Q&A

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By Metrograph

In 2017, Rachel Weisz and Hilton Als joined Metrograph for a Q&A about performance, authenticity, and two of their favorite films, Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends and John Huston’s Freud.

Girlfriends screens at Metrograph from August 17 as part of The Process: A Tribute to Robert and Irwin Young.

METROGRAPH: I want to salute Claudia Weill again for a great film. And it’s my pleasure to be able to introduce two enormous fans of this film: Oscar-winner and great actress Rachel Weisz, and Pulitzer Prize-winner and one of the great critics working today, Hilton Als.

HILTON ALS: A sort of interesting fact that I learned today was that Claudia studied with Walker Evans as a photographer early on. I love the use of stills in the movie, and it was a sort of device from that period that in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)-did you ever see that?-where they use stills. There was a way, I think, American filmmakers were mixing up genres for the first time, especially if they were telling women’s stories. Anyway, the movie is Rachel’s selection, so I want to hear what you think about the film.

METROGRAPH: Jumping in, I will just say as a way of introduction, Hilton, you mentioned that you and Rachel had been talking and this film came up, and you had a mutual affection for it. How did you both stumble upon it initially?

HA: It was Rose, wasn’t it?

RACHEL WEISZ: Mmhmm. I’ve never seen the film on a big screen. I have a DVD of it, which my girlfriend Rose-who I’ve been friends with since I was about 14, so a long time now-she told me about it, and when I watched it on the DVD, I spent so much time looking at Rose and talking to Rose and, you know, Rose got married and then had a kid, and this happened to me and that happened to me-and then with other girlfriends, too-and I had never seen a film that really portrayed that before. I know that sounds like kind of a vast statement, but I had never seen a film that felt how it feels to have a really deep friendship with another woman, and it just told it in such a delightful-I mean, I’m just so charmed by it and by their friendship. It’s also very, very funny, which is lovely. I think I was just chatting to you about that, and saying how I’d love to see it on the big screen.

HA: It was a conversation that started with Girlfriends, and then Jake Perlin said, “Oh, what’s the film that you would choose as your favorite, or one of your favorites?” and I said “Freud, John Huston’s Freud (1962),” which I had seen once at MoMA. I don’t think it’s never been released on DVD, and it’s a film that Montgomery Clift made with John Huston right after they did The Misfits (1961), which had been such a nightmare for Huston because it was Monroe’s last film, Clark Gable’s last film. I find it to be an extraordinary document about movie stars becoming actors…  Anyway, I think what Rachel and I were talking about was responding to authenticity in performance, yes?

RW: I think there have been a lot of imitators of Girlfriends, but nothing I’ve ever seen has felt this authentic. And I think what you love Montgomery is his complete commitment and his authenticity. I think he’s your-if you had to choose an actor, would he be your favorite?

HA: American. [Laughs.] I think he’s one of the great American actors because it’s pure cinema, it’s not theater.

RW: It’s completely internal.

HA: It’s not Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando’s relationship to film was through the stage, and Clift, who had worked very early on the stage, invented a language for cinema the way that Louise Brooks invented a language for cinema, which was that it was letting the camera into your interiority, and that was the story. So, I think the struggle probably during the making of Freud was, in fact, between the auteur and the auteur, with the actor as the person that defines the piece, and Huston didn’t like giving up that kind of control. But you can’t really be in control with Montgomery Clift. You can give him suggestions, but you can’t control that kind of poetry. And I feel that with this, too, no? With the young women, that there’s something, that what Claudia has given them is this immense frame to just be in.

“there have been a lot of imitators of ‘Girlfriends,’ but nothing I’ve ever seen has felt this authentic.”

RW: Yeah, and I feel this… the subjectivity of the girls. I mean, I feel Melanie [Mayron]’s subjectivity, and you feel the men around her desire her, and I feel the filmmaker desiring her but in a way that’s really different from the way I see women being portrayed in films mostly.

HA: Directed by men.

RW: Yes. Or sometimes even directed by women. But in general, there’s something about-I guess we were all desiring Melanie, but she just never became the object of the piece, she was just so fully alive every moment. Do you think?

HA: And also alive to the humor of loving another person. Let’s face it: intimacy is a kind of disaster that you enter-you should enter with a sense of a humor. And I think that she enters it knowing. When she says to him, “Why don’t you want to live…” She says, “I was just coming out of a heavy relationship,” and what I love is that he doesn’t ask who it was-and if she said it was a woman, he wouldn’t be like, “Oh, you gay…” No psychological ramifications, and that’s what I love the best in cinema is that things aren’t explained. It’s the actor’s face that tells us everything. We don’t actually really need the story that much. What we need is the actor responding authentically.

RW: And that she doesn’t-she can’t quite take herself seriously, which is delicious and delightful, but she’s also really trying to take herself seriously as an artist and in this new relationship, but she can’t-she’s sort of straining for the serious, which is delightful.

HA: And also loving her own apartment, too. Because I’m ancient, there were some things that I remembered so vividly when I was watching the film. For instance, did you see the wok in her apartment? I had cloth bags the way that she has under her cape. My mother made it. Also, the gongs on the wall. There used to be a store called Azuma and you could go get cheap Asian knockoffs of things. It was just a particular kind of style of dress. There was a thrift store velvet dress that she wears at the opening with hair clips, and in those days, hair clips and Baby’s Breath, that was a big thing, to put a sprig of Baby’s Breath in your hair.

RW: That’s a real name of a scent?

HA: A flower.

RW: Really?

HA: Yeah, yeah. It’s true! And uh, I just love that the reality of the film supports the reality of the actors, you know?

RW: Every moment, yeah.

METROGRAPH: In terms of performance, one of the things that gave this film a real sense of authenticity to me is that she has a professional career that she’s pursuing, and that there’s a real discussion of the details of that. I love that moment when she says, “Look, that’s the pan I process my pictures in. Please don’t wash your clothes in them.”

RW: And she says, “The picture’s corrupt. It’s not mine anymore.”

METROGRAPH: When you’re creating a role, are those sorts of details very important to you? Do you think that somehow the authenticity of this is elevated because there’s some specific things, either the details in dress or art direction, because it all feels so lived-in?

RW: Yes, oftentimes your job, it can be very much left out. I mean, she’s dating, she’s trying to find love, she’s trying to be a photographer, she has parents, she has an older man hit on her, she has a scary taxi-so many things happen, but yes, the details of her job are really mined, which in my experience as a woman rather than a giraffe or some other thing, get left out.

METROGRAPH: Yeah, all these things that fill it out in a way that doesn’t happen in a lot of films. You know, a small scene such as when the male editor tells her “Get closer,” which is not consequential in terms of the narrative, it’s only consequential in terms of the development of the character. Like, he’s telling her what to do from behind his desk.

RW: Yeah, there’s a bit mansplaining going on. Yeah, no, those tiny details… It’s a brilliant piece of writing because, as Hilton said, there’s so much mystery, things left unexplained and unresolved. I think great writing in film is like tips of icebergs, and there’s little moments where her career, there are these little tips of icebergs-the things that stick out is what’s spoken, and you just sense this vast iceberg underneath of a career, a love, a passion of photography, or you know, in a relationship, this is how I mash potatoes. You know what that is. It’s like a huge iceberg that we’ve all experienced in relationships. Everyone’s got their own way of doing it. It doesn’t get overexplained. It’s so elegant how it just tips out.

HA: Also, one of the sort of pure cinema aspects of it that I love is when she goes to find Anne, and Anne says that she’s had the abortion. Now, if it was a sort of a typical American film, there would be this moment of tears, and throwing themselves on the bed, and “I feel worthless as a woman,” and “What does that mean?” It would go on and on and on-and she just says it. That is purely cinema. I remember I was telling Rachel I had this conversation with a well-known novelist and someone was adapting her book to the screen, she was helping the screenwriter, and she said, “They just take the guts out,” and I said, “That’s the actor. It’s their face. That’s the guts of the movie. We’re not there really to read your book.” We’re there to look at people be interesting behaviorally and as authentically as possible. And imaginatively.

RW: Yeah, as you said, the moment on Melanie’s face where her best friend’s husband is arriving, and she knows…

HA: She’s got to deal with it.

RW: She’s got to deal with it, and the fun’s over, but she still loves her…

HA: Yeah, exactly.

RW: …and in that one internal moment is 10 pages of a novel just on her face.

METROGRAPH: Watching the film tonight, I felt that so much of what it’s depicting, particularly about female friendships, seems to be in response to what I imagine was a lifetime of watching men make films about female friendships-

RW: Did they ever make films about female friendships? I don’t know. I can’t think of any.

METROGRAPH:  I’m talking about Three on a Match (1932) and more classical Hollywood stuff or maybe not “female friendship” but even like what’s known as woman’s pictures. While this film is wholly original, it also seems to be very much in conversation with those films, the work of someone who had grown up watching a certain type of images being presented to them.

I’m wondering, in performance, are you certainly striking out doing something new, but are you in some sort of conversation with the way you thought performances have been in the past? Do you see that going on here, for instance, in the, I guess, lead performance? Because I notice it a little bit.

Hilton: You’re asking a great performer what is the root of a great performance.

METROGRAPH: And how much previous performances internalize…

HA: And how much does film history, or movies like this, affect your vision of what you’re doing for a character. I don’t think you do.

RW: I always strive to be as authentic as this film. I’m not consciously aware of being in a kind of call-and-response with history, but I guess we all are in everything that we do and say. It’s a really general answer, but…

HA: No, no, I think it’s also one of the reasons that you do it, or any great performer does this, because they don’t know why. Believe me, I’ve asked, and like over many, many years, and there’s a sort of, it’s almost as if they’ve kind of stroked out in a way. They sort of look at you like, “Whoa. Like, I don’t even… Dr. Freud couldn’t even get to that answer.” So, I think the thing that we love really is mystery, right? We don’t know why they can do that, but they can do it.

RW:  I mean, you can-I think it’s really very often down to the director and the environment that is created by the director. So, you know, hats off to Claudia for allowing this kind of naturalism. It’s an extraordinary-there’s such a sense of freedom from all the performers. Even when they’re uptight, like Bob Balaban’s little-he’s an uptight character, but he’s sort of free within that.

HA: And they all love each other as performers. That’s the other thing, that nobody’s trying to get a leg up in the scene. They’re just there to support each other. It’s a real ensemble.

RW: Yeah, it really is. The moment that always gets me is where Melanie’s character gets her first show, and then she meets the other girl, and she says, “I got my show,” and there’s a second of jealousy-and actually to answer your question, this is as a viewer not as an actor, I feel so programmed by all the films I’ve seen where a woman gets envious and bitchy of another woman’s success. I always think, “Oh God, she’s going to be envious and mean,” and then she says, “Oh, well done,” and then they start laughing and then she helps her out. I just feel that’s so…

HA: I just adored it when she said, “You little squirt” and puts her arm around her, and it’s really the thing that you want in love, right, is that they’re telling you the truth and they’re also touching you in this beautiful way.

RW: There’s so much love in the film, yeah.

HA: I just wanted to say, briefly, that John Huston was not very good to Montgomery Clift on [Freud] and there were a lot of homophobic slurs and aspersions cast onto Clift, who was very closeted and in deep pain about it. Again, the work of the great actor is just to use it, so one of the things I love about this film is his physical gestures. There are a number of dream sequences, and the way Clift uses his body just to reach-to get out of the frame, to get away, and to still give us a character, but also to be free in the mind, to show what freedom of the mind looks like.

METROGRAPH: Any time you want to just come back and talk for a few hours about Monty Clift, that would be great, because I can’t really overstate how great this guy was. I think maybe he doesn’t have the reputation of Brando because he didn’t have a second act?

HA: He didn’t, and also he was very young. There’s so much to say about him, but one thing that I really want to say is that I learned so much about writing from him, and I learned so much about writing from great performers.

RW: One thing you said to me about Montgomery Clift that really stayed with me, just thinking of bodies and what actors know and what actors don’t know about what they’re doing, he said, according to you, that your body doesn’t know you’re acting.

HA: That’s right. He said that’s why it’s so exhausting because-for us, we know that they’re pretending-but your body, to make it real, your body is responding as if you’re in these situations of heartache and loss. And the way that the women respond to each other when she shows up at the house, it’s that feeling of looking for your lost love and finding them, and wanting everything just to be the way it was and knowing that it’s not. You can read it in an actor’s face and they make that real.

METROGRAPH: It’s a beautiful film. I’m very grateful that you gave us an excuse to show it.

HA: No, are you kidding? Thanks for making the… Thank you!

RW: Thank you!