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| Interview: Elisha Cuthbert and Jamie Babbit of "The Quiet" |
by Peter Sobczynski
The star and the director of "The Quiet" are anything but while talking about their quirky new film.
“The Quiet” tells the story of Dot (Camilla Belle), a young deaf woman who moves in with her affluent godparents (Martin Donovan and Edie Falco) after the death of her father and winds up becoming the sounding board for the dark and depraved secrets of everyone around her. Of course, Dot has her own hidden secret as well and when catty daughter Nina (Elisha Cuthbert) discovers it, she uses her knowledge to play a game of her own that will have shocking consequences for everyone. Although ungainly and messy at some points, I have to admit that it has grown in stature in my mind in the weeks since I saw it. Director Jamie Babbit, finally making her theatrical follow-up to her 2001 debut “But I’m A Cheerleader” after spending a few years directing episodic television, does an excellent job of setting up a mood that is ostensibly normal yet still somewhat unsettling (although some may invoke David Lynch, it stuck me more as being what a teen melodrama might be like in the hands of Hal Hartley) and the central performances from Belle and Cuthbert are both quite good as well–the latter effectively demonstrates that she can do more than look sexy, as she did in “The Girl Next Door” and “Old School,” or get stuck in a cougar trap, as she did during her stint on the hit TV show “24.”
Recently, I sat down with Cuthbert and Babbit to discuss their work on “The Quiet,” which is now in limited release and is scheduled to open wider on September 1. In doing so, however, several of the aforementioned secrets of the story are revealed so if you plan on seeing the film, you may want to hold off on reading the interview until after you have done so.
Considering that it is wildly different from the things that each of you have done before, how did the two of you become involved with “The Quiet.” Elisha, you’ve done different types of things before but they have all been within the confines of recognizable genres while this one doesn’t really fit comfortably into any one story type.
Cuthbert: After “House of Wax,” I needed to do something more character-driven because I didn’t think I was being challenged enough. I was really out looking for something specific. Originally, I was looking at Dot, believe it or not. I found the script and I thought it was really great but I didn’t know if it was going to get made or not. I knew that I really loved the director and I felt like if I could attach myself to it, we could find the funding for it. We did and in all of that, which was obviously quite a long process, Jamie convinced me to play Nina, which was the pretty cheerleader role but one with so many other layers. I went back and looked at it again and saw that it had a lot more character in it for me to do.
Babbit: For me, I just read the script and I could see myself sink two years of my life into it because it was so rich and there were so many things going on. Besides, I hadn’t done something like it before and I don’t want to make the same movies over and over again either. If you want to grow as an artist, you have to push yourself to do different things.
One of the things about the character of Nina is that on the surface, she appears to be the perfect teen queen but we soon discover that there is a lot more going on underneath the pretty surface. Seeing as how that kind of weird split would seem to be an inescapable factor in the life of any hot Hollywood actress, did that notion play any part in how you were eventually able to connect with the role?
Elisha: I didn’t really connect with this character in the least bit. Normally I could say something like she was tough or driven but I was playing a 17-year-old suburban kid going through probably the worst thing any girl could ever go through. I just felt so far from that–even at 17, I felt like I was 25. It was a difficult thing to make this movie. I was going into it with all these good intentions–I could sink my teeth into it, create this character and people would be impressed–and here I was bawling in a bathroom on set over how I wasn’t going to be able to do this. Everything about Nina was wrong to me in regards to what I felt personally inside of me. That was a big thing that I had to overcome towards the end of the film because we shot the stuff between my character and Martin Donovan towards the end of the shoot. To play the victim or to play someone who didn’t really know any better was hard for me because everything about me wanted to just deck him in the face. I just felt like it was a hard place to go to because I had nothing to relate to. I think something special came out of it for me just watching it and seeing how far I was going from myself–that was everything that I was hoping for.
Babbit: People were asking me, “Why the cheerleader girl again?,” but what I liked about the Nina character was that she was a cheerleader but the movie kind of deconstructs that and shows that it may be her face but that isn’t what she is about at all. (To Cuthbert). I’m sure that as an actress in the business, you get that all the time–people assume that you are a certain way even when there is so much more going on.
Cuthbert: Yeah, especially after “The Girl Next Door.” There was a huge amount of feedback towards whether or not that was me or just the character. A lot of the people in the industry assumed that it pegged me as that kind of romantic comedy character. I was telling everyone afterwards that I hate romantic comedies because I didn’t know how I was going to get myself into anything but them. When you realize that you have so much more to offer than just one genre, you kind of have to fight to get into others.
One of the things that I liked in the film was the way that it captured the tone of feeling isolated and alone within the crowded halls of a typical high school. In what ways, if any, did your own personal school experiences come into play while working on this film?
Babbit: One of my really good friends in high school had a father who was beating her mother–he was a doctor, she was a professor and they were a wealthy suburban family. She would come over to my house and say that her dad totally knocked the shit of her mom. I definitely grew up with suburban horror for sure–my family was the one where people would come and crash at my house when they were trying to get away from their own psychotic families. My mother was a shrink and she would always give free therapy to all my friends. Also, when you grow up gay in suburbia, you get used to hiding who you are and get really good at keeping secrets–I wasn’t out to anyone in high school but I kind of secretly knew–and so I related to everyone having a secret.
Cuthbert: A big challenge for me in this film was to revert back to being 17 again while understanding that my 17 was different from Nina’s 17–not just in her relationship with her father but in just being a normal teenager in a normal town. I had to keep thinking of my sister and how everything was such a big deal at that time and everything meant so much. There was no filter–she felt something and she would say what she thought instantly without any sort of consequence. Some of Nina’s snappiness in the film reminds me of what my sister was like at that age.
Speaking of the scenes involving Nina and her father, could you two talk a little about the difficulties of directing and performing material that involves such tricky subject matter?
Babbit: It was interesting, actually, because I don’t know if you knew we were going to be filming as much as we did because the script said that it would be off-camera a lot . . .
Cuthbert: There was a little bit more than I assumed there was going to be...
Babbit: At some point, she found out . . . My philosophy was to shoot it at the end and make it really specific instead of just saying “Just kiss and grind on each other and we’ll see what happens.”
Cuthbert: Jamie was really good at respecting us and seeing how hard it was to go through. We were all uncomfortable.
Babbit: It was uncomfortable for everyone. Martin was insecure because he thought “I’m so old and ugly and she’s so young and pretty.” Those were his insecurities. In rehearsals, he told us that he had some love scene with Liv Tyler and how he freaked out because he was so insecure. He was going through his older man freak-out while Elisha was wondering how Nina could let her father do this and why she doesn’t just punch him in the mouth.
Cuthbert: I wanted to save her and yet I was her–it was like a tug-of-war in my own heart and mind and it was a painful experience.
Babbit: What I think worked really well is the tug-of-war that was going on inside of you because that was exactly what Nina was going through. It all kind of worked for the scene. The nice thing about Martin was that because he was so insecure about his body and being with a younger woman and all those things, he had that kind of needy desperation on his face.
Cuthbert: And I am sure that he was getting the wrong impression from me because I was being a little bit snappy between takes. It was a reaction that was coming out of me and it wasn’t because I was like “Eww–I’m with Martin Donovan”–it was because I didn’t know how my character could subject herself to this. That made for a very real response and as soon as I could get those scenes over with, that was the best thing that could happen.
Babbit: Which is exactly what Nina was thinking. We did as few takes as possible and cleared the set and made it very specific.
How much of a challenge was it for you to play the scenes with Camilla Belle, considering that since her character is deaf, she isn’t giving you the sort of reactions that you would ordinarily get from an actor you were appearing with in a scene?
Cuthbert: Jamie actually set up a really great thing before we actually went to Austin and shot the film. It was Martin Donovan, myself, Katy Mixon, who plays Michelle, and Camilla Belle and we did improv sessions in which we went over some scenarios and I got to test the waters before putting anything on film. It was about fussing out how I was going to play it because you really had to find your own beats and moments since there was nothing to bounce off of–there was no banter of back-and-forth and it would just go on until Jamie would yell “Cut!” It was sort of an interesting process because I had never done that before. I was sort of resentful towards Camilla because she didn’t have to memorize any lines and only had to sit there and not respond. I thought that I was babbling on and on while she was just sitting there listening or not listening.
Babbit: It really helps, I find, when directing actors to give them something to do even when there is no back-and-forth with the lines. A lot of times, I would tell Elisha that her character was trying to get a reaction out of her so that she would have something that she was trying to do in the scene, especially once she knows that she can actually hear.
Jamie, could you talk about your thoughts on the visual style of the film? Much of it has been shot in a way that emphasizes the color blue and between that and the glass surfaces seen everywhere, it gives the film a feeling as if it has been shot underwater.
Babbit: It just felt thematically right. “But I’m a Cheerleader” felt thematically right as a bright, colorful and campy thing. For this, the characters all feel stuck in their suburban hell–they can’t breathe and they can’t get out. Colorwise, it just seemed right to do all cool colors.
You shot “The Quiet” on digital video instead of film. Normally, when filmmakers discuss using digital video, they speak mostly in terms of how it saves time and money and allows for more takes. From a more artistic standpoint, what are your feelings on digital video as a filmmaking medium?
Babbit: You can do more takes and you don’t have to worry about the film cost but you do have to worry about the actors burning out and getting to the point where they just can’t do it again. It does save money, because you don’t have to pay for processing or film stock–you have to pay for the blow-up back to 35mm but when you shoot on HD and are picked up by a studio, the studio has to pay for the blow-up. It’s cheaper up front but it costs about the same in the end. As far as the visuals go, I agreed to shoot it in HD because it was mostly interiors and nighttime, which is when it looks best.
Cuthbert: It took about the same amount of time because you wanted that grainy film-like quality and spent a lot of time smoking up rooms.
Babbit: That took a long time and we’d have to stop if the smoke was inconsistent. HD is actually high maintenance and the camera is just as big as a 35mm camera. I do think it saves money in the up-front costs and I think that is the reason to use it. If I had to shoot a lot of scenes outside or a lot of daylight scenes, it would have been a nightmare and I would have said no.
After you made your debut with “But I’m A Cheerleader” a few years ago, you spent most of the interim time between it and “The Quiet” working on television shows like “Popular” and “Wonderfalls.” What was it like for you to get back into the world of indie filmmaking after having spent several years in the television trenches?
Babbit: I would say the hardest thing about going back was not having a union crew and not having the experienced people or the toys. It was also a relief because I didn’t want to have to deal with the politics of TV–the way that the writers and producers are always at your back controlling you like a puppet. Here, it was nice to be an independent filmmaker and have free reign. That was also helpful because I had a baby three weeks before shooting, so I needed all the freedom I could get because I was working and breast-feeding at the same time and if I was on a TV show, they would have been like, “I don’t think so.”
Elisha: I think it is all relative. You take a movie like this and you know exactly what you are getting into. The only difference for me in terms of television to film is that you have the freedom and creativity to sit back and try and do something different in a film whereas television can be very repetitive. I played the same character for four years on television and that is kind of nuts but it is at a faster pace–we’d shoot 9-10 pages a day. There is a tone and quality about being able to focus on a two-hour movie as opposed to hour after hour on a show.
When you premiered “The Quiet” last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, what was the experience like for you, Jamie? When you premiered “But I’m a Cheerleader” a few years earlier, you had the luxury of nobody knowing who you were and being able to go in with a clean slate while this one was made by someone who was now a known commodity to many in the audience.
Babbit: It was interesting because when I had “But I’m a Cheerleader” there, they were like “Who’s that girl” and so on. This time, they were going “Oh, we know who that girl is” and then they would watch the film and be expecting something that they didn’t get. In a way, that was kind of fun to fuck with people’s expectations.
It is crazy because the audience reactions have been so different–people laugh at different times, get freaked out at different times and scream at different times. It is really fun to hear where the laughs come–a lot of people do laugh during the film and often at really uncomfortable moments.
Cuthbert: My manager laughed at the part when I am in the lunch line with Michelle and I say “Michelle, take it down a notch. The whole world already knows you’re a cunt–there’s nothing left to prove.” He loved that and no one else in the audience laughed at it. It raises different ideas and questions and that is what I love about it. I love going to movies that think outside the box so that you can walk away and talk about them with whomever you went with.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=1926
originally posted: 08/30/06 21:25:49
last updated: 09/29/06 17:28:14
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