Oh yeah, sure. We spent a lot of time talking about the script in the first week or so. [The director] brought us up there just to rehearse and play and get to know each other. But it’s so easy to get to know each other because we just blended so well. Alexander is amazing at casting and not all directors are good at casting. But good directors are always good at casting. That’s why we worked so well together. He knew that we would. He knew that we would get along.
How many times did you shoot your side of the grape monologue?
I’m not exactly sure. I think we maybe did it three times, maybe four. I don’t really remember. I just sort of did it really simply. One thing that you should know about Alexander is that he sits right next to the lens. I’m old enough to remember the day when all directors did that. Of course now they look at this little tiny monitor where they’re really not seeing the humanity of the person. They’re not seeing the subtleties; they’re not seeing the changes in your eyes. A lot of times, at least directors with me will say, “Um, you need to kind of bump it up a little bit.” And I’m like, “No, I don’t. You don’t realize. Trust me.” They’re like, “Just this one part, give me a little bit umph.” Of course, they’re not going to see it until they get into the editing room because they’re not there. You’ll see it with many actors, because I know that I’ve done it in a lot of films, that there’s this really sort of irregular performance. And all of a sudden they’ll be a scene and you’re like, “What was that?,” because the director’s not keeping up a through-line.
With that particular scene he was [close] and even the lights to the naked eye seemed low. It was a really intimate feeling because we’d done the whole front room first. So by the time we got out there, there was this really intimate, laid-back, warm feeling. I had real wine in my glass, which I carried with me throughout that whole scene so I could smell the wine because at that point, we were supposed to have drunk a lot of wine. So I just had the smell of it, which would have been around a lot. And just the look of it and the feel of it in the glass. And he was just right there all the time, watching.
I can’t watch myself so I just do whatever I’m doing, and I really trusted him to know when I had it. He would let us do it as many times as we wanted to. But I thought, “No, I don’t want to ruin it. If you think it’s there, then we’ll stop now.” Then Paul and I were walking back to the trailer, and of course now we could drink that glass of wine (laughing). And we’re walking and we’re really silent. Paul stopped and said, “Am I crazy or did that almost seem kind of easy?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Do you think it was okay? Was it any good?” I said, “I think it was.” Because there wasn’t this intensity that you can get on a movie set, like ‘a monologue is happening now’. Reading and preparing, the crew’s tense. Now it was just like it looks onscreen. That was the real feeling on set. I was just sitting there talking and those words were so beautiful that they just feel out of my mouth. He just kept this kind of concentration. It was just always there so I never felt like I dropped the ball and I had to go run and pick it up myself. He’d hold it with me. It was a wonderful experience.
Do you have any plans to work with your brother Michael in a movie?
I’d love to work with my brother in a movie. I mean, we’d love to work together but it’s almost like people either don’t realize that we’re brother and sister or I think just the nature of our personalities, if we weren’t brother and sister they would certainly cast us opposite one another. It’s hard to find a brother and sister script. It’s just not out there.
So you’d want to play brother and sister in a movie?
Oh yeah. Or I think because we have a lot of chemistry because we know each other so well, we’re really close, and I think that that would really come off on screen. So I think if we weren’t going to be brother and sister, I think we’d have to be adversaries, which I think would be great. We would have so much fun doing that.
