Julianne Moore talks Chloe (From Chorley Citizen)

Julianne Moore talks Chloe

4:43pm Wednesday 17th February 2010 in

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Four-time Oscar nominee Julianne Moore has one of the richest and most varied CVs in Hollywood.

She began her acting career in 1983 before joining the cast of the soap opera As the World Turns, for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1988.

A series of supporting roles during the early 1990s cemented her reputation in independent films before her performance in Boogie Nights (1997) brought widespread acclaim.

Among her best-known work stand the likes of The End of the Affair (1999); Magnolia (1999); The Shipping News (2001); Far from Heaven (2002); The Hours (2002); and Children of Men (2006). In 2009, she won a Golden Globe nomination for A Single Man. In Chloe, a film by Atom Egoyan, she stars opposite Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried, playing the complex and intriguing Catherine, a woman struggling to keep her marriage afloat… What was it that attracted you to the role of Catherine?

It was Atom primarily. He was the one. I had always wanted to work with him. And it was very exciting to get the phone call. Everybody I know has been married for more than ten years now and everybody has had something dramatic happen one way or another in their relationship, so I was really compelled by the story. All these movies you see about people getting married, they’re like: ‘I want to meet someone and get married’ and they do get married and it is like ‘THE END’! But life is not like that, as we all know.

Catherine is a very complex character. That must have been an attraction?

Yes, what interested me most about Catherine is that here’s this person who is so fragile, so vulnerable and really lacking sexual confidence — she thinks her husband’s having affairs, her marriage is falling apart — and you ask the audience to identify with her, go along with her on this journey. She meets this girl, Chloe, and finds a way, a conduit to her husband and back to her own marriage, but really Catherine completely disregards Chloe as a human being. Chloe only exists for her as a tool, and to me that is shocking. That is what is interesting about the movie, it does kind of take you by the hand and say ‘Look at this poor woman. Gosh! Gosh!’ And then you go, ‘Wait a minute, someone dies!’ What do you make of Liam’s character in the movie?

Atom and Liam were talking about how he is such a great guy and such a perfect husband and I said, ‘Are you kidding? He’s flirting with every girl and he was humiliating her.’ If you were there with your husband and he started flirting with the waitress, you’d be: ‘I can’t believe this is happening. This is really embarrassing.’ And Atom went, ‘Oh, I didn’t think about that.’ It was really funny because it changed his perspective about what was going on in the marriage on screen. She’s not being great. She’s obviously being very controlling. Liam’s character has said that he didn’t want a surprise party and she threw one anyway. There’s stuff going on and there is miscommunication. Whenever there is a problem in a marriage it is everybody’s fault.

Does being a woman make you more sympathetic to one character than the other?

Women do this a lot, where they tell themselves stories. Like they will say, ‘Aha! There! You know what that means!’ And you go from here to here to here and maybe you tell that little story to yourself and your girlfriends and you haven’t told your husband, boyfriend, or whatever. I was on the phone to a girlfriend this summer and she was convinced that every time her husband was checking his email he was checking for messages from an old girlfriend. And she phoned me and I said, ‘Did you ask him, talk to him?’ And she was sobbing and she said that she had not. I said, ‘You don’t know whether any of this is true?’ and she said, ‘No, but I am sure of it.’ That happens a lot. I don’t know that men do that quite so much.

So most problems between the sexes stem from a lack of communication?

Yes. Or communicating in a different kind of way. A male friend of mine went to Rome with his girlfriend. He was talking about going to a hotel and opening the window and looking at how beautiful it was and thinking ‘Wow, Rome is beautiful and I love it’, and he is a very quiet guy. In the meantime his girlfriend kept saying, ‘Are you okay, are you mad at me, what is going on, do you like it here?’ He said to me, ‘I don’t know why she wouldn’t just be quiet.’ I said it was because she was so scared. He was so quiet for so long that she thought he was unhappy with her. He said that no, he was very happy. So a man will perceive silences as ‘I am happy and I don’t need to talk’ and a woman can think, ‘Oh my God! He’s not said a word.’ So there are different styles of communication here.

You are quite courageous as an actress. Is there anything you are afraid in front of the camera?

Not in front of the camera, no. Everywhere else, yes. I don’t find feelings scary or acting scary. It’s pretending, so what we are doing is within a safe environment; it’s more the ideas that you are kind of exploring, a feeling or human relationships, so that part that doesn’t frighten me at all. For me doing something fearful would be jumping off a cliff, parachuting or even diving off a diving board. I don’t like that kind of thing very much.

Were the passionate scenes with Amanda difficult for you?

We had done a lot of work together before we got there so we already knew one another fairly well. But of course it is challenging and different, but the most important thing is having a partner, somebody there with you, experiencing the same thing as you, doing the same things with you. You are kind of a team. You make a lot of jokes and you do whatever is required. It falls within the realms of what the normal human experience is and it is not something particularly outrageous, and it is nothing that can hurt you either. Amanda was a great partner so she made it very easy for me.

Both this character and your character in A Single Man are quite isolated. Is that pure coincidence?

I think it is just complete coincidence. Charley in A Single Man is a different girl. What I like about her is that she has such a great sense of humour and a sense of irony about herself, and she also is self-pitying, and she is wallowing in it and being a baby about it and all that kind of business. Catherine is in a different place. They are both very different characters.

In your business often it is difficult for a woman to get older. It seems the opposite with you; you are still busy… Yes. I am still pretty busy. I have been very lucky. I can’t complain about that. I think it is very difficult no matter where you are and what age you are, if you are not getting jobs and you are not doing what you want to do you are going to feel really bad. And that is not just in our business. It is in any business.

Do you have other projects lined up for this year?

No. I have two things that I am going to work on next year. I don’t have things lined up. You never know. You don’t ever know what will happen. Sometimes it is like six months ahead and then there are times when you don’t know what you are going to do next week. We work from job to job. It is a freelance kind of job. You have to be prepared for that, if you go into this business. It is hard.

You learn to save money, just in case. There is a difference between a job and a life, though. You have to know that you have your job — I have a great job that I love —but you also have family and a life with friends. You have all of that.

You are a pro-choice activist. Why is that important to you?

It is imperative that we have access to birth control and a choice over our reproductive systems. It is important for women and particularly young women to have that; everybody gets to choose what they want. Whether or not you choose to have abortions is up to you but the options should be there. It’s not about telling people what they should do. It is about allowing people choice.

You’ve written some books for children. Why do that?

The reason it came about was my son was seven when I wrote the first book and the character was seven in the story. My daughter is seven now. It’s kind of like kids don’t know, they don’t know really notice what they look like, what their differences are until they kind of reach about that age and then there is this horrible thing that happens and they look in the mirror. I can remember my son saying, ‘My tooth is so big. I don’t like it.’ It made him feel funny. It is just that moment when they become self-aware and it is kind of heartbreaking. And every kid has something. And the book is really about that.