Elizabeth Banks on Getting Into the Role of ‘Isabel’ in “Heights:” “Chris [Terrio, director] and I met and started talking about the character [and] we just both felt really comfortable that I sort of knew who this woman was. I knew who this girl was and so I was bringing my own world view and perspective to it.
It’s funny because we sort of based the character a little bit on Gwyneth Paltrow. I mean like we had a long discussion about how it’s kind of like Gwyneth Paltrow. Like she went to Spence and she was very well educated and she’s kind of a New Yorker. She has this famous mother and she’s trying to get out of her mom’s shadow, and you know, just like in terms of mannerisms and the way she was gonna look – we really wanted her to sort of be like Gwyneth Paltrow. Or like our perception of Gwyneth. I mean, you don’t know Gwyneth Paltrow, but the perception of Gwyneth Paltrow is like yeah, she grew up in this very sort of rarefied part of New York. Like she had this great life in New York and the daughter of this famous actress, and but [she’s] also trying to make her own way in the world and have her own identity. And so that’s what we talked about a lot when we were creating her character.
I hope it’s not obvious. It’s not like an homage or anything. It was more just like that relationship, too. We thought that was interesting and again, it’s all perception, too, because we don’t know anything about those people. But you know, Glenn [Close] is so close to her character, as well. She lives in New York, is a single mom, has a daughter. It’s just we were working from, I think, a good basis.”
Collaborating with Director Chris Terrio: “We did quite a lot, I wouldn’t say improv because that’s not really his style, but he will come to the set in the morning and say, ‘Let’s read through it,’ and anything that’s not making sense or not feeling right or not feeling necessary… This script was definitely fuller when we first started shooting and we cut a lot out. That’s true about a lot of scripts. They need to have a lot going on when you read them so that you really get a sense of the people and the characters on the page, but the minute you put it up visually, you can take a lot of the words away because you can do so much with a glance, or a look, or an embrace that you don’t need the words. Suddenly the words seem redundant. So we took a lot of the redundancy, I think, out of it by taking some of the words out and just making it more of our own, too. And making it more of Chris’. I think Chris was really invested in the writing of the screenplay [see footnote]. He adapted it from Amy Fox’s one act play, but her one act play was only the last scene of the movie.
While Banks and Terrio worked well together, Banks says that the two didn’t always share the exact same vision for her character. But she further pointed out that that’s not unusual. “I think most actors - I don’t know, I shouldn’t speak for everyone else, so I’ll just speak for myself - but I read scripts and I read the role. Whether it’s on five pages [or longer], you sort of put weight and importance on whatever you’re doing. It’s exactly what they say, ‘There are no small parts, only small actors.’ I totally believe that. I read every role thinking like, ‘Ok, I’m gonna do this and this,’ and my vision of the movie was from my character’s perspective. I didn’t really care what Jesse [Bradford] and James [Marsden] were doing!”
Padding Out the Script: “Chris and Ismail [Merchant] and Amy sort of outlined like, ‘Ok, what are the 24 hours leading up to that moment? What’s going on in these people’s lives that led them to that place?’ [Chris] fleshed it out and then once [he] knew who the cast was going to be, he really fleshed it out. You know, he wrote a lot for Glenn [Close]. The two of them worked really closely on it.”
* The official credits read: Amy Fox, Screenplay - Chris Terrio, Additional Screenplay Material
