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NAOMI
WATTS feels guilty. That, at least, is the reaction the
actress says she had when she first watched Funny
Games, the 1997 film she has just remade
shot-for-shot with its original director, Michael Haneke.
It’s not exactly that she feels bad about doing yet
another rehash of an old movie. Watts has famously
appeared in updates of The Ring and King Kong,
and is scheduled to star in a new take on Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Birds, due out next year. “I do
feel slightly guilty about that,” she says. “But, you
know what? It’s perhaps because there’s such a lack of
good ideas now.”
No,
Watts’s sense of culpability comes from something else.
To her, Haneke’s hyperviolent, self-referential drama
about a family terrorized by a pair of psychopaths
points an accusing, though well-deserved, finger at the
modern movie fan’s fascination with cinematic violence.
“It made
me think about what I’m guilty of as an audience
member,” she says. “That when a set of brains hits the
wall, I’m punching my fist in the sky at certain times
in movies.”
DARK SIDE.
The
Oscar-nominated actress continues to explore the dark,
violent underside of contemporary life with
Funny Games, which she
also executive-produced.
Known
primarily for roles in Mulholland Dr., 21
Grams and other examples of what she calls “dark and
twisted movies,” the 39-year-old actress also admits to
another pang of conscience. Not about being a consumer
of the macabre, but about being a creator. “I’m not in
the bright and cheery ones,” she admits with a laugh.
The
problem with Haneke’s earlier movie? It was in German.
That, coupled with the fact that the director’s intended
audience was always American—violence, after all, is
Hollywood’s bread and butter—is why Watts says she
jumped at the chance to give the film an
English-language spin, one that would more easily strike
its target.
Okay,
maybe not “jumped.”
“I was
afraid it wouldn’t land well with the American
audience,” says Watts, a British-born emigre to
Australia who now lives stateside. She recalls that she
wouldn’t commit to the part without first seeking advice
from such mentors as her 21 Grams director,
Alejandro González Iñárritu. “All the directors I
respected said: ‘You have to work with this man. He’s a
genius.’”
In the
end, she felt so strongly about Haneke’s critique of
celluloid sadism that she didn’t just star in the film:
she also executive-produced it. “It’s a piece that gets
under your skin,” she says.
As for
who had final say, Watts says there was never a clash of
egos between the film’s writer-director and its
star-producer: “I was not the boss. Definitely not.” In
fact, one of the few times she can remember Haneke even
coming to her for advice involved what, for many
actresses, would be a concession to the very
exploitation Haneke’s film is meant to criticize.
Watching
the original version,
Watts says, she
felt uncomfortable when actress Susanne Lothar puts her
slip back on after the bad guys force the heroine to
take off her clothes. As Watts told Haneke: “I have to
say that was one of the only false moments in the film,
where I just felt like it was a little bit contrived
that she has a slip on. It took me out of the movie for
one second. It made me think, ‘Oh, she didn’t want to
show her body or something. She wanted to hide a little
bit.’”
Yes,
Haneke told her, that was a matter of some discussion,
even while making the earlier film. So, how would she
feel about not having her slip on?
“I said,
‘To be honest, I think it would help me to feel the
fear.’”
It’s an
answer that says something about the actress’s enduring
attraction to the dark, even naked, side of human
emotion.
Attraction? For Watts, it’s a full-on fascination. To
explore the dark side, she says, is to embrace it.
“Then, perhaps, it helps us understand it. The more we
know about it in others, the less alone we feel.” |
