Page 2
Jason Schwartzman continued, "The way that I wanted to portray it is that he wanted to connect and probably tried hard to. I don’t say a lot in the movie. Sofia’s style is very spare – her writing style’s very sparse – so I’m playing a very silent man in a sparse movie. I’m not saying much, but I think what we tried to do was just give the feeling that even though he didn’t say anything, he wanted to. There was a difference in my mind between didn’t and can’t, you know what I mean? I think like for every line he says to her, there’s a lot more that he wants to say and knows what he wants to say, and it just comes out wrong or awkwardly and is kind of confusing to those around him.
When we were rehearsing, we actually rehearsed in a room a lot like this in a hotel, and Kirsten [Dunst] and I were working. She would ask me a question or say one of the lines to me, and my natural inclination was to look at her and begin the scene. Sofia would say, ‘No, look forward, keep it tense, don’t make eye contact, wait a little bit longer to say the line, and you have to be okay with not pleasing with her,’ which is something that I naturally want to please people - and especially Kirsten. The idea was that every time she says, ‘Do you like this?’, in my mind it was like, ‘Oh yes, I like this and this and this.’ He had a very active internal monologue, but just what he did say was wrong. I just thought it was funny that he was into locks and into gears. I always thought that his mouth was like a gear that didn’t work.”
Filming the Bedroom Scenes: “I was awkward in those scenes because I was wearing a see-through nightgown. I really did feel awkward in the bed scenes because I think when I was beginning to play the part, I kind of walked around the character for a little bit. You know, you walk around it and try to figure out what the dimensions are and everything, and I couldn’t understand a king. I had a hard time and I was like, ‘How am I going to play a king? How am I going to play a king?’ And I realized that my way in was that he was a man who was trying to communicate and struggling to do that and was shy. I just thought, ‘Wow, a shy king.’ That’s just something you don’t think of because I always think of royalty as very regal and almost unbreakable and brave and confident. To read about a guy that had low self-confidence and was myopic… He just seemed human, and it was interesting.”
The Mix of Pop Music and Authentic Costumes and Sets: “See, I think the music, although on paper it looks like a contradiction, I think it teams up pretty well with the spirit of the movie. It syncs up to it. I think that Sofia talks about she wanted to make a movie about youth and the tempo of youth and the speed of young royalty and these people. I think to her, the music she chose is that spirit and it’s not different from the time of Marie Antoinette, just to her in her mind, that music makes her feel that way. She talks about like, she said, ‘If I was going to a masked ball, I would want to hear Hong Kong Garden playing.’ I thought when I watch it, it doesn’t actually feel like it clashes. To me, it feels like they compliment each other very well. I know for me, the music was very valuable to me on the set. I had these mixes in my makeup trailer and in my car and in my hotel. You know, I always had the music playing around me and she always had it playing on the set. I found it very, very helpful. Even the rock-and-roll music, it was great. When we shot the masked ball, we had all that music playing and it felt more natural. It felt very good and the excitement of the music helps, I think.”
The Costumes of Marie Antoinette: Schwartzman says the costumes weren’t uncomfortable, they just took a little time to get used to. “I just had to learn to accept that and know that I couldn’t move the way that I personally move in my day-to-day life in those costumes. If I tried to go against them, it just didn’t work. But if you go with the flow of the costumes, they’re all right. I wore a garter belt every morning, which is really funny, and vests. The vests hug you in strange places, and they’re very tight in the back and just you have to act different. Once you just accept it and learn the movements, they’re actually really comfortable. I came to love them. I actually went out to lunch one day in them because I wanted to see if the people in Versailles would even pay any attention to me, and they didn’t. I walked out in complete wardrobe and I even halted a car, and I got nothing. Nothing at all. No one even cared.”
