Sources/Quotes
Australian actress Naomi Watts has always regretted telling a journalist she had considered suicide before she had her big break - as she insists the comment was taken too literally. The 21 Grams star, 36, admits she was on the brink of dangerous depression during hard times as a struggling actress in Los Angeles, but was shocked when she realized the press had latched onto her comment. She previously told a reporter, "I remember driving along Mulholland Drive, thinking, 'Maybe I'll just go over the cliff because I can't take it anymore.'" However, Watts explains, "That wasn't literal. For the record, I am not a suicidal person. But I understand depression and I've lived it and I felt really badly when I read that and suddenly it's everywhere, 'Naomi Contemplating Suicide.'" Watts leapt to fame in 2001 with David Lynch drama Mulholland Dr.
GF: Flirting (1991) was the film that got you noticed, right? Along with Nicole Kidman, Thandie Newton and Noah Taylor.NW: Yeah, though I'd had other parts here and there. I'd taken a break from acting because I'd had a terrible experience modelling in Japan and I swore I'd never be in front of any camera again. Back in Sydney I got a great job producing fashion shoots for a big department store when I was 19. Then I was poached by Follow Me, and Alternative fashion magazine to Vogue. A friend I'd done acting classes with begged me to come to a weekend workshop. I resisted at first, but I did it and had a great time. That was it. On the Monday morning I quit my job and told them I had to follow my dream. Two weeks later I ran into (director) John Duigan at the premiere of Dead Calm (1989). We got to talking and I told him I was an actress and he said I should audition for Flirting. I thought, This could be one of those bullshit lines you hear at a party. But I called, auditioned and got a part. After that I was offered a role in a soap called A Country Practice, but I turned it down.
GF: Why?
NW: Naivete. I felt I didn't want to get stuck on a soap for two or three years. Everyone thought I was mad. I probably should have done it, but it doesn't make any difference. Eventually I got a few more high-profile jobs and then I came to Hollywood - again naively.
GF: Which is exactly what your character, Betty, does in Mulholland Drive.
NW: People keep mentioning that, but it never occurred to me. When I came to America there was so much promise of good stuff and I thought, I've got it made here. I'm going to kick ass. Then I went back to Australia and did one or two more jobs. When I returned to Hollywood, all those people who'd been so encouraging before weren't interested. You take all their flattery seriously when you don't know any better. I basically had to start all over again. I get offered some things without auditioning today, but back then they wouldn't even fax me the pages of a script because it was too much of an inconvenience. I had to drive for hours into the Valley to pick up three bits of paper for some horrendous piece of shit, then go back the next day and line up for two hours to meet the casting director who would barely give me eye contact. It was humiliating.
GF: How did your character in Mulholland Drive evolve between the ABC TV pilot David Lynch originally shot and the subsequent movie version?
NW: In the most brilliant way possible. I saw the pilot and I was really unhappy with it because a lot of Betty was lost. In the beginning you think she's a one-dimensional character who should be on the side of a cereal box. She's got stars in her eyes, dimples in her cheeks, bounce in her step - you want to slap her. But the paying off of the character was gone from the pilot; it was sabotaged.
GF: But then Lynch turned it into a movie with an expanded script...
NW: Yes, and I got 18 more pages.
GF: And we see how Betty is actually someone else, Diane. By the same token, the amnesiac Rita, who Betty befriends, is also someone else, Camilla.
NW: Everyone's got a different interpretation of it. But I had to make something up for myself so I could make some solid, coherent choices. I thought Diane was the real character and that Betty was the person she wanted to be and had dreamed up. Rita is the damsel in distress and she's in absolute need of Betty, and Betty controls her as if she were a doll. Rita is Betty's fantasy of who she wants Camilla to be. In the end, though, all the characters are little conduits of David and what's going on in his stream of consciousness. The hardest part for me was playing Betty, because she was less naturalistic than Diane. I needed to make her human somehow. When I see her now, I go, "Oh, my God, you're a psycho." But there were places where I tried to show that she had deeper dimensions, for example, when she turns detective.
GF: Presumably, too, in the audition scene where she suddenly steps out of her goody-two-shoes persona and shows her seductive side.
NW: I love that scene. It just comes out of left field. Betty's definitely a thrill-seeker. I saw her as this completely innocent young girl from a small town who suddenly finds herself in a world she doesn't belong in and is ready to take on a new identity; even if it's somebody else's.
She’s played second fiddle to best bud Nicole Kidman for far too long - but now Naomi Watts is coming out of the shadows with a steamy lesbian role in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, says Garth Pearce
Until now, Naomi Watts has been best known in her supporting role as Nicole Kidman’s best friend. The two actresses first met as teenagers in Sydney at an audition for an advertisement, but they were both judged the wrong shape to sell bikinis. Watts remained Kidman’s confidante as the latter’s career soared. Last year, when Kidman’s marriage to Tom Cruise combusted spectacularly, it was Watts’s shoulder she cried on. Now, however, the 31-year-old Watts’s supporting role is about to change, thanks to a virtuoso performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. "I am cynical," she reveals. "This time, though, the big offers are firm and I have to start believing that this is the breakthrough."
In Watts’s case, the flash-and-burn of all her hopes has been exacerbated by watching Kidman’s irresistible march to international success. At one point, they were neck-and- neck, working together on the small-budget 1989 Australian film Flirting. There was not much to choose between the 5ft 11in pale girl with tumbling red ringlets and the blonde, blue-eyed 5ft 5in Watts. Then Kidman got her break in the thriller Dead Calm, and everything changed. Tom Cruise, already a big star, saw her performance, cast her in Days of Thunder, and they fell in love. Meanwhile, Watts was still struggling in Australia, playing a paraplegic in the daytime soap Home and Away. "It has not all been plain sailing and, like any friendship, there have been ebbs and flows," she says. "But Nicole has remained my best mate - and we know virtually everything there is to know about each other."We meet in London. Watts has been driven up from Wales, where she has just completed filming Plots With a View with Brenda Blethyn, Alfred Molina and Christopher Walken. She is a straight-talker: pretty, with direct blue eyes, and an accent that is a curious hybrid of English, Australian and American.
She was born in Britain, but her parents were divorced when she was four. Her father, a sound engineer for Pink Floyd, died in 1981, when she was 11. When she was 14, her mother and stepfather emigrated to Australia, taking a reluctant Watts with them. "I had to face not only another new school, but a new country and way of life," she says. "I met Nic in the first year and I think that is why we’ve been so close. I was a newcomer and she helped me."
In the mid-1990s, Watts moved to Los Angeles to join her old friend there. "At first, everything was fantastic and doors were opened to me," she says. "But some people who I met through Nicole, who had been all over me, had difficulty remembering my name when we next met. There were a lot of promises, but nothing actually came off. I ran out of money and became quite lonely, but Nic gave me company and encouragement to carry on."
A glimmer of hope came when she was cast as Jet Girl in 1995’s Tank Girl, but the film flopped. "It is a tough town," says Watts. "I think my spirit has taken a beating. The most painful thing has been the endless auditions. Knowing that you have something to offer, but not being able to show it, is so frustrating. As an unknown, you get treated badly. I auditioned and waited for things I did not have any belief in, but I needed the work and had to accept horrendous pieces of shit."
Even a move to Britain to work on a BBC period drama, The Wyvern Mystery, had a cruel irony. Her co-star was Iain Glen, with whom Kidman had performed in passionate close-up in the West End play The Blue Room. It was as if, yet again, Watts was left holding the bouquet flung by a triumphant Kidman.
"It is difficult to rub shoulders with people who are doing well when you are not. You have to believe in yourself and keep that belief to yourself. Otherwise, you are lost. It is also best not to make comparisons. If I ever found myself thinking that way, then I would focus on the guy sitting on a street corner with a begging cup, and think: ‘Compared to him, I am the luckiest person.’"
Any comparison she used to make between the respective lots of her and her best friend ended last year, when Cruise announced that he wanted a divorce. Kidman, 34, say friends, became an emotional wreck and leant heavily on her friend. "Nic still does not know to this day the real reasons for the whole thing - and that is the truth," says Watts. "We have shared intimacies about our lives and I can’t pass these on. But I know she has handled the whole thing in the most graceful way.
"The awful thing is that she’s had to live out her divorce in public. Other couples do that all over the world in private and it’s still a painful process. I was already sceptical about marriage after my own parents divorced, but this has made it worse. With Nic, there has been no escape. She has carried on promoting films like Moulin Rouge and The Others, knowing the first question will be: ‘What went wrong?’ When she really knows, she might answer."
Watts, in contrast, has been able to conduct her own two-year relationship with the 41-year-old British director Stephen Hopkins in total privacy. Nobody yet looks when they go out together and nobody asks about it. "I first worked with him on a commercial when I was a kid," she says. "He was just a young director and I never gave it a thought. We met up regularly and, at some point, we found ourselves single and getting on with each other. It has been like that ever since."
But even Hopkins, who directed Lost in Space, was taken aback by what Lynch asked of Watts in Mulholland Drive. She plays Betty Elms, a struggling Hollywood actress - shades of art mirroring life here - who becomes embroiled in an odd friendship with the mysterious Rita (Laura Harring). In the film, Betty is drawn into a lesbian relationship with Rita. There are moments of sexual intimacy between the two actresses and one despairing masturbation scene performed by Watts. "The film is over two hours long, but those are the scenes I remember when I first read the script," she says. "I met David Lynch at his house a few days prior to shooting and went through the graphic details. It was like a laundry list. But the day before we started shooting, I went back to his house and shed a few tears. I was freaked out. There were three scenes in the film when I am supposed to take my top off. I negotiated it down to two. I was not offended by it - I am just very wary of that stuff.
"The lesbian and masturbation scenes were non-negotiable. I had kissed lots of girls before, but not like this. It was quite odd, because Laura and I are both soft and gentle and there was no driving force. I was amazed how honest and real all this looks on screen. These girls look really in love and it was curiously erotic. Laura is very free in her sexuality. I am, too, but usually only with someone I am intimate with."
She is less certain about her solo sex scene. "This was one I found difficult right up to the shooting experience," she says. "I had to go to the bathroom about 100 times between takes. The camera was about four inches away from my face, moving up and down my body. The scene plays for a minute or two, but Lynch went on for about eight. That is why he is so brilliant. He is there for you, yet still determined to get the best he can. If he had bailed out, then I would have lost it, too."
Watts has delivered so comprehensively that she has leapfrogged from unknown to Hollywood front-runner. While Mulholland Drive is the choice of New York film critics as their best movie of the year, she was runner-up as best actress to Judi Dench (in Iris, out on January 18).
Naomi Watts, who has been used to playing second fiddle to her best friend, now looks set to join her in the spotlight. "On the strength of this," she says, "I have been offered a choice of big studio films. I am not going to blow it."
The Sundaytimes, January 06 2002
"FILMMAKER: Could you talk about the process you went through to re-conceive Mulholland Drive from a TV series into a feature film?DAVID LYNCH: [Mulholland Drive] started as an open-ended pilot. At a certain point, ABC saw that open-ended pilot and hated it. That could have been seen as a huge negative, but, in fact, it was a blessing. About a year later, Studiocanal bought it from all the parties that were involved from the beginning, and it came time for me to really commit to making it into a feature. I had zero idea how I was going to do that, so it was a time of high anxiety. One night, I sat down, the ideas came in, and it was a most beautiful experience. Everything was seen from a different angle. Everything was then restructured, and we did additional shooting. Now, looking back, I see that [the film] always wanted to be this way. It just took this strange beginning to cause it to be what it is.
FILMMAKER: When you say you had zero idea of how to finish it, why was that?
LYNCH: Because it was, you know, an open- ended thing in the beginning, and now it's a close-ended feature film. It was a big change, and it required ideas - ideas that I was so happy with when they came in.
FILMMAKER: When you say the ideas came to you about how to finish the movie, in what form did they come?
LYNCH: I sat down in a chair at 6:30. And at 7:00, they were all there. They came out of a kind of darkness and made themselves known.
FILMMAKER: Then what happened?
LYNCH: I wrote them down right away, because if you forget something like that you commit suicide. It's important to write them down in a certain way so they'll always trigger those [same] ideas again. Pretty quickly after that I started writing out how to reshape things. I restructured and added [material].
FILMMAKER: Can I ask more specifically what those ideas were that came to you in that half hour?
LYNCH: The ideas were how to make an open-ended thing restructured so it would hold an ending. It was strange because it was as if the clues were all there in the original script, but they weren't really. I don't know how to explain it. it was strange."
"Questions aside, audiences will surely be buzzing about the lesbian love scenes. The scenes weren't part of the television pilot, and Harring recalls exactly when they emerged as part of the film."David said he wanted to have a meeting," Harring says. "He said, ‘We're making this into a film. I have 18 more pages.’ We got so excited. We were yelling and screaming, and then he put his hand out and goes, ‘But there's going to be nudity.’
"He'd put his hand out so we could shake on it," she says. "So I shook his hand, all excited, but later I was like, ‘What did I just do?’ It didn't sink in that there was going to be some nudity. But after that we just trusted David. We didn't discuss the details at all."
"Lynch had created a sensation with the television series "Twin Peaks" in 1990, but he says it was only the open-ended nature of the "Mulholland Drive" story that made him want to go back to TV."I was just in love with the idea of a continuing story. Television is a heartache. It's bad-quality picture, bad-quality sound and it's goofed up with so many things." When the networks decided they hated "Mulholland Drive," he says, "It thrilled my soul."
The original two-hour pilot remains intact in what is now a 146-minute film. When Lynch came up with the financing to develop it into a story with a beginning and an end (well, sort of), he was able to go back and add a few embellishments.
In addition to lesbian love scenes, a masturbation scene and the disruption of the entire time-space continuum, he has come up with the usual complement of scenes that appear to make no sense whatsoever.
He says he doesn't always know how he comes up with his more baroque ideas, but he likens the process to Nikola Tesla's invention of the alternating-current motor. "In one instant, he saw coming to him -- every screw, every turn of the copper wire, and the knowledge of how it works," Lynch said. "So these ideas might come like a pop of electricity, but the whole thing is there -- the sound, the mood, the character, the way they talk. It's important to fall in love with ideas, then stay true to those ideas."
"Lynch casts the actors in his films by sorting through stacks of head shots. When he sees a face he likes, he calls the actor in for a meeting without regard to the qualifications listed on the back of the picture. There is never any auditioning, just a conversation.
"He asked me about my life and I asked him about his life," Watts recalls. "It was just an exchange between two humans, which is completely irregular. Normally it's all about testing and selling, all that stuff."