Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

by Chuck Palahniuk

  "Sometimes, you want to put in an aside that goes, 'By the way, audience, it was really three in the morning when we did this scene. It was thirty degrees outside. And I brought you all of this despite all of that. It was That Night, a movie I did before Cape Fear had come out. It was this 1962 love story. A guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Very endearing, very sweet. I was supposed to meet him in the middle of the night on a pier in Atlantic City. It was freezing, but it was supposed to be summer. You know, those hot nights. Meanwhile, I'm kind of blue. My lips go, 'brrrrrrr, and they chatter. So I had to hold it so I'm not chattering, plus be in a summer dress. You'd be in your parka until they said, 'Okay, we're ready for you. Then you'd take it off and say, 'Gosh, I'm so in love…

  "When I worked on From Dusk Till Dawn, the vampire movie when I worked with George Clooney, he said, 'Gosh, all my friends keep asking, "Ooo, so you're working with Juliette. Is she really psycho? Is she really intense?" And I'm like the most opposite from intense. Maybe when I was young I was a bit brooding. Maybe I'll cop to that. My work is actually, really a light process. I go in and out of it. When the camera's going, I'm on. When it's off, I'm off."

  She says, "When people want to know how you're able to do what you do, they need to explain it. It helps them if they go, 'Okay so you're kind of really crazy, and that's how you're able to be really intense onscreen. They need an explanation, when my explanation is, it's magic."

  From her list, she reads: "Did the female anatomy ever mystify and scare you? (Because it did me, and I'm the owner.)"

  Driving past the Scientology Celebrity Centre, she says, "The whole thing in Scientology, the big motto is: What's real for you is real for you. So there's not, like, a dogma. It's simply an applied religious philosophy. And there's little courses, like the Success Through Communications Course. They have things you can apply to your life, but not like a falsity, not like a robot-thing. You can see if it works, and if it doesn't. If it works, it works. It's something that has helped me a great deal."

  From the list, she reads: "Have you ever been caught in a natural disaster?"

  She reads: "Did you ever own Birkenstocks?"

  Just outside her bedroom door, looking at a framed, poster-sized picture of herself and Woody Harrelson from the cover of Newsweek, Juliette says, "With Natural Born Killers, I've appreciated as times goes by how that movie is satire and my character is a caricature, although I filled it with some real human emotion. But to me it's kind of campy. It's silly. It's exaggerated beyond what's real. I just had to give it some energy, like that whole beginning sequence-how sexy am I now! — where she's yelling. I have a big voice, so I can turn the volume up, but when we'd cut, it felt silly. Everyone thought, ooooh, I must've been so disturbed, but I wasn't. To me it was just very campy, that performance."

  About how people reacted to the movie, Juliette says, "You could homogenize everything, but you're still going to have your exploders, your guys who explode. And why is that there? I think since the fifties, the increase in psychiatric drugs has turned that into a landslide from what it was… I did research. I actually spoke at some Senate meetings, but that would be a much bigger problem for them to deal with, considering that you have six million kids from six on up on Ritalin. So they don't even want to look at it. They'd rather just say, 'Could you guys just please be less violent in the movies?

  "Here you have the famous Son of Sam guy, the killer, he said why he killed was the dog barking was giving him messages. Was the Devil speaking through the dog. Okay, so do we lock up all dogs? Because of what that criminal says?"

  From her list, she reads: "What was your favorite expression growing up? Or what was it closer to:

  That's so fresh.

  That's so bitchin'.

  That's so wicked.

  That's so rad.

  Or, that's so hot."

  Juliette says, "I don't think you have to use your past to create in the present. There's different schools of acting where you have an incident that was painful and you match it up to the movie and use it. To me that's too complicated. I just surrender to the material. I just have to surrender.

  "To me, the three hardest things to do in acting are: one, sobbing, because I so rarely do that in my life. I may well up, but I don't sob. Laughing hysterically is another, where it says 'She can't stop laughing. And the third one is being surprised or being scared, like, 'Gosh, you scared me! You have to think backward, like, 'When I get scared, what happens? Oh, maybe my hands shake after the initial shock. It takes a minute to get your breath back. You work on getting to that place.

  "To sob, I usually use the pressure or the fear that I have to do it, and if I don't do it, I'll fail. I'll fail myself. I'll fail my director. I'll fail the movie. People have this faith in me to produce. The frustration that I can't cry will lead me to tears."

  She says, "I was doing Natural Born Killers, with Oliver Stone, and it was this scene with Woody Harrelson up on a hill, and we're arguing. And I'd just gotten my period that morning, and didn't sleep very well. I'd gotten about an hour's sleep, plus the pain of the woman thing, and we're arguing, and we cut.

  "Woody's like, 'You want to do it again? I want to do another take.

  "And Oliver's like, 'Yeah. How about you, Juliette? You want to do it again?

  "And I go, 'Why? It sucks. What's the point? I suck. I don't even know why I'm doing this. I'm not going to get any better! It sucks! It's terrible!

  "And they look at me, and Oliver says, he pulls me aside and says, 'Juliette, nobody wants to hear how you suck. Nobody here cares that you think you suck. And from that point, I stopped doing that. It was such a turning point. Such a very good thing he did. He stopped me from catering to that little shit."

  She reads: "Did you ever fall in love with an animal in a way where you wished you could talk like human friends? (Because I would fall in love with my cats and wish that we were the same species so we could relate.)"

  At a party in Westwood, actress and screenwriter Marissa Ribisi watches Juliette and Steve eating chicken and says, "They're so cute together. They're like a couple dudes."

  Leaving the party, under a full moon, they take fortune cookies and get the same fortune: "Avenues of Good Fortune Are Ahead for You."

  Driving home from the party, Juliette says, "All I thought about for a wedding was to have a view. We were outside on a cliff. It was the first time I saw him in a suit, and he was dashing. My view-because I had to walk this little trail that came out of this tunnel, because there was this park, then a tunnel, then this cliff-and as I was getting closer it was just this silhouette of this man with the sun behind him. It was incredible."

  She says, "I kept thinking, 'Should I have the veil down or veil up? Veil down? Veil up? I loved the idea of a veil, because inside it's like a dream. And that's what wedding days are like."

  Steve says, "I didn't have shoes. All I had time to do was buy a suit so I didn't have shoes that would go with it. So I had to borrow my friend's shoes. We just swapped them on the cliff. For the pictures."

  The VCR in their living room breaks, so they're watching Steve's skateboard videos on the bedroom television, and Juliette says, "When I first saw his skateboarding videos, I welled up in tears. First of all, the music is so beautiful, and he chose the music, the piano. It is so aesthetic to me, his gliding and jumping and defying the physical universe. Because that's not supposed to be done. You don't take an object with wheels, and jump off a structure. It's a defiance. It was the first time I was able to be awed by a partner in this way."

  Upstairs, looking at a framed photo of Marilyn Monroe, Juliette says, "People have reduced Marilyn to a sex symbol, but the reason she had so much power is she made people light up. She had a joy. When she's smiling in a picture, she's a blend. She's in a female body, this beautiful woman form, but she has that child-love shining through, this kind of child-light that makes other people light up, too. I think that's what's special about her.

  "There's a word
for it in Scientology. What's common to children is they give off… how they're able to uplift, their joy, it's called 'theta. It's what's innate to a spirit. So in Scientology, a spirit is called a thetan, and what a spirit would give off is theta. It's what I would call magic."

  Reading from her list of questions left over from that long-ago romance, she says: "Do you feel that we are all potentially Christlike?"

  She says: "Do you have hope for humanity? And if not, how can you honestly keep on going in the face of that hopelessness?"

  She stresses, "There are no right answers to these."

  POSTSCRIPT: Halfway to Juliette's house, the man who was driving me got a call. Apparently the magazine's credit card wouldn't authorize payment, and the dispatcher told the driver to "obtain payment from the passenger." Payment for half a day's driving was about $700. The week before this, a hotel gave me the same story about another magazine's credit card, then billed both my credit card and the magazine's. I felt pretty cagey about the double-billing issue, and told him no way. He told me I was a thief. I told him to let me out at the next stoplight. He locked the doors and said, no, and my bag was still in the trunk. I started calling the magazine in New York, but by then everyone had gone home. For the next two hours, we drove around the Hollywood Hills with the doors locked, the driver shouting that I was responsible. I was a thief. I shouldn't use a service I can't pay for.

  I'm telling him how the magazine made all the arrangements. And I keep calling New York. Still, I'm thinking, Wow, I'm a limo hostage. This is so cool!

  Eventually, I call 911 and say I'm being kidnapped. A minute later the driver throws me and my bag out in the gutter in front of Juliette's house.

  I never told her what happened. I just went up and rang the doorbell. She and Steve probably still think I'm always this shaky, sweaty mess.

  Turns out the magazine's credit card was just fine…

  Why Isn't He Budging?

  "I [Andrew Sullivan] was born in 1963 in a small, actually very small town in southern England, grew up in another small town not far away in southern England, got a scholarship to Oxford, then I went and got another scholarship to go to grad school in Harvard in 84, and did a public administration degree at the Kennedy School and then realized that I couldn't cope with the sort of regression analysis of welfare reform and moved into philosophy, mainly political philosophy, and then did a Ph.D. in political science, mainly political theory, in the next few years, and while I was doing that I sort of moonlighted by going down to Washington and interning at the New Republic, and then going back and being a junior editor and then becoming editor of the New Republic, I guess, in 1991, and doing that through 96, and then putting an end to that and sort of getting my life together."

  "I had a… I hated my family life. I hated it. I had a very visceral hostility to the circumstances in which I found myself growing up, and I think I detached quite early… I didn't enjoy it when my parents were fighting at all. I was horrified and traumatized by it… To some extent you get used to it. My mother was incredibly frank and direct about everything, and it was all very-raw. My father was always slamming doors and yelling and screaming and getting drunk and playing rugby, and my mother was always complaining and yelling. I mean, this was on and on and on, and I think a part of me just sort of withdrew from all of that and saw it as a spectator sport, but part of me was also extremely traumatized by it. But whether you're traumatized or not, it's where you're at home. Even if it's a horrible trauma, this is what the therapists tell you, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Even if it's deep unhappiness, it's your unhappiness."

  "Well, maybe that does follow that one seeks out relationships that replicate that…"

  "I was confirmed in Arundel Cathedral in Sussex. I come from Sussex. My family doesn't. They come from some bog in Ireland somewhere. But Sussex was a very English Catholic county and many English martyrs came from there and that was part of my identity as a kid."

  "My confirmation saint was Saint Thomas More… I was an English Catholic boy, and I guess it was a way of affirming a particular kind of identity and resistance to England, to all of its anti-Catholic trappings, and also More has always completely fascinated me. He's an intensely fascinating man for all the obvious reasons, the attempt to be in the world/not be in the world. Be knee-deep in politics. Be even deeper into his spiritual life. He brings together all sorts of questions about what integrity is, loyalty."

  "The one area that really interests me is sanctity. I'm interested in what saints are. Because it's… I don't know what they are, and I should, really. I think we all should have a better grip on what that's all about, what a human being who is a human being and yet somehow holy, somehow in touch with something else more profoundly than anybody else… And there are several saints that sort of fascinate me, and I would love to figure out some more about. Saint Francis is one. Saint John the Beloved is another…"

  "There's something appealing about the figure who-and I'm sure I sort of project onto this on some level-who's standing by himself. Who's just there and won't budge. You ask yourself, 'Why isn't he budging? What's going on? Why? Why? Why?»

  "I used to be envious of people who were positive [for HIV]. Because I felt like they were living in some enhanced way that I had not yet been able to achieve. This is where sanctity comes in. The whole definition of a saint is somebody who lives as if they're going to die tonight. A saint is so in touch with reality, which is of course our mortality, that he's able to live at a different level of intensity… I found myself falling in love with people who were positive… A couple people I'm thinking of, I think they really were quite remarkable in how they tackled their disease and lived with it and overcame it and shone with it even as they died. There is something particularly attractive about it, just as we're attracted to martyrs, and we're fascinated by suicide bombers… None of those people wanted to be in the situation they were in, but they had a certain impatience with stupidity and ephemera."

  "Without getting into any details, I've just had this very very very tempestuous and short-lived relationship that I bumped into in San Francisco. I just bumped into him on Saturday night… Our last contact was just sort of a very peremptory and vicious email, and I saw him and talked to him and we didn't raise our voices or anything. We were talking, and my friends pointed out that they noticed two things. One, they noticed that obviously we were angry but that there was an incredible intensity about the relationship.

  "There was something between the two of us that just crackled when we were together. And I guess I do like that. It keeps me from being bored."

  "Being married doesn't mean you're less alone. I think a relationship can be the most intense form of being alone if you're not careful… Friendship is what really resolves and mitigates loneliness while not compromising the self in the way that love does, romantic love does. And More was not completely alone. He had his daughter, who was very close to him, and he had some wonderful friends."

  "That's a big question: 'Why are you alone? I mean, we're all alone. Aloneness is… that's life. It's the quality of our aloneness that matters. Whether it's quality solitude. I am a solitary person. I always have been, ever since I was a kid. I guess it's hard… it takes a lot for me to let somebody in."

  "Someone once pointed out: 'Among straight people, you're a gay guy. Among English people, you're a Catholic. An Irish Catholic. Among Americans, you're sort of English. Among the academia establishment, you're a hack. Among the hacks, you're a sort of academic. You keep displacing yourself out of any particular team.»

  "It might be a defensive response. I mean, the Republicans don't want anything to do with me. Neither do the Democrats. People on the right are very suspicious of me. So are people on the left… I like to think that I try to think and write for myself, and sometimes that means that you do piss off people, on a regular basis. Solitude is a natural place for a writer to be. And, again, it's not like my models… like Orwell was the hero of any group of peop
le, I mean, he was very much on his own. I'm very leery of attachment."

  "It's terrible, the minute I feel like everybody agrees with me, I want to change my mind. I'm such a sort of-and this is probably why I was not very good at the management side of being an editor-because I was literally more comfortable in opposition to my entire staff than sort of gently uniting them. Or even our readership [of the New Republic], I always kept people, I tried to keep everybody on edge.

  "Obviously I've thought about this to some extent. I don't want to problemitize it in some ways. I think it's how you are, but… it's what makes me feel secure, I think, that lack of security."

  "I'm not interested in being well received or not well received. When you start thinking like that, you're finished, I think. The only interesting question for me is whether I can convey certain things I'm trying to convey more effectively through the medium of fictional narrative than through trying to write stuff that is argumentative. You know, right now, out there there's either factual stuff, biographical, historical stuff, or there's fiction. The genre of political or moral writing for anybody to read is really slim, which isn't purely sort of temporary political I'm-right/they're-wrong kind of Jim Carville stuff."

  "Virtually Normal was a weird book in the sense that-I don't think of it as a weird book-but it was an attempt to say that an issue like this, which is so mired in emotion and psychology, could be written about in a classical rationalist fashion. Its model, that book, was the sort of nineteenth-century polemicists and pamphleteers I sort of admired-not too long, and anybody could read it and generate a discussion, and those sort of pamphlets in the late nineteenth century were wonderful things."