Melissa George Has Been Very, Very Busy: George isn’t exaggerating when she says she’s got five other projects in the works. “I’m going to start shooting Stopping Power with Jan de Bont directing. John Cusack and I are the leads and he’s cool. And I have a film with Stellan Skarsgard, who is one of my ultimate favorites, called Waz. The Weinsteins bought that.
I just shot a film for MGM that doesn’t have a title yet, but it’s only one room with two actors and I’m really happy with that. It’s with Oded Fehr, the Israeli actor. And I have the HBO series In Treatment with Gabriel Byrne and Dianne Wiest, which I am really most proud of. It comes out January. I play a patient in therapy and Gabriel Byrne is my therapist. It’s a 30 page monologue in close-up with no commercial breaks. I’m always one for a challenge and I love that, but I was shooting movies and flying back and forth and the dialogue was enough for four feature films per week in two days shooting because it’s in one room and you didn’t have to do exteriors.”
Fortunately, George doesn’t have any trouble memorizing her lines. “I don’t. I’m actually quite good with my lines. But sometimes in a movie like 30 Days of Night, you’d maybe have a paragraph a day. It was more emotion. Even though there was a lot of emotion, it was maybe more physical than anything, while this one was just raw dialogue. I was just so freaked out and thought, ‘You better be good! (Laughing) There aren’t any car explosions behind you to upstage your performance.’”
Starring in the Vampire Film, 30 Days of Night: George plays the estranged wife of Sheriff Eben Oleson (played by Josh Hartnett) in the horror movie based on a graphic novel. Talking about the shoot, George said, “It was hard for us because the story was revolving around Eben and Stella and you know, the car flipping upside down… I mean, I couldn’t believe what I went through. I couldn’t believe that, and I’m one for anything. You throw me off anything whatever, as long as I have a harness. This one was so ridiculous. It was so physical, but exciting at the same time.
When they flipped those cars up and I looked at Josh and said, ‘Did you expect this?’ We didn’t know what was [happening]. I was saying, ‘Are you going to rehearse this?’ and they’re saying, ‘No, you’ll be fine.’ Then when it fell on the roof -- do you remember that? I’m upside down and the next thing you know is this freaking vampire comes in and I’m like, ‘Is this for real?’ You had this much head space (indicating with her hands close together) and it caved in this much, so we were upside down. You had to be there! It was so ridiculous that we couldn’t stop laughing because we’re upside down with no space in this crunched-in aluminum can in this car. Then I love the director going, ‘You guys okay?’ We’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re okay.’ And he says, ‘Awesome, take 2.’
We’re upside down, they lift the car up with a crane and flip it really around and all the vessels burst in my face from the pressure. I’m like, ‘Phew, that was good. Shake it out, shake it out. You good, Josh? I didn’t want to do another but if you want to do another, we’ll do another.’ So we did it about 10 times. But in a sick kind of way, it was great.
My job is just so cool. Yes, it’s harder in many ways being in a film like that and being in an attic for 12 days with no air. I wanted to get the hell out of there for real. It wasn’t just acting anymore; I was over it. We were doing Ricky Martin dance contests. We were! Everyone is giving scores because we were so over it. It was funny.”
Back to the Jan de Bont Project…: Asked what he’s making her do in Stopping Power, George answered, “Everything, I imagine. Everything and anything. I said, ‘No, no, I’m up for a challenge.’”
George explained the storyline of Stopping Power: “John Cusack and I play lovers and we go on a European vacation to Berlin. She’s just a sassy one with long, dark hair so I’ve got to color my hair again -- another story. And his daughter comes on holiday with us and I never knew he had a daughter. She’s 16. We are fighting, fighting and fighting, and she gets kidnapped. So John Cusack and I and this bad guy with the daughter go on this 51 minute real time high speed chase in Berlin. There won’t be much dialogue. A lot of driving. It’s just an action film. I really wanted to do it. It’s just fun. I want to go to work and have fun after In Treatment. It was so much fun, but it was really being in therapy. I calculated the amount of hours of therapy and it was like I was in therapy for 15 hours a day.”
Reminded that at least the problems weren’t hers, George laughed. “But they became yours. They became my problems because I was like, ‘Yeah, I remember I did that once,’ and then you start to really feel it. It was good because I needed therapy after doing 30 Days of Night. I needed some good therapy.”
George jokes about her time working on 30 Days of Night but says she’s proud of that film because it was an original concept. “I paused for a minute when I was offered that role. I thought, ‘No, no, I don’t know about this.’ Because you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. But I knew about David Slade of Hard Candy and he’s an actor’s director. He works on the performance.
All the vampire stuff was taken care of; they got that down. And I just adore Josh Hartnett. I think he’s got such a great thing going. He’s really anti-Hollywood. He does it in a way where he wants to do good work, and Sam Raimi. So I got that call and what am I going to say, ‘No thanks?’ You know, I was so over it, so tired and exhausted. But regardless of genre, you can’t ever pick a movie by genre. It has to be script.”
