Perhaps the snow-laden milieu of the Sundance Film Festival
is an unlikely place to meet actress Julianne Moore, who was
at the Festival promoting a small independent film, The Myth of
Fingerprints, beacuse these days Moore is
being chased by a variety of dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg's epic
Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World. Paul Fischer spoke with her for this interview.
"Spielberg actually saw me in The Fugitive some years ago," she says. "I had a tiny role in it, but for some reason it prompted him to call me, saying that he hoped to work with me one day. I was obviously thrilled and never believed for a second it would actually happen. I then got
a phone call last year asking me to come in and talk about
The Lost World. We had this amazing conversation about our
families and ourselves. Then he offered me the movie. I was blown
away."
In The Lost World, Moore plays a palaeontologist who travels to an
isolated island where a variety of dinosaurs have been allowed to
roam free following the disastrous Jurassic Park experiment of a
few years previously. Trying to knock some sense into her is her
mathematician boyfriend (Jeff Goldblum), a survivor of the
original experiment.
"She's a feisty, gutsy, independent
woman who knows her mind and won't take crap from anybody."
"It was just non-stop
physicality."
Before working on The Lost World, Moore was asked whether or not
she was a physically agile woman. "Of course I am, I said,
but I never realised what Spielberg meant." It was a
tough film to make, and though she had a stand-in,
Moore did a lot of her own stunts. "There was so much
hanging everywhere. We hung off everything available, plus we
climbed, ran, jumped off things. It was always cold and raining,
so we were always wet. It was just non-stop physicality."
As
for working with those dinosaurs, that, she said, was the easy
part. "Firstly, Stan Winston built these incredibly
beautiful animatronics which were so lifelike, primitive, emotive
and with such personality, that all you have to do is look at
them and act accordingly. Secondly, when they were doing scenes
involving the computer graphics stuff, someone like Steven
would explain carefully where they would be, this is
where they're coming and how many. So you were guided; therefore
it wasn't difficult, given the circumstances, to be able to fill
in the rest."
Moore landed her first leading role in Todd Haynes'
"Safe" (both 1995), garnering critical acclaim as an
affluent LA housewife, who develops allergic reactions to
everyday chemicals and fragrances. Later that year, she
co-starred as Hugh Grant's pregnant girlfriend in "Nine
Months" and was the electronics surveillance expert who was
targeted for death by Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas in
Richard Donner's "Assassins". Moore also plays one of
the women in the life of artist Pablo Picasso (Anthony Hopkins)
in James Ivory's "Surviving Picasso" (1996).
"He wasn't my
boyfriend when we met, but things became complicated as the
relationship developed."
Moore's next two films return her to the character-based
films that have cemented her reputation as a serious and
methodical actress. First up was first-time writer/director Bart
Freundlich's star-studded, film Myth of Fingerprints, about the
simultaneous unravelling and restructuring of a seemingly
all-American family during a Thanksgiving reunion. The movie was
an unexpected Sundance surprise and a big hit with audiences. For
Moore, this beautifully intricate film was not only a great
challenge for her as an actress, but on the film, she met her new
boyfriend, the film's writer/director. "He wasn't my
boyfriend when we met, but things became complicated as the
relationship developed."
Then there's the controversial Boogie Nights, in which she
plays a porn star in a film about the birth of Hollywood's adult
film industry. "The woman I play is a very sad person. She's
in the adult film world in the eighties. She has
drug problems and has lost a son, so she could be an amalgam of
many people who fell into the business." The film is set to
be controversial due its sexually graphic material and the
possibility of America's infamous NC-17 rating. "I like to try different things", she says.
Myth of
Fingerprints and Boogie Nights will be released later this year.
