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punchin' judy
"I had heard she was kind of a tough nut, but I dug her instantly. I think she’s the greatest actress of her generation. I’m truly grateful to be working with her twice in a lifetime. We’re the Astaire And Rogers of bizarre relationships.” Peter Weller is splayed out on the floor of a Bevedy Hills home, smoking a large cigar and riffing on the subject of Judy Davis. It’s about 1 AM. and he’s taking a break from his second film with Davis, "The New Age". He pauses, propels a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, and says, "But if you don’t have wings, she’ll bury you.” Weller is right. Barring, pethaps, Meryl Streep. and a)lowing for the hyperbo)e that infects movie journalism. Judy Davis is indeed the greatest actress of her generation. She can do more with her mouth - she raises lip chewing and grimacing to a fine art— than most actors can do with their entire body. It’s a pity she has been )argely confined to marginal films, or marginal roles in weightier films, and now she is reaching an age - 40 - when many actresses are forced to take up knitting. Her choices in protects have been less than fortunate. For reasons best known to herself, she has often worked with first- or second-time directors. Although she recently revealed a winning flair for comedy in "The Ref" she once again played the role with which she has been most closely identified: the shrew. Davis shines in "The New Age", but the film itself is a mixed bag, best when it casts a cold look at contemporary upper-middle-class L.A. reality, worst when it becomes mired in New Age nonsense— soul retrievers” and the like, which no one outside the 310 area code takes seriously. Her last film, "Dark Blood", was never even finished, due to the death of River Phoenix, and she clashed bitterly with the director. All and all, hers has not been the meteoric journey many had predicted after her stunning debut in Gillian Armstrong’s "My Brilliant Career" in 1979. Davis probably brings some of this down on herself, and therc are undoubtedly directors who run the other way when her name comes up. But an industry devoted to recycling ‘5Os TV shows offers precious little in the way of material suitable for grown-ups, not to mention grown-up women wfth talent like hers. Davis should be working with Hoffman and De Niro and Pacino. But the bad news is hardly news; so let’s turn to the good news, which is Davis herself—outspoken. caustic, and wickedly funny. Wearing a charcoal gray pin-striped suit over a white T-shirt, she is sitting in Savoy. a small SoHo restaurant, tearing the wings off George Sluizer, "Dark Blood"’s director. She looks askance at the bottle of China Soda the waiter delivers in lieu of the diet Coke she asked for, sighs, takes a couple of drags from her cigarette and crushes it in the ashtray. “It’s my fault, because when I first met George, he more or less told me what he was like as a director, and I only heard what I wanted to hear,” she recalls. “He said that he believed in discipline, that film sets aren’t democracies, and I’m saying, ‘Oh, absolutely.’ “George was a bit scared of me. I thought he was foolish in his approach to actors. In my opinion he confused River about his character, constantly telling him how he should play it - angrier, or loonier, or whatever. I don’t like having labels thrown at me by a director.” Davis expects her opinions to be taken seriously, expects to be heard. She and Sluizer came to blows right away, over rewrites of the script. “I tried to get out of the film, but I couldn’t after the (Kim) Basinger business” says Davis. “I think he felt that I was an incredible challenge to his control. Which I suppose I was. There are some directors who just want to be inside your head and in that way interpret their character through you, using you almost like a host. As an actor. I just felt I had no space. So I had to create it. Davis makes quick, abrupt movements with her hands, which involuntarily fly up to the becoming tangle of dark hair that cascades off her head. She is well-known for her chalky, blood-sucked look, and indeed, she is pale - and small, with chiseled features, deep red lipstick. and the nervous manner of a trapped animal. She fingers her watch, lights another cigarette, stubs it out. Sydney, Australia, where she has left her husband, actor Colin Friels, and her seven-year-old son, Jack, is presently ringed by forest fires. “It’s very close to where we live,” she says. I spoke to Colin last night. He said, ‘It’s perfectly safe; it’s not going to come here, ‘cause there are houses in the way.’ I said. ‘What do you mean? Houses burn like trees burn!’ “ She pauses again, presumably contemplating the notion of flying back to be with her family. “To get burnt?” she asks rhetorically. Her eyes widen. “They can fly out!” She pauses. “I asked him to check if the insurance was paid up. It would be an act of God, wouldn’t it? I’m really confused about this act-of-God business.” Davis stops. George Sluizer again pushes his way to the front of her mind, “He’s an act of God,” she says, with a wry grin. “He’s an act of the devil.” Judy Davis was born in 1955 in Perth, a barren outpost of civilization on the western coast of Australia surrounded by ocean and desert. She grew up in a rather conventional and airless Catholic household, and space - to define herself, to become her own person - was in short supply. Young Judy was forbidden to see movies and was sent to a convent to be schooled by nuns. She was too smart and rebellious for this to have been a very happy experience. Like that of many lapsed Catholics, her constricted childhood seems to have left her with a lifelong inclination to tweak authority. By the age of seventeen she would have done anything she could to flee Perth; she defied her mother’s threats and joined a band, singing Simon & Garfunkel tunes as she made her way across the Far East. Beating a hasty retreat back to Australia, she ended up at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, and landed her breakthrough role in "My Brilliant Career". The film tells the story of a 19th-century Australian woman who turns down a marriage proposal from a handsome and extremely eligible suitor (Sam Neill) in order to pursue her calling as a writer. The movie established Davis’s MO with directors: She and Armstrong had a tug-of-war over her role. “I just didn’t like the character I was playing—I didn’t like the woman it was based on. She wrote these silly books about her early childhood in the bush that nobody was interested in. At the opening of the film in Sydney, I met her nephew. I said, What was she like?’ He answered, ‘She was a real bitch!’ Davis apparently so frightened Neill that fifteen years later, when asked to talk about her, he would only read a prepared statement. "My Brilliant Career" rode the twin waves of feminism and the New Australian Cinema to international success and established Davis as a talent to be reckoned with. On the publicity tour she displayed one of the endearing traits that distinguish her from most actors, who tend to be spectacularly cautious when speaking to the press: In an interview with Judy Stone in The San Francisco Chronicle. she trashed the movie. “I realized I couldn’t lie to I.F.Stone’s sister,” Davis says. “She said, ‘What do you really think of this film?’ And with a flood of relief, I said I didn’t like it. The producer, a woman, told a journalist in London that I was miserable during t1~e filming and that all I needed was a good fuck! It may well have been true, but it is a strange thing coming from a woman who produced that film, and quite unnecessary to tell a journalist.” Davis followed up "My Brilliant Career" with three Australian films, "Winter of Our Dreams", "Hoodwink", and "Heatwave", and often collided with male directors. I was perceived as antagonistic,” she recalls. ‘strong-willed. difficult, a person who questioned too much. No guy was gonna make me believe I was antagonistic simply because I was asking questions about the job I was doing. It was driving me crazy. In 1984, Davis got another big break, playing Adela Quested in David Lean’s adaptation of "A Passage to India". It is hard to imagine a more mismatched pair than the imperial Lean, in the autumn of his career, and the passionate young actress, bristling with intelligence and opinions—and questions, always questions. Needless to say, sparks flew, and Davis has dined out on Lean stories ever since. “Any intellectual questioning made Lean highly nervous she re calls. “You could actually see him twitch. Lean was a dummy at school, and he really had a phobia, a hang-up about his intelligence When I worked with him, he was older and he didn’t have the energy he needed. It was like cranking an old car, and he just couldn t do it The film doesn’t finally have any power. “There was a touch of the bully about him—he’d take it out on the people who were weakest and most dependent. That meant (his wife) Sandy. She would come up and say. ‘David, do you need anything?’ If Lean got into a bad mood, which he did with regularity, he’d take it out on her. You could kind of judge what kind of mood he was in by his hand gestures toward her. If he was in a bad mood, he’d make a big hand gesture—she’d get out of his way. It was pretty disturbing to witness. “Lean had been married to an Indian woman who played the sitar. Consequently, the sitar drove him crazy. Whenever a sitar was being played in a restaurant, he says”—Davis’s voice, suddenly all proper and British, falls into a husky whisper "'Shut that thing up.’ One of his wives tried to knife him in bed, tried to put it through his throat. After seven months, I could relate to it. But there was something irresistible about him too." The fireworks on the set by no means compromised her performance, and she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. In 1987 she reteamed with Armstrong for "High Tide", which many people regard as her best performance. She enjoyed the experience; it allowed her to write and improvise for the first time. Four years later she played French novelist George Sand in "Impromptu", the movie debut of theater director James Lapine. “When we met," Lapine recalls, “she sat there for an hour, bad-mouthing every director she’d ever worked with.” "Impromptu" called for Davis to play a passionate and sexually omnivorous woman. Once again she did a brilliant job; once again she complained about the movie. “She always complains about the writing,” continues Lapine. “Judy’s smart, and particularly when you do a historically based piece, she’s gonna go and read everything she can about it, and she would have done it differently, no doubt.” Davis is very particular about her look, and Lapine claims “hair and makeup became rhis great, great issue. She likes a certain complexion— chalky. Our big problem was that she was playing opposite Chopin (Hugh Grant). who was supposed to look like a white, chalky sick person. So it would have been weird if she looked more pale than him. “God knows, she gave us a lot of grief about certain scenes, like the big scene at the end of the movie when she and Chopin actually make love. Judy has a hard time saying things like ‘I love you.’ I said to her, ‘Judy, do you tell your husband that you love him?’ She said, half joking. ‘No. Only my child and my dog.’ She’s a twisted human being.” Lapine laughs. “She’s not easy, and I’m sure a lot of people—in L.A., in particular—they want easy. It doesn’t bother me. She delivers the goods, and that’s really the bottom line.” After "Impromptu", Davis plunged into "Naked Lunch", a typically bent David Cronenberg film, where she worked with Peter Weller for the first time. “I hardly know her, and the second day, we gotta do this fucking scene, man. I gotta kiss her, plus we gotta be stoned, and all these other circumstances that "Naked Lunch" had laid on us—talking about cops, and being busted. But the thing is, she’s really sexy and she charmed me. She’s, like, this fabulous kisser, man. She’s like a cushion of clouds. David and I are car freaks. I turned to him and said, ‘Judy’s like a Ferrari, man. You just crank it up, sit in it, and it just goes.’ Davis played a small but vivid role in the Coen brothers’ "Barton Fink", and then stole Woody Allen’s "Husbands and Wives" from an accomplished cast that included Liam Neeson, Mia Farrow, Juliette Lewis, and Sydney Pollack. “I had seen her in a few things,” says Allen. “'My Brilliant Career', 'High Tide'. And I thought that she was one of the most exciting actresses in the world. She plays comedy, she plays drama, she projects intelligence, she’s sexy. There’s nothing that you could want that isn’t there.” Lapine says Davis told him she enjoyed working with Allen—most likely because he left her alone: “That’s what I think she wants. Ultimately, she’d like to show up. do what she does, and leave. I don’t think she’s interested in direction.” The film earned her a second Oscar nomination. "The Ref". a Disney comedy with Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary. directed by Ted Demme, Jonathan’s nephew, was an unlikely project to attract Davis on the face of it, and the principals were surprised she agreed to do it. Most likely she was mainstreaming herself, although she has a genuine flair for comedy and liked the dark script, by Richard LaGravenese and Marie Weiss. But "The Ref" got off to a wobbly start. Demme was virtually a first- time director, with a difficult star who was, to some extent, slumming. “There was kind of a snotty attitude going on,” says a source from the production. “She said something in public that was embarrassing. because she was angry about other stuff. Ted is a regular guy, he’s not a game player. At one point he said to her, ‘Listen, we’re all good people here. 1 don’t want this bad feeling, so if you’ve got a problem—talk to me. After that she was fine. You have to earn her trust and respect. She’s like an abused child.” Another source close to the production says, “She’s edgy, she tests the waters all the time. She tested it with Ted. She liked him, liked the movie. If she doesn’t like the director, she could just kill you." Davis almost killed George Sluizer, or he almost killed her, depending on who’s talking. The plot of "Dark Blood" oddly resembles the plot of "The Ref "(and "The New Age" as well), a darker version of a comedy that was already fairly bleak: a married woman trapped in a triangle. If Davis’s relationship with Sluizer was strained during preproduction, it snapped altogether when filming began in Torrey, Utah, by all accounts a difficult, even dangerous location. Everything was a struggle, from the nude scenes (predictably sensitive) to simple exteriors. Davis says she made it clear to the director that she needed to wear a hat to protect her skin, which is quite pale, if they shot in the desert. His reaction, as she remembers it: “ ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’ “ She was emphatic: “‘I just need that to be understood, so when we get out there you’re not complaining about the fact that I’m wearing a hat, and if that’s a problem you should say it.’ ‘Naw, naw, naw.’ They scheduled this particular scene for mid-afternoon, when it was drenched in sun. It was maybe 9,000 feet. In the summer. So, okay, I can angle my chair to the sun so I’m protected.” Sluizer is Dutch. With her preternatural gift for accents, Davis mimics him with harsh, guttural growls and barks. ‘“Naw, naw, tiss chair has tiss vay to be.’ Then Ed Lachman, the DP, said, ‘Don’t worry about the sun; we’re gonna scrim it, it’s so harsh anyway.’ So they build the biggest scrim I’ve ever seen in my life. As big as this room. The director started screaming and ranting and raving: ‘Naw, naw. You are deestroyink my shot! Tees ees exactly vehr the cahmera hahf to go.’ What the camera was going to do was come out the doorway past me, and there was this huge scrim in the way. If the guy just explained what he was doing. they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of making the scrim. “So they took the scrim away, and I’m again left there in the sun. I went and got my hat. I said, ‘I don’t want to get cancer because of your film. I did let you know this, and I feel I shouldn’t be in a position where I have to point it out to you in front of all these people.’ He’s bobbing up and down, and I said, ‘Excuse me, George, would you mind not bobbing up and down, because it’s very distracting.’ He found that terribly cutting, to be told that he was a distraction. Which he was. He stormed off the set to write memos. He spent a lot of time writing memos. “Judy is a very good actress,” says Sluizer. “But she’s not that easy to direct. Sometimes actors infringe on the movie. It’s happened with Dustin Hoffman with some films, where he pulls the covers, everything to himself, and then other people might disappear behind the actor.” Sluizer seems to admire her despite himself. “There is a lot of energy, a kind of intensity that is fascinating. She’s there. You just say ‘camera,’ and there’s another person than the one you saw five seconds before.” Would he use Davis again? “That would be quite difficult, because it has stressed me quite a lot,” he says. “Obviously, when you’ve had problems, you’re not going to be a fool—if I have a stomachache, I’m not going to take the worst foods. But once my stomach is better. I might take another of whatever it was that made me bad. I’m not saying it could never happen. I don’t grudge.” “It’s important to know what your strengths are,” says Davis. “I absolutely believe in my intuition; I think that’s a great asset to an actor. The weaknesses in my personality are impatience and sometimes intolerance. Which came out with this guy George. I was very quickly, utterly intolerant of him. I decided that he was dangerous, and kept away from him.” "The New Age" preceded "Dark Blood" and was a far happier set. It was written and directed by Michael Tolkin, and feels like a cross between The Rapture, Tolkin’s directing debut, and "The Player", which he wrote. ‘After 'The Rapture', I wanted to bring it back home,” says Tolkin. “I felt there was enough going on in L.A. that had been avoided, ignored, or overlooked.” Explains Nick Wechsler, who produced "The Rapture". “Michael and I have talked about doing a movie that would look at a certain element of L.A. society in the same way that Fellini looked at Italian society by doing "La Dolce Vita" in the ‘5Os. When we were in Cannes, we spent every day talking about this movie, and we were hanging out with Peter Weller. so it was natural for us to shape the lead character around Peter’s character—very charming, very smart, maybe follows his dick too much.” In "The New Age", Weller plays an out-of-work agent who opens a clothing shop on Melrose with his wife and explores various New Age remedies. ‘Almost everybody I know is involved with some kind of reli gious quest,” says Tolkin, “whether somebody does yoga. or somebody joins a synagogue, or goes to church, or meditates, or channels.” Perhaps. But it’s hard to generate much sympathy for an out-of-work agent whose crystal breaks. If the film is going to work, the characters’ pain has got to cut through the sociology. “Judy has been a hero of mine,” Tolkin says. “She’s the patron saint of modern emotions. One of the great things about her is that unlike most American actors she’s not interested in playing characters that are likable. I have very uncomplicated feelings about her. She’s the real thing; she’s an artist. She pops. Judy Davis is a genius.” Like Sluizer, Weller is struck by Davis’s “there-ness”: “There are really charismatic and captivating people who stand in front of a camera and act their ass off, but it’s like the difference between a great director and a great shooter,” he says. “Some guys can shoot the shit out of a movie, but the story isn’t present. And some actors, and maybe me too sometimes, can act the shit out of a scene, but the event isn t present— the feelings aren’t there. She’s always going for the guts of the scene, the reality of the thing. It’s really a gift, man. She owns her own beauty somehow. It’s the old Buddhist notion: Whatever you own becomes your own. The gift of living is being who you are and nor aspiring to anybody else, and I think that’s her magic.” The irony, of course, is that Davis is also uncomfortable in her own skin—she’s antsy, dissatisfied, and that’s where the tension comes from, and her peculiar modern- or postmodernness. That, and her clarity (or coldness, depending on your opinion of it) and her lack of illusions. Illusions, for example, about her "Dark Blood" costar River Phoenix. Although she cared for Phoenix, she refused to give herself up to the tears and lamentation that greeted his death. “The Monday after River died we all went on the set and we were asked to form a large circle,” she recalls. “George gave his speech about River—it was true what he said, he was a lovely boy. And then Jonathan Pryce asked us to join hands and wish River’s spirit a happy journey as it went across the . . . And I felt very uncomfortable with all that. I didn’t want to hold hands, I don’t believe in spirits passing. But I didn’t have a choice, so I wished that I’d not gone to the studio. I don’t like to be forced to be dishonest. I think it has to be remembered, in the midst of all this, that he was 23 and he made the choice. He thought he was immune, I think. There’s something about stardom and the way it empowers people, the way people give these stars such power. Judy Davis is a paradox: a brilliant actress with a not-so-brilliant career. A world-class talent who prefers, perhaps, to be a big fish in small movies. Sharply intelligent, yet shy and insecure, a wallflower at Hollywood parties. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know that she has her pick of projects,” says Lapine. “She’s not part of the circle. She doesn’t live out there, play that game, and I don’t think she would do a lot of crap. I wish Judy were more politic, because she’s biting off her nose to spite her face. She’s making herself into an art-house star. But on the other hand, maybe that’s what she wants. Peter Weller is standing amid his guests near the swimming pool behind the Beverly Hills home rented for "The New Age". He is wearing a black shirt and an ugly tie covered with explosions of pink—perhaps flowers, perhaps nebulae—in any event, not a promising accessory for someone intending to open a hip clothing shop. Davis, fetching in a slinky black dress with spaghetti straps, chews her lip as she watches him flirt with an attractive blond. “Someone’s knocking or something,” says Tolkin, who’s wearing an ankle-length overcoat in the mild April weather and looks like a character out of "Crime and Punishment". “Can we cut?” says Davis. “I screwed up my lines.” She says them again—perfectly, with a slightly different inflection, changing the meaning ever so subtly. Tolkin is pleased. As a postscript to this article, two letters in response appeared in the January 1995 issue of Premiere magazine: "Thank you for profiling Judy Davis ("Punchin' Judy", October). She's an extraordinary actress, and like Peter Weller says, perhaps the greatest of her generation. However, while many praise her work throughout the article, Judy's talent is overshadowed by reports from directors and producers that she's difficult. Even Judy herself says that she's perceived as 'strong-willed...a person who questioned too much.' I have to wonder if those quoted would be as preoccupied with her demeanor if she were a man. One issue on which everyone agrees is her exceptional talent, so why is so much attention paid to everything else? As James Lapine says, 'She delivers the goods, and that's really the bottom line.'"
Courtney Froemming, Alexandria, Va.
"Peter Biskind's article on Judy Davis reminds me why I should never allow myself to be interviewed. I don't remember the context of my remark,'I don't think she's interested in direction.' I've always fround Judy receptive to direction when it was offered and incredibly skilled at using whatever input came her way. Does she like to talk endlessly about her character or rehearse at great length before shooting? No, and neither do I."
James Lapine, New York, NY
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