When independent actors and filmmakers roll into town for the usual barrage of pre- film release interviews, they are rarely met with the Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight fanfare of their better known, big-budget counterparts–but that doesn’t make them any less worth the notice.
Such is the case with A Slipping Down Life, which stars Guy Pearce as a struggling musician known as Drumstrings Casey and and Lili Taylor as shy Evie Decker, an amusement park worker. The unlikely duo are residents of a small South Carolina town who fall in love after Evie, greatly enamored of Drumstrings, cuts his name in her forehead one night during one of his shows. The long-in-the-works film is based on a novel by Anne Tyler.
In a small room in the Mondrian Hotel, perched on the southern slope of Sunset Blvd. overlooking the teeming Los Angeles savanna below, veteran indie actors Taylor and Pearce sat down with Hollywood.com to explain, for one, why the film took so long to come out.
“Crazy producer,” said Taylor, voice hoarse from a cold that had her bundled up and sipping tea in the chilly room. “Quite simply, just not sound of mind,” she added of the producer who took the film and attempted to recut it to make it more appealing to distributors following a very successful 1999 premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
Pearce, best known for his breakout role in the re-spooling thriller Memento, shook his head in amazement at the fight over the so-called unbalanced producer’s more commercial edit of the film, “We basically said, we’re not gonna support that [version of the film] so there’s been a stalemate for years until the bank eventually took the movie off the producer because she hadn’t paid them back.”
Distribution troubles aside, Pearce and Taylor had nothing but warm words for each other and their work in this low-key story adapted from Anne Tyler’s novel of the same name. Said Pearce of indie movie darling Taylor, “She’s just extraordinary. We all know what a good actor she is. And she’s incredibly perceptive and she’s very down to earth, she’s very open.”
The laconic Taylor, who says she decided acting was her calling before she was in kindergarten, had high praise for the Australian actor as well. “He’s fantastic. He’s a great actor; he’s a great person.”
A longtime singer and musician back in his native Australia, Pearce actually performs all the songs that so attract Taylor‘s Evie to him, but doesn’t see his character as a rock star so much as a mixed-up guy searching for meaning in his life. “The show is not what he’s at all about, it’s his way of just expressing himself…finding some sort of peace in this dislocated space that he lives in.”
Taylor also believes her Evie cannot be defined by the one action that defines her character–carving up her face with his name using a broken edge of glass. “See, if I was a psychiatrist, I wouldn’t diagnose her as a self-mutilator even though that was an act that she did. She’s not, like, a chronic. If some other object had been there, or some other environment–it’s more random, in a way, I think.”
For indie darlings Taylor and Pearce, life outside of the limelight is fine by them. “I’ve never been really ambitious. I’ve always felt fortunate and lucky to be doing what I’m ever doing,” says the soft-spoken Pearce. “I never would’ve thought to come to Hollywood, but I came here to do some publicity for a movie and then this agent wanted to represent me and then he sent me off to do some auditions and then I got L.A. Confidential.”
Taylor, whose extensive career includes everything from such bigger films as Ransom and The Haunting to John Waters‘ Pecker and Robert Altman‘s Short Cuts, seems able and willing to take or leave the Hollywood lifestyle, choosing instead to live in New York and focus on smaller, more complex roles.
“I’m gonna bring something more complicated. I think that maybe [big studios] don’t want something so complicated, and maybe I don’t want to be in something so simple,” says Taylor. “I think particularly for a woman, it’s a formula, and I don’t think the woman serves the formula by being very complicated. And that doesn’t interest me.”
A Slipping Down Life opens in select theaters May 14
