By James Mottern, writer/director of Trucker
(from the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival)
There's a moment in A Woman Under the Influence when Gena Rowlands's character has just said good-bye to her children, steps into her craftsman-style house in Los Angeles and, now alone, begins to somewhat childishly pace back and forth in her foyer; back and forth, like a sweet, innocent, caged tiger. It's a magnificent shot where Cassavetes beautifully captures the essence of that character, and where Rowlands brilliantly conveys, in my opinion, the mundane beginnings of what becomes this woman's meteoric and tragic unwinding. It's also the first few moments of, arguably, one of the finest performances by an actress on film. I could watch that movie again and again, and do. Then there's Vittorio De Sica's Two Women, where the audacity and humor of Sophia Lauren's character is so finely tempered by a subtle fear and anger that it takes a few viewings, at least for me, to really begin to understand the depth at which she is working. She won an Oscar for that, which to me, as a hard-core movie fan, stands out as one of the greatest movie performances of all time. Ellen Burstyn in The Last Picture Show; Julie Christie in Shampoo; Sally Field in Norma Rae; Liv Ullman in Scenes from a Marriage; Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen; Faye Dunaway in Network; Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity; Jessica Lange in Frances; Pam Grier in Jackie Brown; Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener; Kate Winslet in Little Children; and so many, many more exceptional performances. And yet, great female characters in film are really very few and far between. I can never quite understand it because, for me, women characters are almost always intrinsically more interesting and are the ones I am drawn to as a viewer - especially when they are atypical to what you might ordinarily see onscreen, like a woman desperate for a man or losing a man or hating a man. The simple analysis is that women are beautiful and I like to see them on film. That is absolutely true. But, really, I find women more often possess a depth, courage, humor, nuance and somewhat tragically human quality that I want to watch and experience; and, to me, an actress more often serves the character as opposed to forcing the character to serve her. It is, of course, not always true; but as a writer and director, a female character - especially when she is the main character - is the one I find myself connecting with and wanting to explore. In my film Trucker, I really so badly wanted the actress who would play the part of truck driver Diane Ford to possess at least some of the qualities of the actresses I just described. When I first started to think about casting Diane, somebody gave me a list. On the list were many fine actresses, including the one I eventually cast. At first you feel like a kid in a candy store, but then you really start to try to feel what the person would bring to the part. And what I always told myself is that I would serve the story first. So I kept looking at the list, and stepped into the story and walked around in it for awhile. There were great choices, but every time I'd think about the list in relation to my film, I would keep going back to one particular shot in a movie called North Country. Charlize Theron's character is trying to get her fellow workers to join her in her lawsuit. She goes to the character Sherry's home to ask her for help and is rejected. As Charlize's character says good-bye, Sherry stands outside and watches Charlize's character drive off in a truck. The shot is simple, not too wide, but the look on Sherry's face and the way she moves before she heads back inside just blew me away. It's just a moment, but there was something about it; it was Diane. The role of Sherry was, of course, played by Michelle Monaghan. I'd seen her in a film called Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang. If you have not seen that film, I really recommend it for many reasons, but mostly for Michelle's performance, as it is underrated and rather awesome, in my opinion. But I really appreciated her work in that picture as it was funny, sensual, commanding and raw. She also really seemed to turn herself over to it, didn't pull any punches. That is both unusual and a lot of fun to watch. There is something very old-fashioned, even sweet, about that performance, but also things in it that are strange and new that I had not seen on film before - subtle, interesting, nuanced things that I won't describe here. But having seen her range in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang and then her performance (and, for whatever reason, that one simple shot) in North Country, as the actress to play the part of Diane Ford in Trucker, Michelle Monaghan made the list evaporate. I got the script to her and she agreed to do it. I had to find financing, which I had just lost, and I did with Celine Rattray at Plum Pictures in New York. She really fought to get the movie made. And, finally, on a brutally hot August day last year, we went out into the desert and set up the camera. My DP was Lawrence Sher, and he and I decided on a wide 2:35 aspect ratio to capture the bigness of the landscape and what I felt was the breadth of the main character's experience. But before we shot, Michelle and I sat down several times and went through the script - not really rehearsing but more trying to understand and capture the voice of the character and to tune it for her performance. We had so little time to shoot that it was important to me and, I'm sure, to her to know where this truck-driving woman was coming from and maybe where she was going. I really like actors and generally am very open to an actor's insights, as they are often highly intuitive and their comments more often than not astute. But you've got to have real guts to go through a script like that with a good actor because they will definitely call you on your shit; and if you don't have a good answer you'd better find one because they will call you on your shit until you do! But, really, it's a great way to get everyone on the same page so that when you do go and shoot, everyone knows what to expect and what is expected. To me, that method was absolutely invaluable when I got out in the field. |
