Handling the Awards Attention
It's old hat to Helen Mirren now, but looking back on her Oscar experience for The Queen allows Mirren the opportunity to put it all in perspective. "I was very lucky last time because at the same time as all that was going down, and it was full-on, because also at the same time I had done Elizabeth so I was having to deal with all of that as well. So I just was constantly sitting through these long, endless evenings and I was always the last one up and it was, oh god, it was brutal.""'Just let me get home please, and let me drink,'" Mirren recalls thinking. "I could never drink, so everyone else was having fun and I'm sitting there going, 'Oh sh-t, I can't even have a drink.' But I was making a film in England at the same time, so on top of all that I was commuting. Literally every weekend I was flying back to England, then I was on set. But that was the best thing because I was doing a really nice film called Inkheart. It was an ensemble film, all my fellow actors were fantastic and really fun to be with, and it was the thing that sort of brought me back to, 'This is actually, this is what we do. This is what we do, we don't do that, we have to do that for various reasons, but this is what we really do. This is what I get paid to do,' you know? So that was a great thing for me."
But I mean it’s so important for this kind of film, for things like that to happen," said Mirren. "It’s great for the film, and I honestly genuinely feel like it brings attention to the film. It's a small film, it doesn't have a big budget marketing budget at all. And with these little independent films, [...]it’s getting so hard for independent films to get out there at all. And in the next two or three or four years it might become even more difficult. And they are the films, I love the big movies, I love them, fantastic, you know, fabulous, but the library of film has got to be broader than that. And it’s wonderful that a film like The Last Station can get made. It’s getting so difficult to make a film like this. The only way another one will be made is if enough people to go see it. The only way we can get enough people to see it is if it gets recognized."
