ANJELICA HUSTON: The Hollywood Interview

Anjelica Huston in CHOKE (above).

[This article is appearing in this month's issue of Venice Magazine.]

by Terry Keefe

Anjelica Huston has often been described as regal. And she is. With her classic, almost aristocratic features, height, and powerful screen presence, she could have easily been typecast playing queens and warriors earlier in her career, because she's the type of woman who you would follow into battle, certain she could lead you to victory. But Huston can also play warm and accessible in manner, the near opposite of imperial, and consequently, has a penchant for bringing to life dark, and sometimes twisted, characters, who are also highly sympathetic. A great example of this combination of Huston's iconic screen image and her ability to supplement it with a very relatable persona is in Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, where the trio of brothers played by Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, and Owen Wilson are on a trip through India, with the intention of finding their long-lost mother, Patricia, played by Huston. The mother character doesn't appear until well past the midpoint of the film, but it's the type of role which requires instant star quality times 10, or the air would have been let out of the narrative. Huston walks out to greet her sons, and with very little dialogue, you're quickly aware why they would travel across the world to track her down. Or follow her into battle. She has that much personal power. And when that same mother abandons her sons in the morning, not for the first times in their lives either, you can't hate her any more than they can. Because Huston has simultaneously managed to make the deeper motivations of Patricia extremely understandable as well.

[Huston in The Darjeeling Limited.]

Another trademark of Huston's is the breadth of her range. She is at home in almost any genre, and playing a very wide variety of characters. In The Grifters, she is the damaged, scheming, dangerous, and, ultimately, pathetic conwoman Lilly Dillon, who causes the slow downfall and ultimate death of her own son; in the bleak comedy of The Royal Tenenbaums, she's the well-meaning and highly moral matriarch, Etheline Tenenbaum, in a very broken family who practically orbit around her to absorb her positive energy; and in the two Addams Family movies, her Morticia is a riot, delivering deadpan comedic lines with allusions to death, disease, and dismemberment.

It's all a long way from the early days of her career, when she was famous, certainly, but largely due to the fact that she was born into Hollywood royalty, the daughter of legendary filmmaker-actor John Huston, and also because she was a longtime companion of Jack Nicholson. An early starring role in the John Huston-directed A Walk With Love and Death in 1969, when Anjelica was just a teenager, had been poorly received by critics. Considerably smaller roles followed for much of the next decade, although Huston also found success as a model, working regularly with the likes of photographer Richard Avedon. A supporting role as the lion tamer Madge in Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1981, drew more positive attention, but it was in 1985, when she appeared in Prizzi's Honor, also directed by her father, that her acting career finally began to take off, particularly after Anjelica won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in the film. She was into her thirties at this point, a time when, unfortunately, many Hollywood actresses start to see their careers slow down. Her journey was just heating up, but then, Anjelica Huston has never been the conventional version of anything.

Which makes her a good fit for the defiantly unconventional world of Chuck Palahniuk in Choke, her latest film project, and the second Hollywood adaptation of a Palahniuk novel, the first being 1999's Fight Club. Directed by Clark Gregg, also an actor who is perhaps best known as the Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Iron Man, Choke centers around the downwardly-spiraling life of Victor Mancini, played by Sam Rockwell. Victor is a sex addict who attends sexual addiction support meetings largely as a way to hook up, and who supplements his income by pretending to choke in restaurants, allowing patrons to perform the Heimlich on him, and then essentially becoming sponsored by them. You see, Victor has learned that once someone saves your life, they feel responsible for it, and he's managed to get many of his rescuers to send him money on a regular basis. Not that the cash doesn't have a positive purpose, of sorts, as it goes to pay for the care of Victor's mother, Ida, played by Huston, who is suffering from Alzheimer's in an expensive hospital.

Huston as the younger Ida in Choke and the child version of Victor (played by Jonah Bobo).

Through a series of flashbacks, we visit a much younger Ida when she was a radical who felt compelled to bring Victor on a trip to the zoo as a child, with the higher-minded purpose of releasing all the animals. He was mauled by a lynx then, and that was perhaps the high point of his youth, as things got worse from there, which we see in some detail. Victor was frequently put into foster homes by Ida, but then kidnapped by her later on when she couldn't bear to be without him anymore. These are hardly the type of formative experiences that produce stability, and Ida can certainly shoulder much of the blame for Victor being the man he is today. But she is also essentially on her deathbed, drifting in and out of reality, and for Victor to move on, he must make peace with his mother and their past. Huston imbues Ida with a humanity, albeit a fragile and broken one, which makes the culmination of their journey believable, and quite powerful.

Huston and Sam Rockwell, as the adult Victor, in Choke.

We sat down with Huston in Venice, where she lives with her husband, famed sculptor Robert Graham, to discuss Choke, and her career, this past September.

It seems like one of the prime challenges of adapting the work of Chuck Palahniuk to film is finding the right tone, both in the script and the execution. Because you really could take a book like Choke and make a completely absurd dark comedy from the material, or you could go for something far more dramatic and bleak.

Anjelica Huston: He really is an interesting writer to interpret because anything is possible. The lines are very kind of finely drawn..so they could be ludicrous, or they could be credible. And I think, that's part of the attraction of working on his material...how to sort of make the ludicrous credible, and vice-a-versa.

On the topic of interpretation, the film of Choke creates a similar tone to David Fincher's adaptation of Fight Club, in terms of balancing the humor with the drama. Tonally, they feel like they're from the same universe. But, visually, whereas Fincher went hyperkinetic with the look of the film, Clark Gregg has chosen to allow the performances and the story to drive Choke. His camera work is very straightforward, and you could almost call the film character-driven.

I think with Clark being an actor, he went more for the character in the piece, and for the humanistic moments. Which I think is a good thing, too, because it softened some of the harsher aspects of the material...which is not lovable, it's far from lovable. But I think, you know, there's a fine line between repulsive...and something else. And it shouldn't just be repulsive, it has to be thought-provoking, and it has to push the edges...but it can't just be horrible. It can't just be disgusting, even though there are, in fact, everything but bodily fluids in this movie. You don't want to send people howling from the theater, and on the other hand, you have to negotiate this very dangerous edge of what will make people run from the theater, and what will, in some way, attract them, and lure them, and hypnotize them.

How were you able to find the center for Ida's character? Or did you find one? Because she's so many things at once.

Mostly, for me, it was finding sort of who Ida was as a young woman, more than anything. There's that young, vibrant, kind of alive, radical Ida -- and then there's the older, washed-out version, and I think the washed-out version is like someone took young Ida and put her in bleach, you know --put her in the washing machine and just took all the color out of her. And just left this reactionary, fussy, angry shell of a woman. It seemed to me that Ida was initially a radical and she really thought she was doing the right thing by young Victor, by warning him against other people...people who might want to take advantage of him. And these are all ways, of course, to hold him closer, ever closer, to herself [laughs]. But I think, insofar as she's revealing herself to him, she's telling him her truth. It doesn't matter, really, whether or not it's The Truth. It's Her Truth, and I think she really means the best by him. I found her rather sympathetic. I felt like she really does feel that it's she and Victor against the world. She's training him to be a stronger, better person, in her mind. It's a rather exciting and terrifying adventure they're on. And those scenes were so fun to play. One thing that I wish could've been emphasized more was the fact that she's a glue-sniffer, and that this woman was basically an addict, on top of everything else. And that's why her brain has rotted before her time. I've read a few reviews, where I don't think they really got the fact that, you know, Ida has actually fried her own brain.

This was a low-budget shoot, indie to the point where you brought your own wigs for the various age-changes.

Right, nobody talked to me initially about how we were going to do the age-changes. And I had a wig that I'd had from a show that I did sometime in the '80s, I think [laughs]. And I said, "Well, maybe, you know, maybe you could use this." Because I didn't know how they were going to achieve this effect without a wig-maker there. So I brought them that wig, and then there was the question of what to do to in the scenes of Ida as a younger person...and I felt that she shouldn't look that much like me, that it should be kind of a radical departure. And it just so happened that the hairdresser in the movie had purchased a double's wig, a kind of vinyl wig in a cheap wig-store, somewhere in the Bronx, I think, for my stand-in, for the scene where I attack the cop. And I saw it in the makeup room, and said, "Hmm. Maybe that would be interesting for Ida!" Not that it looked the least bit plausible or real, but because I felt it might be good as part of Ida's disguise.

It could be completely plausible that Ida's disguise would not be completely plausible.

Exactly [laughs].

There are a lot of parallels between Ida and Lilly in The Grifters, in the way they both manipulate their children, expose them to criminal behavior, and leave them damaged as adults. But, and this is definitely a case of everything being relative, Ida is the far better mother of the two.

Yes, she is. Ida, at least... she's running amok of the law, but there's a sense of love where Ida's concerned in the writing, and, I hope, consequently, in the playing. In The Grifters, that poor woman, Lilly, she was a completely lost cause. She was like a fox that bites off its own leg, to leave the trap. But they are, I think, cut from the same basic cloth.

You've played quite a few memorable mothers with problems, but they're each very different. They're memorable as characters first and foremost.

Good. I hope so [laughs]. I mean, it's a woman's fate, I guess, at a certain age, to be cast as a mother, and then as a grandmother. But these are all, I think, very interesting people, and that's what I like playing. I like playing character, and I'm happy that I'm thought of for those characters. And remember that I've also already played the craziest mother, although I thought she was a great mother...Morticia Addams [laughs]. She was a wonderful mother to play, because everything is about the antithesis of what it should be. "Oh, you're looking so ill, so pale. How wonderful!!"

Let's talk a bit about Sam Rockwell as Victor in Choke. I can't really imagine anybody else really playing this role as well. He's able to say these demented Palahniuk lines and then be lovable at the same time.

Right, he's brilliantly sweet and then also scatological. Sam's amazingly talented. He's one of the sweetest people I've ever met. He's very involved with his work. In his time between shots and stuff, he'd always listen to Chuck reading the book on tape. He's a joy to work with, and he's extremely accessible emotionally. I felt like our characters of Victor and Ida had a whole lot in common, a whole lot of days spent together. And sometimes that can be hard, to create a whole lifetime between two characters, when you actually barely know the other person. But I never thought for a minute that there that I didn't know who Victor was. Or that Victor didn't know who Ida was.

Is that primarily a chemistry thing, or is it more preparation?

Chemistry, I think, largely. But preparation too, because when you come onto the set, you're in character - not necessarily speaking in accents between takes - but you should know who you are. You don't come on set wondering who you are. As far as all that's concerned, Sam is perfectly prepared, he knows who he is, he knows what his task is. There's no messing around.

You went right from Choke to doing your first episodes on "Medium." [Huston appeared as the character of Cynthia Keener on a number of “Medium” episodes this past season, and received an Emmy nomination for her work.]

I also managed to get sick that last weekend in New York on Choke. I flew on the Saturday. And I had to learn nine pages for the shoot on Monday. I was really very worried [laughs], because it was a lot of lines and I had been beating myself up pretty well on Choke, but it all was okay. Patricia Arquette is fantastic, and she was so sweet, and she said, "You know, the secret of this show is that, they make it work. They cut it together, and they make you look good!" I said, "I don't know if that's going to be possible!" [laughs]

Let's talk about some of your earlier films and your work with one of your regular collaborators, Wes Anderson. We spoke about finding the right tone on Choke. If there was ever a film that could have easily gone off the rails in terms of tone, The Royal Tenenbaums, with its mixture of comedy and pathos, not to mention a huge cast of actors, and diverse characters, would be it.

I always thought of Tenenbaums as this little sort of New Yorker cartoon come to life, with that same very earnest tone. Wes created this sort of semi-fictional, suspended little family. All of the characters are living their lives quite seriously. It's not played for laughs, but at the same time, it's situational comedy. Wes is a very precise director. Very, very precise. And I think he's even gotten more precise as he's advanced as a film director. He knows very, very clearly what he's looking for, and can't be second-guessed. For example, I remember one day when we were working on The Life Aquatic, and I had something like one line in the afternoon in the house. My husband had just arrived to come and see me, and I said, "Oh, I'll be out by lunch. This is nothing, this is a breeze." I was still there at eight o'clock at night. This bloody line, that Wes was not satisfied with. I don't know, ultimately, whether it was me, the line, his mood, what it was, but he wasn't satisfied. We did multiple takes. And you start to feel, like, you know, "Is there something inherently wrong with me? Am I a dreadful actress?" All of that stuff goes through your head. But it's because Wes has it in his head what he wants, and he's not going to leave until he gets it. Surprisingly, he has a lot of endurance. He's a very skinny guy...almost concave, very bony, and we were out at sea with Bill Murray. Bill was chattering and freezing. The Italian seas in December are no joke - it is cold out there! But Wes was totally intrepid. He's one of those people like those explorers you used to read about, who go to the Antarctic, and they look like mosquitoes or something, but they come back alive. [laughs] How do they do that? That's what Wes is. He's incredibly strong under fire. The kind of guy who won the war.

[Huston, with Ben Stiller, Danny Glover, and Gwyneth Paltrow, as Etheline Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums]

Returning to The Grifters, one of the things that I love most about the film is that it's never specific about the time period it's happening in. It feels like the present day, for the most part. The cars are all modern. But then there are the little noir touches, like the way your character of Lilly pronounces "Los Angeles," which feel like they're from a much earlier era.

[Does the Lilly Dillon pronunciation of Los Ang-hel-lees] Los Angelese. [laughs] That was actually all [novelist] Jim Thompson. Straight out of Jim Thompson. I didn't know that I was even up to play that character [when I first heard about it]. I was in New York, and my agent in New York, Boaty Boatwright, had asked me to dinner, and Stephen Frears was there. We'd met in Los Angeles a month before or something. We walked together down Broadway, and he started to tell me why I wasn't right for this part in this movie, The Grifters. I think at that point, Melanie Griffith was slated to play Lilly Dillon, and he was telling me really why I wasn't right for it, but I hadn't read the script, and I didn't know why I wasn't right for it. And although I don't like being wrong for something, I wasn't all that concerned because I didn't even know I had been considered on any level. But then, a couple of weeks later, when I was in Los Angeles, I got a call from my agent, who said, "Oh, Stephen wants you to read for The Grifters. And Marty Scorsese's in town and could you go over to the Chateau Marmont and meet with them." I said, "When?" And it was that afternoon. I had a red silk dress, a very thin Italian red silk dress. I put it on, and I thought, "This character should be a bleached blonde. I don't look right for this character, but I'll go anyway." So I went to the meeting, talked to them, and Stephen looked at me for a long time. Then he said, 'What if...what if you were a blonde?" [laughs] And so, we were exactly on the same page, and we started to talk about that. They had this hairdresser there who pulled some blonde wigs out of a bag, and he started to make me up like Lilly Dillon. And we took some photographs there in the hotel room, and I knew that I had the part. I was really concerned, because I didn't know Stephen's work that well, and, you know, there was a scene in which she's hit so badly by the Bobo character, that she evacuates in a corner of the hotel room. And I was like, "I don't know if I want to be the woman who evacuates in the corner of the hotel room!" So I went to see my agents, and my agent was then at William Morris, and [legendary agent] Sue Mengers was there, and I said "Well, I don't know about this scene." And she said, "Are you kidding? Shut up. Get out of here! You're going to go and do The Grifters. Don't even question it!" And then so I just went off and did it, and had an amazing time with those other actors. Johnny [Cusack] was great, Annette [Bening] was great. It was a really fine cast, and it was low-budget at its best. It was our little secret, and we knew it was great when we were working on it. We loved our lines. It was just fun to show up and say those lines every day, and be those people every day.

[Huston as Lilly Dillon in The Grifters.]

Your work as Maerose in Prizzi's Honor would earn you some of your first serious recognition, not to mention an Academy Award. Let's talk about the origins of that project.

Well, Prizzi's Honor started off with [producer] John Foreman, who had made The Man Who Would Be King with my father, in Morocco, and was something of a standard-bearer for me, although I never really knew why, because, up until that point, I'd never shown much talent, I don't think. But he had a film that he was making, a kind of B-movie at MGM called Ice Pirates, and Ice Pirates was about the search for ice on an alien planet, or the water, actually, because water has become the most precious thing in the world. Anyway, it was a bit of a dopey movie, but he gave me a really nice part, as the Greatest Swordswoman in the Universe [laughs], opposite John Matuszak. He came to me with a Richard Condon book called Prizzi's Honor, and said, "Would you like to read this, and tell me what you think of Maerose?" So off I went, and I read the book, and I was knocked out. It was fantastic. And I came back to him, and I said, "John, it's great. It's really amazing." And he said, "Yeah? What do you think about Nicholson to play Charley, and your dad to direct?" And I said, "Oh god, don't do that to me, please, please." He said, "Well, it's the only way we're gonna get it going. So, are you aboard? Are you gonna help me get these guys together?" I said, "Ah, I guess so." So we got the script to Dad, and to Jack. My father was living in Mexico at the time, and it was on the weekend. John called me up and said, "You have to get Jack to go and visit your father tomorrow." I said, "That's impossible. That'll never happen." And he said, "Well, it has to happen." And, so, somehow we got it to happen. We got Jack all the way to Puerto Vallarta to meet with Dad. And it wasn't just Puerto Vallarta. Dad lived out in an area that was only backed by the jungle, that you could only reach by boat, about an hour and a half from Puerto Vallarta -- so, you know, it was a big trek. So finally Jack makes his way there, and they hole up at my father's place, which was very beautiful, on the edge of a cliff, in the middle of the jungle. No telephones, nothing, just CB radio. And a satellite dish. Meanwhile, John Foreman shows up at my doorstep - I was living in Beverly Hills at the time - and said, "That's it, we're going to Vallarta. We have to keep Jack in Vallarta until he says 'Yes.'" And I said, "No, no, no, you don't understand. I'm not going to Vallarta. Because if I go to Vallarta, I'm gonna hear everybody's complaints about everybody else. I don't need to be there." John was furious with me, and he took off for Vallarta himself. He arrived at the airport to find Jack on his way back to California, with a pair of huaraches in one hand, having agreed to make the movie, thank God. So, then we set about doing it, and next thing we were in New York, and that was it. And casting...I have to say, the cast was so brilliant for that movie -- such a funny, crazy cast of people, from Bill Hickey to Annie Selepegno, my father's old Italian secretary, who was playing my Aunt Amalia and who could barely get a line of dialogue out. It was hysterical, hysterical -- we had such a funny time on that movie. And Jack would go off to the gaming parlors, the betting parlors, while I'd go off to church, hanging out with these characters in Brooklyn. It was great.

[Huston as Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi's Honor.]

How was it being directed by your dad? Was it basically like working with any director, or more difficult than that?

No, it was hard. He was pretty hard on me. It was very important that I be good for him, and he was...I can't say that he was a taskmaster, but you just never...you wouldn't show up unprepared for my dad. I think part of working for my father, especially since we'd had a bad experience the first time out, was just working hard to be the best that I could be for him. I knew every line I had in that script before I ever walked on the set for the first scene. And I've kind of used that as a template for my work since then. That's why doing a job like "Medium" is difficult for me, because usually I like to know a whole script. On television, sometimes, you show up and they don't know what's going on in the next scene. [laughs] They don't know where your character is from. You don't know if you're good or bad or indifferent. So that can be a little bit confusing sometimes. I like to know my lines before I ever appear on set. I like to know my beats, and where my beats come, and what I'm aiming for in a scene, and what's happened before, and what's coming next. If a script is adapted from a book, usually I'll buy a paperback of that book and cut it up, and paste the relevant scenes in the back of my script, so I can always go back to the writing, if need be. That's helpful.

Did you dad impart any specific acting advice that you've held onto?

I think he tried to impart a few things. I don't know that it had a lot to do with advice. My dad always said to me, "Trust your instinct, it's good." He wasn't a format person. And I think the thing about instinct is that it can go to the left or right, but it doesn't follow a format. Instinct as an actor comes from what you give me, and that's so much what the actor's job is -- reaction, being able to listen to the other person. So if you're equipped with a good instinct as an actor, a lot of your work is done, because you're attuned to listening, you're attuned to looking for the signs in the other person. You're attuned to how you might feel in a situation like this, or if that happened to you. And it becomes less "if that happened" and more "that's happening, and I'm reacting, and I'm in it, and I believe it."