It wasn’t that I was demanding things all the time and he was resisting
Posted in General on 21. Jul, 2010
“It wasn’t that I was demanding things all the time and he was resisting. It’s just that sometimes you can’t stand the way someone is eating their cereal in the morning. Anybody who has been in a long relationship knows what that’s like. Sometimes you just look up and think: `Who is this person – yuk!’ When you are working hard together that feeling is exacerbated.”Sarandon says the intense emotions helped make a movie she is proud of – but she would not want to work with Robbins again in the near future. “What gets tricky is that you expect more of somebody you are living with than somebody you just hired,” she says “You are more polite to somebody you have hired.
I behaved on the Dead Man Walking set in the same way as I have on all my movies, and my outspokenness is not always welcome. But on other movies if I was publicly humiliated, I would just leave; with Tim I couldn’t leave You are in a bit of a hostage situation, both of you. I’m glad we took most of our disagreements to our trailer and settled them in private.”GIVEN the strength of personalities involved, one can imagine that trailer rocking like a small boat in a hurricane. But it seems to have worked – Sarandon’s performance is rich with emotions. It’s a prime example of how, with age, she has found a way of opening up a character from within, allowing the audience an intimacy that’s rare among Hollywood’s female stars.Sarandon senses that acting has changed her. Indeed, that’s the point: she has made a career out of self- discovery.
She took drugs in the Sixties, marched with activists, and explored the highs and deep lows of stormy relationships with actor Chris Sarandon and writer-director Franco Amurri. Now she gives the impression – in person and on the screen – that every experience can be used as an exercise, a way of developing tougher emotional muscle.”Acting has always been interesting to me because it’s about self-discovery,” she says. “As a little hippie flower child, doing LSD and mysticism and everything else I did before I had children, that was the quest – what is your purpose here? Who are you? Where is your demon? I always wanted the courage to try and answer these questions.”She drinks some tea and pauses, making you aware that she’s digging deep within herself to find an answer. “Acting forces you not only to have compassion and to put yourself in other people’s lives, but to discover things in yourself that you hoped were never there or you wished were there.
To me it always seemed to be a means to an end – a way to find out more about myself.”That can mean tough decisions. Sarandon will not work outside New York during the school year, so that her children can enjoy their education with minimum disruption (she and Robbins have three children in their family – two boys, aged three and six, of their own, and a girl, from Sarandon’s relationship with Franco Amurri). This meant recently turning down a key role in Jane Campion’s forthcoming adaptation of Portrait of a Lady. “That’s the first time I’ve turned something down which really upset me, because I think Jane is a great director.