Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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She says, "I was going to be a singer first. Before being an actress, I was going to sing. And I always thought I'd maybe act on the side. I always thought of musicals. Singing and dancing. I want to sing still, so I wrote songs with a friend who's a musician. The biggest fun thing is it's my words.
"The only break that I got was that my dad had me meet this small agency. Say hello. The big problem for actors starting out is getting the agent. Agents want you to have a SAG card, but you can't get your SAG card unless you have an agent putting you up for work. It's a catch-22. So my dad got me into an agent's office, but I still had to audition. I did a reading, and they had to see something in me.
"If you met me when I was younger, I was really quiet. I did a TV show once and people were asking my agent, 'Is she okay? She seems really down. It was just your typical teenage crap. Just because I don't smile at everyone and ask them how they're doing, I have to be sad?"
From her list, sitting on an antique sofa, Juliette reads: "Was there a time when you were mystified by the workings of your penis?"
She reads: "Do you look more like your mother or father?"
The tape recorder goes on and on, listening.
She says, "Even at eighteen I'd go, 'Where is the hidden rule book that says I have to be made up? Because they'd have this chair and all this makeup. I was, like, 'Can't we just take a picture? That's why all my magazines from earlier are not made up and they're not raw. They're in-between, and what shaped me is what they called the 'alternative girl' or the 'kookie girl' because I couldn't vamp up at the drop of a hat.
"When I was younger, they'd have a rack of clothing I'd never wear… They'd have a makeup person… And I'm supposed to represent myself? It was like this weird thing. I'd always wanted to be like my male predecessors, like Brando or De Niro. You take a man, and you just document him in a picture.
"What you exude, your sexuality is just a part of oneself. So a manufactured sex appeal which includes an open mouth and lip gloss and bright colors, this is this American porn sex appeal which has nothing to do with sex. It's like blowup dolls. I could do that, very easily. It's not like I can't. It's just never been my objective.
"Now I realize you're selling things," Juliette says. "So you basically become a rack."
She reads: "Did you date an older woman that you'd consider an older woman, and what did she teach you?"
"What's the first image you have of the female body?"
She asks: "Does the respect factor drop when a woman has breast implants?"
Juliette says, "I had two dreams about De Niro when I was working with him. I think it was all in anticipation of this scene. Because this, in my head, was the big scene. In one dream, we were underwater in a pool and we'd come up for air. He'd go underwater, and I'd go underwater, and we'd glide past each other deliberately, like kids would play in a pool when they like each other. Like a flirtation. But I woke up from that dream, and I had a crush on him.
"In that scene, the little tango dance between our characters, all I knew was he was supposed to walk up to me, and then say, 'Danielle, can I put my arm around you? He's supposed to kiss me in the script, but all Scorsese said was, 'Bob's going to do something. Just go with the scene.
"Before that scene, I knew we were going to film the kiss part. I had just eaten lunch. It was catfish or something, and I was, like, 'Should I rinse my mouth out? But I didn't want to, because that would let him know I thought about it. I don't want to act like I thought about the kiss. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. So I didn't. I didn't do mouthwash. And then I get to the set, and Bob is right near me, and I smell mouthwash. And then it dawned on me in that moment-I felt like such a little kid-because I thought, 'He's being professional. He's being considerate of me. He's being courteous. But by then it was too late to go back to the trailer. I don't know if I was offensive or not.
"When you watch it, that's the first take. We did it twice. He puts the thumb on my lips. It's very intense because we're only this far from each other, and I'm looking right at him. He starts to put the thumb in my mouth, and she moves it away. And then he persists, and she allows it. And people after that kept talking about the sexuality and burgeoning sexuality at that age, and I never looked at it that way. I looked at it as, before he did the thumb thing he was listening to her, he was validating her in a way that her parents weren't, and then he did this sexual thing. But what you see in my eyes is, after she sucks the thumb and it gets pulled out, she's looking at him like, 'Was that good? Did you like that? It's a pleasing thing."
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 in the moment.
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 are 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 pretended 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.