True Blood’s Anna Paquin’s film “Margaret” is getting a new life for it’s Oscar hopes. “Margaret” has been inching its way toward reassessment and in some sense resurrection, to the point where there is now an undercurrent of backlash from those who feel its movie-you-can’t-see mystique is too much a part of its appeal.
“Margaret” is going to be playing for one week at the Cinefamily in Los Angeles starting Jan. 27, giving local audience another chance to see for themselves whether this most singular film lives up to its legend. Paquin, an Oscar winner and now the star of HBO’s “True Blood,” rather suddenly made herself available to a few press outlets just this week to talk about the film with Mark Olsen.
How weird is it to be talking about a film you shot in 2005?
I could not possibly have loved that script or loved doing that movie any more. It was one of the most incredible professional experiences I’ve ever had, and, you know, movies all have their own path to being seen by people and some of them are long journeys and some are really quick. And this one’s just been a bit longer. I’m just pleased that people are watching it now.
When you were shooting the film did you have any idea it would become the problem child it turned into?
No, actually. The shoot was extraordinarily smooth. Everything kind of ran perfectly. It was a sort of long script, so obviously if you shoot all of a very long script there’s just going to be a lot more material to play around with when you’re trying to put the movie together. Which ultimately, as an actor, is not something that I really worry myself about. That’s kind of, thankfully, somebody else’s department. I’m just like sweet, I will shoot all one-hundred and sixty, seventy, whatever-it-was pages of incredibly well-written, beautiful scenes with incredible character work.
Did you ever reach a point where you thought the movie would just never come out?
Honestly, my life moved on. I’m doing other things in my career, I’m doing other things in my personal life, a lot’s happened in the last six years in my life. I didn’t really know what was going to happen, to be honest. It moved from, I think about this every month, to I think about this occasionally.
How many different versions of the film have you seen? How many times do you think you’ve seen it?
In its entirety? Well, I saw bits and pieces sort of way back when, when post-production first started. I’d come into the edit suite and watch cut scenes and stuff. I’ve seen various versions at various points. I’m not great about watching myself, so really the only time I really sat down and actually watch-watched was right before the film was going to be releasing over the summer. I hadn’t seen the entire thing put together before that.
Look, sometimes the work that’s the most gratifying to do as an actor is stuff that’s kind of uncomfortable to watch because it’s very personal and it’s very raw and it’s very unselfconscious. And we really kind of went for it. I only end up watching stuff when it’s about to open or air or whatever because ultimately I want to know what other people are going to be seeing.
There’s a moment early in the film where you switch the word you’re saying partway through. It’s a real trigger that this movie is going to be different, in that either that’s a flub that was left in or the texture of the dialog is going to be really specific.
Let’s put it this way, there is no dialog in the film that wasn’t written the way it is. If there’s stuff that sounds like stutters and half-thoughts, that’s the way Kenny writes. And he does that in a way that’s pretty damn genius, if you ask me. It’s the way people speak. You get in the middle of something and your brain sort of switches paths. And if you read his plays it’s all that way as well. Every single piece of dialog corresponds to what the other person is saying, even if it’s going too fast to really hear what everyone is saying. He writes like a playwright, the words and punctuation, every comma, is specific.
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