Naomi Watts has become the directors’ choice to play pretty
women having an awful time. She was a grief-stricken widow in
21 Grams; a journalist tormented by a ghost girl from
beyond the grave in both The Ring movies; a midwife who
tangles with the Russian mafia in last year’s Eastern
Promises; and the mother in a family tortured by psychopaths
in the coming Funny Games. If that wasn’t bad enough,
she’s soon to be brutalised by malevolent seagulls, reprising the
Tippi Hedren role in a remake of Hitchcock classic The
Birds.
The British-born, Australian-raised actress has made anguish her
trademark, with a disturbing, lived-in intensity. Yet pleasantly,
her torments on screen bear little resemblance to the happy place
where she is in real life. The 39-year-old, whose success came
famously late, has an eight-month-old son with her partner, US
actor Liev Schreiber; and - these days - the creative clout and
star power to make the movies she chooses.
So why does she keep taking these roles? “It’s fun to play fear,
the unknown,” she says. “There’s a lot of emotion that comes within
fear and that genre. I guess everyone has their niche - and that
seems to be mine.”
“I wouldn’t call her a technique actress,” says her friend, film
director John Curran. “She’s got really great instincts in the
moment and knows how to put herself out there and tap into the
emotion when she’s sort of free-falling. She’s very brave in that
regard. She’s happiest when she feels like she’s a little bit out
of control.”
Lacking the aristocratic hauteur of Cate Blanchett or the
statuesque primness of friend Nicole Kidman, Watts has doggedly
carved out a screen persona that’s girlier and yet more disturbed
than those peers. But it was playing a bisexual blonde ingenue who
has a breakdown in David Lynch’s opaque Mulholland Drive
that really made her name in Hollywood.
“I guess some [of my films] are strange,” Watts says. “They’re off,
they’re not mainstream. But that’s not ever what I set out to do,
to appeal to the masses. I was just trying to do something that
would appeal to me. Maybe my mind is strange, I don’t know,” she
laughs a little.
In person, Watts doesn’t seem dark, strange or tormented. Perched
in a hotel armchair, wearing a silk turquoise top close to the
colour of her eyes, she is here to promote her new movie, The
Painted Veil, directed by Curran. Her manner, though polite,
is reserved. Perhaps recent experiences have made her wary of the
media: since giving birth to her son she has become more of a
paparazzi target, and lately everyone wants to know how she feels
about the untimely death of Heath Ledger, a former boyfriend.
She began dating the late actor, who was 11 years her junior, on
the set of Ned Kelly. She has been credited with
encouraging him to take the artistic risk that was his
legacy-defining Brokeback Mountain role, although they
broke up before filming started in 2004. However, under her
publicist’s threat of immediate interview termination, I can’t ask
Watts about any of this: Ledger is off-limits.
She’s happy, though, to talk about Schreiber, her partner of three
years.
The couple are in Sydney for three months while Schreiber works on
X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The Painted Veil, which finished
shooting in late 2005, was Watts and Schreiber’s first movie
together. Watts and Edward Norton star as a mismatched British
couple stuck in a cholera epidemic in 1920s regional China, in the
film based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel. Watts finds
dimension and humanity in the unsympathetic character of Kitty
Fane, a spirited, frivolous London socialite turned adulterous wife
who has an affair with Schreiber’s character. Watts admits she was
worried about working with her new lover.
“We were very early in our relationship, probably only four or five
months in,” she says. “So we were both a bit edgy and nervous.
Particularly me - I’d already seen him live on stage so he had the
upper hand. [I was] still at that stage in the relationship when
you’re very intent on impressing that person … So I’m desperately
trying to impress Liev and I’m completely forgetting about how
Kitty should be moving and operating within this moment.”
The film was shot on location in the beautiful Guangxi province, in
a Chinese co-production that had its share of logistical
challenges.
“It was one of those films that have life-changing memories,” Watts
says. “It was incredible, the locations. We were really there,
living it as the locals were in these very remote parts of the
southern provinces.”
Curran says that Watts - who also produced the film with Norton -
required minimal direction.
“I always liken her to a classic silent screen actress,” Curran
says. “She’s really a master at conveying a lot by doing very
little. It’s a rare gift. Her script notes are generally about what
to take out, not what to add. She can play it, she doesn’t have to
say it with words.”
The Painted Veil’s remote locations and cultural clashes
sound like a picnic compared to Watts’s next role in Funny
Games, an R-rated film pitched as a bleak deconstruction of
violence as entertainment. It had a limited release in the US this
month.
“It was definitely difficult,” she says. “It’s a harrowing film and
subject and the way we shot the film was very close to reality.
[Director] Michael Haneke is not a believer in cheating much. When
I say that I mean just in the way he ties your hands or …” - she
mimes tying a rope around her neck.
“It was all very full on. But I have to say I felt good making it,
I conceived my son when I was making that movie so I couldn’t have
been in that much of a state.”
After Mulholland Drive, Watts took every interesting role
she could fit in, with a strong sense of making up for lost time.
But with the birth of Alexander Pete Schreiber last July, she has
applied the brakes.
“I don’t think I’d stop completely just because I’m a mum now,” she
says. “But even before my son came into the picture I was slowing
down, because I was worn out and also because of meeting Liev and
finding the balance of how we spend enough time together and juggle
work as well.
“But [motherhood] is fantastic, it’s everything I wanted.”
She won’t discourage her son from going into the family business
but prepubescent stardom is out.
“If [acting] is his dream then so be it,” she says. “But certainly,
that’s a long way off. No child acting, that’s for sure.”
Watts was born and lived in England until she was 14 (father Peter
Watts, Pink Floyd’s sound engineer, died when she was seven). Her
mother Myfanwy moved Naomi and her brother Ben to Sydney in the
early ’80s, then Naomi moved to LA in the mid-’90s. She has spent
more time in the US than anywhere but homesickness for Australia
has begun creeping back.
“I came back this time with my son, and it felt so much like home,”
she says. “I hadn’t had that feeling in a long time. It was
something about the sound of the voices, the food, the smells, the
light … I have a lot of nostalgia.”
Still, a more permanent homecoming is unlikely, to her regret. “Not
right now - Liev is such a New Yorker, he’s so connected to that
city.”
Watts, too, seems to be leaving LA behind and moving into her
Manhattan period. She plays a Manhattan district attorney with
Clive Owen in The International, out later this year.
Intriguingly, in next year’s Need, she will play a wealthy
Manhattan therapist who learns that a suicidal patient, played by
Nicole Kidman, is having an affair with her husband. It will be the
first time the two old friends have co-starred, though their
careers have often been unkindly compared with each other.
Hollywood success came a lot quicker to Kidman.
Watts was 31 when she made Mulholland Drive. That was
after at least six years of rejection in Hollywood and roles in bad
movies (Children Of The Corn IV, Gross Misconduct, Tank
Girl), which Watts satirised with breathtakingly
close-to-the-bone humour in the low-budget film Ellie Parker, a
minor Sundance hit. It’s hard to imagine Kidman sending herself up
as brutally as Watts does in that film - a flawed but funny flick
on digital video about a talentless, perpetually out-of-work
Australian actress in Hollywood.
Indeed that is Watts’s other major screen type, the struggling
actress (see King Kong, Ellie Parker and, memorably,
Mulholland Drive). It’s a role that looks a lot closer to
her real life than the tormented victim. For a time, Watts was
considering turning Ellie Parker into a TV series but at
the last minute pulled the plug in favour of pursuing her big
screen dreams. In a perfect piece of cinematic irony, it was on the
last day of shooting - playing Ellie as a B-grade blonde in a
bathrobe who is doing a bad job of acting dead - that Watts took
the call cementing her success.
“We were stealing shots in very illegal places just under the
Hollywood sign,” she says, “and I was negotiating my King
Kong contract on the phone.
“I just want to be involved with other good artists, great
filmmakers and great writers. The material has to speak to you …
because if you’re doing it for some other reason, like … you’re
going to make a lot of money; that’s just not enough of a
reason.”
Still now, with the ability to pick and choose her roles, Watts
returns to characters struggling with awful fears or torments.
“I’ve never set out to end up in that genre,” she says, then
smiles. “Having said that, I’ve always been a fan of
Hitchcock.”
The Painted Veil opens on April 24.
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