SUSAN SARANDON chats about providing comic relief and what she calls her ‘eyelash / wig arc’ in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lovely Bones.
Susan Sarandon greets fans at the Royal Film Performance of The Lovely Bones (Photo by Jorge Herrera for Paramount Pictures)
MMM: You’ve said in the past that your character provides the film’s comic relief. But she’s much more than that… she holds things together when the family seems to be falling apart, doesn’t she?
Sarandon: But in a drunken kind of way. I’m happy to be the comic relief, I think that she says a lot of the things that you wish you could say sometimes in a very insensitive way and that’s always fun as an actor, to be able to do the things you can’t normally get away with.
Peter and Fran [Walsh] wrote me a really lovely letter when they offered it to me, and I think she is important at that one moment because she does, very unexpectedly, hold the family together. She’s the least likely person that you would think would rise to the occasion. But sometimes you get a second chance.
She seems like she’s failed miserably with her own daughter, but now she has a chance to step in and maybe at that point in her life she’s more qualified to be a better mother and to understand some of the pain and how you have to keep pushing through it.
MMM: Where did you find the clue to how to play this character who’s very mercurial? And had you read the book before taking on the role?
Sarandon: I read the book a long time ago and strangely enough it resurfaced after 9/11 – that was the book that a lot of fire-fighter families, for instance, gravitated towards because for all of its difficulties, it’s somehow reassuring. That was one of the things that I was hoping the film would also be at the end… that it talks about these ties, this energy that never dissipates, this connection that survives.
So I was a big fan of the book a long time ago. I don’t know if it’s because at the very beginning she says, “My name is Susie Salmon and I was murdered.” But there’s something about that in the book and in the film also that makes you understand that somehow she’s okay before you go into all of this horrible stuff. There’s a declaration that she seems somewhat in control because she’s the storyteller. So you don’t feel this voyeuristic exploitation of a horrible crime. And the fact that it’s not shown, and not shown in the book, that somehow she disassociates herself… I was a big fan of the book.
Susan Sarandon at The Lovely Bones premiere (Photo by Jorge Herrera for Paramount Pictures)
And my kids expect me to be a wacky grandmother at this point so I guess it wasn’t a huge leap. I’ve asked my kids, because their grandparents are not… the best, what should you be to be a better grandmother. This woman is the opposite of that. I liked the fact that she was proactive in her stumbling way. I think you really have to have moments where you can laugh. And everyone has their own way of mourning. You need her at one end of the spectrum of that process too.
I probably had the easiest job because I had so much hair and eyelashes. And I never said a word without a cigarette or a drink, so I felt at home immediately. When I would lock into that dynamic – even though I don’t smoke or drink… cigarettes – I had a great time with her.
Cher taught me about hair acting. She said she always picks the hair ahead of time. So I started out with all this hair and eyelashes and then I lost it all. So that was the arc of my character… an eyelash / wig arc! So I always knew where I was depending on whether I had a drink and my eyelashes!
MMM: As a parent yourself, how do you deal with the darkness at the heart of this story? How does it affect you?
Sarandon: I think when you have kids, everyone talks about how much life there is now and how much you appreciate life, but what they don’t tell you is that the second you have a child you think about death. I never thought about my mortality or anybody else’s mortality, and I had my kids really late, until I had children, and then everything is really fragile.
You can’t even allow yourself the thought of losing a child. Also you think about your own mortality. So I’ve been in a kind of death oeuvre… I’ve done so many films lately, and the Broadway play of Ionesco’s Exit the King, that deal with mortality. So all of those things make you understand that your life is finite and to write as many letters and tell as many people…
It also tells you that you have to trust in the universe and put light around your kids and send them out as you also can’t protect them. And that’s the other thing this movie says. They’re really good parents. They’re making her [Susie Salmon] wear hats she doesn’t want to wear. They’re doing all the things that parents do, and still she ends up in a horrible situation. So you can only do what you can do and try to enjoy the rest, and that’s what you feel finally as a parent.
By film journalist Jan Gilbert
