Actress Naomi Watts pulls a fast one in David
Lynch`s Mulholland Drive. Introduced as Betty Elms, an impossibly sweet
and perky blonde trying to make it in Hollywood, she reinvents herself as
a lesbian Nancy Drew who, in partnership with mystery brunette Rita (Laura
Elena Harring), discovers the rotting corpse of a failed and embittered
actress whose alter ego was ... Betty Elms.
With its dream logic and baleful satire of the
movie business, Lynch`s recently released thriller-cum-conundrum, which
origianted as a pilot for a TV series that ABC balked at, has the trace
marks of both mid-`50s Hitchcock and Kenneth Anger`s book Hollywood
Babylon (Dell). A 31-year-old Anglo-Australian with 15 years` worth of
credits, Watts demonstrates remarkable range as she negotiates this dank
world; her performance shimmers, in different moments, with innocence,
lust, goodness and sadomasochistic humiliation.
We talked at the Toronto Film Festival the day
before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
and then again a week later.
Graham Fuller: Are we from the same English
town? I`m from Shoreham in Sussex.
Naomi Watts: [laughs] I`m from Shoreham in
Kent.
GF: The next county along - close
enough.
NW: I lived there until I was eight. My father
worked as a sound engineer for Pink Floyd so there was a lot of that
rock`n`roll lifestyle; I hardly ever saw him. My mum raised my brother Ben
[Watts, who photographed Naomi for this story] and me on her own because
she split with my dad when I was four. She had no money, so we lived with
her parents and her sisters. There are a lot of strong-willed
matriarchs in my family. I`m the youngest woman and the shyest of them
all. Mum had a series of bad boyfriends, and we moved around with them.
There was talk of my mother and father reuniting at one time, but he died
when I was about nine and it freaked my mum out. I think she felt she
couldn`t bring us up alone nad she passive-aggressively threatened my
grandparents, saying she would send us to a foster home, so that they
would take care of us, which they did.
GF: Where did they live?
NW: They had moved to norteast Wales and we
went there to live with them. We took Welsh lessons in a school in the
middle of nowhere while everyone else was taking English. Wherever we
moved, I would adapt and pick up the regional accent. It`s obviously
significant now, my being an actress. Anyway, there was quite a lot of
sadness in my childhood, but no lack of love. My mum is a very
demonstrative, loving person, but she`s had a really hard life.
GF: Did she remarry?
NW: Yes. Then she went on holiday to Australia
and it felt it was the land of opportunity, so we all emigrated. I was
uprooted again, this time to a whole new culture, one that took me a long
time to fit into. At school, I hung out with the dorks because I knew they
would accept me. It took me a while to find my way to the cool
group.
GF: When did you start acting?
NW: Mum put me in drama classes when I was
about 14. I`d been going on about it for some time, so maybe it was a way
to shut me up. Then I started taking more serious classes. I`d had the
desire to act even back in Shoreham.
GF: Do you think it was related somehow to
your father´s absence?
NW: Mabye I was lacking some kind of support
and needed to be accepted or appreciated. My father had not only left the
family, but he`d died, so perhaps as a child I felt doubly
abandoned.
GF: Flirting [1991] was the film that got
you noticed, right? Along with Nicole Kidman, Thandie Newton and Noah
Taylor.
NW: Yeah, though I`d had other parts here and
there. I`d taken a break from acting because I`d had a terrible experience
modeling in Japan and I swore I`d never be in front of any camera again.
Back in Sydney I got a great job producing fashion shoots for a big
department store when I was 19. Then I was poached by Follow Me, an
alternative fashion magazine to Vogue. A friend I`d done acting classes
with begged me to come to a weekend workshop. I resisted at first, but I
did it and had a great time. That was it. On the Monday morning I quit my
job and told them I had to follow my dream. Two weeks later I ran into
[director] John Duigan at the premiere of Dead Calm [1989]. We got to
talking and I told him I was an actress and he said I should audition for
Flirting. I thought, this could be one of those bullshit lines you hear at
a party. But I called, auditioned and got a part. After that I was offered
a role in a soap opera called A Country Practice, but I turned it
down.
GF: Why?
NW: Naivet¨¦. I felt I didn`t want to get stuck
on a soap for two or three years. Everyone thought I was mad. I probably
should have done it, but it doesn`t make any difference. Eventually I got
a few more high-profile jobs and then I came to Hollywood - again
naively.
GF: Which is exactly what your character,
Betty, does in Mulholland Drive.
NW: People keep mentioning that, but it never
occurred to me. When I came to America there was so much promise of good
stuff and I thought, I`ve got it made there. I`m going to kick ass. Then I
went back to Australia and did one or two more jobs. When I returned to
Hollywood, all those people who`d been so encouraging before weren`t
interested. You take all their flattery seriously when you don`t know any
better. I basically had to start all over again. I get offered some things
without auditioning today, but back then they wouldn`t even fax me the
pages of a script because it was too much of an inconvenience. I had to
drive for hours into the Valley to pick up three bits of paper for some
horrendous piece of shit, then go back the next day and line up for two
hours to meet the casting director who would barely give me eye contact.
It was humiliating.
GF: How did your character in Mulholland
Drive evolve between the ABC pilot David Lynch originally shot and the
subsequent movie version?
NW: In the most brilliant way possible. I saw
the pilot and I was really unhappy with it because a lot of Betty was
lost. In the beginning you think she`s a one-dimensional character who
should be on the side of the cereal box. She`s got stars in her eyes,
dimples in her cheeks, bounce in her step - you want to slap her. But the
paying off of the character was gone from the pilot; it was
sabotaged.
GF: But then Lynch turned it into a movie
with an expanded script...
NW: Yes, and I got 18 more pages.
GF: And we see how Betty is actually someone
else, Diane. By the same token, the amnesiac Rita, who Betty befriends, is
also someone else, Camilla.
NW: Everyone`s got a different interpretation
of it. But I had to make something up for myself so I could make some
solid, coherent choices. I thought Diane was the real character and that
Betty was the person she wanted to be and she`s in absolute need of Betty,
and Betty controls her as if she were a doll. Rita is Betty`s fantasy of
who she wants Camilla to be. In the end, though, all the characters are
little conduits of David and what`s goinf on in his stream of
consciousness. The hardest part for me was playing Betty, because she was
less naturalistic than Diane. I needed to make her human somehow. When I
see her now, I go, "Oh, my God, you`re a psycho." But there were places
where I tried to show that she had deeper dimensions, for example, when
she turns detective.
GF: Presumably, too, in the audition scene
where she suddenly steps out of her goody-two-shoes persona and shows her
seductive side.
NW: I love that scene. It just comes out of
left field. Betty`s definitely a thrill-seeker. I saw her as this
completely innocent young girl from a small town who suddenly finds
herself in a world she doesn`t belong in and is ready to take on a new
identity; even if it`s somebody else`s .
GF: Were you thinking of Doris Day or Grace
Kelly?
NW: Yeah. And Tippi
Hedren, Kim Nowak.
GF: Nowak seems right because her character
in Vertigo [1958] also starts out as someone else. Was playing Betty the
key to finding Diane, or vice versa?
NW: I couldn`t have done Diane without doing
Betty. Knowing that things once went well for Betty is what caused Diane`s
depression to emerge. Everyone` experienced some degree of depression in
their life and I definitely have, but not to the point where I didn`t get
out of bed or shower for days.
GF: What the film`s really about, though, is
the trampling of dreams in Hollywood, isn`t it?
NW: Yes, and how it can stifle
creativity. David must have experienced some of that when the
network refused to finance the Mulholland Drive series.
GF: What did you learn making the
film?
NW: David helped bring me out of my shell. My
spirit had been broken a bit over the years by my having to work on films
I didn`t love. Hollywood`s a surreal place, and it really is an assault on
your spirit. David saw me for myself and was OK with my self-doubts. And I
gave him the part of myself I felt I`d been hiding for so long, that
didn`t need to be hidden. But he`s an artist and he knows that creativity,
humor and sexuality all come out of a dark place.
GF: Do you have a partner?
NW: Yeah. We`ve been together a year and a
half.
GF: How do you balance work and
love?
NW: My work is the only thing I`ve been able to
depend on. I`ve never been completely sure in a relationship to the point
where I`ve felt like I`m going to be completely taken care of
emotionally.
GF: Do you want to stay in Hollywood and
make a life there?
NW: I have been making a life there, yet I`ve
never felt like it was home. I need to leave L.A. every three months for
the sake of my head.
a heap on the floor, then that`s another
way. I guess I`m a mixture of both. But watching the way people are coming
together now ... I mean that`s pretty wonderful.
SEVEN DAYS LATER
GF: What were you doing in Toronto the
morning of the terrorist attacks?
NW: I`d had my hair and makeup done and was
doing a magazine interview when someone walked in and said a plane had hit
the World Trade Center. We turned on the telly, but we had no idea it was
an attack at that point. It just seemed like something had gone horribly
wrong. I finished the interview, which was hard to concentrate on, because
I wanted to get out of there and watch the rest of the news. I think I did
two or three more interviews, but after the first one I realized I didn`t
want to be beholden to whatever I was saying who the fuck am I to comment
on such a big tragedy? David [Lynch] and Laura [Elena Harring] and a
couple of the publicists and I stayed in the hospitality suite and watched
it all on TV for about two hours. We were all crying and shaking. My
brother, Ben, lives in New York, so I was trying to call him the whole
time and I was thinking the worst because I couldn`t get a hold of him for
three brothers.
GF: How did you feel after the initial
shock?
NW: Like an idiot who just needed to be told
what to do. I wanted to be in New York with my brother, somehow getting
actively involved and helping. But I felt unequipped so I had a massive
depression. I felt, How do I fit in? I`m just using up space here. I was
addicted to watching the news and drawn to heraing people`s stories, so I
also felt weirdly voyeuristic. My mum, who was in France, was hysterical
when she finally got hold of me on the phone. She was like, "You`ve got to
leave America! You`re not safe!" And I said, "Mum, calm down. I live in
America and I`m feeling this in the same way as any other American." And
it became really clear to me that this is my home [cries briefly] and I`m
not walking away from it. I didn`t know how to express it to my mother
because she`s conflicted about her children being in America. But now I
feel like going out and holding up an American flag. I`ve always felt
different from Americans, but we are in this together. It`s not about
defining what culture you`re from - we are all human beings on the one
planet.
GF: How did you leave
Toronto?
NW: I went by bus to L.A.on the following
Friday. I was on it for 50 hours! We didn`t stop except for refuelling and
getting disgusting meals. [laughs] I`m a vegetarian and I ended up eating
my first burger in 15 years. We couldn`t even shower. But for some reason
I felt safe, like I was in some kind of bubble. I was coming down with
this cold and all these mixed emotions so I took NyQuil and knocked myself
out for 24 hours straight.
GF: In the moments you were awake, do you
remember what you were thinking about?
NW: I couldn`t get images out of my head -
horrible images of those poor people that were in those buildings
desperately trying to call their family and friends.
GF: What`s it like being back in
L.A.?
NW: Weird. I`ve been trying to make calls and
get on with things but everything seems frivolous and mundane. You feel
guilty for trying to bounce back, but the truth is we have to. I amtrying
to move forward. If it feels right to get on the phone and drum up
business, then that`s your way of dealing with it, and if you just want to
be
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