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Home , Amy Madigan, Bob Rafelson, Ed Harris, Frances Farmer, Graeme Clifford, Jessica Lange

Jessica Lange Regis Dialogue with Molly Haskell, 1997

Bruce Jenkins: Let me say that these dialogues have for the better part of this decade focused on that part of cinema devoted to narrative or dramatic filmmaking, and we've had evenings with actors, directors, cinematographers, and I would say really especially with those performers that we identify with the cutting edge of narrative filmmaking.

In describing tonight's guest, Molly Haskell spoke of a creative artist who not only did a sizeable number of important projects but more importantly, did the projects that she herself wanted to see made. The same I think can be said about Molly Haskell. She began in the 1960s working in for the French Film Office at that point where the French New Wave needed a promoter and a writer and a translator. She eventually wrote the landmark book From Reverence to Rape on women in cinema from 1973 and republished in 1987, and did sizable stints as the film reviewer for Vogue magazine, The Village Voice, New York magazine, New York Observer, and more recently, for On the Issues. Her most recent book, Holding My Own in No Man's Land, contains her last two decades' worth of writing. I'm please to say it's in the Walker bookstore, as well.

Our other guest tonight needs no introduction here in the Twin Cities nor in Cloquet, , nor would I say anyplace in the world that motion pictures are watched and cherished. She's an internationally recognized star, but she's really a unique star. She's someone who never allowed that celebrityhood to mar her personal life, nor her extraordinary work as a film professional. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to welcome here to the Walker to conduct a dialogue on her two decades on screen and to interview her, Molly Haskell and .

Molly Haskell: It's the homecoming queen. Well, you hardly ever do these things, and I think obviously your destiny is to come to the Walker Art Center because you're from Minnesota and now you're back in Minnesota. So you can go home again, is that the moral?

Jessica Lange: Well, it's been easy for me. I don't know.

Molly Haskell: You were born not here, you grew up where in Minnesota?

Jessica Lange: In northern Minnesota.

Molly Haskell: Uh-huh. Was it country, or small town?

Jessica Lange: Small town.

Oct 3, 1997 1

Molly Haskell: Small town. We met 20 years ago, I didn't know if she would remember, but she did, at a little dinner party in New York, and she came in and she had just shot King Kong and it hadn't been released yet and she was with her then, was he husband or beau?

Jessica Lange: Beau.

Molly Haskell: Beau. Always beau.

Jessica Lange: They've always been beaus.

Molly Haskell: , and she was the loveliest thing I've ever seen and she hasn't changed, only she's gotten more interesting, I think. That was, what was that, about-

Jessica Lange: It had to be '76, wasn't it?

Molly Haskell: '76, and well, start back ... One of the things about your being, for a well-known person, relatively unknown, precisely because you haven't done things like this and nobody really knows that much, all the gossip columnists haven't gotten hold of you as much as they might've. Did you want to be an actress? Or was it dancing? Or what started you off?

Jessica Lange: Actually, I started off at the in the art department studying painting.

Molly Haskell: Fine arts, uh-huh.

Jessica Lange: Uh-huh, and photography, and ended up with a group of photographers from here and we traveled around Europe and ended up coming back to New York to live. This is a long story. In New York, I got involved with a modern dancer. She had just left the Merce Cunningham and was starting a modern company of her own and theater company in downtown, way downtown, before it was really SoHo-

Molly Haskell: Hip.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, and from there, we got interested in mime and discovered that Étienne Decroux, who was like the old master, was actually still alive and teaching in Paris. So I left for Paris to study with him and stayed there for two years and then decided there wasn't really that much I could do with it, so ... Besides that, he actually discouraged you from performing. He would fly into these fits of rage if he found out that you actually had- Oct 3, 1997 2

Molly Haskell: It was too vulgar to actually perform?

Jessica Lange: Yes. Yes, it was. It was too pedestrian. So I decided to go back to New York, and the only kind of logical step from mime seemed to be acting. So went back to New York to study acting.

Molly Haskell: Did you go to the Actor's Studio then?

Jessica Lange: When I first got back, I studied with Herbert Berghof.

Molly Haskell: Oh yeah.

Jessica Lange: And then from there, with a couple other acting teachers, with Warren Robertson and and then the Actor's Studio.

Molly Haskell: So you did stage work first?

Jessica Lange: Well, actually, I didn't do any stage work. I did a little bit of stage work in Paris before I came back to study in New York, but my very ... my very first audition that I ever went on was for King Kong.

Molly Haskell: Really?

Jessica Lange: Mm-hmm.

Molly Haskell: That's amazing.

Jessica Lange: And I got the job. It was like so-

Molly Haskell: And you had no idea what you were getting in for, did you?

Jessica Lange: No.

Oct 3, 1997 3

Molly Haskell: Well, that was an ... What happened with that? Did people resent it because it was a remake of a film they loved? Or what do you think?

Jessica Lange: I have no idea. I was so completely naïve.

Molly Haskell: Naïve, you didn't know, yeah.

Jessica Lange: Clueless as to what the situation really was. All I know is that it was a very long shooting schedule. I think we shot for something like nine months.

Molly Haskell: And grueling, I'm sure.

Jessica Lange: And it was ... I remember Chuck Grodin saying to me at some point, "This isn't what movies are really like." But I didn't know, because it was the very first thing I-

Molly Haskell: So they might've all been like that as far as you were concerned.

Jessica Lange: They could've all been that tedious. But yeah, I don't know. I have no idea really-

Molly Haskell: Well, it's a much better ... You probably haven't even seen it again, or ever, maybe, but it's a much better film than its reputation would allow. Certainly you're better. I don't know if the film is, because it was really ... it was one of those things that's not repeatable.

Jessica Lange: No.

Molly Haskell: Did you ever see the original? I mean, it's just-

Jessica Lange: Yes.

Molly Haskell: And something about the black and white. But to play a screaming victim for two hours.

Jessica Lange: Well, you had to be young and naïve to do it.

Oct 3, 1997 4

Molly Haskell: You do, that's right.

Jessica Lange: It had to have been-

Molly Haskell: It has to be your first film, otherwise you wouldn't do it.

Jessica Lange: It had to be your first film.

Molly Haskell: So what came after that?

Jessica Lange: Then I did that little goofy part in Fosse's film-

Molly Haskell: Oh, All That Jazz.

Jessica Lange: ... All That Jazz.

Molly Haskell: Yeah.

Jessica Lange: Mm-hmm.

Molly Haskell: And then Postman Always Rings Twice?

Jessica Lange: And then Postman.

Molly Haskell: Well, we're going to show that in a second, and that was Bob ... How did you get that? Had Rafelson seen you in King Kong? Or ... By that time you were known, you were sort of making magazine covers and things like that.

Jessica Lange: Well, yeah, I mean obviously, I guess he had. That was the only thing I'd done up until then.

Molly Haskell: Well, that was a really challenging part. The original Postman Always Rings Twice with and , which some of you may have seen, was from a James Cain novel, very steamy, but the earlier Oct 3, 1997 5 version, they couldn't do anything. All Lana Turner could do was wear a bathing suit so even though they were having this wild affair, it didn't come through. There was no electricity. But yours, I think this is one of the ... Well, I don't want to get into it too much, we'll talk about it afterwards, but one of the more erotic scenes, not only for that time but in the last 20 years. All right, so can we show that now?

Jessica Lange: Well, that's a hell of a way to start.

Molly Haskell: We start, we pack a wallop up front. Well, what's fantastic about that scene, I think, is that this of course is the ... She's married to this old Greek owner of the gas station and poverty stricken and just dying to get out of this place, and ... What makes it fantastic is it goes from being what you think is going to be the standard rape scene and then when she turns and becomes involved, I mean that, I think what everything ... This scene was wildly discussed and talked about and responded to at the time, so that's one reason we're showing it first.

Molly Haskell: It was really a conversation piece, and but that moment when she turns, because there were a lot of movies where women were getting raped or abused or otherwise violated and victimized and here, it's that turning of the thing and when she knocks that bread, that luscious-looking bread off the table, it's just ... What was it like to do that? Did you do that early on in the film? Did you discuss it beforehand? How did it evolve?

Jessica Lange: Well, we didn't discuss it very much beforehand. It was ... You know, the thing about James Cain was that so much, I mean the sexuality was all tied up in violence for him. It was really dark. That's what I enjoyed about, and it was kind of, you know ...

Molly Haskell: Lower middle class-

Jessica Lange: Death, sex, and opera was like his main thing. But with this piece, it was interesting because no matter what scene we were doing ... I mean, obviously this scene, but then every other scene, whether it was Jack pumping gas or me working as the waitress pouring coffee or murdering the old Greek or whatever it was, Jack would always say right before the take, he'd say, "Remember, honey, this is all about sex." And it's true, that is the essence of James Cain and it certainly is the essence of the relationship, and it is what destroys these two people in the end.

Molly Haskell: Well, and it's a hungry woman. How often do you see that on the screen, a woman, passionate, a woman with an appetite? It's just fantastic. And of course, James Cain was done earlier, in the earlier Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, but they never really could do it full throttle until this.

Jessica Lange: No, I think they had too many censorship.

Oct 3, 1997 6

Molly Haskell: Yeah, and there are not that many American directors who could do it well, I think. Americans are skittish.

Jessica Lange: Rafelson was very, he really did like these kind of scenes. But he always would like my part, which I thought was odd. He'd say, "Now let me show you how this ..." and then he'd say, "Come on, Jack, get on top of me now."

Molly Haskell: Well, I think this is one of the things, when we talk about male versus female, you really can't divide it up that way in movies because one of the reasons men like to direct women is because they can identify with the woman. They play both parts, don't they?

Jessica Lange: Yeah.

Molly Haskell: Yeah.

Jessica Lange: No, I mean, I loved working with Rafelson on this because he was just, he was fearless. He is not a cautious man, as you know, and ...

Molly Haskell: And it's never, you don't ... Even though it's all about sex, you don't feel like there's anything gratuitous in it the way you did when suddenly the screen opened up and you could do sex, so then everybody did it in a kind of automatic way.

Jessica Lange: No, it was absolutely inherent to this-

Molly Haskell: Organic, yeah.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, it is what this story is about.

Molly Haskell: But that was an amazing thing for you to do, still. You were young and not far from the starting gate.

Jessica Lange: I know. That's probably why I did that one, too. It was my second time out.

Molly Haskell: Well, you're known for your ... I think fearless is a word that would describe a lot of your performances, so you showed ... I mean, fearless even to do King Kong. That was ... Not every starting out actress- Oct 3, 1997 7

Jessica Lange: Yeah, fearless or stupid.

Molly Haskell: Now, did you have any sense of your career at this point? Or were you just looking at scripts and ...

Jessica Lange: No, because there had been actually a period of time after King Kong that I didn't work.

Molly Haskell: Yeah. Why was that?

Jessica Lange: Well, because I wasn't offered anything.

Molly Haskell: Yeah.

Jessica Lange: So when I actually, when Rafelson started calling me about doing this, it was just, it was like a godsend, I couldn't believe it. Here was a great part, especially for somebody who hadn't done that much work, a chance to work with Jack, and a chance to do a film by . I mean, is still one of my favorite movies, so-

Molly Haskell: He's a great director, and obviously he saw something in you. People thought of the role in King Kong as bimbo, so they typecast you as bimbo, but he saw that you were a lot more than that.

Jessica Lange: Yeah. No, it was great, it was really ... It was a great opportunity and I always think, this was actually the beginning. This film was really the beginning for me.

Molly Haskell: Yeah, and Nicholson was good, obviously. He was uninhibited, right? He had a way of-

Jessica Lange: He was the ... I couldn't have asked to work with an actor at that point that would've been more generous and sweeter than Jack was.

Molly Haskell: That's so funny, because he always plays these diabolical parts and yet, he's a really completely generous actor.

Jessica Lange: He was so generous. I mean, I was watching to make sure that what I was doing and that ... and he had such an uncanny sense of the camera.

Oct 3, 1997 8

Molly Haskell: Really?

Jessica Lange: And he would always say to me stuff like he'd see me do a take, even if he wasn't in the scene with me or whatever, and he'd say, "You know, honey, that's camera's over ..." and he'd always somehow try to give me the information that I didn't, because I was-

Molly Haskell: Well, it makes it okay to do those things, too, if somebody like that says, "Look, go on. Do it."

Jessica Lange: Yeah. Yeah.

Molly Haskell: "Expose yourself."

Jessica Lange: Yeah, he was great.

Molly Haskell: So then 19, what was it, '82 was the big year, or was it '83? '82, Frances and . You couldn't get two more different ... Frances, how did that come about?

Jessica Lange: Well, was editing Postman. He was the editor, and he had gotten ahold of this script of Frances and had got them to hire him as a director. He had never directed anything before, but he was so passionate about it, and he brought it to me and asked me if it would be something that I would be interested in, which was so-

Molly Haskell: This was the script, then, or-

Jessica Lange: This was the script.

Molly Haskell: Was it based on the ... I read the -

Jessica Lange: Well, it was based on a lot of different biographical information, not necessarily on the book, but it was interesting, because when I was doing acting classes in New York, I had picked up that book. My acting teacher from years and years before had said, "If you ever play a part, this is the part you should play," and he gave me this book, Will There Really Be a Morning? And I read it and I actually excerpted scenes from it and put together and we did some of these scenes-

Oct 3, 1997 9

Molly Haskell: As an exercise.

Jessica Lange: ... in acting class, yeah, in scene study class. So and out of the blue-

Molly Haskell: Which ones? Just out of curiosity.

Jessica Lange: The ones between the mother.

Molly Haskell: Uh-huh.

Jessica Lange: Mm-hmm. Which was really what the relationship-

Molly Haskell: The essence.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, the ... Yeah. But it was interesting, then-

Molly Haskell: So Clifford sent you a finished script?

Jessica Lange: Mm-hmm.

Molly Haskell: Uh-huh, and you liked the script?

Jessica Lange: I loved it.

Molly Haskell: Yeah.

Jessica Lange: I mean, I just loved everything about , so he could've sent me a, you know, a blueprint and I would've said yes. And it was so interesting because he was still editing Postman and he was in pre- production on Frances, and I just assumed that the part was mine and he took me to meet , whose company was producing-

Oct 3, 1997 10

Molly Haskell: Oh really?

Jessica Lange: ... the film, and I just assumed that it was already my-

Molly Haskell: A done deal.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, that it was my part, and I remember going in to meet Mel Brooks and talking to him and later, he wrote me a note saying he was going to give me the part because I was so sure of myself, that he thought it had a quality of Frances to it.

Molly Haskell: You didn't know you were auditioning.

Jessica Lange: I had no idea.

Molly Haskell: Once again, fearless or dumb, we're not sure which.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, we're not sure.

Molly Haskell: Well, of course, Frances Farmer was this doomed star but a thinker, an intelligence, and in the beginning, she gives this high school paper for which she wins a prize, after which she's accused of being Communist and radical and left-wing. She goes to New York, becomes involved with the Group Theater, with . It's an incredibly tumultuous life, and on drugs, drink, institutionalized, . It's a harrowing story, and looking through it to try to figure out ... It's impossible to get clips, because there are so many big scenes in it and there are so many different moods. The scenes with ... Well, I don't want to get into it too much. What we're going to ... You don't know which clips we're going to do. Well, we'll surprise you, okay? We'll do Frances now.

Jessica Lange: I haven't seen any of these for a long time.

Molly Haskell: That's a fantastic scene, and there's a quality there that you don't have anywhere else in the film, this kind of mischievous, diabolical wit. It's very darkly funny, and you pay for it, for taunting this guy, and I think ... and , of course, as the mother is ...

Jessica Lange: Yeah, isn't she great? Oct 3, 1997 11

Molly Haskell: But that little sister, I mean ... and what's also fascinating is how your character just keeps ... The mother in this case has had her institutionalized, the mother has betrayed her, sold her down the river, and yet, you don't know that and you don't want to believe it, you just keep going back home thinking, how can your mother be bad? It's your mother.

Jessica Lange: I know it. Yeah, that was her biggest mistake is she kept going back, and every time she'd go back, her mother would send her back again to the institution.

Molly Haskell: And you know, and then you have these ... I mean, this rage, you have that rage always, and sometimes it comes out during the film more than other times, except in the scenes with . It's almost like ... There's one where you're sitting, I think you've gone to and he comes out to ... He plays, what is he, a journalist or a politician? Or ...

Jessica Lange: Well, he was actually based on a real character.

Molly Haskell: Really?

Jessica Lange: Kind of a local political in , who kind of tracked her.

Molly Haskell: Followed her? And was in love with her.

Jessica Lange: Yes, kept track of her and was ... Yeah, more or less, I think.

Molly Haskell: And if she'd married him, she would've settled down and been a political activist in Seattle. But there's a scene where you're on a deck or something in and he's saying, "Well, you just have to pick your battles, Frances," and that's the problem, she can't ... she doesn't know when.

Jessica Lange: Yeah. No, they're all battles for Frances.

Molly Haskell: Oh, everything. Every moment is a battle, and that's what happens here, she turns this guy into an enemy. I mean, he's a horrible, oily person but she needs him-

Jessica Lange: Right, she could've slid out of that situation really easily, but she couldn't do it.

Oct 3, 1997 12

Molly Haskell: Was that exhausting, that film, to do?

Jessica Lange: It was, but it was so exciting, because it was really, it was kind of the biggest dramatic part that I could imagine doing, and it was a character that I really loved. But Graeme Clifford, the director, being an editor shot every possible foot of film that could conceivably ... I mean, he-

Molly Haskell: Yeah, he was insecure. It was his first time out as a director.

Jessica Lange: It was his first time out and he wanted himself covered well in the editing room and I remember when we would be on location, we were on location up in Seattle and we were shooting six-day weeks and we were shooting like 14, 16-hour days and everybody was exhausted after the first-

Molly Haskell: And lots of takes on each one?

Jessica Lange: And a lot of takes, and after the first week of shooting, he called me on a Sunday morning and he said, "I can't get the crew, but I can get the camera, and I thought maybe we could just go out and shoot for a couple hours this afternoon. You know that scene where you climb that tree?"

Molly Haskell: Oh my God.

Jessica Lange: But yeah, he was ... He was ...

Molly Haskell: And you being an obliging person, not like Frances Farmer-

Jessica Lange: I said no.

Molly Haskell: Oh, you did? Good for you.

Jessica Lange: I actually said no. No, I said, "We have to draw the line somewhere."

Molly Haskell: Well, that's the trouble with the film, if there is one, it's just it's so episodic-

Oct 3, 1997 13

Jessica Lange: Yes.

Molly Haskell: ... you don't feel an overall trajectory of it. But there are some fantastic individual scenes. There's one that I love where, by this time you've gotten to be drinking and you're a little bit on the skids and you've got ... and also, I love when you first get to Hollywood and it's a picture that's in the program here with you, that beautiful white and that dress, and saying that you don't want glamor. This is something we will talk about, too, how do you feel about that.

Molly Haskell: But then you're late on the set and you come in and I think you're a little drunk and you go, they send you into ... Everybody's been held up for four hours and you go in to get made up and there's a woman doing your hair and she's just furious at you and she starts pulling at your hair and said, "You're ..." I mean, she's just abusing you and abusing you, "You're losing your hair," and finally you just get up and hit her and walk out, and I just love that, because hairdressers are always doing that, they're always saying, "What are you doing with gray hair?" Or what are you, losing your hair?"

Molly Haskell: But it's a very unusual scene where she just hauls off and socks this woman. So you're really willing to do things that are abrasive, aggressive, already that are teetering on the edge of unlikability, and you knew it, didn't you?

Jessica Lange: Yeah, but I mean-

Molly Haskell: And I love that.

Jessica Lange: ... with Frances, I just, I thought there was something so noble about her character that I guess in some way, all that abrasiveness and her harshness and I mean really her craziness in dealing with these situations, I thought they were all grounded in absolute truth, and that was the thing that I felt was her saving grace. This was a woman who just couldn't ... who couldn't let anything slide by.

Molly Haskell: Yeah, she was completely impolitic. Most people on this earth are political or diplomatic at one time or another, because their self-interest is at stake. She didn't have any of that.

Jessica Lange: No. She had no survival instincts when it came to that whatsoever.

Molly Haskell: No. No. No. And no armor.

Oct 3, 1997 14

Jessica Lange: No.

Molly Haskell: And that's a quality you have, too, I think, or that you can show, is this unguarded, unarmored, you're not protecting yourself, and that is, I think, fantastic. It's unsettling, because you're so close to the skin and the audience is with you. They don't know what's going to happen. It's scary. It's a scary ... Yeah, and you were nominated for an Academy Award. Who won that year? I think you should've won.

Jessica Lange: Thank you, Molly.

Molly Haskell: Do you remember?

Jessica Lange: I do. Of course, I remember. I remember every year I didn't win.

Molly Haskell: You don't care about those things, right?

Jessica Lange: No, that year actually, won.

Molly Haskell: Oh, that figures.

Jessica Lange: For ... Yeah, it does figure.

Molly Haskell: Nothing, no ... For what? For Sophie's Choice.

Jessica Lange: Sophie's Choice.

Molly Haskell: Well, that was a heavy year.

Jessica Lange: Yep.

Molly Haskell: It seems unfair. Well, it does, because there have been not that many great roles for actresses through the years-

Oct 3, 1997 15

Jessica Lange: I know, and you had two great, great roles.

Molly Haskell: Two great ones, right, yeah, up against each other.

Jessica Lange: Mm-hmm.

Molly Haskell: And at the other extreme was Tootsie, which I just have such a soft spot for, and it's got so many great scenes, the story of course of ... and playing a desperate New York actor who finally dons women's clothes in order to get a role and gets the role on the soap opera. The very first scene, what is it, you're on a set and you ... What happens, on the set of the soap opera and you end up on the floor looking at each other?

Jessica Lange: Right.

Molly Haskell: It's just-

Jessica Lange: Yeah, I can't remember.

Molly Haskell: ... the chemistry. Several scenes that I love, but one I think he's come as Dorothy and they have this, it's this lovely little friendship between Dustin Hoffman's kind of hard-boiled ... and Dustin Hoffman, of course, finds out he's a better person as a woman than he was as a man, and as Dorothy, he becomes this firebrand feminist on behalf of womankind, and he's of course in love with ... What's your character's name?

Jessica Lange: Julie.

Molly Haskell: Julie, and Julie doesn't know who he is and he's over visiting her and you've got the little baby and you're talking ... You're always making the ... and this is true of actually, there is a link between Frances and Julie, in that they always-

Jessica Lange: Make the wrong decision.

Molly Haskell: ... fall for the wrong people. They make the wrong decisions, and Julie says, "I see a man and the minute I see that he's a bastard, that's when I make my move." And then you have a, maybe in the same scene, but you say, "I don't know why do men always have to do this song and dance. I wish just one time, a man would come up to me instead of saying you're beautiful, you're this, 'I want to go to bed with you.' Just once," so of Oct 3, 1997 16 course, later on at a cocktail party, Dustin Hoffman arrives not as Dorothy but as the male actor that he is, and Julie's out on the porch and he walks out overlooking New York and says, "I want to go to bed with you," and of course, she throws a drink in his face. This is later in the film, when they've gone to the farm where is your wonderful father, and Dorothy has been invited out for the weekend and Charles Durning has just made a pass at Dorothy, and now Dorothy goes up to go to bed with Julie. So we'll show that scene.

Molly Haskell: Oh, girl talk.

Jessica Lange: Dustin was so great.

Molly Haskell: Was it wonderful to film?

Jessica Lange: Well it was ... You know, it was interesting, because I had just finished doing Frances and they sent me the script, , the director, sent me the script and I kept saying, "I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think I want to do this."

Molly Haskell: Why?

Jessica Lange: It seemed so kind of lightweight after doing Frances, and actually, Kim Stanley said to me, "Do a comedy next." So then I looked at it again and actually, it's the only time a director's had to kind of really pursue me to do a part, and Sydney kept coming after me-

Molly Haskell: You'd never done comedy.

Jessica Lange: No, I'd never done comedy.

Molly Haskell: And you didn't think you could do it?

Jessica Lange: I didn't think it was very funny. I didn't-

Molly Haskell: Did the script not seem that funny?

Jessica Lange: Well, when I first saw the script, it was before came in and did her rewrite and everything, so it

Oct 3, 1997 17 got considerably better. There were so many different versions of the script, and it was something Dustin had been working on for a long time.

Molly Haskell: Does he ever work on anything for a short time?

Jessica Lange: I don't think so.

Molly Haskell: Was he impossible? Well, finish what you were going to say.

Jessica Lange: No, so finally I said yes I would do it, and when we were actually shooting it, it was like, I kept saying to Sydney, I said, "You know, I'm just not funny. I mean ..." because I was surrounded by really great comedians-

Molly Haskell: Yeah, and-

Jessica Lange: ... I mean really great comic actors, Bill Murray and-

Molly Haskell: ... George-

Jessica Lange: Yeah, and Dustin and , and I was like the straight one, and I kept like ... Dustin would say, "Well, why don't you try this?" And it would go so far against my grain to do something kind of ...

Molly Haskell: But that's what makes it. I mean, there's something, the still, quiet, vulnerable center that humanizes the whole thing. Again, I think you're ... First of all, comedy is generally underrated, I think. It's so hard to do, and when it works, which this does, I think it's just one of those things that clicks all the time. It never gets awards because people don't appreciate just how hard it is to do, and you humanize ... I mean, I can't imagine the Dustin Hoffman character with somebody else.

Molly Haskell: There's something, your quality, and the ... For instance, when he gets in bed with you, you haven't seen him yet and he turns and you look at this head full of curlers and you just, you want to crack up so bad and you don't, and you just tactfully sort of turn your head away so you won't ... and there's so many undercurrents in that scene. It's just marvelous. And there's this, this intimacy that women have, that he's sort of loving, and yet at the same time, he has a lech for you, I mean, I think it's just incredibly ... it's incredibly complex.

Molly Haskell: Is he difficult, though? I mean, is he just such a perfectionist that he-

Oct 3, 1997 18

Jessica Lange: He is a real perfectionist. He was not ... I mean, it never difficult for me working with him. I know he ... I think he probably made Sydney's life miserable while they were shooting and maybe afterwards, too.

Molly Haskell: Well, Sydney got back at him. That scene between the two of them is one of the funniest things in there.

Jessica Lange: Yes. Yes, it's a great scene. Yeah. But we did, for instance, the scene at the end where he reveals that he's not a woman on live television, we shot it for one week solid, and then he looked at it and he-

Molly Haskell: At his request.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, and he did not like it, and we re-shot it. So it was like three different times we came back to that scene until Dustin was satisfied with getting it right. But Dustin worked in a way that I've never worked with any other actor, and that was he created this kind of, it was almost like a stage performance in a way. Most film actors you work with have this thing of being extremely private. Dustin always invited tons of people to the set and would have people standing around watching them and he would-

Molly Haskell: Did that bother you?

Jessica Lange: Well, I didn't ... For a part like this, it didn't. Had it been a different kind of role, yes, because I always like to work on a closed set. But he would work himself up into almost a frenzy and he would have the camera rolling and he'd scream at Sydney, "Keep it rolling! Keep it rolling!" And he'd like run around in circles and he'd come through the set and he'd say his line and then he'd run off and he'd scream, "Keep it rolling! Keep it rolling!" And he'd come ... and you could see, I mean, it actually works great when you see it all pieced together, but when you're-

Molly Haskell: He was hyping himself up, was that what he was doing?

Jessica Lange: Yeah. But when you're witnessing it as another actor, you're sitting there thinking, "Jeez. This is ..."

Molly Haskell: Well, it's also ... It's not exactly team playing, either. I mean, it's really he's doing his bit and let the pieces fall where they may.

Jessica Lange: But he made it work, and he made it work beautifully for that character.

Molly Haskell: What's interesting, because I remember the time there was a lot of sort of feminist disagreement, was this Oct 3, 1997 19 great or wasn't it. I thought it was wonderful, but I thought it was interesting that in the '70s, we finally got a film about how difficult it is to hold down a job and ... to be divorced, hold down a job, and raise a kid at the same time, and who played the role? Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer.

Jessica Lange: Right.

Molly Haskell: So now we finally get a film about an aging single woman, and who plays the role? Dustin Hoffman. So he was sort of the great feminist, the great feminist-

Jessica Lange: But you know, Dustin had that thing about being a woman. He was absolutely ... I mean, his greatest, I think ... He used to talk about it. His most profound disappointment in life was the fact that he would never bear a child.

Molly Haskell: Really?

Jessica Lange: I mean, he used to go on and on about this, that experience of childbirth and he would never know it. So I think Dustin in some way was really fascinated with being a woman.

Molly Haskell: Yeah, that's what makes it so good, because he really got into it. There's even that moment where he's just practicing being a woman and Bill Murray, his actor roommate, comes in and says I forget what, but it's like, "Wait a minute. You're really getting into this, aren't you?" So it plays with that idea. I mean, that's what you said earlier about Bob Rafelson, this is the whole thing about acting and directing, you get to be male and female, and that's why Hoffman was so good in Kramer vs. Kramer with the kid, probably, because he really has this ... and he's very mothering with you in this. He really expresses the ... He's trying to get you on the right track, even though he's-

Jessica Lange: Trying to make me quit drinking and date the right men.

Molly Haskell: He's a much better mother than Kim Stanley, for instance.

Jessica Lange: Yes.

Molly Haskell: If you had to choose, and ...

Jessica Lange: Yeah, you would never choose Kim as your mother. Oh, God.

Oct 3, 1997 20

Molly Haskell: What was this like making ... because you were making large and small films during your career. Was Tootsie more like a New York film or a Hollywood film? Or did you think of it in those terms?

Jessica Lange: Well, it was a ... It felt like a New York film, and it was nice, because we went back. I had been in ... because I was living in New York and I had been in for almost a year making Frances and getting ready to do that, going from Postman to Frances, and when we started shooting, it really was like going home, and Dustin lived there and Sydney loved to be in New York. So yeah, it had the feel of a New York film. It was nice.

Molly Haskell: So it wasn't ... Well, none of the ones you'd done, at least up to this point except King Kong, I guess, where it was sort of super productions where everybody was-

Jessica Lange: No.

Molly Haskell: ... counting how much money you were going to ... I mean, they weren't making films like that. It was still when Hollywood was-

Jessica Lange: It was great. You could make these films and nobody was breathing down your ... I mean, with-

Molly Haskell: You weren't counting ... What the first weekend was going to do wasn't paramount in everybody's mind.

Jessica Lange: No. Nobody cared about that. Nobody was tracking the film before it came out.

Molly Haskell: And doing test audiences and focus groups and all that-

Jessica Lange: Focus groups, oh. Filmmaking by committee, I think it's just ruined filmmaking.

Molly Haskell: Oh, and it has. And just think, this looks like a golden period right now looking at it.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, it does. It does, when you think of it. Plus those films probably ... I mean certainly, Frances could never be made today.

Molly Haskell: No, no.

Oct 3, 1997 21

Jessica Lange: Postman? Probably not. Tootsie, maybe, because it had kind of the most commercial overtones, but I don't know.

Molly Haskell: Well, I was talking to a woman from WGBH that she's doing a documentary on the '30s and the production code, and she had submitted a script from, I think it was a Kaye Gibbons novel, a small, woman-oriented script to Lisa Henson and her company. I mean, Lisa Henson and some other woman, Lisa Henson is Jim Henson's daughter, I forget the name of that company, and she got a phone call, because she's a friend of theirs, and so this young male employee called within a week and said, "I read your script. I just loved it. It's funny, it's touching. I was moved, I was surprised at myself, but we have a mandate from to do only male action pictures or high concept comedies. No woman-oriented material."

Jessica Lange: I know. I think that mandate has gone around.

Molly Haskell: And that's it. That is the Hollywood mandate, and that's what you're just saying. At least Tootsie is a high concept comedy. If it were things the Birdcage, those things, especially if you've got male stars in it, then it's a go, but we'll get more into that when we get to Thousand Acres.

Jessica Lange: Yes.

Molly Haskell: All right, let's see. What else have we got here? Country. This was really something you nourished, wasn't it?

Jessica Lange: Mm-hmm.

Molly Haskell: It's close to your heart and geography.

Jessica Lange: Well, it was interesting because the way it came about, I had always been fascinated with ... and usually it was in the context of the Depression, this idea of what happens to a family, what happens to a person, when they are forced off their land and they become ... well, in the Depression, obviously migrant. But one day, I was actually in New York and ... I was in Los Angeles, and I picked up the , I was ... I don't remember what I was doing out there, but I picked up and on the front page was a picture of a farm auction.

Jessica Lange: The man ... There was a husband and wife and a mother-in-law, and it was at kind of the height of the auction and the picture was just of these three people and then a crowd of farmers behind, and the picture was so touching, because you could see the woman's rage. She was just like ... She looked like she was about to, like her head was going to explode, and the mother-in-law behind had that same expression on her face. But Oct 3, 1997 22 the man was completely poleaxed. It was like he had ... like he was not connecting anymore to anything, like it somehow had ... it was so painful and it had gone so far beyond his realizations or expectations or beyond his imagination, and the picture struck me that you could do a story now and set it in contemporary times because of the situation with the family farms, especially in the Midwest.

Jessica Lange: So ... and here again, this is a film that could no more be made today than fly to the moon. I actually, from this picture, just had a concept. Why don't we do a story about a family living on a farm in Iowa and because of everything that's going on, they're about to lose the farm and they come and they auction off the farm and all their possessions? I found a writer, I found this great writer from , Billy Wittliff, and told him the story and he said yes, he'd really like to write it, and we talked about well who would we like to direct it? We said, well, how about Hal Ashby? So we called up Hal Ashby, he said sure, he'd like to direct it.

Jessica Lange: I mean, it was so smooth compared to how things usually happen, and we had two meetings. We went to the newly formed Touchstone division of Disney and to the Ladd Company, and walked into those two places on one afternoon, the three of us, Wittliff, Ashby, and myself, and what they call pitched the story. We told the story. There was no story. It was like this thing, here's this farm family that their farm's being auctioned off-

Molly Haskell: It was an image.

Jessica Lange: It was a picture. And by the time we got home that afternoon, it was a go film.

Molly Haskell: God.

Jessica Lange: So Wittliff started writing, we made an extraordinary trip to Iowa, the three of us, and did our research and within a year, we were shooting it. Ashby dropped out, Wittliff came in and then we brought in a second director, Richard Pearce, who ended up shooting the film. It was one of those miraculous things that I really don't think could possibly ever happen again.

Molly Haskell: Well, one of the interesting things, the very issues that it raises are the same issues that affect film and publishing, which is that farming is not about farming anymore, but about business. It's about big business, and that's exactly what has happened to everything else. Movies are not about movies anymore, they're about bottom lines.

Jessica Lange: Yup.

Molly Haskell: In the scene we're going to see, it's fairly early on, when the Sam Shepard character has been called down to the bank and been told by somebody who was his friend, now has gone over to the other side, that they're

Oct 3, 1997 23 going to review the loan, the FHA is now recalling loans because there's not enough collateral, they've lost money in lean years. So the wife doesn't know about this yet, so we'll look at that.

Jessica Lange: You could never even do a scene like that now. It moves way too slow for today.

Molly Haskell: The whole thing is very low key. In fact, there are no big scenes in it. Everything-

Jessica Lange: And that man, the extra that was standing there that had that dialogue? He'd be cut out in a heartbeat.

Molly Haskell: That's right. There are no subordinate characters. No.

Jessica Lange: No, no, there's no texture anymore.

Molly Haskell: No time ... That's right. That's right. But it's interesting what you say now, that's true, he's already got this kind of numb reaction to this thing. It's like his whole ... And what's interesting is, and this is probably true of this area anyway, that it's very much an equal relationship. In fact, the wife is the bookkeeper in the family and she's very involved in everything. It's very much a two-way street.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, when we were doing all the research, the one thing that was very clear was that it was an absolute partnership.

Molly Haskell: Yeah. Yeah, completely.

Jessica Lange: I mean, she had her duties, he had his, but it was really 50/50.

Molly Haskell: Yeah, and he does, he's emasculated by this, as a man would be. He feels like he's let his family down. It's just ... It's a killer.

Jessica Lange: Yeah.

Molly Haskell: But what was it like making it? Was it ... Satisfying, I would think.

Jessica Lange: Well, you know, it was very interesting to make, because we made it in Iowa and we were right in the heart of where all of that was going on at that time, and it was interesting because I do think that ... not that it called Oct 3, 1997 24 attention to the ... I mean, on a kind of political scale did it make any difference, a film like this, but on a very personal scale, the response from people was overwhelming, of people who were in that same situation and who really responded to somebody trying to tell that story.

Molly Haskell: Well, it did make a difference, though, didn't it? Wasn't there some ... Didn't the FHA ... Was there some ...

Jessica Lange: Well, it was interesting, because there was a certain amount of press involved with it. We did go and testify before the ... Who were those people? Some senators or something. Not that they gave a rat's ass, let me tell you, but we did go and did this whole thing. The difference it made was there were a lot of women there, a lot of women from this situation, because they had formed a coalition.

Molly Haskell: Right, so they did something very like what you did in there.

Jessica Lange: Yes, and when we testified, it was , ... I think that was it, and me, and we testified before this congressional hearing. You could tell you were just-

Molly Haskell: Going right over ... They weren't paying-

Jessica Lange: Oh, it didn't make a-

Molly Haskell: They didn't want to hear it.

Jessica Lange: No. I mean, they sat there and they were smug and they were very ... But the women that were listening were actually tremendously moved and very thankful that at least somebody spoke for them.

Molly Haskell: Well, it was a general sort of consciousness raising about it, I think.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, maybe so.

Molly Haskell: Was it fun working with Sam Shepard? Did you have a good ... You have wonderful scenes-

Jessica Lange: He looks so handsome there, didn't he?

Molly Haskell: Both of you. What a couple. Oct 3, 1997 25

Jessica Lange: Well, yes, that was the second time we'd worked together. We worked together on Frances, which was where I met him, and then-

Molly Haskell: Is that when you met him?

Jessica Lange: Mm-hmm.

Molly Haskell: Oh, really? You didn't know him before then?

Jessica Lange: No.

Molly Haskell: Oh.

Jessica Lange: No, actually, I met him, he came in to read, or to talk to the director, and the director asked me to come and just meet a couple actors that he was thinking of casting in that part in Frances.

Molly Haskell: And you?

Jessica Lange: I said, "Well, cast him."

Molly Haskell: Yeah.

Jessica Lange: I wasn't stupid.

Molly Haskell: There's that wonderful scene where you first meet and he follows you up the hill to your house in Seattle, and he's kind of teasing you and you're talking smart. It's just a ... Somehow, it's an embryo of the relationship.

Jessica Lange: Yeah. But then when we got around to doing this film, it was great. It was great, because we were able to work together. You know, he did some rewriting along the way-

Molly Haskell: Something he believed in, too ... Yeah.

Oct 3, 1997 26

Jessica Lange: Yeah, and he was real involved with it, so.

Molly Haskell: Well, sometimes you have ... I can't think of any of them offhand, but there are plenty of people who are couples in real life and the chemistry doesn't translate onto the screen, but yours really does, I think.

Jessica Lange: Hmm.

Molly Haskell: I mean, I think what it is ... You know, what it is, is so often when people are very much at ease with each other, they lose that tension. But you seem to be able to do both, to have the tension and also the ease, because it's something very easy here. Yeah, so, okay. We're probably missing ... I'm sort of directing this to the films that we've got here, the next and ... the last two are Blue Sky and A Thousand Acres, but there may be things we want to talk about along the way.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, the film that I did after Country, actually, is one of my favorite films, and that was Sweet Dreams.

Molly Haskell: Oh, yeah. The .

Jessica Lange: Yeah.

Molly Haskell: That was fantastic. How did that come about? Because I thought ...

Jessica Lange: Well, that was one of those rare occasions where you've picked up the morning mail and there was this script and you thought, "What the hell is this?" And you start going through it and you think, "Oh my God, this is a great piece of writing." It was written by Robert Getchell, who's a wonderful writer, and it just kind of arrived out of the blue. was directing, and I immediately said yes. It was one of those parts where I didn't think twice about it.

Molly Haskell: Yeah, you knew.

Jessica Lange: That this would be a great part to play. I just loved her spirit and her energy, and it was so much fun because I could actually pretend I was singing.

Molly Haskell: And know that it was going to come out good, since it was her voice.

Oct 3, 1997 27

Jessica Lange: And know it was going to come out like Patsy Cline, which you can't get much better than that, so. And it was, because I've never been able to even carry a tune. I'm so tone deaf, it's just terrible, but I can hear the music perfectly in my head, but I can't sing. I cannot fine tune-

Molly Haskell: It's a great fantasy, too, that you can, so this must've been a wonderful-

Jessica Lange: Yes, so this was great. But I remember when we first started doing it, because I worked with this kind of legendary Nashville producer, his name was Owen Bradley and he was Brenda Lee's producer and Patsy Cline's and 's and-

Molly Haskell: Were you a country music fan?

Jessica Lange: Not really, but I mean, of course I'd listened to that music. I certainly had heard Patsy Cline's music. I didn't know that much about her life, her death, or whatever, but when I first went in there and I went to the ... his recording studio was called The Barn, and he had set up all the playback stuff and I remember the first time I came in there and all the Nashville musicians were there and I kind of sat down like this, I was all hunched over and I kind of sang along like this and by the time we started shooting, I was so into it, I would be singing at the top of my lungs-

Molly Haskell: Could you do that ... You could, yeah, because-

Jessica Lange: ... I'd be singing so loud and I'd have them crank the feedback up so loud that nobody could possibly hear me, but it was so-

Molly Haskell: You could just let go.

Jessica Lange: ... energizing and so liberating. It was really wonderful. I had a great time doing that part.

Molly Haskell: And you went into the southern thing so easily. Had you ever lived in the south?

Jessica Lange: Mm-mm (negative).

Molly Haskell: No?

Oct 3, 1997 28

Jessica Lange: No.

Molly Haskell: Because so often, that's not-

Jessica Lange: But I always love those southern characters. But with Patsy, it was much more kind of country, deep ... You know that Winchester, Virginia, that kind of deep-

Molly Haskell: Yeah, west.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, and I got a chance to work with , who I ... It was one of those, that's happened to me twice now, when I've done films, and this was the first time it happened, I watched the director's cut and sat there through the whole film and saw Eddie's, one of his last scenes where he's in a bar and he's quite drunk and he's saying to his friend, who's actually played by , "You don't know what it's like to rub up against something dangerous," and as I was sitting there watching him play this scene, I thought, "That's it. He's stolen the film. I mean, this is really his movie. He's so brilliant in this," and it was ... As it turned out, I got good recognition from it, but it was one of those things that I was so overwhelmed by the other actor's work, I thought it so overshadowed what I had done that it just kind of like rocked me in my chair.

Molly Haskell: Nobody steals a movie from you. They never have. Oh, that was a great one. No, he is and he's one of these quiet actors that I think he's an actor's actor in many ways. He's really appreciated by other actors. Blue Sky is interesting, because it was 's last film, and it had this strange career where it was made and then I don't even know quite why it was held up. Was it because of the vagaries and idiocies of Hollywood? Or ...

Jessica Lange: Well, it was because ... First of all, it was because the studio was collapsing-

Molly Haskell: Oh. That happens.

Jessica Lange: ... about the time we were finishing the shooting, so by the time the film was finished and ready to be released, the studio had completely collapsed. They had no distribution, they had nothing left anymore, and instead of selling it off, it became collateral in the bankruptcy, because all their product had to be held, then-

Molly Haskell: Oh, I see.

Jessica Lange: So it actually ended up as part of like bankruptcy proceedings for the following three years until it was finally Oct 3, 1997 29 released. But even at that time, Orion really didn't have a distribution arm, so there was ... I think it was released in about 20 movies for 10 minutes and ...

Molly Haskell: If it hadn't been for the Academy Award, probably nobody would've ever seen it.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, I still don't know if anybody's seen it except members of the Academy. Oh.

Molly Haskell: Well, we'll look at the clip and then tell us how it originated and so forth.

Jessica Lange: Okay.

Molly Haskell: ... the shot of that stiletto heel on the-

Jessica Lange: That was Tony Richardson's favorite shot in the film.

Molly Haskell: Was it? I wondered if that line sort of has an echo when you come in and you say, "What a dump." Did you ever see in Beyond the Forest?

Jessica Lange: Yes, of course.

Molly Haskell: I figured that.

Jessica Lange: Well, I figured Carly borrowed from everybody, you know.

Molly Haskell: So how did that ...

Jessica Lange: Well, it was interesting, because I had just finished doing this film called Music Box, where I played kind of first generation American of Hungarian descent who discovers that her father was actually this horrible Nazi monster during World War II, and she adores and is devoted to her father. She defends him on trial and then discovers that he really was guilty of all these things and at the end of that, it was such a kind of a dark and dour-

Molly Haskell: And very different from anything else you've ever done.

Oct 3, 1997 30

Jessica Lange: Yes, and it was ... You know, I had this dark wig and it was ... I don't know, I just felt so ...

Molly Haskell: Run down.

Jessica Lange: ... down. Yeah. So I thought, "Boy, I'm going to do something the next time that's really kind of wild and take it out there," and this part came up. It was in very early stages when I first saw it, of the script, and it had a ... We were in development with it, my little production company, we were developing it. But the odd thing is, I thought that would be ... It was one of my few times that I made like a career choice, where I thought, "Okay, well if I do Music Box and I do Blue Sky, what an interesting-

Molly Haskell: Combination.

Jessica Lange: ... combination, to do this after that. What a good career choice." Of course, then it sat on the shelf for four years, so in the meantime, I did like three or four other films that came out in between it, so enough of my career choices. But it was great working with Tony Richardson. It was really great, because he is first and foremost a stage director, so he had a great sense of staging, and using the camera just to follow the actors and to really stage the scene, which as you know, film actors almost never do.

Molly Haskell: Bits and pieces, yeah.

Jessica Lange: It's bits and pieces and it's like this kind of traditional way of shooting which is so deadly, the master, the two shot, the over the shoulder, the singles, the singles, and it just ... With Tony, it was great because he staged the scene and then it was as though the camera were in service to the actors, and he is one of the few directors, and I can name them and I will gladly name them. Karel Reisz, who directed Sweet Dreams, Costa- Gavras, who directed Music Box, and Tony Richardson, who directed Blue Sky, are the only directors that I've worked with that do not sit in front of the monitor glued to this little box to watch the image, who actually were present like behind the camera and watching the actors with their own eye. It was really great.

Molly Haskell: So they're with you kind of there.

Jessica Lange: They're with you, and you know it's almost as though ... because doing film is so isolating anyhow, and what you end up doing is establishing the relationship with the camera, basically, even though you're playing the scene with the other actor, but your main audience, you know, is this camera. But when you have a director who's absolutely present and they are next to the camera and watching the actors, it's this ... It actually does, it propels you on somehow. You want to do more, you want to do better, you want to somehow satisfy.

Oct 3, 1997 31

Molly Haskell: Well, you certainly get that in that scene. It's a real crescendo, it really builds, following you around, and you just needed to see the daughters once to know what a horror this is for them.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, really. Just how you don't want your mom to behave when you move. It's hard enough moving to a new town. Oh, God. Mom, come on.

Molly Haskell: Well, yeah. The films, which as harrowing as the character may be, somehow give you something back, as opposed to ones that are more draining? What makes the difference there?

Jessica Lange: Well this one, I mean Tony was so-

Molly Haskell: Because he was so with you, that it made it-

Jessica Lange: He was so ... and he shot so fast. Tony never had a moment of indecision.

Molly Haskell: Uh-huh. That must make a big difference.

Jessica Lange: It was really his film.

Molly Haskell: And he knew what was going on, that's why he didn't have to look in the viewfinder all the time.

Jessica Lange: Exactly, and he absolutely moved. I mean, we moved fast, and so it kind of gave you this sense of freedom and you never exhausted yourself working, which happens a lot of film.

Molly Haskell: So it's not so much the role as the tension that you feel because of the way it's directed or the way-

Jessica Lange: Yeah, because of the ... I mean, I did Streetcar on stage in two different productions, one in New York and one in . Two completely different and separate productions, different directors. One was just exhausting to the point that I thought I couldn't make it, and the other one was so exhilarating. It's the same part, the same amount of time on stage, obviously different production, and that's-

Molly Haskell: Do you want to say which is which?

Oct 3, 1997 32

Jessica Lange: Well, yes, I will. I've never ... The London production was so thrilling.

Molly Haskell: Really?

Jessica Lange: And I worked with a great director, Sir , and it was such a collaboration, and it was ... and the production really soared, so it actually carried you along, rather than you felt like ... In the New York production, I felt like every night you were coming on with like, you know, this weight on your back. The great thing about that, actually, was the play, though. The play ... No matter how bad-

Molly Haskell: It’s foolproof in some way, yeah.

Jessica Lange: ... the production is, the play is rock solid under you. You can't go too far wrong. But with Tony, this particular scene, he had on ... and it's funny, because when I read a script, there's always one scene, one or two scenes, big scenes like this where you think, "Oh God. I've got to work up to that. I don't even know ... Hmm," and it's kind of this thing of you look forward to it, you have a certain sense of apprehension and dread about doing one of these kind of scenes, and I looked at the shooting schedule the first day of shooting and I saw the second day of shooting, this scene was scheduled, and I went to Tony and I said, "My God, we can't shoot that the second day." I said, "We haven't ... I don't know who this character is. I don't know what we're doing yet. I don't have any ..." and he said, "That's why we're going to do it."

Molly Haskell: Just plunge in.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, just jump in-

Molly Haskell: Yeah, before you've got any preconceptions.

Jessica Lange: Yeah.

Molly Haskell: And that's what you did.

Jessica Lange: Yeah. Yeah. But he was a really wonderful man.

Molly Haskell: Did he have a lot to do with the way you look in that, that sort of '50s look that is so great?

Oct 3, 1997 33

Jessica Lange: Well no, he really let me kind of-

Molly Haskell: Did he? Did you develop that?

Jessica Lange: Yeah, and-

Molly Haskell: Do you have a lot to do with how you look?

Jessica Lange: I hate to admit it, but yes, most of the time. I've made some bad choices.

Molly Haskell: Well, sometimes you've been sort of ... Yeah, anti-glamor, you've deliberately downplayed the-

Jessica Lange: Yeah.

Molly Haskell: Yeah, and-

Jessica Lange: But with this, we wanted ... I wanted to do a woman who was ... I mean, she really is kind of like this child. She's such a childlike creature, and I wanted her to have these personas, and so I chose like three of the biggest movie stars of that period, starting with Brigitte Bardot, which was kind of her island, exotic Mediterranean look, and then moving back stateside, I thought, well, she'd definitely go Monroe, and when she had worn that look bare, then she would move on to Liz Taylor.

Molly Haskell: Liz Taylor. Well, it's so interesting, because it's really what-

Jessica Lange: It was fun, with that-

Molly Haskell: It's what women in the '50s did, more than any other decade. It was the last period of really big movie stars, big glamor movie stars that women ... After that, that all sort of, the star mystique sort of unraveled.

Jessica Lange: Right, it disappeared.

Molly Haskell: Yeah. Yeah.

Oct 3, 1997 34

Jessica Lange: But it was fun to do that. It was fun, because just the kind of disguises that the character took on.

Molly Haskell: And so it was almost something distant from you, so that you almost could ... I mean, you had a certain disengagement from it?

Jessica Lange: Yeah.

Molly Haskell: Which is true of that character, because there is a pathology there.

Jessica Lange: Yes.

Molly Haskell: That is not a together person in some ways.

Jessica Lange: No, she's not. I always thought of her as being kind of emotionally backward, you know?

Molly Haskell: Arrested somehow.

Jessica Lange: Yes, arrested development, somewhere along the line.

Molly Haskell: And the children are so mature. I mean, they have to be. They have become the parents.

Jessica Lange: Yeah. They become the parent. But for me, the greatest thing in that film was what Tommy Lee did, and I think that's another case, like with Ed Harris, where the actor, because it's perceived more as a woman's film, a story about a woman, the actor doesn't get the credit he deserves, and Tommy Lee was so note perfect in that movie. I mean, to the extent that with a lesser actor, I don't think my performance would've carried.

Molly Haskell: That's right. Well, first, he is so forgiving, for one thing, so he makes you acceptable. I think this is always a crucial thing. If you don't have that, then the character's flying loose with no sympathy at all, so that he kind of anchors you.

Jessica Lange: And because he's such a ... because he is such a man-

Molly Haskell: Oh, so virile. Oct 3, 1997 35

Jessica Lange: Yeah, there was no moment where you thought ... There was never any danger of him being perceived as kind of a wimpish-

Molly Haskell: Oh, not at all.

Jessica Lange: ... weak-

Molly Haskell: No.

Jessica Lange: It was just, you could really understand, I think, that here was a man who as a military scientist had this very kind of linear, intellectual, rational existence that had him kind of boxed in, and the only-

Molly Haskell: Freedom.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, his only outlet was this, the wildness of this-

Molly Haskell: And he's attracted to that.

Jessica Lange: ... woman.

Molly Haskell: Yeah. Yeah, in some sense, he's complicitous, in a way.

Jessica Lange: Yes, he's very complicitous. Very complicitous. I mean, you can see that all the bad stuff she does ...

Molly Haskell: He just, he gets off on it.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, he likes it, up until that one moment where he says she's taken it too far this time. But it wasn't far enough, because he took her back one more time.

Molly Haskell: One more, that's right.

Jessica Lange: But that was actually based on a real story. Oct 3, 1997 36

Molly Haskell: Oh, really?

Jessica Lange: The woman who originally wrote the story wrote it about her mother and father.

Molly Haskell: Oh, really?

Jessica Lange: And they actually married and divorced seven times.

Molly Haskell: God.

Jessica Lange: See, but now, if we'd done that in the film, nobody would've believed it.

Molly Haskell: You know, you can't do that. There's certain things you just can't ... I remember when Truffaut was making Jules and Jim, in the book, Catherine had many more lovers than she did, and he knew that he would lose the audience completely-

Jessica Lange: Yeah, lose the audience.

Molly Haskell: Yeah, you have to ... All right. We get up to A Thousand Acres, which I think is a terrific film, which has gotten brutalized by the press and I'm not sure why. I think it's ... In fact, there's no one ... I think they're floundering. There's something in that film that has really disturbed people, and we'll talk about that a little bit. This is ... We're going to show two scenes from that.

Molly Haskell: One is when you've ... Jessica Lange of course plays, it's from the book, it's a sort of feminist reworking of and it takes place in Iowa. is the tyrannical father who's divided up his farm among his three daughters, and Jessica Lange and are the two older daughters and Michelle Pfeiffer is this completely furious person, because she remembers the abuse by the father and her whole life has been a kind of rage and she's also, at this point, got cancer, and Jessica Lange is the cheerful, happy one that sort of keeps everybody together and is the optimist, and she's finally, she's overheard her father and the youngest daughter, , in a scene which is a reckoning, is a realization that he did abuse her, Jessica Lange, and so we're going to show that clip.

Molly Haskell: I think that when you actually become the father in that scene, I mean you sound like ... you actually have his voice and suddenly reliving that, and then you have this transformation, which to me, there's something so fascinating about this whole idea, and you have it in Square, when a woman discovers that the

Oct 3, 1997 37 man whom she's adored and idealized all of her life is not only a bastard, but has violated her very being, and then suddenly, she becomes another ... her whole persona crumbles, and she becomes something else.

Molly Haskell: I think it's an extraordinarily powerful film and I think this scene also, we'll just go right into the last scene, not the last scene of the film, but our last clip from that a little bit later. At this point, she's left home, she's given up her share of the property. She's working as a waitress in a hash house along the road and Keith Carradine as her husband finds her there.

Molly Haskell: I don't think the general public knows about this, but the critics, , the director, wanted to take her name off the cut and reportedly, Michelle Pfeiffer vetoed that and said she wouldn't appear in an Alan Smithee film. That's the name, when directors take their names off film, Alan Smithee is the pseudonymous nonperson. What happened?

Jessica Lange: What actually happened?

Molly Haskell: Yeah.

Jessica Lange: What actually happened, and I mean there's no reason to ... We've had a kind of a party line and everybody's tried to finesse this. What actually happened was Jocelyn Moorhouse turned in her director's cut, which was a disaster, I mean, a complete disaster, incomprehensible from an emotional level, from a storytelling, everything, and the studio who was distributing it said, "You've got to fix this. You have to make some changes," and the next thing we knew, she quit. So here we were with this film in not very good shape and no director any longer. So it was then left to the editors and the producers to try to piece together what footage she had left us with, and considering the turmoil-

Molly Haskell: Conditions.

Jessica Lange: ... considering the mess that she left us in-

Molly Haskell: That's quite amazing.

Jessica Lange: ... I mean, the fact that we got the film out at all I thought was quite astonishing.

Molly Haskell: I think it's so interesting that the critics have automatically sided with her without knowing anything about the story whatsoever, just because she's the director and Disney is the big bad studio. Jocelyn Moorhouse, as you probably know, is an Australian director who did a wonderful small film called Proof. Then instead of sort

Oct 3, 1997 38 of working her way along, she did How to Make an American Quilt, which was okay, but then suddenly, she gets this huge project.

Jessica Lange: Yeah, and I think in some way, she was so far over her head in it and the easiest out for her was to say, "This is my cut. If you want changes, I'm ...

Molly Haskell: "I wash my hands."

Jessica Lange: ... I wash my hands of this." It was a very high road to take and what it did, actually, was kind of remove her from being culpable of anything, because then she could say, "Look what they did to my film."

Molly Haskell: Nobody's ever going to know what it looked like when she got through with it.

Jessica Lange: Exactly. So it was a very, I think, on her part, probably a very smart move. I think it was very devious-

Molly Haskell: Not in the long run, though.

Jessica Lange: ... and very underhanded and very unfair, especially to her actors, who had been down this road with her, who had worked on this for months and months, and to leave us in the hands of, you know, without a director.

Molly Haskell: Without anyone, defenseless. Defenseless. Yeah.

Jessica Lange: Without anyone at the helm.

Molly Haskell: Well, it's remarkable, and I think your scenes with Michelle Pfeiffer are just-

Jessica Lange: I like the scenes with Michelle very much. There was something wonderfully organic about working with her, and I felt ... Looking at the film, I can see what we needed and what we didn't have and things like that, but the one thing that I think really worked was the relationship. I mean, I really-

Molly Haskell: Oh yeah, and more than that.

Jessica Lange: ... I really felt that there was something going on there that was absolutely true.

Oct 3, 1997 39

Molly Haskell: Well, it reminds me a little bit, there was a film last year, Marvin's Room, with and Meryl Streep, which was the same kind of two great actresses performances, which these films, first of all, they have a hard enough time competing in this marketplace anyway, and they need every bit of help they can get.

Jessica Lange: Yes.

Molly Haskell: And critics are just so sort of enthralled to these violent, I mean they-

Jessica Lange: I know it.

Molly Haskell: ... they pretend to be above it all, and yet, somehow they're part of the game.

Jessica Lange: No, because we could've actually used the ... For a film like this, you would've needed the support of the critics. You would've needed critics saying, and there were a handful of them-

Molly Haskell: Oh yeah there were.

Jessica Lange: ... who would've said, "For nothing else, go see the film for these performances. Go see ..." But some of them were so off the wall, that never even mentioned the performances in the reviews.

Molly Haskell: Well, what makes me suspicious is that none of them settled on one single thing. A few said it was choppy, because they'd heard that she didn't do the final cut.

Jessica Lange: Right.

Molly Haskell: But they would say, "Well-

Jessica Lange: They should've seen her cut.

Molly Haskell: They were sort of like the Keith Carradine, "People shouldn't talk about these things."

Jessica Lange: Yeah, I know it.

Oct 3, 1997 40

Molly Haskell: They said, "Oh, we've heard that before." Well, they haven't. They've been a lot in the news about repressed memories and recovered memories, but very few films about this subject. It's just difficult. Well, I urge everyone to see it, and it's not too late. Just pay no attention to those critics who have lambasted it. And now we've got time for a few questions. I can't see.

Jessica Lange: I can't see, either.

Molly Haskell: Are they going to bring up the house lights a little bit? And I'll repeat the question and then Jessica will answer. Is someone going to-

Jessica Lange: Or if nobody has questions, we can all go home.

Molly Haskell: Oh, we don't have a mic. I'm ... Here, right over here.

Speaker 4: Hi, who have you yet to work with that you'd love to work with, either a director or actor or actress?

Molly Haskell: Who have you not worked with that you would like to work with, either director, actor, or actress?

Jessica Lange: Oh, well. The first one that pops in my mind would be Pacino. I'd love to do something with Al. There are a lot of directors that I'd like to work with that I haven't had a chance to. I don't-

Molly Haskell: Scorsese?

Jessica Lange: Well, I've worked with Scorsese.

Molly Haskell: Oh, that's right.

Jessica Lange: Yeah. I'd love to work with him again. But yeah, I mean, there are a lot of English actors that I'd like to get a chance to work with. I did some work over there this winter and this past summer, I did a film called that actually is going to be screened at some point, and that was mostly with English actors and I must say, it was really a great experience. So there are a lot, a lot of them.

Molly Haskell: There was someone right behind you. Yes? Yes, you.

Oct 3, 1997 41

Speaker 5: First I just want to say that it's such a pleasure having you here tonight, so thank you for that. I'm wondering what it's like to watch yourself on film?

Molly Haskell: It's such a pleasure having you here tonight and I wonder what it's like to watch yourself on film?

Jessica Lange: Well, it's interesting seeing these things, because I haven't seen them probably since I did them, and I feel very removed from them. The great thing about acting for me is that I get to be somebody else, so when I see the performance, it's almost as though I'm watching somebody else. I don't ... It doesn't-

Molly Haskell: So you can actually enjoy it?

Jessica Lange: Yeah. Well, I don't know if enjoy it, but I feel a certain distance from it. It doesn't feel familiar.

Molly Haskell: You don't cringe, right?

Jessica Lange: Now, if I were to watch this interview that he's taping, I would end up like ... I don't think I'd ever be able to do it, because it's watching myself. But watching a character is, it feels so separate and removed.

Molly Haskell: Well, that's the whole point of acting. That's why-

Jessica Lange: Yes, it is.

Molly Haskell: ... you don't want to do these things. Okay. Yes?

Speaker 6: I'm just wondering, as you look back on your choices that you made and the roles you've been in, is there a common thread or something that drew you to the things?

Molly Haskell: As you look back on the roles you've played and the films you've chosen, is there a common thread, something that drew you to these?

Jessica Lange: I guess they're all women who are in, to some degree, in big emotional swings, whether it's on the verge of madness or nervous collapse or kind of extreme emotional conditions closing in on them. I guess that's really what it ... The thing that attracts me to a part is what emotional area I'm going to be able to investigate. So I guess- Oct 3, 1997 42

Speaker 6: Is that related to your own life?

Molly Haskell: Is that related to your own life?

Jessica Lange: Emotionally? No. I like characters about as far away from me as I can play them. That's, for me, what makes acting interesting is the kind of the disguise and going into areas that you would never want to go into in your own life. I mean, like in Blue Sky. I would never want to be that kind of mother in front of my children, but it's fun to do that, if you don't have to suffer the repercussions. You know? If you don't have to wake up the next morning and say, "Oh, I did that again? Shit."

Molly Haskell: Well, maybe it exercises this little part of you that might do that in real life, so this way you-

Jessica Lange: Well, actually my daughter once said to me, "Mom, do you think playing all these crazy people is going to make you crazy?" Which I thought was very astute obviously, and I said, "No, I actually think it probably keeps me from going crazy," so.

Molly Haskell: Yeah. Well, you do play a lot of women who make bad choices, but you don't seem to have made terribly bad choices in your life.

Jessica Lange: No, I feel very lucky.

Molly Haskell: All right, let's see. One more question, I guess.

Speaker 7: Is a sense of place very important to you? You've done two films with Iowa settings. Would you ever think of coming back to Minnesota, another Far North?

Jessica Lange: I'd love to do something here again, yeah. I would.

Molly Haskell: One last question, the woman ... Was there a woman? Yes? Yes, you.

Speaker 8: I particularly love , too. Could you say something about it?

Molly Haskell: She loved Crimes of the Heart, too, so say a brief something about that.

Oct 3, 1997 43

Jessica Lange: Oh, well, that was a joy to do, because working with Diane Keaton and Sissy Spacek and Tess Harper and Sam was in it, and we had a wonderful kind of familial set and situation. Everybody brought their kids every day. It was very relaxed and I made great friendships with Diane and Sissy and Tess, so it was one of those films that I look back on and I feel great fondness for. It was fun to do.

Molly Haskell: Are you able to keep these friendships? Or are they just, that's one of the casualties of movie making?

Jessica Lange: Well no, I feel like I've kept the friendships. Certain people that I've worked with like or Sissy or Diane, or even now with Michelle, the only problem is that-

Molly Haskell: Your careers are-

Jessica Lange: ... your careers are you're always someplace else, I don't live ... I mean, I live in Minnesota, so-

Molly Haskell: Yeah, so they don't come through too often.

Jessica Lange: I don't see a lot of those-

Molly Haskell: But they're there. They're somewhere inside you, so.

Jessica Lange: Yeah.

Molly Haskell: Well, thank you so much for being here tonight.

Jessica Lange: Thank you, Molly.

Molly Haskell: I know everybody-

Jessica Lange: Well, we got through it.

Oct 3, 1997 44