By Izumi Hasegawa

Izumi Hasegawa: How did you get into this project?

Anjelica Huston: [Laughs] I simply asked. Clark Gregg, I guess, knew my work and sent me the script, which I thought was really strange and interesting, and another fiendish mother so, you know, I couldn’t refuse.

IH: You’ve been playing unusual mother characters less. I saw The Darjeeling Limited – amazingly bringing such life and energy, and a joy to these people that are otherwise sort of on the fringe and a little dark… So when you’re taking on these roles, what is your process in how you go about going “I want to do this” and “I want to bring it to a different level”?

AH: Well thank you. That’s very nice. I think I’m attracted to these characters because they’re imperfect and so am I, and there’s always something fascinating about playing people who have a lot going on under the surface — who have secrets, who have maybe a little bag of tricks, and that’s how I see Ida and those characters are — there’s a tongue-in-cheek quality about playing those characters, like you’ve got a dirty little secret nobody else has, and that’s a bit the way I felt about Lilly Dyllon in The Grifters – just something to keep in your back pocket. I think really good lines have a lot to do with that, You can put them on a coat and, in this case, I liked very much the flashbacks and the relationship as it unfolds and unravels with Victor; she’s not who she said she was to begin with. She’s lied to him all his life. We’re not just lying to the audience, she’s lying to her child. The audience is watching that happening. So, in a way, that’s always interesting to me — the secrets that a character is holding from another character in the movie but that the audience sees — that the audience knows about or is starting to discover. It brings another layer to the mix, and I like that about Ida Mancini — her relationship with her son — and also playing young, playing older — that back and forth thing was interesting. It’s an interesting challenge, particularly when you’re not working with prosthetics — how to get those things, how to make that work.

IH: Yeah, we heard this was a very tight scheduled shoot. Sometimes you had to play both ages in the same day. Is that correct?

AH: Oh yeah, over and over.

IH: And the look was so different. How did you manage that?

AH: Actually, for instance, when you’re working on a very low-budget movie, it’s also what makes it fun for me because I can, once in awhile, mercifully, thank God, go and do a big Disney movie and make some, but then [Laughs] you’re faced with something like this, which is interesting and a little warped and strange, and I brought my own wig to this show. This was a wig that I wore in a thing called Family Pictures over 20 years ago, so I brought that wig into the mix for the older character, but we didn’t have any money to go out and have wigs made. And my hairdresser on the movie had this wig that she was going to use for the stunt girl, for the younger stuff for me, but we had no [Laughs] look for me as a younger person, so I said, “Well, let me try that on,” knowing that Ida is a mistress in disguise. So I slapped on the stunt girl wig, which was some vinyl thing that we bought [Laughs] on the corner in New Jersey, and it kind of worked. It looks weird. We’re not quite sure — is that her hair, or who is she? But for me, it worked for the part, so we weren’t spending thousands of dollars on wig-making, as one does usually in these movies. All this money goes to these things, and then they take it away from you at the end of the movie. [Laughs] “No, you can’t have your wig.” You go, “What are you going to do with it?” [Laughs] So, in a way, yes, it is like putting on a show.

IH: But it was mostly the wig that made the difference between the two?

AH: Wigs make a huge difference — all of that stuff, all of those choices that you make. But what I’m saying is you don’t necessarily have to have a lot of money to throw at something in order for it to be good or convincing, and I always like scrapping things together a little bit. I did that in a little movie that my brother’s in, Bernard Rose’s new movie, The Kreutzer Sonata, which, again, you know Bernard works with maybe five people on his crew. He shoots himself, he gets himself to The Golden Gate Bridge without a permit [Laughs], he does everything without a permit and shoots on planes, you know, post-9/11 without permits. What he does, I think, is quite extraordinary and I like that. I like guerilla filmmaking as well as the high-tone, perkier fare.

IH: In an environment like that, you don’t always have time to experiment or to find the character.

AH: Exactly.

IH: How much preparation did you do, and how much direction did you get from both the author and the director about what they wanted? Or did they give you room to find it yourself?

AH: I think we had one or two rehearsals, Sam [Rockwell] and I, with Clark [Gregg], before we left Los Angeles, down at Sony, and I met Brad and I met a sex therapist who was talking to them about their problems, but it was a couple of really nice little read-throughs. I got a sense of Sam and I think he got a sense of me, and we both got a sense of Clark, and then the next thing — we’re in New Jersey shooting this thing. It was, I think, a very short shooting schedule, so we were kind of flying in and out of New York to Jersey, like back and forth –flying, no driving, but [Laughs] it seemed like flying. We were doing it so on the run, but I’ve forgotten the question. [Laughs] Just rambling at this point.

IH: Was the dementia aspect an extra challenge?

AH: I just believed everything that I was thinking, and that’s kind of how I went about it. Ida has her own set of beliefs and rules. The hospital experience is funny because it’s weird. Every time I do a movie, somehow it reflects what’s going on in my life, and I’ve been in a hospital recently with somebody who’s been very sick, and this is the experience. You cook someone this extremely important meal and you do it from scratch — some lasagna from scratch — and you make it absolutely fantastic. It takes hours and you bring it in, and then the patient does this: “Bleech!” [Laughs] That’s what Ida is. It’s all about expectations and contorted love, and it’s very interesting, what goes on in life and in film, in terms of how one reflects on the other for me.

IH: Am I correct — you don’t have any children?

AH: I don’t, no.

IH: Okay, but you play all these interesting, weird mothers. Do you think that…I don’t know if this is out of line or not, and pardon me if it is, but…

AH: I’ll slap you! [Laughs]

IH: No, but I mean the fact that maybe you can look at motherhood a little bit more objectively than a lot of actresses…?

AH: Yeah, I think maybe. I’m not that precious about subject matter, I think, which is good because I think subject matter is a bit off-the-wall right now and appeals to my taste. Certainly, on television, there’s some very interesting stuff going on. I think, in a way, I can be irreverent about children, in the way that serious mothers maybe can’t be. But I think children are very adaptable. They can, I think, take a lot more than we give them credit for. I did a movie with Nic Roeg years ago called The Witches, a movie that was considered so terrifying to children in America that they could barely show it at nine. Children in Europe were watching this at five or six years old. It’s like [Laughs] nothing, so I don’t know. I think American parents are often very, very careful about what their children see. I remember the company who distributed the movie. There was a scene in the movie of a couple of parents in an elevator, and they were talking about how lovely it was to be away from the children for the evening, and the distributors were like, “Ohhh [Laughs], children in America will be traumatized by their parents wanting to be away from them [Laughs] for the evening.” It wouldn’t cross an English person’s mind [Laughs] to be sensitive to that.

IH: What was meeting the author like — meeting Chuck?

AH: I really liked him tremendously. He came on set. He’s very tall, very muscular, very refined, very soft-spoken, and we were doing the pudding scene — a scene of  tremendous bravery on Kelly McDonald’s part [Laughs], where she kept coming up with this donut of chocolate on her mouth. It was truly revolting. [Laughs] I remember we broke from the scene, at one point, and Greg appeared with a ring of chocolate around his mouth and the whole thing was like [Laughs] in sympathy, and I made my way behind the monitor to where Chuck Palahniuk was sitting and I said, by way of introducing myself really, “This must be very hard to watch your work suddenly translated into this rather gruesome reality of swapping chocolate pudding [Laughs] exchange,” and he said, “Oh no, on the contrary. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to see my work being done so well, and it’s exceeding my expectations.” That’s such a lovely thing to hear from an author who you could fully have expected to be horrified by the sudden reality of seeing his work interpreted by all of these various people. But I thought it was just such a generous reaction.

IH: Could you talk about your experience with Alzheimer’s Disease? I have a family member who has the same disease. You guys are acting so real that makes me feel you have someone who got Alzheimer’s or you have someone to research it?

AH: Well, Alzheimer’s is so insidious because there’s a wonderful movie called Away From Her that came out a couple of years ago. That was very, I thought, accurate, and it’s a small thing. It starts with a small thing. Like in that movie, she puts a frying pan in the refrigerator and there’s just that little suspended moment and he looks at her, and this whole world is born. All of a sudden, that’s the reality of these two people –that’s the elephant in the room, and I think that’s how it is and I think it’s the way you see things. It’s that difference between how you see me and [Laughs] where I’m at, and it’s like the terrible thing. I think much more for the patient is for the person who loves the patient, or the Victor Mancini side of the couple who takes it to heart, who can’t believe that he’s not recognized by his mother, the woman he loves and who loves him. There’s a wonderful quote that I’ll paraphrase, in Joan Didion’s book, about loss and her mother which is like, “Who will know me, now that my mother is dead? Who will recognize me? Who will ever know me in that way?” That’s, I think, the basis of the problem between the child observing the parent losing their way or the lover watching his lover drift.

IH: I want to shift for a second. You’ve done some directing. Any directing in the future?

AH: I had a really beautiful script that, actually, Sam is interested in doing with me, and it’s called Give Us A Kiss. It’s really a beautiful script, written by Angus MacLachlan, who did Junebug, and it’s a really lovely Ozark noir story — good story. So I’m hoping to do that. I have to raise money, though. It’s such a drag. [Laughs]

IH: God, you have such great taste. Do you think something genetic might be involved in that?

AH: Thank you. Well, I like to credit Him in every way. He deserves it.

IH: Back to your character for a second: There were so many layers to when she recognized him and when she didn’t. I wondered, just from an acting standpoint, were there moments, because she’s such a master of disguise, that she did recognize him and didn’t want him to know?

AH: Yeah, I think so, and she’s running it her way. And also I think though, for the most part, she’s pretty honestly where she is when he brings Brad in. She honestly just thinks Brad is him, that’s it. I don’t think she’s messing with his head then. I think she did the most messing with his head when she was a young woman, and in order to get her way and in order to steer it in her direction. But I think, for the most part, in the hospital, it’s that [Laughs] she’s not doing anything for anybody else except herself, and I think her main interest is Tito and Tito’s well-formed buttocks [Laughs]. That’s where she’s at in the hospital, much more so than with her son or his interests, or sympathetic to his problems.

IH: I haven’t seen all your episodes so I don’t know what happened to your character, but are you going to be on Medium?

AH: Oh, I finished up on Medium. Boy, that was challenging. I’d finished Choke and I flew on a Saturday and I learned my lines on a Sunday, and I went to work on Monday on Medium, and I was sick [Laughs] from the horrible hospital in New Jersey. [Laughs] We all got the crud, it was horrible. [Laughs] But Medium was really good for me. It was a big challenge; they give you your lines, like, the night before you work — nine pages of lines. I didn’t like that, and I never worked before not knowing who I was really or what my character was going to be doing, and every time I got a script, it would be this revelation, “Oh, I’m a mother, or [Laughs] my daughter disappeared,” or whatever, so that’s really acting by the seat of your pants. But I loved Patricia Arquette. She’s a jewel of a girl, and I’ve never met a nicer or more understanding crew. I was in tears on my first day. I said, “I can’t do this, this is crazy. I’m sick, I’ve got all these lines, I don’t know who I am,” and she said, “It’ll work. It works. Believe me, they put it together in the editing room and they make you look good. [Laughs] I can’t explain it to you, but don’t worry. It’s going to be okay,” and I’m like, “Ahhh, ahhh.” [Laughs] And she’s right, they do somehow patch you together and make you look good. But they’re great people, and Glenn [Gordon Caron] is a really interesting writer, and there was not a person on that crew who wasn’t totally sympathetic and totally there for you. That’s really important. They work so damn hard, my God — 14, 16-hour days. I don’t know how people do that every day, and for the rest of their lives.

IH: Was the character Cynthia Keener just set as an occurring character for Season Four?

AH: I had, I think, six or seven episodes and that was it.

IH: Do you believe in Alison Dubois’s special talent?

AH: Yeah, these people exist and they do have a special talent, and they are psychic. They use them all the time in forensics and life’s more interesting mysteries.

IH: Can you talk about Clark’s touch as a director with his acting background? Is there an emphasis that he then places on rehearsal?

AH: I think he’s got great humor. He has a cheerful air of expectation to him that works really well as a director. He’s Irish, which I love, but he’s also up for the best. He’s looking to be pleased. He’s positive, he’s got a great sense of humor, he’s attractive, which is really good, and…what else? I think he’ll just get better and better, and you see how a first-time director starts to evolve on a movie stage. First they’re a little tight and everything’s a little bit static, and then, a few days into it, you notice a new relaxation and then things start to flow more, and the camera gets a bit more experimental and maybe we’ll try that and grab a close-up here; that starts to happen, and you feel the director really getting into his stride, and it was great to see Clark getting into his stride, and I think he’s got a really good eye and he had no time, so he had to be very succinct in his choices. I think, like most really good actors, he knows when he’s getting a good performance. He doesn’t have to get in there and meddle. He let Sam and me run with it; I never felt any kind of forceful imprint. He seemed happy most of the time. If he wanted something a little different, then he’d go for it, but overall I think he’s going to be fine. I think he’s going to go on making movies, if he wants to. It’s hard, though. It’s like a mantra. The amount of times you have to see it, that’s just after you shoot it. It’s not for everybody, so I’m always happy when I see a new director who seems inspired by it because it’s really hard work.

IH: We’ll go back to an old director: Anything upcoming of Wes Anderson?

AH: No, he’s doing The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but I’m not in it.

IH: What do you have coming up?

AH: I’ve got this movie, When in Rome, coming out, and a little appearance in The Kreutzer Sonata for my brother and for Bernard.  I’m supposed to be going to London in October to work with Hugh Grant in a new working title movie, which should be fun.

IH: What do you in When in Rome?

AH: I play the director of the Guggenheim. [Laughs] Yes, I wear a lot of good outfits. Smart.

IH: Were you familiar with the author’s work before you started this? Had you read the book?

AH: I knew him from Fight Club, and I read Fight Club after I saw the movie. So yes, to an extent, but I haven’t read everything he’s written. He’s a good writer.

IH: So you didn’t read this book before you joined this project?

AH: Oh I did, before I joined the project, but I hadn’t read it before I was asked to join the project. So I read it when I knew it was an offer.

IH: Do you have any family that has the same disease?

AH: That has Alzheimer’s? No, nobody in my family has Alzheimer’s…except for me on occassion. [Laughs] 

IH: Friends?

AH: Friends, yes.

IH: This is a little bit out of left field, but I was looking back over your career — actors have such a unique relationship with the audition process. Is there anything that you can find fun or enjoyable about it?

AH: About auditioning?

IH: About auditioning, do you personally feel that you’re good at it, or is it kind of a misery tolerating it?

AH: I’m good at auditioning, if I see somebody else do it first. I’m generally really bad in auditions and I don’t like going in someplace wanting to be liked or not knowing quite what somebody wants. If somebody wants something, I am pretty good at providing it, but it’s the people who haven’t really made up their minds, and you sense them trying to make up their mind around you. That’s tough. I’ve had a couple of those, where you just go in and you know you’re not right for the part, the director doesn’t really know why he’s called you in [Laughs] except that he thinks maybe you have something to provide. That’s hell. On the other hand, a play that I did here called Tamara, many years ago, right after I did Prizzi’s Honor, I went to see the play before I auditioned for the part, and the actress who was playing the part was really very good, but I knew I could knock her socks off, and I went in and I auditioned, and I so impressed and I got the part. I was very good in that audition, but really only because I’d seen her beforehand and I knew what I wanted to do, and somehow it clarified my decisions. But going in and trying to please somebody who you don’t know what they want — I’m really bad at that.

IH: Did you make backstories of your characters — where she’s from and why she got Victor?

AH: Yeah.

IH: Can you talk about…

AH: No. [Laughs] I just think those things are…that’s like your background. That’s what you do. That’s your secret, as an actor — how you construct your background.