Kristin Scott Thomas is almost universally regarded as being on her way to a second Oscar nomination with her role in I've Loved You So Long, a French-language movie in which she plays a woman released from prison 15 years after being convicted of murdering her son. Thomas shrinks and eventually expands in the role of Juliette, a woman so unconvinced of her own worth and willingness to live that she lurks in the shadows of her sister's life as a ghost.
Thomas, on the other hand, is doing 8 shows a week on Broadway right now, and happily talks about her role in I've Loved You So Long while stressing the difficulty of getting into the head of a character that troubled. Below she talks about forming a bond with her onscreen sister Elsa Zylberstein, the agonizing side of acting, and letting off steam at the end of the day by yelling-- good-naturedly, we assume-- at her architect.
What was your emotional conception of Juliette when you first started filming?
When I started off, and before I actually started filming, I had a fear. I thought she would be more afraid, and by the end, I clicked onto that quite quickly. This woman was not afraid. She was afraid of nothing. There was nothing more to be afraid of.
What made you realize that she had no fear?
It wasn't one precise moment. Just gradualy getting to know, just to live with those feelings. As an actor you have to go to places that are really very, very uncomfortable, even places that are almost impossible to go to if you're a mother [for this film]. You just don't want to think about it. You save the thinking about it until the last minute. I did not sit around and brood, believe me. The thing that kept me sane during that film is I had just bought an apartment that I had gutted, and I spent most of the time that I wasn't on the set screaming on the telephone at my architect. Choosing tiles between takes.
And you do a lot in this without dialogue.
I love that about [director] Philippe [Claudel]. Being a writer you'd expect him to write reams and reams, and you'd have to say everything. But he was very relaxed about my take on his dialogue. Sometimes I felt that it was a bit too literary, and I would want to take it down a bit. Then sometimes we would improvise as well, take more or less what was being said.
What do you look for in a director?
Encouragement. It's a big question. on this play [The Seagull, on Broadway]. I've been working with such an amazing director, Ian Rickson, who's so completely brilliant. I want a director like him. I've worked with some amazing directors. I've been so lucky with the people I've been working with. And they've all been very very different. It is fantastic to be able to think about who I've worked with. But it is encouragement. it's encouragement to be brave, I think.
In what ways do you need to be brave?
As actors, we're always asked to portray and react to these extreme circumstances, otherwise it's not interesting. They are agonizing things to think about. Where you have to be brave is what we all have inside of us are little seeds of those feelings. What we have to do as actors is just blow it all up, and make it big enough, and make you believe they robbed a bank. That's what we have to do. All those things-- my fear of abandonment, my fear of doing something irreparable-- all those kinds of things, they're just tiny little things inside me. My job as an actor is to take all those tiny little things and make them bigger, visible, and legible. So people can empathize.
So do you continue to discover the character as you go along, and did you convey everything you wanted to convey?
You start off with a good solid idea, and that comes with the costume. You read the story, you are interested in the character, then you get the costume. It's with the costume, with all these other things, that may seem unimportant or superficial-- they are actually incredibly important. How she is perceived physically, the first time you see her, the first impression is the lasting impression. In films that's so so important. I find that's the opening of the door into the character. As you go along, as you play the role for 5, 6, 7, 8 weeks, you learn more and more about a character who doesn't exist. You do learn, but who are you learning about? Are you learning about yourself? It's a very interesting process, especially in a film like this.
What's it like working on this versus an English film?
It's exactly the same. Except maybe you get fed better.
