Virginia Madsen: The Hollywood Interview

Actress Virginia Madsen.

VIRGINIA MADSEN
SERVES IT STRAIGHT UP IN SIDEWAYS
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the December 2004 issue of Venice Magazine.

Virginia Madsen has, since making her film debut in 1983’s Class, brought to mind some of the great screen sirens of the 30s and 40s: Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Lauren Bacall, Lizabeth Scott, women whose intoxicating beauty and devious minds made for a decidedly deadly cocktail of sex, double-crosses and murder. Films such as The Hot Spot solidified this image, but also had the effect of eclipsing what a fine, complex artist Ms. Madsen really is. With fine turns in more than 50 features and TV movies in the past 20 years, Virginia Madsen has finally earned the recognition she has so long deserved in Alexander Payne’s critical and audience fave Sideways, quite simply the smartest American film of the year. Virginia’s quiet, achingly honest performance as Maya, a waitress in a Santa Ynez Valley watering hole whose encounter with road tripping buddies (Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church) kicks off a life-changing series of events, has Oscar buzz written all over it, as does the work of her director/co-writer and co-stars (Sandra Oh being the other standout).

This has been a big year for the Madsen family, with older brother Michael Madsen making waves with his memorable turn as the hapless Budd in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2 (See Venice cover story Feb. 2004) and mom Elaine currently penning her latest magnum opus. Virginia sat down with Venice recently to discuss her own contribution in Sideways.

How did Sideways come to you initially?
Virginia Madsen: I wouldn’t say it “came to me.” You can imagine that everyone wanted to work with Alexander Payne, so he had his pick of actors. The hard part was getting an audition. When I got the audition, like any other movie, I was only given a couple of scenes, and I was really scared, thinking how am I going to show him this character, it’s such a character-driven piece, with just these couple of scenes? And in reading the scenes, they’re so beautifully written, and there’s so much there, I realized that it wasn’t so much a character as it was me.

Virginia and Paul Giamatti in Sideways (2004).

So you really related to Maya?
Yes, I really felt like it was really an aspect of me, and it was important that I be able to walk in the door with that. The most important thing about playing Maya is that you not put on a character, but open up, and reveal this side of me.

How did you relate to her? What aspects of her character spoke to you in this way?
She has some characteristics that I wish were more highlighted in my own personality. (laughs) I think she’s quieter than I am. She’s a good listener. She’s really at peace with herself, and that’s how I feel when I go to the Santa Ynez Valley. I really love that place so much, and I’ve been going there for about four years, because a friend of mine moved there. I’ve made a few friends there since, and it’s become sort of like my sanctuary. So I thought, I know how I feel when I go to the Valley, I feel like Maya, and I think Alexander must have recognized that in me. All of the stress of Los Angeles and city life falls away when I drive to the Valley, and I feel really serene when I’m there. I notice that there’s a lot of people who live there that are like that. So I really wanted Maya to be representative of the people who live in the Valley. It’s country life. It’s live and let live. There’s three things in the Santa Ynez Valley: cows, grapes, and horses. Everybody is equally passionate about those three things. It’s just really good to be around those people.

L to R: Sandra Oh, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia, and Paul Giamatti in Sideways (2004).

It’s sort of a more accessible version of the area around Carmel, in northern California.
Exactly, it’s just closer. There’s a whole other cool vibe going on around Carmel that’s awesome. There’s almost a hippie kind of vibe in Santa Ynez, because a lot of the original grape growers there were hippies. With all due respect to the other wine countries up north, there’s a little more of an elitist vibe up there. In Santa Ynez, there’s a feeling that everyone’s welcome. They’re much more impressed by who you are as a human being, so you can imagine how excited I was when I found out that I was going to have a job there for a couple of months!

And the community really embraced you guys during the shoot, it sounds like.
Yes, and most of the credit for that has to go to Alexander. He really knows how to put people at ease and is such a genuine, caring guy, that people immediately open up to him. He and (producer) Michael London seem like the antithesis of “Hollywood guys.” They’re both so respectful and are very good listeners, and very laid back, and they both really fell in love with the place. So the people reciprocated. Frank Ostini, who owns the Hitching Post, gave me free reign. I worked behind the bar, hung out in the kitchen, asked him a million questions, because it’s been quite a few years since I waited tables (laughs). They all knew Rex Pickett, who wrote the novel, and were as committed as we were that the story be told in the right way.

Virginia in Dennis Hopper's The Hot Spot (1990).

I have to say it was very nice to see you play a normal, down-to-earth gal after all the bombshells and femme-fatales you’ve played in the past.
Well, I only played a few of those, but nobody ever saw the other films where I played normal people (laughs) because I spent 15 years doing very small, independent films, and played characters much closer to myself, where I wore no makeup and was just a normal girl. Nobody ever saw those. And that was okay. I wish they had, but it just makes the whole Maya experience more powerful. I may have played those other types, but looking back on them, there was something about those performances that never rang true, at least for me. It really had very little to do with who I was as a human being. It was very surprising to me that people bought it! (laughs) It was funny, especially when I was being really super evil in a movie like The Hot Spot, and I just thought ‘My God, that was the most over-the-top, over-acting I’ve ever done in my life, and they bought it!’ (laughs) It was an image and I didn’t really understand at the time, the power of that image, and how enormous an effect that would have on an audience. Dennis Hopper once told me “You don’t get it, because you’re too young. But in about ten years you’re going to understand, that you can’t really watch yourself be that type of person.” And he was absolutely right. When you’re doing that at 25 years old, you’re not going to understand, and I’m really glad that I didn’t, because if I had, I might have learned how to work it, and played games with that personality. So my naïvete was a blessing in disguise.

Both you and your brother have been, in many of the roles you’ve played, sort of throwbacks to the 40s and 50s film noir genre. I think Michael’s characters have been reminiscent of Robert Mitchum/Lee Marvin types, and yours have been Lizabeth Scott/Lauren Bacall types, and we simply don’t have those archetypes anymore in film, and I think people have been hungry for them, which explains why so many people have been anxious to keep you both in those slots.
Yeah, and Michael and I were very well-studied in that area, watching all these classic movies, and some not-so-classic movies, when we were growing up. For him, it was the 40s and 50s, but me, I was more into the 30s. We really had such a fascination for those films and those actors, so we knew had to do that really well. That’s what we played when we were little. What’s interesting now, is how powerful that kind of femme-fatale image is, and the reaction to someone like Maya, a regular gal, is even bigger, when I’m just revealed as who I am. I think there’s a lot of people out there who are hungry for something that’s more real. We all know that reality TV isn’t real, it’s just the latest soap opera. With film, the powers that be have underestimated the audience way too many times, and they want something where the audience can feel again, and can feel characters and listen to beautiful dialogue. I think in many ways Hollywood continues to shoot itself in the foot. The audience is like “We’re onto you. We know you want us to cry now. We know we’re supposed to applaud now.” I’m surprised there’s not a neon sign in most movie theaters that says “applause,” that’s how dumb I think Hollywood feels audiences are. But audiences are not dumb. The young audience isn’t dumb either. Kids will always want to see a titillating horror film. But they also want to see a good story as much as anyone, maybe even more. In general I think people have just been hungry for a moving experience. What’s funny about Sideways is that, even though it revolves around two men, and men love it, it’s also a chick film, and also a good date movie, and has also caught on with a younger audience because of the comedy. The comedy is smart in this movie, and that’s why younger people dig it, and why they went in droves to see Garden State, because it was smart about young people.

23 year-old Virginia Madsen in Electric Dreams (1984).

One of the most touching things to me about the film was the theme of finding oneself. Maya was obviously a woman who used to define herself through the men she was with, particularly her ex-husband, and her story of how she came to find herself after realizing what a phony her husband was, was one of the most beautiful summations of self-discovery I’ve seen in any movie.
I think the real star of this movie is the script, and the reason so many people are so moved by that scene is because it’s so beautifully written. The most important thing you can do with a scene like that, Paul Giamatti has said this all the time, is to get out of the way of the script. And that’s what I think we both succeeded in doing, just keeping it really, really simple. That’s hard for actors, especially when most of the material you work on, you have to fill in the blanks because the scripts are full of holes. You have to add something, because usually it’s just bad. But with this, we had to be sure we didn’t add anything to it, that we just let the words come out of our mouths.

Virginia in Francis Coppola's The Rainmaker (1997).

But it’s your speech that I remember most.
Alexander always jokes that my part of the scene was so good because I got to go second. (laughs) And it’s true in a way, because you get so dreamy when you’re listening to Paul, with those big eyes, and he delivered that speech so beautifully. It’s so clear that he’s talking about himself, as such a melancholy poet, which is what (his character) Miles is. I think Maya just falls in love with him at that moment. So I’m already in this really dreamy state when I go into my speech. So, without trying to sound too artsy about it, I think I was in exactly the right space when I did my half of the dialogue. And Paul would do it for me every time off camera as well. Alexander also shot the entire sequence in order, which helped a lot. It was almost the end of all my work on the film, and I knew that I’d have to say good-bye to all these amazing people, and I was so grateful that I’d been given this amazing gift of being part of this film, so all that played a part in it as well. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. You work your entire life as an actor to have a single moment of creative freedom like that. It’s like I just closed my eyes and dove off the cliff. I know that I’ll have good projects in my future, and that I’ll do good work, but I’ll never have another Sideways.