Abbie Cornish Reflects on Bright Star and Looks Ahead to Sucker Punch

What was the toughest thing about playing Fanny?

I think it was making sure I got the relationship between her and her mother right, because that was always the trickiest one, you know? The relationship between Fanny and Keats was just so present, it's in his poetry and their correspondence, but the relationship between Fanny and her mother...I mean, Jane really had to concoct that and make that was it was. For me, it was about finding a place where they have a strong connection between them and they care for each other, but at the same time they are mother and daughter, and it's different from a friendship or the relationship with a sister or a brother.

I thought you might say the toughest thing about playing her was having to do press after.

[Laughs]

Now that you're doing all these interviews and navigating the awards circuit, is that daunting for you, or do you regard it as a necessary thing to support a smaller film like this?

It is something that's necessary on a film like this. It's a film that I'm really passionate about and it was so rewarding that I care about what happens to it. It feels like a small family made this film -- we had such a small cast and crew -- so you do want to help get it out into the world. When we got it into film festivals, it was like we'd blown up this big balloon together and we tied it on a string, and at the Cannes Film Festival, we let it go and it went off into the sky. We let the wind take it away, we didn't know where it was going to go. It was a beautiful thing to be there together in that moment.

I'm sure that you'll be sent a lot of scripts with corsets after Bright Star, so are you happy that you'll have an action film like Sucker Punch following that?

Yeah. I mean, it's always fun to try different things and take on new challenges, and this film has definitely been a new experience for me. There's been three months of training, all the martial arts and swords and guns, and on top of that we're dancing and singing. I've absolutely loved it. Playing different characters in different films helps keep you excited about what you do. It always seems like a whole new adventure.

Is Sucker Punch more a of a musical than I had realized? When I interviewed Carla Gugino, she said she had shot a song-and-dance sequence for the film. Do you have one too?

I do. I have a dance in the film and at the end, all of us girls -- and Carla as well -- sing a song together. To be honest, there's a little bit of everything in this movie. It's kind of crazy: Because it's a fantasy and you're introducing a lot of different realities, there's so much in it. it jumps back and forth in time, from the fantasy world to the real world, but it's not quite a musical. There's just a few numbers in it.

To go from the small cast and crew of Bright Star to a big film like Sucker Punch...I can't think of two directors more different on their face than Jane Campion and Zack Snyder. Do you see any unlikely similarity between the two?

The one I thought of when you said that is, there was this one time doing Bright Star where Ben and I were doing a scene together, and he was sick and laying down in Mr. Brown's study. We finished the scene and I looked over at Jane at the monitor, and her face, it was like she was the third person in the scene. The look in her eyes, she had tears coming down her face...she was so in that moment, and it was really beautiful to see. Then, a couple of weeks ago when we were filming a heavy scene on Sucker Punch, I was watching Zack review the take afterwards and the same thing happened. His face! It was like he was in the scene, to see his face contort and shift and change while he was watching the monitor. He was right there with this emotion in his eyes, and it was gorgeous.

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