The US film star on the dangers of high heels, the charms of Ryan Gosling, and nudity in her new movie, Take This WaltzMichelle Williams: 'Put a spycam on any relationship and a lot of embarrassing stuff will come out.' Photograph: Robert Gauthier/Contour by Getty ImagesPeople might see that your new film, Take This Waltz, also stars Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman and think it's a comedy. They'd be really wrong. It's actually quite upsetting…I gave the script to a friend of mine and I said,
"I'm going to make a comedy! I'm so excited." She sat down to read it and an hour later I walk in and she was crying on the couch and said, "Michelle, when am I going to get to the funny part?"We should explain: your character Margot is married to Lou (Rogen), who's this tremendously sweet and decent guy, but they slowly drift apart. He writes cookbooks that only contain recipes for chicken – that's a metaphor for the relationship, right?
Comforting and bland, yes. Always tastes the same, no matter how you cook it.
Lou and Margot engage in a fair amount of baby talk with each other. Where do you stand on that personally?I've never done it, I don't think. Maybe when you have a kid… You know what it is?
It's the pattern you get into in a relationship, whether it's bad jokes or innuendoes, it's just this habit, this thing you only do with this one other person. If anybody heard it, it would be humiliating. But, in any relationship, if you put a spycam on it for two hours there's a lot of embarrassing stuff that's going to come out.People will recognise it in their own relationships?Exactly. I do enjoy embarrassment, it is my favourite kind of humour. But the idea, personally, of being embarrassed in public, that's the worst possible thing I can imagine. Horrible. That's why I really don't enjoy wearing high heels; they up the possibility for embarrassment tenfold. I try not to wear white because that's just asking for it. I don't wear glasses because someone can knock them off and that makes you vulnerable. I try to walk around with some kind of armour. I'm still trying to figure out if I'm a baby-talker or not.Would you agree Margot is confused?Yeah, there is something infantile about Margot, something stuck. There used to be this really great line in the movie where she watches a couple of 19-year-old girls and says, "Ah, when I looked like that I didn't appreciate it and now that I appreciate it, I don't look like that any more." Basically you spend your 20s trying to run away from your sexuality and then you get to your 30s and you're like, "Whoa! Wait a minute, I could really use those tits, come back! I could really use that body but now I'm in a different body – great." It's one of those funny jokes life plays on you.Do you feel like that yourself?I understand the sense of it but I feel pretty accepting, like, "Yeah, it's a good body, it's done good things, it's gotten me here, it hasn't failed me yet."
You mention feeling comfortable with your body – there's a shower scene in Take This Waltz that's really the crux of the movie. How hard was it to shoot that?I agree, the nudity is not the crux of the movie but the ideas inside of it are.
None of us wanted to do it, us three ladies, Sarah [Silverman], Jennifer [Podemski] and I. How do I describe it? I imagine it's like the moment before you jump out of a plane safely – with a parachute or something. You have to do it, you've paid to go up in the plane, you've got the backpack strapped on and there's other people in line, you know you're going to do it. It's just that moment before you jump that's terrifying.
But boy oh boy, it was in a way a lot easier doing that shower scene than the shower scene in Blue Valentine. It's easier to be naked with girls than boys.I've only just got over Blue Valentine, your 2010 film that detailed the collapse of another relationship. I was broken for weeks after watching that.I think I've only recently got over Blue Valentine. I was broken for a couple of years after that. That one cut really close to the bone because of the way that we worked, the way the director had us rehearse but never rehearse, we just kind of lived together, so things that aren't real felt very real. Yes, that one took a while.
Instead of rehearsal, you basically lived with Ryan Gosling and your daughter in the film for a month. Who did the cooking and things like that?Ryan's a great cook, he's really good at improvising. He said something sweet when we were in that rehearsal period. He did a lot of the cooking and a lot of the dishes, and I think finally I said to him, "Ryan, this isn't how it goes. This doesn't feel real to me." And he said,
"I know, Michelle, but you have a home and a kid. You're cooking when you go home so I feel bad making you do it here too."I'm asking for the men out there: is there anything that Ryan Gosling doesn't do really well?I am left wondering the same thing. Oooohh, ummm, errrr! I really can't think of anything.You play a lot of messed-up characters. Are these roles that come to you or do you gravitate towards them?It's a funny thing: do you get the roles you're meant for, is there a fate in them? I don't know. It's a bigger question of how the world works, which I don't know about yet. I wish I did.
How do you pick your roles?I'm a person who needs a lot of time. I make these movies but I've had a tremendous amount of time to prepare for them and a tremendous amount of time between projects to decompress and go back to my life. So I don't work a lot, because I have a child and a life outside of work that I'm devoted to. So when I do make a decision to work, it can't be a whim. It has to have a lot going for it.Our time is up…I hope that was coherent, sorry. I need to work on whether I'm a baby-talker. And I'll work on how the universe works and what's wrong with Ryan Gosling. When we next speak I'll have answers for you on all three.
SourceSarah Polley: On Love, Desire And The Female BodySarah Polley started acting when she was 4, in her native Canada. She earned critical acclaim for her performance as a teenage girl injured in a school bus crash in Atom Egoyan's film The Sweet Hereafter.
Polley made her debut as a director with the subtle and devastating film Away from Her — a portrait of a marriage later in life, as the wife (Julie Christie) is pulled away by Alzheimer's disease.Now, at 33, she's made a second feature film, called Take This Waltz. It's about a young couple (Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen) in a relationship that's settled into flat routine; when a handsome artist and rickshaw driver moves into the neighborhood, the marriage is threatened.
Polley spoke to Melissa Block of All Things Considered.
Interview HighlightsOn portraying a marriage in crisis"The original idea for the film was wanting to talk about that general feeling of emptiness that all of us have at some point in our lives, if not most of our lives — that feeling that something is missing. And I feel like we live in a culture where we interpret the feeling of something missing to be that something is actually wrong, and needs to be fixed, or can be fixed. So I thought it was an interesting thing to talk about what happens in a long-term relationship when maybe the conversations have died down, the passion has certainly died down — maybe there's a certain amount of contentment, but a feeling that there could maybe be more if someone was to look outside of it."
On a couple's private language, overheard"I didn't want to make a film about a marriage that was terrible and toxic. I wanted to make a film about a marriage that was playful and content, and had the inhibition about it that I think you can only have with someone who you've really gotten to know, with all of their good qualities and all of their faults. I feel like people — when they've been together for a very long time and have gotten perhaps too comfortable — are capable of behavior that they would just be astonishingly embarrassed about if anybody in the outside world could see them. So I wanted to sort of be a fly on the wall for that weird language that develops between married couples that no one in the outside world should be expected to understand."
On the cafe seduction scene in 'Take This Waltz'
"We had an exhaustive rehearsal process before shooting the film, but this was the one scene we actually didn't rehearse. So Michelle [Williams] had never heard those words and Luke [Kirby] had never had to say those words in front of Michelle before. ...
"I was trying to play with the idea of how much sexier the idea of somebody can be than they are in actuality. So the main passion and main erotic part of the relationship between Daniel and Margot really happens in words and looks and in silences. Once there's actual physical contact, [the eroticism between them] becomes quite diminished."On the perspective of a female director"I'm not sure that a man might not have taken the same perspective as I did, but that's not to say that I don't think there should be more female directors out there. ... The answer I want to be able to give is, '
Yes, absolutely, the fact that I'm female is the only reason I could have this perspective!' But I'm forced to admit that — as awful as it's been that men have been the only people making films — they have done a pretty good job of capturing women. Or at least, the great filmmakers have. I think Hollywood has done a terrible job of capturing women, but the filmmakers that I grew up with and admire and respect have generally been really great at it, in the same way that women would be great at giving us a better perspective on men. Maybe in a strange way it's the opposite; maybe what we have to offer is a really interesting perspective on the other gender that can only be offered because we have some distance and are watching."
On the portrayal of female bodies in film"I feel like with young women, their bodies are constantly objectified and used in a sexual context. With older women, [their bodies are] constantly the butt of a joke. For me, the seminal scene that illustrates that is, in About Schmidt, when Kathy Bates gets into the hot tub and Jack Nicholson is horrified and the audience is supposed to scream."I remember being so deeply offended by that scene. One of the first times you're dealing with an older woman being naked in a movie — it doesn't happen very often — and it's the butt of a joke, or it's supposed to horrifying. [In a shower-room scene in Take This Waltz] I wanted to show women's bodies of all ages, kind of without comment, and the only conversation around it is about time passing and what it means, and about sexuality and relationships. That it not be something contrived to produce an effect, necessarily."SourceI really loved the shower scene with Michelle, Sarah and Jennifer in the film. You can listen to the full interview at the source.
