Julia Ormond: The Hollywood Interview

Actress Julia Ormond


JULIA ORMOND IS “IN HER ANIMAL”
By
Alex Simon

Julia Ormond made an auspicious debut as an actress in the landmark 1989 British miniseries Traffik, on which the Oscar-wining Steven Soderbergh film was later based, playing the drug-addicted daughter of a member of Parliament. By 1994, Ormond was being touted as the next Audrey Hepburn, with her old school glamour and classically-trained acting chops, earned at London’s prestigious Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts. High-profile turns in big studio pictures like Legends of the Fall and First Knight suddenly propelled the young, working actress into superstar status, with all the baggage that accompanies that much sought-after, and ultimately regrettable moniker.

With her turn in Sydney Pollack’s ill-fated remake of Billy Wilder’s classic Sabrina, in 1995, it all seemed to turn 180 degrees for Ormond, who suddenly found herself excoriated by the press that had built her up the year before. Fine work in such art house fare as Smilla’s Sense of Snow and Nikita Mikhalov’s epic The Barber of Siberia got her on the good side of a handful of critics, but did little to re-establish her as a movie star.

Rather than bemoan her return to “regular actress” status, Ormond took some time off, married, had a baby, and threw herself into philanthropic work, including work with The United Nations and founding FilmAid, a non-profit that, according to their own mission statement, “uses the power of film and video to reach the world’s most vulnerable communities with messages that inspire them, address their critical shared needs, and effect social change.” She also did fine work in such varied cinematic fare as The Prime Gig, Iron Jawed Angels, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Julia appeared in two of last year’s highest-profile films, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Steven Soderbergh’s epic Che.

Ormond reinvents herself with her turn in Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance, playing FBI agent Elizabeth Anderson who, with her partner (Bill Pullman), must interrogate three material witnesses to a brutal series of murders in a rural Midwestern town. Ormond offers a complex, double-barreled performance that’s a testament to the adage that artists, like fine wines, just get better over time. Julia Ormond sat down with us recently for a chat about film, the nature of violence in our society, and the beauty of being a survivor. Warning: spoilers ahead!

So tell us about going on this wild ride with Jennifer Lynch at the wheel.
Julia Ormond: It was really an amazing ride. It was right from the start, in terms of reading the script, I was aware of how clever it was, and what I believe it says, but of course they’re not going to consider me for it. (laughs) It’s just not the sort of thing I get cast in. Then she let me come in and audition, and beg for the role, and when I got the role, she asked me “Because of the nature of the film, do you think you can afford to take a risk on something like this?” My response was ‘I don’t think I can afford not to.’ Then when I actually got to work with her, I discovered this amazing force, who was so open and so…I think it was just the fact that she’d been so burned by the whole Boxing Helena experience and how indicative that was of what can happen to a filmmaker who steps out with something wholly original, then ends up being misunderstood, and then how deeply personal that response is for somebody. To come back with something like Surveillance, that is so out there and risky and be completely behind it, and not to cave to deliver something that’s more traditionally palatable or what’s “expected” from a woman director, just has to be admired. She made sure that everybody on that set felt respected and nurtured, from the cast to the drivers, and that helped get the best out of them. I wish it was something you saw more of in this business.

Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond in Surveillance.

You brought up something interesting in terms of Jennifer’s story of being a survivor. When I spoke with Jennifer earlier, we talked about you in that sense, as well. When you first “arrived” so to speak, you were being touted as the second coming of Audrey Hepburn, even before the remake of Sabrina. You were a movie star overnight, then after Sabrina, it was like the press turned on you, many of whom were really nasty to you. So you took some time off…
Yeah, I did. I had a baby and did some other things, but what I think happened to me is I believe I’m pretty grounded, and in the maelstrom of what was going on, hype is something that happens externally from you. It’s not something you generate yourself, and so you have your own perspective from within, and my sense was that when somebody is built up that high, particularly if it is movies that are not banking on you—I mean (Sabrina and First Knight) were made because of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery and Richard Gere being in them, not because of me. Until you have that legitimate grounding, that’s the point when everybody in the business recognizes you can make some claim. Up until that time, it’s just hype. What happened for me was that after I’d had the opportunity to do these movies that were high profile, I had the opportunity to do smaller films, like Smilla’s Sense of Snow and Barber of Siberia, and the experience of shooting the latter for a year in Russia really kind of wiped me out. What I perceived about myself was, aside from being creatively exhausted, I’d somehow gotten into a rut in terms of typecasting. I thought I was doing all these different movies: a cowboy film, a breezy romantic comedy, an Arthurian adventure, they all felt like they were different genres, but people would say “Oh, you’re the woman stuck between two guys, or three guys.” And I kind of had to admit, ‘Yeah.’ And that wasn’t good. So you throw that into the mix with everything else, and especially being British, you have the feeling that if you’re built up that much you have nowhere to go but down. So yes, there were people who said some nasty things, but there were also people who said some really amazing things, that were equally untrue! (laughs) I had to look at it from that perspective and what has been sort of a hard graft was stepping away from all that and doing some different stuff: having a kid, investing a lot of time in philanthropic things: building FilmAid International and doing work with the U.N. to raise awareness about human trafficking, also wanting to come back in at a certain point and do things differently, to take on roles that deliberately cut against that rut I found myself in. I’ve had a lot of people say to me “You turned your back on Hollywood,” and I never really felt that. I only felt grateful that I’d been given the opportunities that I’d been given and it took me a bit of time before I realized that the choices I’d made are what created my own rut. What has been really nice is that during the down time there has also been aging during that time (laughs) and wondering am I still going to be doing this in my forties? I breathed a big sigh of relief that I’m still employable (laughs), which was the first part of it, the second being that I find it really liberating in terms of what you’re cast as at this point in your life. So I’ve been enjoying the different range of work I’ve been doing for the past few years.

Ormond in the original Traffik, her film debut.

It makes sense that you would have made those decisions at those points in your life. We’re contemporaries, so when I look back at decisions I made in my 20s and 30s, they’re choices that I would never make now, given the perspective that I have. On the flip side of that, is the character of Elizabeth Anderson one that you would have wanted to play when you were 28?Yes! But that stuff wasn’t coming my way. Part of stepping back is about saying no to the stuff that is coming your way, that maybe career-wise is what other people would like you to do, but I’m fortunate now to be surrounded by a team that are in synch with what I see as a creative trajectory that I want to follow. What I also found was that it took me a while to process the fact that if an actor’s career is a journey and you from point A getting into drama school, point B getting your Equity card, Point C getting a lead in theater, point D getting a role in a film. The things that you relied on, your own resources that got you from A to D are not necessarily the things you want to stay with. You have to look at what’s going to get you from L to M and being an actor is the same as anything else in that it’s a craft that you learn and you grow in, and it’s sort of easy to believe that that’s what my success was founded on, and I needed to fall back on that. And feeling that I was stuck in a casting rut, that was something I had to let go of.

Julia Ormond in Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina.

What I hear you saying is that throughout the course of one’s life there are reset buttons. And you have to be willing to push the reset buttons.
Yes and there’s a lot of risk involved in that.

This is a risky film on many levels. Jennifer said that one reason she thinks she was so vilified was that she was a woman who was tackling this dark material, whereas if a man, like Quentin Tarantino or even her father, tackle a dark subject honestly, they’re held up as being innovators.
I think there’s a lot to that, but I would say this: it speaks to how we see violence and I think a big part of what this movie is about, is how we’re anesthetized to violence and part of what works about the movie for me is that it uses humor to provoke you to laugh at something that your brain is kind of saying “That’s bad!”

This film reminded me of two of my favorite movies for that very reason: A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born Killers, both of which were satires that employed black humor to get their very serious points across.
Okay, I see it being very close to both of those films, but also Reservoir Dogs in how you’re laughing at something that is threatening to a character within the piece. I really want this film to be something that people will go to see, then walk away from it without analyzing it to death, which is something I could definitely be criticized for (laughs), but there’s something it that says violence is something that exists within all of us, and we kind of have an approach to it globally where we’re looking to put a face on it. We’re looking for symptoms of evil. It’s like we have this fairy tale approach of still expecting to see the wicked, evil stepmother or the villain in the dark cloak, and I don’t think they exist. I think it’s much more the fact that it’s something within all of us, and until we recognize that, we can’t really tackle it. So we don’t expect something like this to come out of a woman. People also don’t like to see strong sexuality in a woman.

In terms of the woman being the seducer or the aggressor, you mean?
Yes, there are still a lot of areas in which men and women don’t have equality and to me, part of that equality is gained when I will celebrate the day when a woman directs the next Bond film. Then we’ll be in a position to be treated as equals. At the moment, the expectations of us are still somewhat in a box, and what I love about Jen is that even after all that stuff she went through in her life, she knows how to make a film. With her contacts and resources, she could have picked up any number of more conventional scripts, executed them brilliantly and done a great job. But she didn’t. She stuck firm by her artistic voice and what she wanted to say as a human being, and that to me takes a great deal of courage. I like the fact that all of us are flawed, all of us make crazy choices. Some get stuck in a pattern where they’re consistently doing it (laughs). But what does that say about our capacity for violence? And when somebody is under surveillance and they’re doing something that is perceptively dubious, what does that then lead people to think of as our connection to it? So often, when you look at abuse, and this is a story about violence that has come from abuse, it’s right there close to us where we least expect it. We’ve sort of normalized violence as it’s seen culturally. Explosions. Guns. Legends of the Fall, violence. A situation that is violently dealt with, but nobody is outraged by that. It was deemed as heroics. Look at kids’ films today. How many animals use force, bash each other over head…

Julia Ormond and Anthony Hopkins in Legends of the Fall.

But that’s always been the case, going back to the old Warner Bros. cartoons.
Right, it’s always been the case, even earlier, with classic fairy tales, the poisoned apple. So I think how we see violence is blurred and distorted and normalized. And by losing the capacity to own it, we lose the capacity to see it. And the child in this story is the center of it all. Because she is still innocent, she is able to see.

I thought it was a really brilliant touch that the child was the touchstone for every very disparate character in this film. Each person who came in contact with her had a different take on what had happened. They all met different fates and different epiphanies in the process. I also liked your character’s backstory of abuse.Yes, exactly. I don’t want to give too much away because there are so many great twists and turns in the film, but the way I describe her is usually ‘I play an FBI agent who has to go in and find out who saw what, who knows what, and then deal with them appropriately.’

That’s both a very honest and very ambiguous answer.
(laughs) Why, thank you.

You said something interesting in the press notes about Jennifer “being in her animal” during the shoot. What did that mean?
She’s on her game. It’s like she was in her stride. I think she is somebody who has done a great deal of work on herself, knows herself, is still growing, still speaks of that, but it using herself in a totally full-blooded way to draw herself forward. It’s a very powerful thing when you see somebody hit their sweet spot as an artist. It’s very infectious and it rubs off on other people.


Trailer for Surveillance.