Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
One of America's best actors discusses her directorial debut, "The Anniversary Party," and the joy of working.
Jun 26, 2001 | Jennifer Jason Leigh is a celluloid changeling, able to morph herself into a gun moll, a heroin addict or Dorothy Parker with aplomb. Now, Leigh, 39, hankers after the role of auteur. And if her freshman effort "The Anniversary Party" is any indication of what she's capable of, then the critics might as well pony up that particular laurel on bended knee.
"The Anniversary Party," which Leigh wrote, produced and directed with Scottish man-child Alan Cumming, flows before us with great economy of movement -- as if the two have performed this dance countless times before. They play a successful Hollywood husband and wife on the occasion of their sixth wedding anniversary. The party's on, and their pals are all invited. But Sally (Leigh) and Joe (Cumming) have just reunited after a painful separation, and their soiree's pregnant with a bellyful of disaster.
The film, cast with Leigh and Cumming's friends and shot in a glass house (metaphor alert) in the Hollywood Hills, is trenchant, sexy and tragic all at the same time -- a movie for grown-ups. Recently, Leigh discussed "The Anniversary Party" over a glass of iced tea.
"The Anniversary Party" reminded me of a good Robert Altman film. You've worked with Altman before -- has he been an influence on you?
He's been a huge influence my whole life, my whole career -- and [John] Cassavetes and Woody Allen. They've all made a mark. But certainly Altman in terms of how to make actors feel safe and welcomed. When you're working on an Altman film or an Alan Rudolph film, there's no place you'd rather be. There's so much trust and freedom that it's an absolute pleasure. So that's something that I understood firsthand, those experiences.
What did you do to put the cast at ease?
I cast friends. Everyone's playing friends, but they actually are all friends. I think on a certain level the film works because there's this real familiarity between people. We had no motor homes. Everyone would come to work and get made up at the same makeup tables. We had really good food. The women who played America and Rosa (the housekeepers) cooked these incredible gourmet breakfasts every morning. Then we'd go to the set and work all day. When they weren't working, people were hanging out on the lawn or sleeping in hammocks. Kevin Kline would play piano, and Michael Panes would accompany him on violin. It was an extraordinary experience.
Was everything scripted in the film?
Yes, but there was a little improvisation in the scene where Alan and I are toasted. I sat down with all the actors and talked about the characters' relationships to each other and things that they might know about us and want to talk about. We asked them to go off and write it so we'd have the experience of being surprised, and hearing it for the first time. And they would have the experience of giving it to us for the first time.
In the segment where everyone's doing charades, that was scripted, but to get to that state of heightened frenzy and aggression we had each actor go through the entire charade, and everyone was allowed to throw things in and go through the clue to its completion. Then in the editing room, we edited it back down to exactly what we had scripted. That gave it a life force it wouldn't have had otherwise.
The film also made me think of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Yes, that's our kind of humor, that's what we love. In fact, [John Benjamin] Hickey and I once read through "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" together when we were doing "Cabaret." It's such great writing. I love that kind of brutal, scathing humor. That's something I'm definitely drawn to.
How did the collaboration with Alan Cumming come about?
Alan and I were hanging out with each other after our time in "Cabaret." I had just finished being in "The King Is Alive," which was shot using digital video, and I told him how exhilarating it was, as an actor, to work like that. And how cheap it was. We were both talking about how we wanted to direct, and we thought we'd do it together -- write about something we care about, and write for our friends.
We started with who we wanted to be in it, and began to play with it. It just kept growing and growing. Then we started pitching it. We sold it to Fine Line, and then we had to write a script. By that time we had talked about it so much that we knew every scene very well. Then it was just a matter of writing and rewriting.
How did you make that work, co-directing with Cumming?
Alan and I were really on the same wavelength. I guess we were lucky in that we share a lot of the same tastes and opinions, and we had this incredible intuitive understanding of each other. That helped a great deal.
We were also very disciplined. We only had 19 days to shoot, and ended up with 40 hours of footage. On "The King Is Alive," which also used digital video equipment, they had 120 hours of footage. It took them a month just to make the selects of the dailies. We had a budget of $3.5 million, so that forced us to be sparing in how many takes we did. Usually we did three, working with three of these state-of-the-art digital video cameras.
You thank your mom, screenwriter Barbara Turner, in the credits. How did she help you?
Oh, she was enormously helpful. She was our harshest critic on the script and helped us make it sharper, funnier and smarter. That's why it says "A big 'less words' thanks to Barbara Turner," because she kept saying to us, "Less words. Less words."
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