wake up with me.
Q: What makes Jennifer Jason Leigh the best actress of your generation, as you've described her?
A: She doesn't fumble around wondering. She seems completely pledged to using herself.
Q: Who else do you admire?
A: I love Vanessa Redgrave. She is such an open vessel through which it passes. And I love Meryl Streep and Jessica Lange, Judy Davis, Joan Allen.
Q: What about men?
A: Bob, Al, Val.
Q: The Heat trio.
A: I'm not very oriented towards men. Growing up in a very feminine-centric family, my concept of art is much more easily touched by what women do. [But] I think Ed Harris is a very good actor. Nicolas Cage always makes me laugh. I think that Val and I should definitely work together again. I'm over the moon about Gene Hackman. I would love to do something with Mr. Duvall.
Q: So far with your career, any regrets?
A: Zero. No regrets. Proud of everything.
Q: What are your favorite books and writers?
A: Always Edith Wharton and Steinbeck. Then C.S. Lewis. I'm reading The Screwtape Letters. I'm reading Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, which is a very funny book. I'm reading Steve Martin's plays. I just read two books by an Irish writer named Colum McCann, Songdogs, his novel, and_ Fishing the Sloe-Black River_, his collection of stories. I'm also finishing a book called Mystic in the Theater: Eleonora Duse. [Gets up and goes from the patio to the living room and brings back Stephen Mitchell's The Gospel According to Jesus.] This is the book. Stephen Mitchell is a scholar and a translator of the Tao Te Ching and the Book of Job. What he did here was resume Thomas Jefferson's work in taking all the translations of the gospels and putting them side-by-side and using the spiritual sense of discernment to distill it all down to the essential teachings of Jesus. [This version of the gospel stresses] that forgiveness is not an action, it is a state of mind. You can't galvanize yourself into forgiving someone because you extract it from your morality. You do it because you have a vision.
Q: Isn't that giving a selfishness to the act of forgiving?
A: Oh, but that's the continuation of the most beautiful, complicated, ambiguous--and yet right--yin and yang, the micro and the macro. If I am going to have a sense of nonattachment about what you do, then I don't care what you do because you do have to be accountable to me and to other humans. At first Buddhism seems so easy, and then you get into stuff like that and you realize why it takes 40 years. If.
Q: Wow, we jumped from Christ to Buddha. Let's stay Western. I gather you read the Bible.
A: I don't go anywhere without it, but I can't say I read it every day. I have little devotional books that I look at every day. The Psalms are a bit like haiku. It is clean, but it is very deep and very poetic. "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; there shall thy hand lead me." Psalm 139. It's fabulous.
Q: Let's get back to you. How many times have you skydived and bungee-jumped?
A: Bungee-jumped once, skydived twice.
Q: When do you chew tobacco?
A: Whenever I want. Sometimes three times a day, sometimes not for a month.
Q: Isn't that kind of disgusting? Where do you spit?
A: In a Cinderella cup from Disneyland.
Q: How long have you been chewing?
A: A year and a half.
Q: Do you smoke cigars?
A: Not so much anymore, since I started to chew.
Q: I understand that you often fast.
A: I did that twice last year and I won't do it again for quite a while.
Q: What do you most dislike about your appearance?
A: Right now I have a freckle I'm bleaching.
Q: How do you make soap?
A: Lard and lye. Gets hot in a pot, stir it carefully making sure not to touch it because the lye hasn't gone through the chemical change rendering it innocuous. Then you pour it into plastic Tupperware, cover it with a cheese cloth or a little calico, and put it on the floor in the corner. Eventually when it firms up, remove the cloth and cut it into bars.
Q: What question would make you want to stop doing this interview?
A: Some stupid question about the future which necessitates my being prescient.
Q: So where do you think you'll be 10 years from now?
A: [Laughs]
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Lawrence Grobel interviewed Harrison Ford for the July '97 issue of Movieline.
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