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THE BONNIE & CLYDE OF INDIE FILM, PART 1Gus Van Sant / Interview / November 1999
The movies can boast so few truly original talents that when a disarming filmmaker like Harmony Korine and an eccentric actress like Chloe Sevigny come along, they throw a curveball to those who want everything tied up in nice, neat categories. Together or apart, they have a habit of making the mainstream way of doing things seem incredibly stale. CHLOE SEVIGNY One of the joys of the fall film season is watching the twenty-four-year-old girl played by Chloe Sevigny in Boys Don't Cry enjoy a multiple orgasm as her boyfriend (actually another girl, played by Hilary Swank) ministers to her with her tongue. Since Kimberly Peirce, the film's director, keeps a tight close-up on Sevigny as she shudders into heaven, there's no reason to believe Swank was even in the vicinity. The scene is saying, "Look how much more sensitive a woman is to a woman than a man could possibly be." But the abandon Sevigny communicates, with humor mixed into her expression of ecstasy, is strictly between her and us. It's the kind of naked moment - a true baring - that few American actresses in Sevigny's demographic are capable of making so playfully intimate. Even without her climactic raptures, Sevigny gives one of those performances that you can't take your eyes off, which is not to detract from Swank's amazingly complicated portrayal of a man in a woman's body. Sevigny may not be the most technically polished actress, but her dreamily distracted presence suggests she's not so much "in the moment" as several leagues beyond it. A onetime New York fashion magpie down from Connecticut, Sevigny acted for the first time in Larry Clark's Kids [1995], written by Harmony Korine, her personal Josef von Sternberg, and she was the soul and conscience of that bleak expose. Korine then cast her as a beacon of white-trash blondeness in Gummo [1997]; in his new film, julien donkey-boy, opening this month, she's the Harpo Marx-like sister and confidant of a paranoid schizophrenic played by Ewen Bremner - and a girl so self-absorbed she goes ice-skating late into her pregnancy. Wonderfully naive as a preppy nightbird in Whir Stillman's The Last Days of Disco [1998], Sevigny has no peer in playing girls slow on the uptake. Lana Tisdel, her character in Boys Don't Cry, is based on the young woman of that name who believed that twenty-year-old Teena Brandon was a male - "Brandon Teena" - and embarked on a love affair with her. Teena was raped and murdered in Falls City, Nebraska, in 1993 by two men who also killed two others. (Tisdel survived the ordeal and subsequently had a child.) These events make for a harrowing yet lyrical study of transgender confusion and homophobia, in which Sevigny does a lot more than show pleasure. Natasha Lyonne, a friend and fellow actress of Sevigny, asked her the following questions in the bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan. Natasha Lyonne: What kind of beer do you have? Chloe Sevigny: A Pilsner. Lyonne: I don't know what that is - I'm not that cool. I'm having a screwdriver and some cold fish. Sevigny: Where are your questions, Natasha? Lyonne: I left them at home. Sevigny: Who's gonna listen to this tape anyway? Lyonne: I don't know - I feel like we're recording an album. All right, so I was watching that I'm Almost Not Crazy documentary [1984] about John Cassavetes, and Gena Rowlands talks about making sure you don't let all the stuff that happens on a movie set drive you crazy. A lot of actresses obsess about their look rather than focus on the work, but when I worked with you [in the upcoming If These Walls Could Talk Part II] I noticed you're really focused. You're notorious for being the queen of looking real good and yet you didn't seem to let that all stuff get in your way. Do you have any tricks? Sevigny: No, but when all's said and done I wish I had made a stink about the way I looked (laughs). I've gotten into major fights with makeup artists in the past so now I just say something to the director and hope they'll intervene. I'm not one of those Method actors who gets into character months beforehand and starts preparing and improvising. As soon as I am in the clothes and in the hair and makeup - whether it's bad or good - that's when it happens for me. I find the character after the first take, not before. Lyonne: Do you want to continue costuming or are you focused on acting? Sevigny: I don't want to act for a while now. I usually work once a year. but this past year I did five projects, so I haven't had a second to breathe. I'd actually love to camera-operate, so I'm taking a class in cinematography at New York University this year. I was also thinking about calling up my friend Jean-Yves Escoffier, the cinematographer, and asking him if I could intern in his camera department a few days a week. I'm always endlessly fascinated with the camera and how it works. I'd like to continue doing costumes, too. Lyonne: That could be a cool movie - costumes, cinematography, Chloe. Sevigny: But sometimes it's hard getting into conflicts with the actors. When I did the costumes for Gummo, I was really excited to dress this one actor. But he came in the day before he was shooting his scene and looked at the clothes I'd got for him and said, "You know what? This isn't how I see my character. I don't want to wear any of it." I said, "Fine. I don't have anything else. We're working tomorrow and it's twelve o'clock at night and all the stores are closed. You can go topless and show your ugly ass-white chest. I don't give a fuck." And he said, "Fine, I will." Lyonne: As far as cinematography goes, you already worked with handheld digital video camera on julien donkey-boy, right? Sevigny: Yeah. all the actors did. I love experimental films, but I'm traditional at heart so I'd prefer to shoot in 35mm wide screen. Lyonne: Now, I got really turned on during Gummo when it's slow-mo and you're flipping your hair and licking your lips. That's a hot little scene. I got an erection actually. Sevigny: (laughs) Thank you. That was Harmony's love letter to me, I think. Lyonne: I also love that scene in Gummo when you rip the tape off the other girl's tits and you're like, "They're a little bit wider, a little bit redder..." Sevigny: A better nipple. Lyonne: Yeah. It's a great scene that made people laugh and I think you did that very well, not intentionally at all. That's what they say about comedy - that you can't do it on purpose unless you're really good. Sevigny: You'd know more about that than me. Lyonne: I know that it's really hard to try to be funny. I was thinking that you have a really natural flair for comedy - not just in Gummo, but also in Last Days of Disco and Trees Lounge [1996]. I would love to see you in a crazy old slapstick comedy. I want to write us one where we're a stand-up comedy team in the '20s. I'm Mel Brooks and you're Anne Bancroft. Sevigny: I would love to do that. I think we should do it. Lyonne: Yeah, sure. You say that now, man. I gotta see that happen. Sevigny: I would do a comedy with you any second, Natasha. You shine in comedies. Lyonne: You haven't seen Boys Don't Cry, right? Sevigny: No. I'm not sure I want to see it. Lyonne: Why? Sevigny: Because I feel like in all my acting before that film I never expressed any real emotion: I was always kind of stiff and self-conscious, and I felt that with Boys Don't Cry I really broke that. I was very emotional, but I'm afraid if I see it. I'll think it doesn't read on screen and I'll just be disappointed, so I'd rather have the idea in my mind that I did something I'd never done before. Lyonne: Well, I've seen it and the most amazing thing about the movie is seeing you being fully inside a character. You do go for those emotions and it's pretty deep. How did you like playing a real person? Sevigny: I like it because you can always reference the real person or the real story, and I did a lot of that on Boys Don't Cry. It's also difficult because Lana, my character in the film, is a real girl and a lot of the time I felt like I wasn't portraying her the way she really is. Lyonne: Did you meet her? Sevigny: No I didn't. I watched hours of her on video and different talk shows and I had court transcripts and that was helpful, but at the same time we changed the story a lot. And when people's real lives are compressed to fit into two hours, you kind of feel guilty. Lyonne: You've played a series of white-trash characters - is that intentional? Sevigny: Not at all. Part of the reason I did Last Days of Disco is because I'm always pigeonholed as a white-trash girl, which I'm not. I'm from Darien, Connecticut, and I have the preppiest background ever. I was way more familiar with the world of Last Days of Disco than the world of Gummo or Boys Don't Cry. Lyonne: Don't you think it's quite weird how you get pigeonholed in a certain thing? Sevigny: Yeah. I met a director last week and before I went in they said he wasn't sure he wanted to meet me because he thought I was this white-trash girl and he didn't think I'd be right for the part. I think it started with Kids, although I thought of my character in Kids as being this girl from the Upper East Side who went to Catholic school. Lyonne: As far as working with Harmony goes, is it more turbulent because he's someone that you're in a relationship with, and is it strange working with other directors you're not so close to? Sevigny: I take things from everybody I work with. But Harmony knows me so well and when he's confident in me I know I'm doing well and I just feed off his energy. Lyonne: I know they looked at other actresses when they were casting Pearl in julien and I remember thinking, well, that's a bunch of bullshit because he's gonna hire Chloe anyway because she's the only one that can play the part. Sevigny: Well, we hadn't spoken for almost a year and he called me up about the actresses he was considering and asked me what I thought of them. And I was like, "Well, I don't know. I think this girl's really good. I think that girl's not so good. Do whatever you have to do." Lyonne: Yeah, but obviously he came back to you. I saw that David Letterman appearance you did and he kept bringing up Harmony and you said something to the effect of how it's always all about Harmony. Is that kind of annoying to you and is it important to you to be separate or are you just appreciative? Sevigny: It can be annoying but I'm really honored he asked me to be in julien. I think he's a great artist. I would love to only be in his movies and not work with anybody else for the rest of my life but it's financially impossible. Lyonne: I'm always awed by you, though, because everything you do seems to be particular to your taste and not something you chase because of the money. Is that really hard? Sevigny: It is hard. Especially when they flash it in front of your face and you're like. Wow that is a lot. My dad would've had to work two lifetimes for that much money. And sometimes I think, Oh. maybe I should just do one of those movies and then I'd have that comfort. Lyonne: In my mind i'm like, Yo, the more money I make the more chance I get to be myself and only do the things I want to do. [pause] Kids happened in '95. Four years after the fact, what do you think its relevance is? Sevigny: Kids was the first teen film of this whole wave of teen films and Cary Woods produced it and then he went on to produce Scream and you know what happened after that. I wish that people would recognize Kids more than they do. Lyonne: After seeing it again recently, the main thing I was struck with was how much you've evolved as an actress. But what are your fears? Sevigny: Sometimes I think the more films you make, the more jaded and less natural you become, and that frightens me. When we made Kids, we never knew it was gonna come out. I knew nothing about making films - I was just being - and I don't think I'll ever be able to capture that again. Another great fear of mine is that, when you look at actors' careers, they're always really good in the beginning and they just get worse (laughs). And I think if I wasn't that great in the beginning I'm never going to get any better - I'm only gonna get worse and then I'm in for it. Maybe I should just quit while I'm ahead. Lyonne: That's bullshit, man. Sevigny: How many actors can you name that have gotten better in time? Lyonne: I'm having a tough time with that. Sevigny: Does that scare you? Lyonne: I think it has a lot to do with the director forcing you to be better and then they have confidence in you. Sevigny: Like Harmony. Lyonne: You're lucky that you have someone like that. Sevigny: But the more films I make, the less he wants to work with me. That's why I try and play a different kind of role every time. But I do play the victim a lot. Lyonne: Do you have a favorite book or a favorite movie or anything that's influenced your growth. Favorite drink? Sevigny: Well. I really like martinis. I haven't eaten enough to have one tonight, though. Right now my favorite movie? I watched this movie the other night from Australia called Praise with this girl in it who's so amazing [Sacha Horler]. She plays a nymphomaniac with eczema. Lyonne: Oh, that shit's gnarly. Sevigny: Yeah. But this actress is great. I'm inspired by performances all the time but I can't watch films when I'm making a film. I get too paranoid. Lyonne: And you're reading Laughter In The Dark by Nabokov. Sevigny: Yeah. That book has a scene where this young girl is putting on her makeup at home and she puts some lipstick on her nipples to make them pinker. I'd just love to film that. Lyonne: It's weird because I've actually done that. Sevigny: You have? Lyonne: In high school, I used to be really self-conscious about my nipples and generally self-conscious about my sexuality so I would do things like put lipstick on my nipples to try to make them stand out. Sevigny: Wow, Natasha... Lyonne: Yeah. So I thought I'd never let anyone shoot me naked except you. Sevigny: Maybe I'll shoot you doing that. Lyonne: All right. Well, I think that's it. Sevigny: We can just let the tape drag on while we finish our drinks. Lyonne: Yeah. Let's have a toast. 
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