Hope Davis is running late for our interview in the midst of
the frenetic Toronto Film Festival. But she has the perfect
excuse, she hurriedly explains. "I got stuck in the damn
elevator. That can only happen to me." Davis is no stranger
to film festivals. Her first two films, The Day Trippers and The
Myth of Fingerprints, have been screened at both the Toronto and
Sundance Film Festivals. Both are independent and more
importantly, they both explore the fragility of the modern
American family. Not quite coincidental, the actress explains as
we settle down to our interview at Toronto's Sheraton Hotel.
"This is what a lot of the young film makers living in New
York seem to be dealing with. Writers who are in their late
twenties tend to be thinking about their families. I'd say about
90% of the scripts that come to me are about family stuff."
So setting apart these films is a challenge, and in the case of
both of these films, she says, "the difference in telling these films apart was the
director."
"I really loved this
character,"
In The Daytrippers, Rita (Anne Meara), is the shrill, forceful
maternal head of a suburban family. When the oldest of her two
daughters, Eliza (Davis) is troubled by suspicions that her
husband Louis (Stanley Tucci) may be having an affair, this
mother from hell loads the whole family into the Buick station
wagon and descends on Louis’ Manhattan office for some
sleuthing. ("I saw it on Matlock," she says, as she
checks the speed redial to see who he's just called.) The family
- Rita, Eliza, the wild younger daughter Jo (Parker Posey), Jo's
boyfriend Carl (Liev Schreiber), and Rita's downtrodden husband
Jim (Pat McNamara) - spends the day together tracking the elusive
Tucci through the city. "I really loved this character, but
I also loved how really unsentimental the script was, and how
true it seemed," Davis explains. "Here was this woman
trying to lead a really good, honest life as a teacher, happily
married, loved her husband, was smart - yet her life was falling
behind her and she didn't know it. I thought that this was the
way it really WAS in life, in that people can love each other and
still lie to one another and create falsehoods." Even though
The Daytrippers is just being released, it was made some two
years ago, and was the actress's first major film experience.
"What I liked about doing this, was that my character is so
reactive, she doesn't talk a lot. Being my first film, I was SO
nervous, I was happy to be dealing with the camera and just
reacting."
"When I met him I was
very impressed with him." on writer/director Bart Freudlich
She soon followed that experience with the critically
acclaimed The Myth of Fingerprints, which also stars E.R's Noah
Wyle and Julianne Moore. The film tells of a trio of siblings
returning to face their dysfunctional family and inner demons
during a Thanksgiving dinner. Davis plays the wildly erratic
girlfriend of one of those siblings. It was also the first
feature film from writer/director Bart Freudlich. "When I
met him I was very impressed with him. He was just 26 when we
met, which is amazing, and I wanted to work with him. I also
wanted to play the part, which is so far away from these
neurotic, depressed and freakish characters I often do on stage.
And even though it's ME who gets stuck in elevators on my way to
interviews, I'm not like that, am I?" Davis says that she
found it easy to identify with the family craziness explored in
The Myth of Fingerprints and this particular character who stands
out from the staidness of a repressed family. "You know how
it is when you're with your whole family, then suddenly this
stranger walks in and puts your whole family in perspective. Then
sometimes you think: my God, my family's terrifying. The
character I play in Myth makes this family realise how tense they
all are, and how none of them can TALK; she tries to kind of
connect to people a little bit."
"The kind of work
that's going on there is what I love to do," on NY
While most of us think of the American movie industry as being
synonymous with Hollywood, New York's film industry, which has
spawned both of Davis' films, and the likes of Stanley Tucci's
Big Night, is growing at a rapid pace. Davis has no desire to
move to the West Coast. "I was born and raised on the east
Coast, and I love to do theatre as well." In fact, her next
outing is a play, a production of Chekhov's Ivanov, starring
Kevin Kline, no less. At present, she's wrapping another New
York-based film for actor/director Stanley Tucci. "The kind
of work that's going on there is what I love to do."
Originally, it was actress Mira Sorvino who got Davis
interested in acting. "We were neighbours and her mother
taught a drama class when I was very young, which Mira and I
attended. She was a wonderful drama teacher and I just loved it
from the very beginning." Davis grew up in New Jersey, is
the only actor in her family, which she laughingly describes as
"your relatively normally dysfunctional, nuclear family,
much like in these movies I'm doing." Which is possibly why
she finds these films so appealing.
Though she is happy to devote her time to the New York stage
and screen scene, Davis is happy to look at the occasional
Hollywood film if the right project comes her way. "I might
end up doing one early next year. After all I have to put food on
the table, so sooner or later I'm going to have to venture into
that arena."
