Picture the scene - I'm sitting on a stage in front of 500
cinephiles, next to one of Hollywood's major stars. And she outs
me. We're chatting about Chloe, a stylish thriller which sees Moore
as Catherine, a successful, upper-crust doctor who suspects her
husband (Liam Neeson) of cheating, so hires an escort (Amanda
Seyfried - Mamma Mia, Jennifer's Body) to seduce her husband. As
the tag line ('Desire Can Be Dangerous') suggests, this leads to an
unexpected liaison between Moore and Seyfried, which is not quite
what the doctor ordered.
I tell her I find the sex scenes disconcerting. This turns out
to be somewhat foolish. Before I've had time to catch her eye she
shoots back: 'What? You don't like girls with girls… ?!' I can feel
500 pairs of eyes boring holes into me and my sensible shoes,
followed by snorts of derision. She giggles playfully: 'I'm sorry,
I couldn't resist that!' When I recover, I remind her that some of
her scenes are unbearably uncomfortable, almost as excruciating to
watch as her key moments in Tom Kalin's Savage Grace - yes, I mean
when Moore's heiress sleeps with her own son. Still giggling, Moore
accepts the charge and likens Chloe's sexual storyline to Michael
Haneke's The Piano Teacher. 'What I said to Atom is that we have to
be with Catherine all the way - "Oh, she's not going to do it, is
she? She's not going to do it? Oh my god, she's doing it, she's
doing it!"'
People love Julianne Moore but she's odd for an A-lister; with
over 50 screen credits and star turns in some right old
blockbusters, she still manages to evade the mainstream. Perhaps
it's because she's played gay in the movies on more occasions than
any other straight actress I can think of. To the indie crowd at
the Times 53rd BFI London Film Festival, where I've been asked to
host a Talk Talk-sponsored Screentalk, she's the ultimate darling -
an ovation lasting several minutes has to be forcibly hushed as she
takes the BFI's main stage, which clearly charms her and causes her
to hoot: 'No, this doesn't happen every time I walk into a room…!'
But she still travels on New York's subway to drop her kids at
school without being papped en route.
Moore is in London to promote two very different movies: A
Single Man - the debut from fashion-star-turned-director Tom Ford,
and Atom Egoyan's Chloe, which sharp-eyed film fans may recognise
as a remake of sorts of Anne Fontaine's Nathalie. Ford's movie is a
revelation and leaves Moore's queer credentials nicely intact: it's
based on a Christopher Isherwood novel (he of Cabaret fame); it's
by a gay director, and follows the fate of a gay man unable to cope
with his lover's sudden death. I'm hard pressed to think of a
single thing I don't love about either the film or Moore's
performance in it. In just a few short scenes her fading fag hag,
Charlie, provides the perfect foil to Firth's George. Both
characters are 'English abroad' - a question about her Brit accent
prompts a hilarious demo of how she 'found' it muttered in a
slurring, drunken Lloyd Grossman-esque drawl: 'Particularly in
Britain, as everyone knows, how you speak is an indicator of who
you are or how you want to present yourself to the world. There's a
particular kind of woman - wealthy, party girl - who soooo can't be
bothered pronouncing anything because… she's… soooo…. rich!' Aside
from the fun she clearly had with the role, Moore trusted Ford
despite the film being his very public debut in the director's
chair: 'I've had a history of working with first-time directors -
it's nothing that's ever inhibited me.'
She is extraordinarily perceptive - if not downright sensible -
about what she does for a living. She's often asked to play
characters in a terrible state, dealing with high trauma, which
couldn't be more at odds with her sunny, light-hearted real-life
persona (think of her environmentally allergic housewife in Safe,
hysterically grieving partner in Magnolia, suicidal 50s mother in
The Hours). Asked if she can throw off her characters at the end of
each day and go home and be normal, she laughs and gives an
emphatic: 'Hell, yes! Especially now I have children - my son was
one or two when we did Magnolia, so at the end of each scene I'd go
pick him up. I don't have the luxury of saying, "Oh no, I'm in
character". You can't ever presume as an actor that you know
something because you've acted it. You're just pretending!'
When asked by The Times if her children are aware of her fame,
she replied: 'I think they see it as separate from me. I always
say, "I'm not on the cover because I'm famous. It's because it's my
job, I'm in a movie". I stress work and accomplishment and not
celebrity.'
She evidently knows her limits. Picking on the 'karaoke scene'
in Magnolia (where each actor sings a line alongside Aimee Mann) I
ask how confident she was that something like that would actually
work. 'That's not my job. I bring my acting part, the director
brings their directing part, and we meet in the middle. A
director's not there to be an acting coach. The director is there
to direct the audience through the movie. My job is to do the
acting - to do the singing in the car, if I need to - the
director's job is to pull you through it.' As an actor she's
clearly happy to risk failing. 'Yeah - you put yourself in
someone's hands. It's a director's medium, make no mistake.'
She thinks her career timing has been lucky. When Moore started
out in the early 90s she was welcomed by a mainstream film world
with plentiful roles in The Fugitive, Body of Evidence, even coming
a-cropper in that greenhouse in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle.
'Then suddenly, alongside it, this independent world just sprang
up. I got Safe [Todd Haynes' eerie medical thriller] and that's
where my career changed because suddenly there was this different
avenue to explore.'
Playing a bored housewife whose carefully controlled environment
turns against her, Moore's role in Safe started a pattern of
acclaimed work with Haynes, the king of queer cinema, whose Barbie
doll Karen Carpenter story, Superstar, segued smoothly into Moore's
star turns in Safe, Far From Heaven and on to gender-bending Bob
Dylan pic I'm Not There. Haynes provided the first step on a ladder
of queer success for Moore. Since then she's played 'out' gay in
Rebecca Miller's much underrated The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,
sporting a nifty faux-mullet as Kat, a dyke photographer with a
penchant for S&M. She's played suppressed gay on numerous
occasions too, most notably as lonely 50s housewife Laura Brown,
whose memorable kiss with Toni Collette was a symbol of all manner
of confusion in The Hours (itself a film with both dyke and gay
storylines from Stephen Daldry, a director who describes himself as
gay despite marrying his bff…). Alongside this is Moore's long-term
working relationship with Killer Films, the ultimate indie
production company led by brilliant dyke producer Christine Vachon,
whose contribution to new queer cinema includes Poison, Go Fish and
Boys Don't Cry - die-hard fans can even see this unlikely pair on
YouTube talking about all manner of queer topics from lesbian
representation in film, and the state of queer cinema, to general
homophobia (tinyurl.com/yemeev5).
In her interview with Vachon she observes, 'I'm occasionally
asked [about queer cinema] because of my work [...]. I feel that to
describe it as such can be reductive sometimes [...]. The films
I've made are about humanity, about what it is to be alive and for
me the stories are about all of us.[…]. But the world has changed
so much and our attitude to sexuality has changed so much [...].
Kids at my kids' school, when they play The Game of Life ask, 'Do
you want to be married to a girl or a boy?''
Moore doesn't look like she's about to stop playing gay any time
soon; in January she unveiled her next film to adoring crowds at
the Sundance Film Festival, where it both sparked a major bidding
war and found itself hailed as a clear contender for the lesbian
film of all time. A low-budget indie pic directed by Lisa (High
Art) Cholodenko, it looks set to make waves and sees Moore teaming
up with Annette Bening to play a longterm lesbian couple whose
grownup kids decide to seek out their sperm-donor father. Perfect
on so many levels (not least in its ultra-true-to-life portrait of
a gay 'marriage' at a time when America needs it most), it's a
lovely subtle picture with a central relationship all good dykes
will recognise. The film's only downside is that we're likely to
have to wait the better part of a year before it hits UK cinemas.
Back in London, Moore raves about working with Cholodenko and
admits that the film was one of those she did for love rather than
money: 'Some films end up costing you: some movies allow you to
have a regular job and some you do because you want to and you're
not going to get paid but its all part of the whole thing.'
Meanwhile, as we all hang around anticipating The Kids Are All
Right, there's Chloe, out this month. Moore lavishes praise on
director Atom Egoyan (Felicia's Journey, The Sweet Hereafter,
Exotica - the latter featuring the arresting debut of one Mia
Kirshner). 'It's an extraordinary piece, really challenging. It's
an Erin Cressida Wilson script [Wilson also wrote Secretary] and
her stuff is difficult, and beautiful too - but in another
director's hands it's something that could be somewhat prurient
because there is such a sexual element to it. But with Atom, who
deals so often with issues of identity - 'personhood' - I feel he
was the right person and I was thrilled to get a chance to work
with him and not disappointed.'
For the queer viewer there's perhaps a rather too familiar
psychodyke in Seyfried's Chloe. I ask if she and Egoyan had
discussed the politics of bunny-boiling and she neatly sidesteps,
suggesting the real devil of the piece is her character Catherine,
not Chloe. 'What was interesting to me was the point-of-view thing.
The audience is asked to identify with Catherine right from the
get-go and you go, like, "Oh my gosh, this woman's husband is
having an affair, she's getting old, he doesn't love her any more,
blah blah blah, so she's fragile and her confidence has eroded". So
you're in this space with her as she makes her way back to him, and
then suddenly you look and realise that everything that Catherine
has been complaining about doesn't count and she's just done the
same thing to someone else, at great cost, huge cost. So you've
asked the audience to go this way and then the audience is meant to
say, "Oh gosh, she just destroyed someone in the process". You
know, our nice Caucasian, middle-class doctor, our lovelorn female
heroine has just done this abominable thing and thrown somebody
away. That, to me, was the important thing.'
She laughs in agreement when I suggest she's like catnip to
young gay directors (usually called Tom, or Todd, or occasionally
Stephen) and ask what makes her so appealing to them and their
audiences? 'I'll espouse a queer theory and you can see if I'm
right about this!' she suggests. 'I think, in a lot of my movies
there's been a very dramatic and very human element with somebody
who feels like they don't belong, they don't fit in, and there's
something in them that they want to change or be different. In
terms of the queer experience, traditionally - I think less so now…
but I think a lot of people grew up feeling invisible. So in terms
of the queer audience, they're looking at an actor or a character
who's kind of expressing what they're feeling. Not to be simplistic
about it - but maybe that's it.'
QUEER JULIANNE
The Hours - painfully depressed 50s housewife Laura Brown knows
her husband isn't what she wants and find herself locked in a kiss
with her brittle terminally ill bf Toni Collette
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee - Kat, the girlfriend of Pippa's
aunt, is a predatory 'dominatrix' photographer who loves to dream
up a sadomasochistic scene to snap
Chloe - wealthy gynaecologist Catherine falls foul of
bunny-boiling Chloe in a hot and steamy hotel room The Kids Are All
Right - longterm lesbian partner Jules suddenly finds herself faced
by some confusing temptation when along comes daddy (aka her
children's sperm donor)
This article first appeared in DIVA magazine, April
2010.
