Elisha Cuthbert (24, House of Wax) stars as a popular high school cheerleader whose innocence is just an illusion in the dramatic film, The Quiet, directed by Jamie Babbit and featuring Camilla Belle, Edie Falco, and Martin Donovan. A disturbing tale of betrayal and dark family secrets, The Quiet focuses on one highly dysfunctional family and the orphaned teenager with disabilities who comes to live in their home.
The Appeal of The Quiet: Elisha Cuthbert not only took a chance by agreeing to star in the film, but also signed on as a producer to help make sure The Quiet made it into production. “It was important for me to find something after, obviously 24, and House of Wax and The Girl Next Door, to kind of do something that was off the beaten track as far as those films went. My goal is to just kind of continue to make characters in films that are different from the last ones, especially now at my age and at this point in my career.
When I got the script for The Quiet, I was just blown away at the story and the fact that it was about women, and obviously the characters. And so in doing so I realized there wasn’t any funding, and no other actors were attached to the project; it was just the director. I kind of said, ‘I’m not going to wait around for a studio to figure out I could do a movie like this or even wait for the script. We’ve got it now, right here.’ I felt strongly about the movie and wanted to be a part of it.”
Cuthbert admits she never felt quite this strongly about a project before. “Yeah, because I think a lot of the other films had come quite easy, and not that I didn’t work hard, I mean The Girl Next Door took six or seven months to get attached to, but I mean hard in the sense that to find a script with a dialogue of this quality and a story at this level was important," explained Cuthbert. "And also I think it’s hard for a lot of people to kind of take risks on actors they think maybe can’t do it when you’re sitting at home knowing that you can, you know? So I took it upon myself to try and get attached to it in my own way by producing it and finding the other actors and things like that.”
The Quiet marks the first time Cuthbert has taken the added step of producing a movie she’s attached to. In that capacity, she helped to generate interest in the film. “It’s amazing that for actors mostly, it’s a risk to attach yourself to a film that you don’t know whether or not it’s going to even be made and if you sign on, in doing so, who else is going to be in the movie with you. These are crucial key elements that go into deciding whether or not you’re going to make the movie. But I felt that my passion to play this character and also my passion to be in a film of this caliber…whoever else was in it was important to me. By attaching my name and sort of getting the buzz around the film definitely generated the funding and also other actors.”
Once the buzz started building, then other actors began taking an interest in The Quiet. Edie Falco came on board to play Cuthbert’s character’s mother and that led to Martin Donovan joining the cast as Cuthbert’s father. “Edie and [Martin] had worked together on another project and they had a great time doing it. I think as soon as she was on board, he kind of jumped on the bandwagon. You know, this is sort of how it all comes about. It’s amazing how you get the snowball rolling and it just becomes this massive thing.”
Approaching a Very Difficult and Disturbing Subject Matter: Cuthbert prepared herself for the role of a victim of sexual abuse by combing through a wealth of material on the subject. “I didn’t talk to anyone specifically because I didn’t…it’s one of those things where I didn’t want to kind of revisit things that people had been going through. But I had a package that Jamie [Babbit, the director] had made up for me of authors who had been abused and had told their stories. I did a lot of research and a lot of reading and trying to pinpoint the stereotypes and sort of what they went through. It was interesting because, you know, certain people kind of thought that they had gotten out of the situation and other people hadn’t, and it was interesting. There were so many different variations and levels of it that it was tough and it was really overwhelming. I knew nothing of it, to this extent, before the film.”
Page 2: Elisha Cuthbert on Researching Abuse and the Atmosphere on the Set
