She says, “His thumb was very clean.”
She reads, “Did you go to sleep-away summer camp? (Because some of my greatest childhood memories are from summer camp.)”
She reads, “Do you like roller coasters?”
Steve Berra says, “A long time ago, I was on tour, skateboarding, and I bought Kalifornia at this gas station. I remember trying to imitate a laugh that she did in one of her scenes. It had blown me away. Just this one little laugh the character Adele did. It was so natural and truthful, and I remember trying for ten minutes to laugh however she did it. I didn’t know her. I couldn’t figure out how the hell this person was so good.” A video copy of the movie is playing in their living room, and Juliette laughs, pointing out all the lines she just ad-libbed.
Juliette says, “On the page, my little character, Adele, had maybe a sentence here and there in a scene. So I met with Dominic Sena and was really taken with his energy and his vision for the movie. He was very enthusiastic. So basically, he let me create that character. Ninety percent of what I do in that movie, I made up there. That was like a turning point for me, acting-wise, because I had to really come to the table with something, really invent something. To me, my first official character. That little Adele character.”
She reads, “What do you imagine happens to someone after the body dies? And do you believe that you’re a spirit with a body or just a brain?” Then, “The follow-up question is: How do you explain Mozart writing symphonies at seven? (Because I think that’s a prime example of creative ability being spirit-generated.)”
Juliette says, “When you have good actors to work with, you guys just sort of create this alternate universe of pretend reality. It’s the unexplainable. I just think it’s magic. It’s pure belief. My security blanket is the camera. I know the camera’s universe. It’s capturing only this much. I have a certain security or certainty that I can execute stuff in that space. It’s the condensed reality of the camera.
“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 30 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, ‘OK, 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, oooh, 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, ‘OK so you’re kind of really crazy and that’s how you’re able to be really intense on screen.’ They need an explanation, when my explanation is that 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, 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 on the cover of Newsweek, Juliette says, “With Natural Born Killers, I’ve appreciated, as time 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.
“You could homogenize everything, but you’re still going to have your exploders, you guys who explode. And why is that there? I think since the ‘50s, 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, giving him messages. Was the devil speaking through the dog? OK, 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 are 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 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 and 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 say, ‘Juliette, nobody wants to hear how you suck. Nobody here cared 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 be human friends? (Because I would fall in love with my cats and wish that we were the same species so we could re
late.)”
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 of 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.”
About her own work, she says, “The thing about The Way of the Gun is I felt there was something pure about it. Because it’s with this company, Artisan, it was left alone. It was left to the filmmaker. So Chris got to make the movie in the way he wanted to make it. Had it been with a big studio, they would’ve put different music. I loved the music, it’s sort of this ‘70s throw-back. A studio would’ve went duh-dun and polluted it with all this noise and cut out some scenes to keep the action.”
The Way of the Gun will be released in September. Next year, look for Juliette Lewis in Gaudi Afternoon with Lili Taylor, Judy Davis, and Marcia Gay Harden, and Room to Rent, in which she sings and dances as an obsessed Marilyn Monroe impersonator.
At home, 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 that 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.”
The Story Behind Choke
Bill was the first man I ever met who called himself a sex addict. This was in a church conference room, on a Thursday night, where a couple dozen men and women sat in plastic chairs around a table stained with poster paint and glue. Bill is a big guy, wearing three layers of plaid flannel shirts, with a big square chin and a booming gruff voice.
This is just after Christmas, the first Christmas in almost twenty years that Bill says he didn’t spend with his wife and kids. Instead, he put on a dress and went downtown to an adult bookstore and gave blow jobs all day.
This is the world of sexual compulsives. One by one, almost everybody around that table, very ordinary folks, young and old, hip and square, men and woman, they took turns telling about their week’s worth of sex with prostitutes, lingerie models, and strangers. They talked about internet sex, public bathroom sex, and telephone sex. None of these people were anyone you’d look at twice on the street, but their secret lives were amazing.
Everybody in my family does something compulsively. My brother exercises. My mother gardens. I write. That’s part of the reason why I was at this meeting.
This is the rest of the reason:
Ten-plus years ago, my brother joked that the best place to meet women was at support groups for sexually irresponsible people.
At the time, he was engaged to a beautiful woman. She was funny and charming and looked just like Vanna White. The two of them had met at work, and my brother knew about the support groups because she went to them. They’d almost gotten married, but he’d heard some rumors about what she did while he was gone on business trips.
To resolve the issue, before he left for his next trip, he put a voice-activated tape recorded under the bed in his apartment. When he came home, the tape was run all the way through. Rewinding it and listening, he says, was the hardest thing he’s ever done in his life.
On the tape, his fiancée was drunk and bringing home guy after guy—to his bed. The second-hardest thing he’s ever done was confronting her with the tape and ending their engagement.
Today, he’s married with a beautiful family, married to someone else.
He told me this story one summer while we drove to Idaho to help identify a body the police said might be our father. The body was found, shot, next to the body of a woman, in a burned-down garage in the mountains outside Kendrick, Idaho
This was the summer of 1999. The summer the Fight Club movie came out. We went to our father’s house in the mountains outside of Spokane, trying to track down some X-rays that showed the two vertebrae fused in Dad’s back after a railroad accident left him disabled.
My father’s place in the mountains was beautiful, hundreds of acres, wild turkeys and moose and deer everywhere. On the road up to the house, there was a new sign. It was next to a boulder that lay beside the road. It said, “Kismet Rock.” We had no idea what the sign meant.
Once at a toga party, I was drinking with a friend, Cindy, and she said, “Let me tell you about my mother. My mother gets married a lot.” It was such a great line I used it in Invisible Monsters. I knew exactly what Cindy meant.
Part of visiting my Dad was always meeting his latest girlfriend. Or wife.
Before my brother and I could find the X-rays, the police called to say the body was Dad’s. They’d used dental records we’d shipped to them earlier.
At the trial for the man who murdered him, it came out that my father had answered a personal ad placed by a woman whose ex-husband had threatened to kill her and any man that he ever found her with. The title of the personal ad was “Kismet.” My father was one of five men who answered it. He was the one she chose.
This was the dead woman found beside my father. She and my father had gone to her home to feed some animals before driving to my father’s house where he was going to surprise her with the “Kismet Rock” sign. A sort of landmark named for their new relationship.
Her ex-husband was waiting and followed them up the driveway. According to the court’s verdict, he killed them and set fire to their bodies in the garage. They’d known each other for less than two months.
That first support group for sex addicts, I went because I wanted to understand my father. I wanted to know what he dealt with and why his life was girlfriend after girlfriend, wife after wife.
At the meeting in the church conference room, here were very everyday-looking people, telling stories that even their own spouses didn’t know. I just sat there, and even though everyone was supposed to limit their sharing to a few minutes, we always ran out of ti
me before everyone had to speak. People were so hungry to share their pain.
Several months after meeting Bill, after his story about blow jobs on Christmas Day, he came to the group upset. The fourth step in the twelve-step process is to keep a record of your addiction, recording all your transgressions, past and present. Bill’s wife had found his notebook. She’d told him she made copies, and—if he didn’t give her the kids, the money, the house, the cars and then move to another state—she was going to give the copies to all his family and coworkers.
Bill was frantic and his only way out, he told everyone, was to go home and kill her and kill himself.
He seemed so resolved.
I kept thinking, This is how it happens. All those newspaper stories about murder/suicides, this is how they happen.
The group got Bill calmed down. He wept. A few weeks later, he and his wife had resolved to stay married and face his addiction, together.
During this time, a friend introduced me to a woman. This was at breakfast in a restaurant, and it was funny because her name was Marla. Like Marla Singer in Fight Club. I’d never met a real Marla, and it turned out she’s a therapist who works with sexual compulsives. Piece by piece, the ideas and themes of Choke were coming together.
I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about. Doping yourself with sex or drugs or food, or choosing something like writing, body building, gardening. True, in a way this is trading one compulsive behavior for another, but at least with the new one, you’re choosing it.
Funny, but all my former junkie friends are either fervent Christians or triathletes. Nothing in half measures.
Essays, Emails ... Page 5
