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Julianne Moore Interview
Had you always wanted to be in a '50s movie? No. I don't have any desire to do anything but a really good script. I was just thrilled and excited when Todd [Haynes] sent this to me because I think this is a masterpiece. I think the script was just magnificent and he is a wonderful, wonderful talent. So, that was exciting to me. Is something drawing you to the 1950s housewife role, with this and "The Hours?" No, that's an unfortunate coincidence. I actually said to somebody, "The worst thing about having two movies out at the same time is that people want to compare and contrast the movies because they have to write a story." Unfortunately, they're both in the '50s so I'm gonna have to talk about that when it really was just a coincidence. I mean, they're both really, really different kinds of people and different kinds of stories. I was fortunate to get to do both but they don't have any bearing on one another. How would you describe the tone of this film? This movie is not a movie about the '50s per se and the style is not like we're acting like people in the '50s. This is a movie where we are performing in the manner of movies in the '50s. So, this is movie behavior. It's not real behavior. That was one of the challenges about doing the film. I think it was so interesting that my mother was a teenager in the '50s but she didn't behave in this fashion. By Jane Wyman and Lana Turner and Dorothy Malone and John Bennett, this was a fashion, a kind of very particular kind of acting style that they did in the '50s, which is quite different. Was make-up maintenance a big part of this character? The production values were immensely high in this. Todd is just absolutely an extraordinary director in the fact that he's probably the only person I've ever known who worked with a color chart. Literally, the movie was colorized. We had a meeting one day to talk about some stuff, my hair or something, and then everybody was coming in. The wardrobe person was coming in, the D.P., and the production designer. Everybody was coming in to talk about color, scene by scene. So, every single detail of this movie has a meaning, and has some effect on what's going on. The color of the leaves, the color of the car, my dress, my gloves, my scarf. Where is my scarf? Is it in my pocket or on my head, you know? All of that stuff has some kind of meaning to the story. So, in that sense, that kind of construction is something that we were all aware of and worked very hard to maintain. It was a very interesting way to work because as an actor, it's a lot of fun to have style and that kind of artifice but at the same time, in this kind of genre, you have all the emotion. You have all of that content. It was great to have those things to work with all the time, that duality. What were your first meetings like with Todd Haynes? Todd and I never talk. We made a movie before and we have a very symbiotic, very easy relationship where we don't have to explain things to one another for one reason or another. I don't know why. And I don't like to talk a lot. He talked about some movies that he was referencing, and there are some moments that were referenced very directly, some stuff in "All That Heaven Allows," "The Reckless Moment" and "Written on the Wind" - that kind of stuff. We would talk about, you know, "Did you see this? What do think of that?" But once we were there, I had a sense of what he wanted from the script and from the way he moved his camera. He would talk about what the arc of a scene was and then where I would go in the room. We actually had a full house. Our set was built like a house, not like room by room by room. Literally you could go in, you could walk up to the front door in the living room, go around the dining room into the kitchen and up to the upstairs. It was sort of extraordinary. What is most interesting to you about those movies? What's interesting to me is that these movies are such a commentary couched as melodramas. It's remarkable that Douglas Sirk and Todd Haynes are able to talk about people who are disenfranchised or kind of outside of their community in some way, or feeling the pressures of what it's like to live in a town in the United States at that time. I mean, that's what's so exciting about these [films], but the content is actually so rich and interesting and humane. What do you think happens to your character after you leave the train station? What's interesting is how many people ask me that, or how many people come up to Todd. This woman came up and she said [sobbing], "You know, I know it's gonna be okay for Cathy. It's gonna be okay because the '60s are coming." And it's true. It's great. It's interesting because I literally just had an interview about the same thing, the guy kept saying, "What happens to her?" And I said, "What is interesting is that so many people are very concerned about what happens to her and want to know what her options are. Can she go somewhere, how do they see it?" Elmer Bernstein, who wrote the score, sees the ending as very hopeful. He really thinks this is the best thing that can happen for Cathy. And you see also what Todd does, too, is that he pulls back, and you see the blossoms coming on the tree because it's spring again. So, you could say yes, maybe now she's going to live an authentic life. Maybe now something will change. How has motherhood changed you as a person and in your choice of roles? It's what's been the most profound event of my life, you know, motherhood. It changes you ultimately and wonderfully and it's made me incredibly happy. I was saying earlier, the more experiences I have in my personal life, the richer it makes my personal life and then the richer if makes my professional life. It kind of spills over into that. Does your son understand what you do? He thinks I work in a trailer - Mommy's Work Trailer. But he's a little older, he's four and a half now so now he knows that I do acting. If he wants to act, would you be okay with it? No. I am very, very opposed to children acting. I'm very opposed to children working. I think acting is work and you shouldn't have a job when you're a kid unless you have like a kid job, like a job at a frozen yogurt stand when you're 15 or a paper route or babysitting, that kind of stuff. I don't think you should have real adult responsibility and I think that acting is an adult responsibility. Do you let yourself think about awards? We were so thrilled by Venice, I mean, so, so very, very excited. It meant a lot to us because it's a small movie and a very specialized movie. It's easy for a movie like this to slip through the cracks. So, when we got those awards, we were kind of shocked and thought maybe there is an audience for this movie. It was nice to have that kind of like a trumpeting of the film. We came to Toronto with it and now in the States and so it just gives us hope that people are going to be excited and interested in it. And, I think that that's what, really, at the end of the day, that's what everybody gets excited about with awards. It's that it means that people will see the movie. Because it's gotten so pressurized in the film business. You either have these giant blockbusters with huge advertising campaigns behind them that people are going to see because they all want to see the next "Spider-Man," or you have these little teeny movies. And people will only see the little teeny movies if they get attention from these prizes, and so that's kind of what you hope. You just hope that people will see it. |
