Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson Discuss 'Married Life'

Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson play a married couple whose lives are disrupted when Cooper falls for a lovely young woman with platinum blonde hair in Married Life, adapted and directed by Ira Sachs. Teaming up to discuss their roles at the Los Angeles press junket, Clarkson admitted the film’s a difficult one to talk about without giving away any spoilers.

Avoiding any possible disclosures of key plot elements, here’s the basics of the story: Harry (Cooper) decides the only way not to hurt his wife (Clarkson) is to kill her after he falls in love with Kay (Rachel McAdams). The plot thickens when Harry’s friend Richard (Pierce Brosnan) also finds himself lusting after the gorgeous Kay. That’s not all that’s going on in Married Life, but it’s enough to give you the gist of the film without revealing too much.

Married Life is set in the 1940s but Clarkson didn’t try and channel any actresses from that period in order to get into character. “The beauty of Pat, as you know I’ve played wives, I’ve done period movies, but Pat is – she’s beautiful in that her wit and her sense of humor, her choix de vie,” said Clarkson. “She’s sexy. She’s clearly a woman well into her forties and she’s still got something going on. She’s got a little somethin’ somethin’. And so probably somewhere in my psyche are all of those great actresses from those eras. I do admire many of them and as a teenager I was influenced by them. But I found Pat kind of her own gal and quite frank and honest. What she says about sex I found refreshing - and love.”

The synopsis may sound dramatic, but the film’s surprisingly funny. “That’s what’s fun is to see this film - we were just at the Miami Film Festival with a packed big house, and just rolls of laughter and gasps. No, but when we shot it we shot it for broke, Chris and I, those scenes were shot as Bergman, I’m still recovering,” said Clarkson. “They were shot full out and hardcore. And that’s the thing. Ira [Sachs, writer/director] really wanted… It’s a period movie but it’s not a period piece, so to speak. A lot of the clothes we wore were the real clothes from the late 40s. I think we approached it naturalistically. Ultimately its tone and what you see, it does have style, it has a lift, it is a smashing of genres. He took the thriller, he took the melodrama and a dark comedy and kind of came up with this new cocktail.”

Speaking of writer/director Sachs, Cooper explained their collaborative process leading up to filming. “Personally for me early, early on, way before we started cameras rolling, I was working on another job in Mesa, Arizona, and Ira was kind enough to come down and this was for this particular script, it was a situation where I wanted to go line by line, a breakdown, make sure we were on the same track. My discipline that I learned early on is that time is money, and we had a tight budget on this film and a lot to accomplish. I realized the load that a director puts on his shoulders during production, so I don’t want to waste during set ups or before scenes to work out any problems. Over two different sessions we went over the script twice and found that we were very much thinking on the same lines.”

“It was a very kind of serious, dark set, we had a lot of giggles too, but we came in really kind of loaded, ready to go, we had done a lot of emotional homework,” added Clarkson. “We had rehearsed - Ira is a man after my own heart, doesn’t rehearse a lot and I don’t like to rehearse, but we [referring to Cooper] had worked together. We would run our lines together, which was great seeing that we knew one another. We’ve known each other for a long time. It was just us coming together and spending time together and getting comfortable and safe and all of that. The learning of the lines kind of helped us I think become Pat and Harry as this couple.”

Asked about working with Pierce Brosnan, Cooper said it was a delightful experience. “Pierce and I had a little private get together over dinner,” explained Cooper. “We just talked about our personal lives and we found some similarities in that. Just that evening spending together was just a great, great help in that the first thing we shot was the opening scene of the film, that luncheon at the Sky Bar restaurant, and not to make it happen but I felt like we had a nice feel with each other. The same thing with Rachel… I realize I didn’t do that many scenes with Rachel; we just established the relationship in the film with just a handful of scenes. Everybody was very, very comfortable with each other.”

Clarkson agreed with Cooper. “I didn’t know Pierce, but he’s my confidante in the film and I do clearly have a past with him. We really clearly like one another, and so getting to know him was lovely. He’s incredibly talented and a real gentleman, and lovely to work with – the two of them. It was dreamy to go to work every day. Seriously, sometimes I couldn’t sleep at night I was so excited.”