Love Ranch is the second film Hackford directed with Mirren as the star (the first being the 1985 film, White Nights), and at the Los Angeles press day Mirren talked about what it's like to be directed by her husband. "Well, Taylor was under a lot of stress also making this film because the financial situation was very difficult as it is nowadays with independent film," explained Mirren. "He was the producer as well as the director. It was very, very stressful for him. We didn’t have enough time to shoot it. We were very much under pressure. My husband is also a very ambitious filmmaker. He always wants more than he can have. He was tough on this shoot. He was not a pussycat. He’s strict. He wants more, more, more. Absolutely."
"He’s tough, my husband, I have to say, and there were days when I was planning how we were going to divide the property," laughed Mirren. "But also it was so fabulous for me to go home with him at night. For a lot of my professional career, ever since we’ve been together since 1984, I’m in Hungary, he’s in Columbia. I’m in London, he’s in Nova Scotia. So much of our life has been forced to be spent apart, and we have to deal with that. It was just so brilliant to actually work on a project together and go home together and have the weekends off together. That was fabulous. But having said that, when I was on the set, I was not his wife. I was an actor in his film. I never hung with him. I didn’t have lunch with him. I would never discuss the shot afterwards. We didn’t at home either. We didn’t deconstruct everything at home. It’s his movie. He’s the director - that’s his job. My job was to be an actor on the set and that means my loyalty is to the cast and the crew basically and those were the people I identified with and I spent my time with. That wasn’t theoretical. I just fell into that role. Somehow that seemed to be the best way for me for it to work."
It's been 25 years since their last film and a lot has changed in that time. "Obviously I know him a lot better – a lot better – and he knows me a lot better," said Mirren. "And in the interim, I’ve done an awful lot of work. He’s done quite a lot of work, but in terms of actual numbers of projects, I’ve probably done more than he has because a film takes two years for a director, while an actor in two years can do six or seven projects. You look up a list of work I’ve done. So I came to it a very different person than I was all those years ago. I knew more. I knew him better. So, of course, it was different, but the essence still…I think it is something that being with Taylor has taught me. I was pretty arrogant and self-absorbed as one is when one is younger and I didn’t really grasp what a director does. I didn’t grasp it until I lived with one. Living with one has given me enormous respect for directors, and since living with Taylor, every time I’ve worked on a film, now I absolutely try very hard to give the director what they want."
But it wasn't just the fact Mirren would have the opportunity to work with her husband again that drew her to Love Ranch. "I thought it was a great story. When my husband told me the story and told me that it was true that this had actually happened, I was blown away. I thought why have I never heard this. This is an amazing, wonderful, dramatic story. This is incredible. So really, the story brought me in plus the fact – because in the end I’m self-interested – I thought it was a great role. There are not that many great roles for women, full stop. There are certainly not a lot of great roles for women of my age and so who would say no?"
"I loved the fact that my husband wanted to do it and he drove it. He was the driving force from beginning to end with this movie. In the development of the script, in the financing of the film and the making of the film, he was absolutely the driving force, and without Taylor, it would have never gotten made."
As for her co-star, Spanish actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Mirren said it helped that they both have similar backgrounds. "Sergio has done a lot of theater and I have too and we’re both European at heart and so we come at it from a similar point of view, if you like. The reality was that Sergio had much more to do than I did, really. I had to do my little American accent and play my character, but Sergio was acting in English which I know, it’s incredibly difficult to act in a foreign language which is not your natural language. It’s like acting in a suit of armor. He was in the process of learning that English as he was making the film. He could speak English when he arrived, but he also had to train as a boxer and he had to put on weight as a boxer and learn how to box. So his task was absolutely mammoth," said Mirren.
"This is not a big budget film where you have a training truck on the set like a lot of big stars have and their own trainers are there all the time. We couldn’t afford any of this. This was a low budget, independent film which are becoming rarer and rarer. And so, Sergio had a huge amount of work to do. It was spectacular what he did. On top of all that, we were blessed with a brilliant actor. It was great working together, but what we both did was we put our heads down and we did the work that we had to do on a daily basis. I have to say that Joe [Pesci] absolutely was there with us as well. We all behaved like proper professional actors and did what we had to do."
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Love Ranch is rated R for sexual content, pervasive language and some violence and opens in theaters on June 30, 2010.
