Legendary Actress Ellen Barkin Tries For Another Happy Day

Written by Brad Balfour Saturday, 14 January 2012 10:07

Film and the Arts - Interviews

Ellen Barkin doesn't have to do much to stay in the media spotlight

Q: You starred in Diner with Barry [Levinson] as director and now you’re starring in this film directed by his son Sam -- serendipity or not?

EB: Yes. I was working with Sam for a week and a half on another project that he had rewritten, and he was on the shoot of a genre movie. It was a big comedy cast, spectacular cast, and there were a lot of improvisational geniuses.

I was sitting in my canvas chair one day and I was in between scenes, so I was in my bad-girl villain costume, and my script was closed on my lap. Sam was sitting next to me.

Now I had spent every day on the set with this man basically as the director-writer, even though he wasn't -- and he had nothing to do with directing the camera because the movie sucks.

My script is closed and I looked down and said, "Wait -- Levinson?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, said, "Are you Barry's kid?" And he said, "Didn't you know that?" I said, "No." So it was amazing.

And what I will say to Sam and to his father's credit -- this makes me cry, because Diner was a very hard thing for me to access -- is both men, at very different points in my life, gave me roles that were so close to the surface of where I was at the time, and so raw and true in terms of the work I needed to do in order to succeed for myself.

That's not lost on me. Diner was my first movie -- I played a supporting role.

Sam gave me like the whole orchestra to play with.

Q: How did this cast come together?

EB: When we started the process about three years ago, I said, "Where do you want to start," and he said, "I want to start at the top of the pyramid, with the matriarch,  your mother."

I said, “Okay… Like in a dream world, then who's my mother?"

He said, "In a dream-dream world?"
 
I said, "Yes."

He said, "Ellen Burstyn."

I said, "Okay. Lets make her an offer."

The script got sent to Ellen, she had a meeting with Sam and within a week was in two days later.

Then the next place that he wanted to go was to the Patty character, played by Demi Moore. He said, "Look, I have to go next to your nemesis, and I need someone who looks like she can kick your ass."

There was some discussion about how meek I thought I was, and I said, "Okay, who's that?" He said, "Demi Moore." I said, "Yeah. GI Jane could do that."

Then he just continued in that way. What was beautiful about it, and why I think this is really Sam Levinson's movie, [was] nobody forced him into any of his choices, nobody asked him to cast some[one], nobody pushed a key crew on him.

He has a 23-year-old composer from Iceland who's never scored a movie that he found on the Internet. That was a bit of a fight. He really was just left alone with all of it. It was an extraordinary experience.

The templates for Sam were Hannah and Her Sisters, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Carnal Knowledge and The Graduate.

Q: You've got these characters moving in and out.

EB: We were really the most functional version of a family as a cast. I feel so comfortable speaking for all of us because we all say the same thing. I think we all had the same reaction.

Everyone had someone to take care of and had someone taking care of them. And when we would shoot scenes, whether you were in them or not, pretty much every actor showed up on the set.

They'd call up and say, "Can someone come pick us up? We just want to come." So when Ezra Miller and Ellen Burstyn were shooting that scene, we were all there. When I was there with Ellen alone in the kitchen, they were all there.

It took us 23 days to shoot the movie, and for 23 days there was a closed set. You weren't allowed in that house if you weren't a functioning crew member or in the cast.

If you were on the crew and you were the set decorator, you were out once shooting began, like your job was done. And it was welcomed, because Sam knew that he was asking a lot of every cast member and he was very protective.

I would say that there is not one person on that cast and crew who at any given moment did not know who their daddy was. That was pretty amazing, considering you've got the fucking Mount Olympus of acting that is Ellen Burstyn and George Kennedy, and then you have a little 13-year-old prodigy genius.

Everybody looked to Sam, who was at once so open and collaborative, and at the other time "Great, thanks for your input. I'm the director."

Q: One thing that's so great about this movie is its rhythm. It has this constant rolling process to it.

EB: When Sam gave me the script the first day, I went right back to my hotel room and I read it. I was really shredded on my bed and I was sobbing with tears and snot, like I don't think I've ever sobbed in life, like it really got me. And then I'd burst out laughing out loud, and emotionally, I literally did not know what to do with myself.

The brilliant film that he directed is exactly the brilliant script that was on the page.

I think it's the experience you have as an audience member. It's life, it's an amazing accomplishment. I do have to say that Sam pretty much across the board got his first choices in terms of his cast, and I think everyone had the same response.

Q: How did this character touch you emotionally in light of where you are now?

EB: In the big picture, I think she is representative of certainly every mother I know, and probably 98% of the population of mothers I don't know.

Susan Smith, I don't know that woman. I do know mothers just like me who only want to do good for their children. They want to do better than their parents, and sometimes, to the point of damaging, they want to protect their children from the outside world.

If you do that too much, you're not giving them enough tools to protect themselves. I think that within that framework, mistakes are made all the time -- big ones, small ones, profoundly traumatic ones -- and you just hope that as they go into adulthood and these mistakes start to resonate in their lives, they do better than you do.

So the idea of giving voice to that, I do think is one of the last taboos in movies. Like we can watch the brilliant Mo'Nique break our hearts in Precious because that mother is abusive, and she cracked my heart open.

And we can watch a caricature of a kind of crazy -- maybe I have the good intentions, but I'm hysterical. But we can't watch [characters] like me, like a mother who wanted to make the right choices, and guess what, I fucked up, more than once.

Q: You were gut wrenching.

EB: Because I do feel that it's really hard. I'm Method trained, and I did have to sit there for three years, and then every day all day, because she never has a scene where it doesn't happen.

George Kennedy, when we played that scene and his first line is "Does the grass look overgrown to you?", he might as well have stabbed me in the heart. I didn't plan it that way, but I thought "Oh wow, I bought the house, I paid for the landscapers, it's my responsibility. He's criticizing me, I'm not taking care of my family right, and they hate me."

I think to some extent everybody in the fucking universe feels unappreciated at some time in their life. Everybody feels like, "Just listen to me; how loud do I have to yell?"

This movie doesn't catch this woman 15 years ago or 22 years ago. It catches her when the milk has been boiling over in that pot for quite some time. So she has lost any ability to filter, to see clearly, to understand the result of her own actions. There's too much pain and too much hurt, and so it's like a baby, just acting out.

I do have to say that there are many ways in which, emotionally, my connections are up there for everybody to see.

There are ways in which this woman is maybe the least like me of any character I've ever played. I understand this idea, but only as an idea, of the host egg female. So the minute you can no longer reproduce, your function in society is negated and you become invisible.

So it was a beautiful and really challenging thing for me. I said, I'm going to become one of those women.

I understand the feminist idea of it, it is not my personal experience. For me, at 57, I have never felt more visible, more present, or more deserving for the first time in my life, of just the fact that I'm here. And I've never felt more listened to. I've been feeling it over the last five years, just when I'm supposed to be receding into the background.

Obviously, when you're 30 years old and you walk down the street, people look at you. Anyone with breasts, men look at you. And when you're over 50, they don't. We all know that. But that does not define me.

I'm right up there with the menopausal power pack. I am like really there, saying no, wait a minute, this thing of my kids are grown, they're on their way, I'm not having any more babies, I've got nothing but me, and yes I will raise my children until the day I die and be there for them, but they are not children, they are their own people.

I am so empowered by that. I feel like, okay, let go, because now it's my turn. And I know it's cliché, but when it was my turn in my 20s and early 30s, I wasn't ready. That's when I was a fucking ghost.

Q: What was probably the most difficult decision that you made in terms of shaping this character and bringing her to life?

EB: I knew I was going to play the part the minute I read it. But the most difficult decision was, obviously, to say if you're going to do this, you're just going to do it, and it's not going to feel good. And maybe you come out the other end having learned something.

Q: What do you think defines the essence of the character?

EB: I think one of my fundamental building blocks was that was I was looking at the ways in which she wasn't like me.

I looked at her character traits, her personality traits. I thought okay, so she's someone who never [has] a moment in her life [when] she's not looking for approval, always looking to see what the reaction of her action is.

I don't have that in me. And I don't know why, because I was not a confident adolescent, I was not a confident young woman. I just never gave a fuck what anybody thought about me, and I don't know why.

I think most actors say this, and maybe that's why you become actors. I wasn't popular, but I just didn't care. I think that this woman is the opposite of that.

So as I started to explore that, I said, "right, so she's like a baby." When a baby takes its first step, the first thing they do after they're not focusing on their feet is they pick their head up and make sure that somebody's seen them, hopefully their mommy or daddy.

A baby breaks a plate and looks around to make sure someone's seen them. I think babies probably wouldn't have temper tantrums, [unless] something's hurting them, [then] they would. But a full-on temper tantrum, that's because somebody's watching.

So this whole movie is some version of a temper tantrum for Lynn. You're catching her at her temper tantrum moment. And I thought, okay, she's a baby pre-the age of reason, and not only under five but under two.

So that's a good jumping off point for me. She didn't look like me, she didn't dress like me, she certainly didn't move like me, and she didn't talk like me, and I think that was something that you said you were so surprised at.

Q: And what about that fight scene with Elliot?

EB: For me, it's her shining moment in the film after that scene, where not only does she try to understand, but actually after what he does to her, what she really has to say by saying the line "That's because they don't know you, Elliot," is that they don't know what a wonderful, vulnerable human being you are. And that's some serious parenting.

Q: Two icons of Method acting -- you and Ellen Burstyn -- are not in scenes together until the necessity of it. Did you two talk much?

EB: Constantly. Acting with Ellen, aside from her guidance, her support, the courage she gave me, was like playing jazz with Miles Davis, and I'll just keep saying it.

All I had to do was follow her and she would bring me there. And there was a moment -- and I don't know, because Lynn has nothing but those moments -- where I just was sitting with Ellen, and yes, our communication was constant.

Q: Did you say, "I'm going to do this in this scene?"

EB: No, but there was the Method kind of talk. There was a moment where I just thought okay, like, it's enough already. [I've] just got to not cry or become hysterical.

I said to Ellen, "You know, I've got to just pull it together for this scene," and she said "Go ahead. Go do it. Now you must hold on to the reality of your character. Not necessarily the scene, but just hold on to the reality of your character. Go do it. He's going to cut after about three seconds because it's not going to work." She was right.