Elizabeth Banks on Starring Opposite Glenn Close in "Heights:" “Oh yeah, it affected me. Look, it’s a lot of pressure. Here’s the thing: you bring your ‘A’ game when you’re working with all-stars, and she’s certainly on the list of all-stars. She just raises everybody’s game. I mean, she just makes you want to be a better actor and those are the type of people that you learn the most from and that you want to work with. …I just felt like, ‘Oh my God, you’d better not disappoint her. You’ve gotta be right there in the moment.’ And she’s so in the moment and such a force to be reckoned with and she’s not gonna back down. She’s going to bring her ‘A’ game every time so it was just great. It was so much fun. It’s so invigorating to work with her.”
Specifics on Working with Glenn Close: Asked if she could point to one particular scene that sticks out as a special memory of working with Close, Banks said, “The scene on the street - which took a long time to film because we had two steady cams going at once. She’s walking down one street and I’m walking up the other street and then we kind of meet. It was a tricky shot technically. I mean I thought it was a great idea for a shot and it came off really well in the movie, but that day was really interesting because she was sort of sitting out on the street in New York. Because she had that wig on, no one really recognized her so she could sort of be herself and just hang out. Every once in a while, people would notice her but, you know, she’s in her element up there in the theater district.
It was a really good scene, I thought, between the two of us. We didn’t have the exact same idea about the scene which always makes it interesting. I like it more when actors don’t necessarily agree on how to play something because we don’t sit around as human beings and decide how we’re going to react to things beforehand, or that we’re all gonna have the same perspective. We argue. I think it’s so interesting that acting, to me, just felt great because we came at it from different angles - me as the daughter and her as the mom. And her having a certain idea of motherhood and me having an idea of motherhood, not being a mother and her being a mother I felt like you really believed we were mother and daughter. We had a really good connection that day.
I think the thing about our two characters is that both Isabel and Diana are strong women. You know, I think Diana passed on to Isabel her strength, her convictions, and it shows up in ways that I think the mom always goes, ‘Oh I sort of wish I hadn’t taught her to be so headstrong because now she’s using it against me.’"
The Strength of the Female Characters in “Heights:” “I really think that the movie is about the decision that everybody has to make whether to live their life passionately or passively. You know, whether you let life happen to you or whether you take the reigns and control your destiny a little bit more. There’s always expectations put on you by other people, whether it’s your parents or your friends or yourself. The movie’s really about people trying to figure out how to be truer, a little more true to themselves. And I saw that [in the script]. I loved that both Diana and Isabel sort of find a little, a truer way, not only to be themselves but also to be a mother and daughter again. And I thought that was in the material. I mean that’s what I read into it when I first read it.”
Elizabeth Banks on What She Looks for in a Script: “I really love comedy and I don’t get to do it so much. The first movie I did that got a lot of attention was ‘Wet Hot American Summer,’ which was a cult comedy. But then after that… I have an MSA and I’m trained to do Shakespeare, and I look a certain way and I think that people don’t associate girls like me with comedy. So I had been looking to do some comedy this year and I just got really lucky and did two great comedies that I love - one called ‘The Baxter’ for IFC - with a lot of the same people that did ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ because they knew me already - and this big Universal movie, ‘The 40 Year-Old Virgin’ with Steve Carell. I’m really thrilled about those two movies. I look for great characters. I look for interesting, funny characters. I try to look for humor in every character. I mean I thought there was humor in Isabel, too.”
PAGE 4: Elizabeth Banks on "Spider-Man 3" and "The 40 Year-Old Virgin"
