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Blackbook (December 2006)
Ladies And Gentlemen, Edward Norton & Naomi Watts
Though they fight like George and Martha in The Painted Veil, they look more like Nick and Nora here. Is it chemistry? Well, actually, no. What do you expect from a book inspired by Dante's Inferno? Tea and crumpets? It was the ultimate acting test: To show no chemistry. That was the Methodesque exercise that Edward Norton and Naomi Watts faced when they signed on to play the leads in director John Curran’s sprawling take on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1920s tale of a socially awkward but all too clever British bacteriologist (Norton as Walter) and a social-climbing, past-her-prime party girl (Watts as brunette-bobbed Kitty), who choose to marry for all the wrong reasons. Those who have read the thin, cold-blooded novel, The Painted Veil, written in 1925, know that Kitty cheats on Walter with the dashing but ethically challenged Charlie (played here by Watts’ real-life squeeze Liev Schrieber). Walter catches them, and then forces his wife to choose between being the shame of colonialized Hong Kong or joining him in the heart of a cholera epidemic, with potential hopes that she’ll catch the disease and pay dearly for her indiscretions. Norton has had a terrific run, having played the modern-day, dude-ranch sociopath in Down in the Valley and the stoic romantic magician in The Illusionist—both of which have earned him critical praise. Establishing herself as a horror-movie starlet in The Ring series, Watts recently stepped into matinee-idol land in Peter Jackson’s scenery-stomping King Kong. Both actors say, though, that this latest project hits closest to home, despite how far away it was shot. Boston-born, Maryland-raised Norton, 37, a Yale grad and two-time Oscar nominee—who in real life can be is as intense and passionate as many of his characters (think American History X or Fight Club)—says that after reading The Painted Veil, he always imagined himself portraying the multi-layered yet underdeveloped Walter. And Brit-born, Australia-raised Watts—who showed faux-wholesome ambition at the level of All About Eve in Mulholland Dr. and an emotional intensity that earned her an Oscar nomination in 21 Grams—was (but for some hair dye) made for the part of Kitty. Neither are easy roles. In the course of the following interview, the “veils,” as it were, dropped, and the duo showed their literary intelligence and thoughtfulness—anything but superficial Hollywood fare. At Culver City’s SmashBox Studios—where Matthew Rolston shot these pictures—they similarly dropped the cloak of entitlement that so many of today’s celebrities wear like natural hides, with Watts joking that she looked “like a drag queen,” done up like Marilyn Monroe, and Norton gamely (and for once) smiling for our cameras. Yes, he is a very serious young man: a good thing. BLACKBOOK: The Painted Veil deals with the idea of romantic illusions and delusions, and whether one can grow into love or whether it is something that must be present right from the start. NAOMI WATTS: What’s so beautiful about this film is that it is a love story, but they’ve each got their own personal journey of growth, and somewhere, moving halfway through the film, they change. My character, Kitty, is not a vacuous person, but she’s living life in the twenties—the skirts are above the knee, the haircut’s real short and flashy and showing the neck. She’s trying to get away from that Victorian way of living that her family’s trying to enforce on her. She feels above it all, and she doesn’t want to conform to conventions. She just wants fun. She hasn't reached the deep part of herself. BB: In the movie and in the book, she also has a family pushing her toward wanting a man with a title. Those more superficial, old-fashioned reasons for why someone is attracted to a man are still very much alive today in American culture, particularly in New York society. NAOMI: It’s like she’s ahead of her time, and she doesn’t feel that she has to be constrained or confined just because everyone else has done it, including her younger sister. That might be considered the right thing, but she feels that she can do better. BB: Critics might say there wasn’t good chemistry between the two of you, but the idea from the outset is that the characters aren’t meant for each other. EDWARD NORTON: I think the basic premise of the film comes from the title, The Painted Veil, which, in some sense, is a metaphor for the idea that all of us project certain illusions onto life. The so-called painted veil represents the illusions that we put in front of our eyes about what we expect life to be. When the veil of our illusions has been torn away, only then can we see things for what they are, who we are, and achieve a kind of transcendence or grace. The thing that’s always been interesting to me about this is the notion that everybody has something that they have constructed in front of their own eyes that blocks their vision of the truth and their ability to see things clearly. That veil, that painted veil, is a lot of the time what causes your pain in life. Until you essentially pull it to the side and release those illusions, you can’t really find truth and peace. This story is very much about two people who have done that to each other—they have illusions that they’ve put up about each other and about their relationship—and they also each have their own illusions and delusions about the world itself and what their place in it is. The thing I found really compelling is the idea that you’re starting with two characters that are at their most flawed in some sense. The challenge of this was to commit to how flawed they are in the beginning and— NAOMI: —trust the end, the evolution. EDWARD: Exactly. Because if you relate to a character, your ego slips in, and sometimes, I find, you can’t help it; you begin to like them and you want them to be their best. NAOMI: And you don’t want to fall into the trap of “Oh, my God, am I going to alienate the audience? Is this sympathetic? She’s truly horrible.” EDWARD: It’s true. If you don’t begin at the most flawed, you diminish the scope of the journey that they can make. People always ask you, Is there a part of you that was like this character? And I would say nine times out of ten I don’t feel that. I don't necessarily do a piece of work because I identify with it. In fact, it’s sometimes the opposite—I like it because it feels very foreign to me, or it’s something I want to investigate. But on this one we both actually did relate on some level to the dynamics of the struggles in the relationship. Did you feel more of a personal connection to the character than normal? NAOMI: Yes, I did. I find every time you choose a piece of work there is a reason that’s very personal, and sometimes it’s not always clear. But I definitely identify with her struggle with having to fit in and not wanting to, and rebelling. BB: Do you feel that your sense of romance with a capital “R” has changed over time? NAOMI: I hope so. [laughs] BB: How has your definition of what constitutes love evolved? EDWARD: Men and women are different. Whenever I look at a movie like this—a period piece set in the 1920s; it’s a British couple in China—those things aren't inherently resonant to people now. But if you’re going to do a film like this, there needs to be things in it that are somewhat universal so that people can still relate to it. I did feel like there are dynamics between Walter and Kitty that are very eternally male and female. BB: Walter is smitten by her beauty and vivaciousness, but then those same things become that for which he has the most contempt later, when relations have broken down between them. NAOMI: But it’s interesting how they end up together. I’ve come to terms with the fact that you end up coming together with the person who’s going to teach you the most about yourself. As hard as that may be, it’s karmically correct and healing. And that’s what happens with Walter and Kitty—they completely transform one another and affect each other’s lives to the point where they become the best versions of themselves. EDWARD: They transcend themselves by being pushed by each other. NAOMI: And to the point where the sides are so unrelenting and so deep, and it’s wounding, but somehow they manage to come through. BB: How much is the revenge aspect of the film, which is never exactly spelled out, a part of the film? He doesn’t answer entirely when she asks, “Did you bring the verdict for me to die?” EDWARD: When you talk about what qualities in the story resonate on the universal level, for me it’s the way that Walter responds to his pain, the way that his response to being wounded by Kitty is to punish her. A lot of times men, especially when we’re younger or early in the experience of love and the vulnerability of it, face their vulnerability—when it gets pricked—by turning to anger. NAOMI: Whereas women go, “I see.” EDWARD: We’re all capable of being hurt and lashing out, punishing. But one of the things that was moving about this story is that—at least in the film, which is a little bit of a departure from the book—we felt like it had to be on some level about the way to forgiveness. Forgiving each other is the key to them moving on. BB: How important were the location and the era in the telling of this couple’s story? EDWARD: [Director] John Curran said, “Look, if we're going to make this film in China, this can’t be just a story of an English couple battling it out in their drawing rooms. This has to be located very specifically in time in terms of what was going on in China.” He pinpointed a political moment within Chinese history and located the story within this moment of enormous anti-foreign sentiment, when Chinese people got really sick of these foreigners mucking around their country and telling them what to do. Good movies always function on many levels, and I thought that suddenly there was this whole second level of resonance to the story. What’s going on in the world today has a lot of parallels with that kind of a story—the story of Westerners in their arrogance working in places where the culture, the spiritual beliefs, the traditions, and the politics are totally different. Yet the foreigners either expect that they can stroll in and get people to embrace doing things their way, or they have contempt for the way things are in the place in which they find themselves. BB: Most people initially are attracted to the physical self or to somebody who has an enormous amount of charisma—though there is a tendency for that to change. Was it like that in your first relationships, or did you see something more than that? NAOMI: I always fell for men that could make me laugh. EDWARD: It’s funny when you say that, since the first thing that really attracts Kitty to Charlie [Liev Schreiber’s character, with whom she has an affair] is that he makes her laugh. NAOMI: He also has this dangerous quality. From the instant they meet, you can see he’s playing with her. EDWARD: But a lot of women really care, even more than I would’ve thought, about the completion at the end of the story with Kitty’s journey with Charlie—the fact that she’s grown to where she can see through Charlie. Charlie understands when a woman like Kitty’s romantic needs are to be complimented and when to amuse and flatter. It seems to me a lot of women relate to Kitty’s desire to be swept off her feet. BB: But he puts her on a pedestal in the beginning. Later, he expresses that he knew what he was getting into. NAOMI: They both go into it for the wrong reasons in a way, right? EDWARD: In the early part of the story, Walter is not able to be the man that Kitty needs him to be. He’s not particularly sexy. He doesn’t take her by storm the way that Charlie takes her by storm. Walter is very formal in his expressions of love. He kind of asks permission, almost to make love to her. When we had to do this scene where Walter first tries to make love to her, it was kind of funny because you’re always playing with how far do you take something, and Naomi kept laughing at me. NAOMI: He’s so funny! There’s a beautiful awkwardness to it. But he’s someone who’s probably made love several times before, and it's not like she’s a virgin. BB: Sometimes the less you care, the more you become who you are, and you want that. You’re dying to see her come around to see the good in him that everyone else sees. NAOMI: Yes. And she learns this through everyone else around her, and is shocked that she hasn’t actually noticed it herself. Then she starts observing him through what he’s doing and how it’s affecting other people, and she changes, basically. BB: It’s so sad that often times it takes something horrible to happen for people to find who they really are, or to learn anything at all. EDWARD: One of the things that you learn as you get older is how important it is to be big enough to forgive people that you love for their errors, and yet that’s without any doubt one of the most difficult things to do. In our discussions about how to transpose this novel into a movie, we felt it was really important that there be a really unequivocal moment of forgiveness. The novel never quite lets them have that moment of true transforming forgiveness. But we felt that, for the purposes of the film, we wanted to allow them, however briefly, to transcend themselves—and have it happen through a moment of forgiveness. By Steve Garbarino © BlackBook Magazine |
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