On the verge of a long-overdue break from her incessant work schedule (more than a dozen films in the last three years alone) and awaiting the birth of her second child, two-time Oscar nominee Julianne Moore discusses motherhood, money, on-screen nudity, on-set nooky and her latest film, The Shipping News.
________________________________________
When the end of the year rolls around, and Hollywood releases its most award-worthy movies, you can pretty much expect to see Julianne Moore in one or two of them. Moore, who garnered Best Actress Oscar nominations for 1997's Boogie Nights and 1999's The End of the Affair, has become something of a prestige-film staple. But on one late-fall afternoon, when Moore has a lunch date with Movieline timed for the release of her latest project, The Shipping News, she is nowhere to be found. The unseasonably warm weather in New York City belies the fact that not far away, crews are still clearing the smoking rubble from a pit that was once the World Trade Center. While the first impulse is to worry that something unexpected has happened to Moore--perhaps she had to run to the doctor to check on her pregnancy with her second child by writer-director and longtime boyfriend Bart Freundlich--you suspect that she's simply forgotten, and is just as scattered as most New Yorkers walking around in a fog even a month after the unimaginable horror.
Sure enough, her publicist insists Moore was profusely apologetic when informed of her oversight, that it was the first time this has happened to her. Mutual friends who know Moore well testify that she's the antithesis of a flake, and imagine that, when she found out that she missed her appointment, she turned a shade of crimson that rivaled her hair color.
As predicted, an apology is the first thing I hear after I've driven, weeks later, to the New Jersey-based set of Far From Heaven, a movie that casts her as a 1950s suburban housewife and reteams her with writer-director Todd Haynes, for whom she turned in an acclaimed performance as a housewife who becomes allergic to her environment in 1995's Safe. That character seems to have endured, for there is a report in this morning's New York Post that Moore skipped the previous day's shoot because she suffered from an allergic reaction to sugar after being slipped a sugary drink, and had to be rushed to a doctor.
Recovering from her belated embarrassment, Moore warms to the gossip. "It's complete fabrication," she laughs. "I was picked up at 4 a.m. and worked all day, but what I liked about [the story] is that somebody slipped me the drink, so technically I'm not culpable. And also, I'm not allergic to sugar." She will prove it during lunch by consuming two large pieces of cake which surely would have induced a full-blown sugar coma, were she so afflicted.
Born in North Carolina to a military judge father and a social worker mother, the 40-year-old Moore moved more than two dozen times during her childhood. Upon graduation from Boston University's School of Performing Arts, she headed to New York, where she did theater and won a Daytime Emmy Award for her performance as half-sisters Frannie and Sabrina Hughes on the soap opera "As the World Turns." Television movies and miniseries led to feature films, including early roles in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Fugitive and, perhaps most memorably, director Robert Altman's Oscar-nominated ensemble film Short Cuts, in which, during an argument with her character's husband, played by Matthew Modine, she removes her skirt to clean a stain, and plays the rest of the scene naked from the waist down.
Since then, Moore has alternated between critically acclaimed independent projects like Vanya on 42nd Street, Safe and The Myth of Fingerprints (during which she met Freundlich, the film's writer-director) and studio-produced popcorn fare like Nine Months, Assassins and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Surviving Picasso, Psycho and Magnolia further reinforced her eclectic taste in material.
In person, Moore is not exactly what you expect, but you don't know really what to expect given that, unlike many female stars who essentially repeat the same performance in different movies, Moore is a risk-taker who is different in each film. The drug-addicted porn star in Boogie Nights is nothing like the temptress in The End of the Affair, who's nothing like the corseted bitch in An Ideal Husband, who's nothing like the spoiled rich girl who covers her body with paint, flings herself at a canvas and calls it art in The Big Lebowski. Even succeeding Jodie Foster's Oscar-winning performance in The Silence of the Lambs with Hannibal, which turned out to be a big hit, took moxie.
This risk-taking nature has made Moore one of the most prolific actresses in Hollywood. In 1999 alone, she made five films, and 2001 brought three more: Hannibal, the science-fiction comedy Evolution and The Shipping News, director Lasse Hallström's adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1994 novel about a newspaperman (Kevin Spacey) who, after a painful breakup with his wife (Cate Blanchett), returns to his ancestral home in Newfoundland, where he slowly rebuilds his life through a relationship with a local woman, played by Moore. And she has already completed the marital drama World Traveler, written and directed by Freundlich, and The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel centered on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, directed by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot) and co-starring Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman.
Although Moore rarely seems to slow down (offscreen, she is a spokesperson for Revlon cosmetics), this latest spate of work will be her last for a long time. After Far From Heaven, she plans to rest, have her baby and take a nice, relaxing break.
MICHAEL FLEMING: Word of your pregnancy got around quickly in Hollywood because you were expected to join John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in the John McTiernan-directed film Basic. Congratulations on having to drop out.
JULIANNE MOORE: Thank you. My son, Cal, is three and a half, so this is perfect timing. I love John McTiernan, but it was difficult because I was trying to keep this quiet. We were supposed to be having a creative conversation about the movie and I just finally said, "I'm pregnant. Please don't tell anyone."
Q: Pregnancies bring up insurance complications for movies. Was it a problem on Far From Heaven, or when you became pregnant with your first child?
A: I got pregnant with Cal on The Big Lebowski, which seems kind of funny, somehow. So I was barely pregnant when I made that movie, and there wasn't much to worry about. We were in preproduction on this movie when I told Todd. He said, "Great, congratulations," and not "But what about my movie?" He was so excited for me, and I said, "Listen, I think we're going to be OK. We'll be able to kind of hide it until the end." Then we went into the whole insurance thing, which wasn't easy.
Q: How far along will you be by the time this film wraps?
A: I'll be close to five months, so I don't know how much I'll show. It's not so bad now, even though they're already having to adjust my clothing. It's a '60s look, and I'm going baggy. My solution is to wear big pants and belt them low.
Q: You seem to have earned a rest. What did you make, like five movies over the past 12 months?
A: It has been bad, way more than I meant to do. I did Hannibal, which was just so much fun, and then I went right into my boyfriend's movie, World Traveler. Then I did Evolution, and that's when the rumblings began about a possible strike. I wanted to do another movie, and then The Hours and The Shipping News happened right on top of each other, both competing for the same slot. Both were movies I really wanted to do; I couldn't choose, so we squeezed both in. But everybody was in the same boat, working more because of a fear there would be a strike.
Q: Will it be easy for you to take off?
A: It will; maybe a year because of the baby. You don't know how long, but I'm not planning to work for a really long time.
Q: You've been about as prolific as Samuel L. Jackson, who, even though he is a leading man, once said he gets insecure when he's not working. Do you feel that way, like all of this might stop if you don't move right on to the next one?
A: I understand it, and every actor feels that way--like one day it will all end. But that's not it for me. Once I finish a movie, it's no longer creative, no longer alive. It's over for me.
Q: Do you ever think that having too many movies in the marketplace will hurt your price, or your ability to leave audiences wanting more?
A: Those are business decisions that you kind of can't think about. If I want to do something it's because I really like the part, I like the script or the director and I'm interested in a creative way. Maybe you'll do a movie because it's got a chance to be commercial and it will make you some money. But I don't strategize that much about it.
Q: Well, when you do movies more for a business reason, some of them, like Evolution, haven't worked, while The Lost World did. Are you sometimes compelled to take these roles just to be in a big movie?
A: I did Evolution because it was a comedy, and I never get to do those. It wasn't because it was a big movie. It felt nice for a change to do something that wasn't very serious. I didn't have to cry once, which made me very happy.
Q: It has been a particularly numbing time for any New Yorker since September 11. You don't live far from the World Trade Center. Where were you when it happened?
A: We live very close, in the West Village. But we were at the Toronto Film Festival, about to show World Traveler and start our second day of press. We'd gone down to the lobby around 9 a.m., and were about to introduce the movie, when someone in the lobby said that something had run into the World Trade Center. We went right back to the room to watch television--myself, Bart and Billy Crudup. We turned on the TV and watched the second plane hit. Like everybody, we were stunned. The day went by and we stayed in that room. Thankfully, our son was with us. That would have been too scary to imagine. If he'd been in New York, I would have crawled home. As it was, Bart went right to the airport and rented two minivans, and we took everyone who wanted to go back once they reopened the border.
Q: What was it like when you got back?
A: When we drove back, it was dark and you couldn't see anything, really, but the smoke. You could see that even in the dark. Because we live below 14th Street, there was this police line. We had to show ID to get our car through. You could already see by then how extraordinary the people of New York were. We asked the cops if we could get them pizza, and the guy was like, "Oh, man, I can't eat anything else." He pointed to this big pile of food boxes behind him. But the devastation has been overwhelming and still is. It took a long time to process, the horrible idea that these people were just vaporized.
Q: What's it like being an actor in New York right now? Did you go to any benefits?
A: We went to the fireman's benefit organized by Denis Leary, and spoke to a lot of them. It was heartbreaking because you could see they just felt so guilty they had survived. Denis gave a great speech, saying, "You guys did a great job, go easy on yourselves." I gave a speech about my little boy, who just loves firemen. The thing about the firemen in the city is that they're just so good to the kids. They'll be on their way to a fire and they'll wave. I've taken my son on tours of the firehouse. I was talking to one of them about my little boy and he said, "Don't let your boy be a cop or a fireman." You'd never think about that, and it's terrifying. In the speech, I'd said that we didn't think he knew anything because when we were in Toronto, we kept him in the other room. We said there had been a fire, but we didn't go into what happened in the planes. Then two weeks later at dinner, he said, "Mommy, why did the firemen die?" We just lost it.
Q: What did you say?
A: We said they have very dangerous jobs, that they were saving people's lives in the building, and some of them got caught in the fire. We told him that it was going to be OK, that there wasn't going to be another fire. It's just awful, for the kids.
Q: Is your son aware of what you do for a living?
A: He knows that I act. He just thinks it's something people do. In school, they ask the kids what they think their parents do. He said, "Well, I think she acts, and he does real work." He'll see a poster, like on the subway, and he'll yell out, "Look, Mommy! That's your movie!" And I'll be like, "Shhhh." He has a heightened sense of what's make-believe, what is a movie. So he'll say, "I don't know why Jimmy is afraid of this. It's just a movie." He realizes.
Q: Tell me about The Hours. You star with Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep. Did you bond with them?
A: I can't tell you because it will spoil the film. It's [about] three different women at three different points in time. It follows the arc of Virginia Woolf. One is Virginia Woolf, another is a woman nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway, because she has a lot of parallels to that character. A third character is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and that's me, a housewife in the '50s with a young child. There is some overlap but I can't tell you where because it will ruin the surprise.
Q: But you got to spend some time with Meryl Streep, or was it Nicole Kidman?
A: I can't tell you, stop it!
Q: Well, tell me under the guise that you could have run into each other in a corridor, while you were shooting different time periods. I just wondered how it was bonding with actresses you admire.
A: That's the best part of the job, getting to work with the actors and directors I have.
Q: So you had a bonding experience with important actresses, you just can't tell me who?
A: Yes, exactly.
Q: Did you do the movie because of the cast or director, or because you were a fan of the source material?
A: It was the book. I got it for my birthday a couple years ago, read it and loved it. I never thought it could be made into a movie, though, because it is so dense. Years go by, I hear there's going to be a movie of it and I get offered the part I liked best. On Shipping News, I was in Alabama and I got a call from Lasse Hallström and from Kevin Spacey. I got a voice on the cell phone and it's like, "Hallo, thees is Lasse Hallström, I want you to bee in my moovee," and then I hear, "Hey, this is Kevin Spacey." Things come about in different ways. The Hours was a no-brainer, because it was a part I so identified with. I would have torn out my eyeteeth to play that role. Shipping News was a lovely project, but I always wanted to work with Lasse and Kevin.
Q: When Bart plans a movie, does he automatically expect you to be in it? When he wrote World Traveler, about a guy who leaves his family, fools around and then wants to come back, did you read it at each stage? Or does he get in line like other directors?
A: He told me his idea for World Traveler long before we had a baby, even before we were pregnant. That's why it's interesting that people say the story is based on our lives. We really had just been dating by then. He had this idea for the character, it was about a woman and her relationship to her child. I was excited by the idea and he'd fill me in now and then. I always knew I'd do it. But he's writing something right now with a very dear friend of mine in mind for it. So she's going to be the female character in it. I don't think I'm going to be in it at all. And I'm fine with that.
Q: How is it to act with your mate? I think if I tried to hang a picture with my wife, we'd get into a fight. Making a picture would be impossible.
A: It's hard. Bart is exceptionally patient, which I love about him as a director. But the thing that is most difficult is that we know each other so well, our personal signals and what goes on between us are very subtle. He can see when I start to get tense, whereas another director might not know. I can see it in him. It's good and bad that we're attuned to each other like that. Things you'd ordinarily like to hide from your director are very visible to him.
Q: Does it ever impact negatively on your relationship, like if you have a bad day?
A: No. Especially because it allows us to spend more time together, so I'm always happy about that. You drive to work together, you drive home, you can talk about everything. It's nice.
Q: I've talked to people about you and your reputation is: very professional, not a prima donna...
A: She's no fun at all...
Q: And there you go, having an affair on the set with the director of The Myth of Fingerprints. Was that awkward?
A: It was awful. Especially because it was his first movie. I wasn't seeing anybody at the time, it was all very casual, but I called Ellen Barkin, who's a great friend of mine, and told her what I was feeling. She said, "You're sleeping with him, aren't you?" I said, "I am not!" She said, "Well, you'd better not, because you're going to ruin his movie." I refused to acknowledge that, but I felt terribly guilty.
Q: Like being pregnant, did you try to keep it quiet on the set?
A: We did keep it quiet on the set. We tried to be discreet but you never really are as discreet as you think. You're looking around, wondering who knows. At least we stayed together, so we don't have to feel like it was some casual set affair.
Q: Some people fall in love on movie sets--like every time they make a movie.
A: I never do. I had never done that before, gotten involved like that. It's just not something I do. It was kind of a surprise and I was a little embarrassed.
Q: You'd been married once before [to actor John Gould Rubin]. After your divorce you spent time in L.A. in the movie scene, dating. Did you feel you were ready to settle down again?
A: I suppose I was. I wasn't really thinking about it then. I wasn't officially divorced; we were in the process. I think I was ready for a serious relationship, but I wasn't thinking that when I met Bart. He's younger, and so you don't think...
Q: Do you think when he brought you in he had those designs?
A: No, he really didn't. It surprised him as much as it did me. I think we were both very shocked by it.
Q: With a second child on the way, do you think you'll get married?
A: I don't really know. We feel pretty comfortable and happy right now the way things are. Marriage is not something we've thought that much about. Truth is, having a child or two with someone connects you to a person forever. It's the biggest commitment you can make.
Q: I want to talk about some of your movies. When Jodie Foster stepped out of Hannibal, was that a role you wanted badly? Or were you hesitant succeeding an Oscar-winning performance?
A: It happened so fast, there wasn't a whole lot of time to process it. I was on my way to London to do press for The End of the Affair when I was told I was on the short list and would get the script. I read it, and it was good. Then I was in Ireland when I was told Ridley [Scott] wanted to meet me in L.A. I said I couldn't do it, I was in London two days, Ireland two days. I wanted to go home and see my kid. No way was I going to L.A. Of course, I went out there for a day, but the only thing I was thinking about was that we liked each other, and then I had the offer and the job. I don't torture myself about movies unless I have an offer.
Q: You've been one of the most prolific actresses, at an age when some slow down. Has this been deliberate?
A: I have done a lot of movies. But you have to realize that, with a movie like Short Cuts, that was two weeks, maybe three weeks, of work.
Q: A question about that argument scene with Matthew Modine, where you appeared bottomless...
A: Oh, don't go there, please. It's so boring.
Q: Well, one question. Did you know that you'd be full-frontal in the script and say, "Sure, let's go," or did you have to think long and hard about it?
A: When a director like Bob Altman asks you to do something like that, you do it. And he doesn't lie about it, he tells you exactly what it is and says, "Will you do it?" I said, "Yeah." Because I know what he does.
Q: What was clever was seeing a nude scene with no sexual context. John McTiernan told Movieline that when he remade The Thomas Crown Affair, he wanted Rene Russo to appear topless while talking business because it made her character seem tough and uninhibited. There was no sexual context. Your scene was a husband and wife in the worst argument they've ever had, and it made sense she'd be oblivious to being nude. Yet it took McTiernan the whole shoot to convince Rene to do those scenes.
A: The greatest strength you have as an actor is a great script and director, and then it's so relaxing. I feel this way with Todd; I rely on him. There are so many things I don't have to think about. A director's job is not to direct the performance; people always confuse a director with being some kind of acting coach. They're not supposed to be in there saying, "Do it a little sadder, you should be thinking about your dead dog." That's baloney. It's my job to come up with that performance. If the directors like Bob Altman, Todd, Paul Thomas Anderson and is doing his job, I can do something special.
Q: Was there one film that helped you start your momentum? Perhaps Boogie Nights, in which you were a revelation?
A: It was my first Oscar nomination, and people noticed me in a different kind of way. I also feel that way about The End of the Affair because it was a love story--heartbreaking and poetic. But once again, my career has been such a series of small steps.
Q: For the porn scene you did with Mark Wahlberg, you managed to act it just badly enough that it seemed like many of those porn films of the '70s without straying into parody. Why?
A: We only watched a couple of those movies. What you're really doing is trying to remember how it is for people who don't know how to act. She wasn't connected through her body or her voice. She doesn't know how to get across any kind of sense of rhythm. You can watch some porn films and see wonderful actors, especially in the '70s. But we chose to do someone terrible. So there's a moment where I push myself away from the chair, while saying a line, and I throw myself off balance. That's someone who is trying to be naturalistic, who doesn't know how to put a gesture in there without stopping. They have no sense of language. You have to do it just right, because you don't want to be making fun of anybody. It only took a couple of takes.
Q: Magnolia felt somehow all over the place. Did you feel good about the movie?
A: I think it was a really inventive and wonderfully ambitious piece of work, very challenging and hard to do and I was glad for the opportunity to try something really big and find my way through it.
Q: When you're in a big movie that doesn't do that well, like Evolution or Magnolia, do you take it hard?
A: No, I don't care. I don't mean to sound callous.
Q: You don't wait to get the weekend numbers from the studio?
A: No, that's none of my business. If I were a producer, and had a business interest, maybe I'd feel different. If I do a movie like Magnolia, I'm not doing it for box office; that's an art film and you're trying things. When you do a more commercial movie like Evolution and it doesn't do well, well, what the hell are you going to do about it? It's like, you made it, you had a good time, you hope it will do well for all the people involved, the studio. But it's not something you can get crazy about. Now, maybe if I cared a bit more about how much my films made, I'd be a big movie star and make more money.
________________________________________
Michael Fleming interviewed Michael Mann for the November issue of Movieline.