She explains that: I trust him completely and he’s more protective of me than I am myself
Posted in General on 26. Sep, 2010
She explains that: “I trust him completely, and he’s more protective of me than I am myself. So I felt comfortable doing anything to explore stuff knowing that he would make it work in the end.”She sticks closely to the party line on the Star Wars films, gushing that, “It was an amazing experience to work with great actors like Ian McDiarmid, Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen – all of them are incredible people, and I really enjoyed working with them And similarly with George [Lucas]. “I didn’t want to become either hypersexual or prudish because I was reacting to something that was out there. I think I have a good concept of myself now, and that does change still, but it changes more according what’s happening inside me as opposed to what other people think.” It helped that the director was Mike Nichols, who directed her in a stage production of Chekhov’s The Seagull in New York, and whom Portman looks on as “a second father”.
Not since Brooke Shields in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby has a child actress been so erotically filmed by a French director.As if to get as far away as possible from L?, Portman chose more wholesome roles, playing Al Pacino’s daughter in Heat, a sunny-natured Midwestern single mother in the forgettable Where the Heart Is, another small-town love object in Beautiful Girls and an ing?e in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You.What’s changed now that she feels at ease with a more erotically charged part, like that in Closer? “Now, it’s not like they’re not going to write about me in that way, but I feel like I’m stronger in my own personal development and won’t be influenced by it,” she explains. You know, men writing me about me in that way,” she says, remembering a painful period in her life. Indeed, her look is uncomfortably arousing in L?, with her lipstick and lacy Madonna-style gloves, and precocious air of abused-child sorrow. “I want to try and do all different things, and when I was younger I wanted to stay away from doing overtly sexual roles, because I didn’t want my public image to interfere with my personal development. After L?, it was such an experience, I realised that people could take it and make it their own thing. All of a sudden I was reading reviews that were talking about the development of my breasts under my T-shirt, and that was so upsetting to me as a 12-year-old to read about. “People keep describing her as a pole dancer!” she says with a trace of irritation.
“I mean, in the movie there are about two scenes where my character is a stripper or pole dancer, and there’s then, like, five scenes where she’s a waitress. It’s funny that people keep defining her as that.”But then she lets down her guard a bit and relaxes. “I bring my ideas, research, knowledge and opinions to the table I listen to them, but I feel that we are team-mates. They have the final decision on the issues, but it is a conversation.”When how much bigger a departure it was playing a pole dancer in Closer is brought up, Portman backs so far into her chair I fear she’s about to leap out of it like a startled cat and run from the room Ever the trouper, she soldiers on and tries to laugh it off. “A director doesn’t just tell me what to do, and I do it,” she insists.
I just found that really unusual, and then I met Zach Braff, and he was confident and funny, and knew exactly what he wanted to do with the movie. He could answer my questions, and was really open to input.”Portman expands on how important it is to her to have a “team-mate” relationship with her directors. And that’s how these categories have been created – the romantic comedies, the thriller But this didn’t fit into any category. The character wasn’t the usual love-interest character, she had her own strangeness, and a host of problems. I mean, I read the same script over and over again, it sometimes feels And this was so different from all of that It didn’t fit into a genre. Hollywood feels safe, and there’s often the tendency to take something that was successful and make another version of it. “A role has to be something that interests me at the moment, that I can be obsessed with and passionate about, and believe in fully.”Trying to get more specific, I ask what in particular about Garden State attracted her “I really liked the script and the character,” she says “It was unlike anything I’d ever read.