Despite nabbing an Academy Award last year with her self-financed and controversial “Consider” campaign, Melissa Leo says that neither life, nor the frequency of juicy Hollywood offers coming her way, is much different now that she's an Oscar-winner. “The projects you think have been offered to me have not, I guarantee you,” she told Movieline this week at SXSW in Austin, where she and directors Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy screened their minimalist character study Francine to critical applause. Still, Leo perseveres. And as the intimate acting showcase demonstrates, there’s plenty of reward to be had in smaller and more daring projects.
Francine follows the quiet, often disorienting moments in the experience of a woman recently released from incarceration (Leo) who is now slowly and cautiously adjusting to life on the outside. Taking on a number of jobs and tentative friendships, Francine finds herself increasingly comforted by stray animals she adopts, only further alienating herself from the people around her. Filming in New York’s Hudson Valley region, co-directors Shatzky and Cassidy tapped their photography and documentary film backgrounds to capture Francine’s attempts and failures at human interaction with a sensitive observational style that allows Leo the space to fully, and courageously, inhabit the character.
Prior to Francine’s SXSW premiere (which garnered high praise for Leo’s performance and the directors’ minimalist use of visual and aural elements), Leo spoke with Movieline about why she sought and lobbied for the lead in Francine, how things haven’t changed all that much since winning her Oscar, the emotional scene in which a dog appears to be euthanized onscreen, and why it was important to show Hollywood that she could “show up.”
How did you come to meet these folks and hear about their idea?
It was the summer before last sometime in the springtime, and the Hudson Valley film commissioner is a good friend of mine – he and his wife run the Woodstock Film Festival – and I get little blurbs from them online about what’s going on in the Hudson Valley. It was a casting call, but not for Francine – for the various and sundry characters she meets along the way, and a lead lady was required for this film. The name was Francine, after all! They were going to do something very interesting and tell a story largely through the pictures and not so much dialogue; that sounded like a really interesting notion, so I inserted myself through Laurent [Rejto] and said if they’d be interested in considering me for Francine I would love to talk to them about it.
And this was before you’d even seen a script?
From a paragraph, really, which I think was based on their own words. Just a little paragraph of what it was.
You sought this out from a single paragraph description, which makes me wonder: What sort of projects do you look for, and are you always searching?
Constantly looking is a very good way to put it, but I don’t know that I’m looking for one thing or another in particular. Something specific, but it could be a lot of things that are specific. And this project sounded A) very specific, B) a leading role, and this notion of taking film – young, young, film – into yet another realm – really taking it back to its basics, of the images. The sound in Francine is a very important element in the film, both the music that’s laid in and the sound – just like in The Artist! That’s not a silent movie; you don’t hear the actors’ dialogue but again in that film the sound is such an important aspect of the film. That all really intrigued me, but probably first and foremost the thing that caught my attention was the chance to do a lead.
But you’re Melissa Leo! Are lead roles still hard to come by?
Who’s that? [Laughs] I say that to you because that’s what most people even today still say. Cab drivers… and then there’s this embarrassing moment when they say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize!’ It’s really ok! Maybe I should wear a stamp on my forehead. But more seriously, the life of an actor is not what one imagines, and I find too that the life of an Oscar-winner is not what one imagines. For an actor, for an Oscar-winner, life is no different than for all the rest of us. We must try each day to be our best selves and make our best choices. Maybe we have a finer array of choices put in front of us, but the process is no less different. My experience, 365+ days later? The projects you think have been offered to me have not, I guarantee you. It will happen in time, if I persevere. But if I expect something to return because I took a beautiful golden statue and a lot of prestige home, I’m going to miss out on the second half of my life.
You still operate, then, the same way you always have when it comes to career choices?
I hope to continue to grow as I think I’ve done all my life, to continue to be my genuine self all at the same time. We’ll see how it goes!
Did you shoot in sequence?
No, which is why it’s really important that they’re able to share with me this project as a whole. If we would have shot sequentially, this idea of withholding is a very important notion for a director. There is an advantage in withholding, there is an advantage in telling everything; you’ve got to weigh out when to do that. If you had been going sequentially I would wager to guess they could have withheld more. When we shot 21 Grams, which is told in this beautiful poetic way that [Guillermo] Arriaga wrote it, but we shot it in sequential way which is one of the things that makes 21 Grams land in reality the way that it does. Because Benicio [Del Toro] and I and the kids all knew every moment before this that we’re shooting right now, as we shot. But that’s the key to this project and in the aftermath of getting to see it now and talking to you guys and Brian and Melanie, it has been endless growth and education to me, and I think to Brian and Melanie also, of how these two uses of film – my experience in 30 years as an actor and their experience of light through celluloid, and the sounds that accompany it! – it’s a fascinating marriage.
Your performance in Francine feels so alive and in the moment, especially compared to more heavily constructed films – almost theatrical in a way. Is this kind of work particularly rewarding compared to projects with more artificial constraints?
I take that as a compliment – I think that it can happen both on the stage and in film, where the film over takes what’s being shot. I’ve read some scripts of films that we might whine about – ‘Oh god, that one was so bad, and they spent how many millions of dollars on it?’ – and my heart goes out to the actors that lead in those films, because those characters aren’t written as characters in a story, they’re written as vehicles in a film. Francine might well be a very nice vehicle for me, I saw that, but it is not conceived of as such. She’s conceived of as a character, and that is Brian and Melanie’s gift to me.
As we watch Francine’s journey unfold onscreen there are a couple of moments and scenes that will likely jump out to viewers. Francine’s relationship with animals is significant; she not only takes them in as her companions, she also at one point works as a veterinary assistant. There’s a key sequence in which we see a cat injected and put under sedation, followed by a moment in which you cradle a dog as it’s being euthanized, and I have to ask… what were the circumstances of shooting those veterinary scenes? Because they certainly felt real.
[It was] an appointment he had had standing for many weeks beforehand! [Laughs] This was the part of the film, when we were shooting at the vet’s, when my world walked right into their documentary world. It was fascinating to be there as Francine and be permitted by this veterinarian to be there. ‘Don’t you need me to put a mask on?’ ‘No, no, you’re fine.’ It’s a great question, and it’s important first of all for people to understand – I think I’m pretty much an animal lover but these guys live and die for the beasts. Their love for them is so palpable and strong, that the notion of making Francine with anybody ever being hurt in the process, they would sooner hurt me than the animals! [Laughs]
I knew in my brain that there was no way these animals were at risk of actual harm, but the emotion of the moment certainly feels real; you feel that this creature is being put to sleep before your eyes.
That’s moviemaking! That cleverness on the filmmaker’s part to time it and understand my belief, as Francine, that I am holding a dying dog, that makes you believe. That’s what we’re doing here together.
From your point of view, what are the ethical complications, if any, of even integrating real anesthetization into a fiction film?
It’s interesting, the question arises; how many of the many, many films they have here at SXSW portray a human being dying, by natural causes or by someone else’s hand? Human death in films is so common, you can’t have a movie without somebody dying! The notion of animals, that there wouldn’t be some way to use that life reality in the same exact way that we do…
When you look at your current and future choices of projects, how do you see the balance of smaller films like Francine versus bigger, more mainstream films?
Well maybe when they offer me those bigger films I’ll have to consider balancing them! [Laughs] I think everything’s going to be just fine, it is looking like a very nice year. I have had a job these last three years on HBO doing Treme, and in a way my time is built around Treme just now. I think that things will come and go and change, but honestly it felt the summer before last I had been working on Treme and that seemed to be a good money earner – I’m not a billionaire from it but it’s a nice steady gig – so when I saw this come up in the Hudson Valley I thought, ‘Oh! I can spend a month at home and be near home shooting a movie, and I love the Hudson Valley and sharing that on film with people.’ I don’t know if my choosing has been quite as discerning as the body of characters I’ve played; I’ve taken what’s come along, and I think that in the next little while here it’ll continue to be the same. I’ll have the opportunity to help newer filmmakers discover new and different aspects of film and continue to work in larger machines. I shot two days on [Robert] Zemeckis’s Flight with Denzel Washington and those two days are going to get me a lot of mileage next year when that movie comes out. So it’s all going along really fabulously and I’m really glad and pleased with the timing of Francine, too – it feels really beautiful to me after working off-Broadway in theater, independent film, and the quirky television thing. It fits right in with me and my work.
Talking with you about your work philosophy reminds me of the “Consider” campaign you ran yourself, and successfully. Do you still feel like you need to be proactive about your own image and brand in certain ways?
Nobody’s asked me about that for a long time, and it was very misunderstood. I did it. I initiated it being done, with the help of close friends I actualized it. Had I asked representation or the other people that actors work with they would have strongly advised against me doing such a thing. Why, I don’t know… maybe they didn’t understand my intention, either. Maybe they were fearful for what seems to have been the result of it; it got a lot of nasty things said online, but that was not my intention at all. My intention was this: I was being considered, or so it seemed at that point, and getting prizes in lots of places, for playing a woman who is a good 20 years older than I am. If I’m going to have a chance at winning an Oscar and being able to think of myself as a movie star in some kind of way, and maybe getting that kind of work one day, it dawned on me that I would have to show Hollywood that I can show up like a movie star.
I had asked a publicist to get me the cover of a magazine, but there was no cover of no magazine. When I finally solicited from the publicist, ‘Tell me what they say – I know they say no, you’ve told me you asked them but what do they say? I need to hear a reason.’ Too old, not big enough box office. Okay, well that’s factual. I don’t need to take an insult from that; now I have some facts to work with. So I got myself up like a movie star, and I paid my own money, and I said to Hollywood, simply, ‘Consider.’ Not for an Academy Award, not for a blah blah blah, but just ‘Consider.’ To me it seemed a gracious thing to do. To me it seemed a way of taking care of my own business. That’s all it was.
You’re much more candid about most actors about acknowledging the need to be proactive in your own career and aware of the machine and how you fit into it.
The machine’s never carried me along. I’m only in the machine because I’ve insisted on being there.