Wanting Moore

by Michael Fleming

From "Wanting Moore," Michael Fleming's interview with Julianne Moore, in the February/March issue of Movieline on newsstands now.

Born in North Carolina to a military judge father and a social worker mother, the 40-year-old Julianne Moore moved more than two dozen times during her childhood. Upon graduation from Boston University's School of Performing Arts, she headed to New York, where she did theater and won a Daytime Emmy Award for her performance as half-sisters Frannie and Sabrina Hughes on the soap opera "As the World Turns." Television movies and miniseries led to feature films, including early roles in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Fugitive and, perhaps most memorably, director Robert Altman's Oscar-nominated ensemble film Short Cuts.

Since then, Moore has alternated between critically acclaimed independent projects like Safe and The Myth of Fingerprints and studio-produced fare like Nine Months and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Surviving Picasso, Psycho and Magnolia further reinforced her eclectic taste in material.

In person, Moore is not exactly what you expect, but you don't know really what to expect given that Moore is a risk-taker who is different in each film. This risk-taking nature has made Moore one of the most prolific actresses in Hollywood.

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In 1999 alone, she made five films, and 2001 brought three more: Hannibal, the science-fiction comedy Evolution and The Shipping News, director Lasse Hallstrom's adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1994 novel. And she has already completed the marital drama World Traveler, written and directed by longtime boyfriend Bart Freundlich, and The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel centered on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, directed by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot) and costarring Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman.

MICHAEL FLEMING: You seem to have earned a rest. What did you make, like five movies over the past 12 months?
JULIANNE MOORE: It has been bad, way more than I meant to do. I did Hannibal, which was just so much fun, and then I went right into my boyfriend's movie, World Traveler. Then I did Evolution, and that's when the rumblings began about a possible strike. I wanted to do another movie, and then The Hours and The Shipping News happened right on top of each other. Both were movies I really wanted to do; I couldn't choose, so we squeezed both in. But everybody was in the same boat, working more because of a fear there would be a strike.
Q: Do you ever think that having too many movies in the marketplace will hurt your price, or your ability to leave audiences wanting more?
A: Those are business decisions that you kind of can't think about. If I want to do something it's because I really like the part, I like the script or the director and I'm interested in a creative way. Maybe you'll do a movie because it's got a chance to be commercial and it will make you some money. But I don't strategize that much about it... I did Evolution because it was a comedy, and I never get to do those... I didn't have to cry once, which made me very happy.

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Q: Tell me about The Hours.
A: It's [about] three different women at three different points in time. It follows the arc of Virginia Woolf. One is Virginia Woolf, another is a woman nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway, because she has a lot of parallels to that character. A third character is reading Mrs. Dalloway and that's me, a housewife in the '50s with a young child.
Q: Did you do the movie because of the cast or director, or because you were a fan of the source material?
A: It was the book. I got it for my birthday a couple years ago, read it and loved it. I never thought it could be made into a movie, though, because it is so dense. Years go by, I hear there's going to be a movie of it and I get offered the part I liked best. On Shipping News, I was in Alabama and I got a call from Lasse Hallstrom... It's like, "Hallo, thees is Lasse Hallstrom, I want you to bee in my moovee," and then I hear, "Hey, this is Kevin Spacey." Things come about in different ways. The Hours was a no-brainer, I would have torn out my eyeteeth to play that role. Shipping News was a lovely project, but I always wanted to work with Lasse and Kevin.
Q: When you're in a big movie that doesn't do that well, like Evolution or Magnolia, do you take it hard?
A: No... If I do a movie like Magnolia, I'm not doing it for box office; that's an art film and you're trying things. When you do a more commercial movie like Evolution and it doesn't do well, well, what the hell are you going to do about it? It's like, you made it, you had a good time, you hope it will do well for all the people involved, the studio. But it's not something you can get crazy about. Now, maybe if I cared a bit more about how much my films made, I'd be a big movie star and make more money.

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