| |
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
Esquire UK (March 2008)
Best Served Chilled
Blonde, beautiful and British (OK, British-born), who could have predicted Naomi Watts would become Hollywood's hrbinger of nightmares and doom? This is not the first occasion that Naomi Watts has robbed me of a good night's sleep. I twitched my way through the humid creep of Mulholland Drive, stifled numerous petrified screams during The Ring, and watched most of the astoundingly bloody Eastern Promises through the cracks between increasingly clammy fingers. But her appereance in the upcoming Funny Games (released 4 April), a frame-for-frame remake by Michael Haneke of his German-language movie from 1997, is by far the most harrowing turn of her career. "This one is really quite upsetting, isn't it?" says Watts, screwing up her face in a sympathetic frown as she sits down opposite me in a New York restaurant on a cold winter's morning. In person, she's sort of translucent, all pale, clear skin bundled up in a big pink sweater with those wide, light blue eyes - hardly, you think, the archetype for a bringer of nightmares and gloom. Funny Games was always intended for an American audience as that is, ultimately, who it's about. Michael Haneke says he envisioned the original version of it as "a reaction to a certain American cinema; its violence, the way it toys with human beings", and when he was offered the chance to do an English-language remake, he had just one stipulation: "I agree under the condition Naomi Watts star in it." The actress plays Anna, a rich, too-happy housewife, who gets trapped and tortured with her husband and son in their super-posh summer house in the Hamptons. But the film is mostly about terrifying its audience and then leaving you stranded, shifty and desperate for the end, wondering why it is that you regularly cough up £8 to watch such horrible things. "We're culpable," is how Watts explains her decision to participate in such a disturbing piece of work, "because we make those films. We cheer the violent moments on because violence is explained. It's all about revenge, bad guys are bad guys and good guys are good guys, so you will it. You want it and you will it." But your will doesn't work in Funny Games: the bad guys are epically sinister, yes, but they are blonde and dimpled and all dressed up for a game of golf, not, as Watts says, "with the one tooth and the greasy hair and the shiny suit." All of your tense, sweaty suffering goes unrewarded as the movie offers very few moments of relief, and no trace of fist-pumping, triumphant revenge. Without giving too much away, Watts's character, who is forced to spend much of the film cowering in nothing more than her underwear, turns out to be far tougher than her husband (played by a rather wet Tim Roth). Neither, though, is tough enough to count as tipically heroic, as movie stars in scary movies usually are. The violence - frequent, shocking and administered without so much as a raised eyebrow - is never justified, it roots are left unexplained and unexplored. "Michael [Haneke] is not trying to create cinema so much as he's trying to create a message, and through that message the cinematic values evolve," Watts explains. "I like what he's trying to do, as difficult as it is to watch." Naomi Watts has been acting for more than 20 years (she is, unbelievably, 39). Born is Shoreham in Kent, she spent much of her childhood in north Wales as her mother, Myfanwy, is from Anglesey. Her father was a soun engineer for Pink Floyd - he is the spooky laughter on Dark Side Of The Moon - who overdosed on the road when she was seven, at which point Watts and her brother Ben (now a photographer) went to live with her grandparents in Wales. When Watts was 14, the family moved to the other side of the world to Sydney, where she started to model and act. Her first role was on the Australian soap opera Home And Away - she played a paraplegic. Then came a mini-series called Brides Of Christ, and then a role in Flirting, which launched Thandie Newton and Nicole Kidman, Watts's best friend, to the big leagues. It didn't, however, do much for Naomi. Success from the outside always seems like a sudden or overnight thing, particularly for Naomi Watts: Gorgeous Aussie stars in David Lynch film, mass success follows! But it wasn't like that at all. The truth is more like this: Gorgeous Aussie moves to LA and goes on thousands and thousands of depressing, deadening auditions. She spends so much time trying to figure out what directors and casting directors want her to be that she sometimes forgets who she is. She thinks of quitting the whole horrible game, except that she can't fathom what she'd do instead. "I kept getting little bites along the way that kept me going," she recalls. There was a 1998 movie called Dangerous Beauty that Watts admits wasn't very good, but was loads of fun to film over three months in Rome. There were TV roles on the BBC. There was even, though it takes some sleuthing to discover it, Children Of The Corn IV: The Gathering. And never once did she try to kill her massively successful best friend. "I'd play mind games on myself. I'd say, OK, I want that, but somebody else wants a SAG card [Hollywood's equivalent of an Equity card], somebody else wants a $3,000 car." And as for Kidman, "People always say it must've been hard, but the truth is, it kept success within the realm of what is possible." Watts's big turning point was Mulholland Drive, originally conceived as a network television series by David Lynch. It was shot and then it was killed, deemed far too weird for American TV. "Which is ironic," Watts points out, "because they'd hired David Lynch." A French company heard about it, though, bought the two-hour- pilot and decided to work it into a feature-lenght film. "David had a fantastic meditation session one day and figured it all out," Watts says. Twenty pages were written, filmed and, finally Naomi Watts was a star. Her character, Betty Elms, turned out to be exactly the niche Watts was born to fill. "Perky, happy-go-lucky little Betty," Watts saysand then she shakes her head. How terribly naive... Betty was actually twisted and brave, topless and making out with her misterious, hot roommate who may or may not have been named Rita. It's sort of a wonder that Watts, by the looks of her, did not wind up starring in an endless string of lucrative romantic comedies: Falling into, mistakenly out of, and then blissfully back into goofy, long-montage-ready love. "Don't get me wrong," she says, "I'd love to do more comedy, but that kind of thing is just not truthful to me." She needed Betty Elms and all of the complicated characters that followed: blonde bombshells in appereance only. It makes perfect sense that she's scheduled to star next year in a remake of The Birds. "I like playing scared," Watts says. "It's fun - and besides, no one's that perfect. There's always another side, and that's the fun of it. I love to crack it all open, to find the contradictions we all have in ourselves." It explains her (Oscar-nominated, ahem) performance in 21 Grams, where she plays a tragic suburban mother with a terrible past. It enables us to understand (other than fulfilling a long-held ambition to work with David Cronenberg) why she has pulled towards Anna, the nurse who is herself drawn in by the darkness and danger of Viggo Mortensen's Nikolai in Eastern Promises. It even shines a new light on her work in I Heart Huckabees, a black comedy where her role as plasticised corporate spokeswoman is revealed as a sham. About three years ago Watts met actor Liev Schreiber, on whom she already had what she calls a "major talent crush". She'd been through the Hollywood dating mill: she spent several tabloid-documented years with Heath Ledger, who is eleven years younger than she is. But then there was Schreiber, and there he was in Glengarry Glen Ross... "Once I saw that," Watts says, "I was just in awe." She moved into Schreiber's loft apartment and, this summer, they had their first child, Alexander Pete. They've since settled into one of those groovy bi-coastal lives: all first-class flights and exposed brick here and a swimming pool there. Recently, they bought a house by the beach in Long Island, and they're currently looking for work they can do together - as they did a few weeks on The Painted Veil, shot entirely in China. "It's terrifying," Watts says about working with her man, "because he's so, so good. We talk about projects, process and then we laugh and say, thank God no one was here to hear that." Once she's finished here with Esquire, however, she and Liev will pack the kid in the car and head for the beach, an admission that instantly stirs dread flashbacks from Funny Games. "It has made me slightly paranoid," she confesses. "I've definitely thought, 'Oh God' when I'm on my own and the doorbell rings." She smiles, buckles her coat and gets up to go. As the swish of her blonde hair disappears into the Soho throng, I am powerless to stop the creeping, ominous chords striking up in my head. By: Amy Larocca © Esquire UK |
 |
