Jennifer Jason Leigh has made an art of exploring her own dark places through the dark characters she plays on-screen. Here she goes again in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ.
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For an actress whose screen work is a study in extremes, Jennifer Jason Leigh is extremely good at blending into the woodwork when you meet her in person. No one looking at the porcelain-skinned wisp of a woman sipping tea in the corner of a downtown Manhattan restaurant would guess that this is the feisty, deluded hooker from Last Exit to Brooklyn or the heroin-addicted screecher from Georgia.
At 37, Leigh has spent her entire career engaged in fearless adventures with disturbed, damaged, or at the very least, strange characters. For her first big role, in the telefilm The Best Little Girl in the World, she played an anorexic student. In the 1982 comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High her character was the only one who had to face a problem as big as teen pregnancy. In Rush she played a narcotics officer hooked on junk. In Single White Female she was a homicidal roommate. Her writer in Dolores Claiborne was so disturbed she had to soothe herself with alcohol and cigarettes around the clock. In Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle she portrayed the drunken, heartbroken title character. In Washington Square she was an ugly duckling heiress who falls for a gold digger. In A Thousand Acres she played the favorite daughter of a molesting father. And these are only some of the dark, troubled souls she's inhabited in her 19-year career.
Unlike most stars, Leigh doesn't seem to worry too much about where she stands in Hollywood. Critics tagged her as one of the most gifted actresses of her generation, but even critical approval seems vaguely irrelevant to her. Perhaps Leigh has been able to make her "actor's choices" without agonizing over their limited box-office appeal because she regards acting more as a way of life than a career. She was born in Hollywood, the daughter of writer Barbara Turner and the late actor Vic Morrow, and she's never been interested in doing anything else.
Leigh's preference for playing characters who are rich in complications continues with David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, in which she stars as a strangely shy recluse who loses herself in the computer game she has created, a game so complex it involves a lifelike pod which connects to a player's spinal column for total interactive reality.
MICHAEL FLEMING: We'll talk about your new film eXistenZ, but first I want to ask you about Eyes Wide Shut, in which people may have forgotten you once had a role opposite Tom Cruise. Under other circumstances it would have been your next film, but after you finished working on it you were replaced and your scenes were filmed over again with another actress. What happened?
JENNIFER JASON LEIGH: Stanley Kubrick needed to add some footage, but I was already working on eXistenZ. He said he needed two weeks, which with him ends up being four weeks, and I had no time--there was no way. I couldn't leave eXistenZ in the middle of the shoot.
Q: How much time had you spent shooting with Kubrick?
A: Ten days--it was just a cameo. I would love to have been there a whole year. I loved doing it, and I loved working with Stanley and Tom. Obviously I'm sad that I won't be in it, but I still have the experience of doing it.
Q: What's Kubrick like?
A: He's a mensch. He's smart, interesting and open. You could ask him about anything.
Q: It's a shame to have been cut out of a movie everyone's dying to see. You probably wait your whole career to work with Kubrick, and...
A: But I did work with him! That's the thing--I did. Unfortunately I won't ultimately get to be in the movie, but I did do it, and I'm glad about that.
Q: In eXistenZ, you play a genius who loses her inhibitions when she's immersed in her work. She sounds a bit like you, this reticent woman who lets loose on-screen in wild, daring roles.
A: In certain ways, she's something like me. She's a bit introverted in life and her release is in what she creates. She doesn't have to talk about it, but she expresses herself through these games. That's what I love about acting. I get to use other people's words to express myself. I get to explore all these things that are not safe, that I wouldn't otherwise get to do in real life. For me, a shy person, it's the most perfect thing in the whole world.
Q: What do you admire about Cronenberg?
A: I love his mind. His movies have been so out-there, so completely his own, but as crazy as they are, he is sane. He's loving, easygoing, low-key and smart.
Q: Was Cronenberg's Dead Ringers a resource for you when you played a woman trying to replace her lost twin in Single White Female?
A: When Dead Ringers came out, I saw it twice in a row. I loved it. But I didn't think of it for Single White Female. In that I was playing someone who didn't feel whole unless she was merged. I found that a painful psychology to get into, but also fascinating. It was a great character, because she was very dark but she wanted to be loved so much. Plus, I loved working with Bridget Fonda.
Q: You don't seem like the kind of actress who chooses roles for what they can do for you down the road.
A: No. When I find a role I want to play, I just go after it.
Q: Is that what happened when you read Alan Rudolph's script for Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle?
A: I really loved playing Dorothy Parker--it was one of the favorite times of my life. We were a great ensemble, and really liked each other. We had these huge dinners together and hysterical charades parties. It was fun just believing for a little while that we were these geniuses.
Q: A number of critics complained about the accent you created for that role.
A: That was Dorothy Parker's voice. The accent was pretty spot-on.
Q: Did it bother you to go to the trouble of replicating your character's exact speech patterns and then get criticized for it?
A: No, because to me it's absurd. If you're playing a person and you have recordings of their voice, it would seem a little stupid not to use them. I had a lot of tape on her. I went to bed with her voice and woke up with it. I studied it like it was an instrument. I had it down, so the criticism didn't really bother me.
Q: How much time do you spend getting the voices for your characters down?
A: Oh, forever. On voice alone I'd spend three hours a day. Especially for Parker, because we had about three months' prep before we shot that film--I had time to do a lot of research.
Q: In The Hudsucker Proxy, your voice sounded a lot like Katharine Hepburn's in Bringing Up Baby. Was she the inspiration for that aspect of your character?
A: What I tried to do was a mix of Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur and Rosalind Russell. I put their comedies on tape and listened to them.
Q: Critics first began to take note of you when you did Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which you played a hooker named Tralala.
A: I liked that movie--and Miami Blues, in which I loved working with Alec Baldwin, and got to improvise a lot. I did those films back-to-back, so I think of them together.
Q: And you played prostitutes in both.
A: But they were very different. Tralala was someone very split off and not in touch with her feelings at all. She'd been raised in a hellhole. To survive, she cut herself off from her emotions. And she envisions she is the queen of this neighborhood, that she is the best whore--the most beautiful, the sexiest, the best everything. Then she falls in love with this young soldier and it all falls apart. It scares the hell out of her because she had been so protected. So she goes into that bar and invites a gang bang so she can get her old self back. It's an attempt to salvage a self that didn't feel, that wasn't open and wasn't hurting and yearning. It ends up being a horrific, horrific rape, but she doesn't see it that way, she sees it as a desperate attempt to get herself back. It was very easy to play that scene, but it was very hard to watch.
Q: You had a meeting with Garry Marshall to play the hooker role in Pretty Woman that eventually went to Julia Roberts. But didn't you read the original script by J.F. Lawton, where she ends up being tossed out of a limo by the Richard Gere character, who then flings her $3000 into the street
A: Yes, I read the dark version. She was also a coke addict in that one. Garry wasn't interested in me at all. We had a very brief meeting and it was like, no, no, no. He actually said something so hysterical to me about the character--he said, "She's only been doing this a few weeks, so it's still a lot of fun for her." Yeah, it's a lot of fun getting into a car with a 68-year-old guy and giving him a blow job. Really exciting.
Q: While we're talking hookers, you played a phone-sex hooker in Robert Altman's Short Cuts.
A: I actually went to phone-sex places to see what happens. The first were really funny, but after a few weeks, it wasn't so funny. At one place there was a guy who was a heavy metal guitar player with a broken leg, playing a woman on the phone to make money while his leg healed.
Q: Some critics have said that if you'd varnished your characters a bit--made them less raw--you might have won an Oscar by now.
A: When you're doing a part, you don't say, Oh, I wonder if I'm going to win something for this. You're thinking, What does this person feel about herself when she wakes up in the morning. Or what did she dream last night? Or what will she eat for breakfast' You're trying to make that person as real, and true, as you can. That's what I'm trying to do. The other stuff, I don't think about.
Q: Most of the characters you've played could be described as being dysfunctional in one way or the other. Ever worry about being stereotyped?
A: Other people can concern themselves about that. My agent can, or my manager. I just go for parts that interest me, inspire me. Maybe there's something similar, but if I'm inspired to play that person I have to go with that. You have to be true to yourself on some level. It might not be the wisest strategy, but I'm just not a careerist.
Q: Isn't being in a hit important to your career?
A: Obviously it's great if a movie does well, that's terrific. But I never go into a movie thinking, "Oh, this is going to be a big commercial success." You can see that by my resume. I've done very few commercial films. But I'm really proud of the films that I've done... well, most of them.
Q: Which of your films are you most pleased with?
A: I really love Georgia. The whole thing was ecstatic filmmaking, though it took a toll on my health. Because I was playing a heroin addict I got down to 89 pounds, when I'm usually 105. I was emaciated and felt horrible, horrible, horrible. This character living inside me was like a virus, and like a virus it takes two or three weeks to dissipate before you come back to yourself.
Q: How much of the character you played in Georgia was culled from your sister, Carrie, whom you helped through some tough times when she was a heroin addict?
A: There are bits of Carrie in Sadie. A lot of the stuff like getting her to a hospital, being with her in the hospital, came from that. But [there's a big difference in that] Carrie has a tremendous singing voice.
Q: What kind of an emotional payoff did playing this spunout, expressive character have for you?
A: I got to sing, and I love singing, even though I'm not a good singer. I also liked working with my mom. I came up with the story, it came out of my head, and my mom wrote this incredibly brilliant script. It's great to see something you thought of made into a movie. The whole thing was magical.
Q: If you find playing a disastrously self-destructive character like Sadie "magical," is their any film you did that was difficult to do?
A: The character I played in Rush was obsessing about everything all the time and living in fear. That was a hard shoot. Very tough, on every level. It was the director's [Lili Fini Zanuck] first movie and she was very aggressive.
Q: How was making Backdraft, the only mainstream role of yours I can recall?
A: I love [director] Ron Howard, but I don't think I did a very good job on that movie. I didn't really know how to connect with that character, I didn't know what I was doing. But I tried hard.
Q: You seem very far away from the troubled, on-edge people you play onscreen. What is your life like offscreen?
A: Low-key, actually. I hate parties. I don't like big crowded things. I like hanging out with my friends. A really great night for me is going out to dinner, then going to the movies. That's about it. I'm really quiet. I have dogs, so I play with them. It's not like I have all these amazing hobbies, though I love to take pictures. I love Polaroids and I have a Polaroid camera collection from the '50s.
Q: Do you want to settle down, get married and have kids?
A: I don't know. I feel pretty settled down, but I don't know if I'd do those other things.
Q: You've never talked about who you're dating. Why?
A: I just don't want to talk about my personal life. I feel like it's mine, I'm not trying to promote it. It's nice to have things that are your own, that you value enough that you don't have to use to sell a movie.
Q: What do you think of the younger crop of actresses, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Winona Ryder?
A: I love Gwynnie. She was in Parker with me and I think she's tremendously talented. Even then she shined, so beautiful and spontaneous. She kind of took your breath away. I love Winona Ryder. And I think Christina Ricci is just fantastic--she's really got something and she makes wonderful choices.
Q: Do you think you've been successful as an actress because, like Gwyneth Paltrow, both your parents were already in the business when you were a child?
A: I was on sets a lot so it never seemed like this fantastic, faraway fantasy. It's what people around me did. I always knew I wanted to act, because it's where I felt free and most natural, and most uninhibited. When I was a little kid, I'd put on plays in the backyard. That's how I could accept myself.
Q: You're admittedly not a careerist, but where would you like to be in a decade?
A: There are directors I'd like to work with, everyone from [Martin] Scorsese to Jane Campion to Todd Solondz.
Q: Any new directions you'd like to go in?
A: Yeah, I'd like to do more comedies, because I enjoy doing comedy. But they're hard to find. Maybe they don't naturally come my way.
Q: It's interesting that you have the same agent as Johnny Depp. You two must drive her crazy, because you're both so talented and yet so determined not to appear in stereotypical studio films.
A: I'm happy with where my career is now. I've turned down things that I wish I hadn't turned down because they ended up being great movies and would have been good for me. But what are you going to do? You're not always right. I've made some stupid-ass mistakes. But that's OK.
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Michael Fleming interviewed Joel Schumacher for the February 99 issue of Movieline.