You don’t appear in a lot of scenes in this film, yet you nearly walk away with the whole movie with one crucial sequence. What drew you to this project?
Susan Sarandon: “Cameron Crowe is a draw. I’ll tell you, I’ll look at the part and see if I like the person, and if there’s scenes that I feel I can do something with, and scenes that frighten me. And if the movie is about something that I feel I can talk about for four days in a junket. And if I have those things…I liked what it was trying to say, and I thought that one little sub piece was very critical for the movie and was kind of challenging and scary–because of the tone of it, not so much because of the length of it or the tap dance or anything, but just trying to find that tone and make it live in the moment and not seem like ‘This is what our movie’s about: Breaking out my act for everyone [laughs].”
Did you know that this would turn out to be one of those scenes that will be in your clip reel for the rest of your life?
Sarandon: “I knew it should be, but I didn’t know if I could pull it off. I knew it had the potential to be really an important scene, because of the contradictions, because of the surprise of it, and also if I could find some way to give it some sort of integrity and still make it funny–that’s the tricky one, you know. I could have just made fun of her, because she isn’t a very good dancer, and that isn’t a very good dance. But I thought of my kids when they were performing and I wanted some feeling like that–they’re trying really, really hard, but it’s really funny, but they’re still trying really hard. I had a friend of mine, I gave Tim [Robbins] a surprise birthday party a couple of years ago, at a piano bar, and strangely enough, of all the people that were actually singers, nobody sang. But this other friend of mine, who was incredibly drunk, tried to get on top of a standing piano and then she started singing, an Elvis Presley song, something very slowly, with gestures and doing this whole thing. I was so afraid for her, because I thought ‘This is just horrendous, and she was pretty drunk,’ and she continued to sing, and as she went on, it got more and more moving, because she just kept going, slowly and deliberately and with feeling and gestures and everything. So in the beginning we were laughing so hard we were weeping, and then by the end we were just weeping, because it was so sweet. And so I was thinking of that: these kids must see her get up there and just be thinking ‘Oh my god, what’s she doing? Oh my god.’ And then it somehow kind of changes.”
How did you find just the right tone?
Sarandon: “In this one it was really important that it’s something that I’m giving [to my husband], so that physically it’s gotta be awkward to a certain point and hopefully funny, but also have some kind of grace and dignity because it’s going to him, so that was the kind of–I didn’t want to–she’s so frantic and everything, but I was hoping to find a way to fill it and not just make it Lucy at the chocolate factory. I was trying to find some way that it could be believable in the context of the entire film, and so we talked a lot about tone. And when I was putting the dance together–I knew that from the very beginning when he came to talk to me in New York, Cameron told me that he saw in the end this shot from behind me, something that he’d seen in a Richard Pryor performance, and he asked me to look at a Richard Pryor performance, where he starts to talk about something very personal, so we choreographed it, I knew some tap dance steps and stuff, but we tried to not use to many, because really she’s probably had three lessons, right? How many could she have taken in like a week, right?”
You weren’t convinced “Moon River” was the right song for the scene.
Sarandon: “Yeah, I kept saying, I don’t know if it’s funny enough. And then I said, ‘You just tell people you’re tapping to ‘Moon River’–that’s funny.’ It’s impossible to tap to ‘Moon River,’ it’s a waltz tempo. So there’s no way that it would end up being too right. I felt really vulnerable and terrified, so that helped. It was scary…I’m not comfortable getting up in front of people. Every time I have to do that for, especially politically, is just horrendous for me. I was very moved when I saw my kids in the audience, Judy Greer was weeping at one point, so I felt very full–at least the first 20 times that I did it. I don’t know about the next few days, but at least in the beginning, because of course I had to do it over and over again, and I probably got a little bit too slick as time went on. But at least in the beginning it felt really horrible and awkward and tough.”
What uniquely distinguishes Cameron from other directors?
Sarandon: “He’s a really interesting combination of somebody who is very, very specific and thoughtful and controlling in a way, I mean, you don’t change your words, he knows exactly what he wants, he keeps the camera going, and has people say phrases over and over. But then on the other hand, he’s so accessible and enthusiastic–he just screams with joy after every take, and he’s playing music during, between, after. He uses a lot of the same people, so it’s a very happy set–people really like him. So, I think that’s really special, because you get some people that know what they want, don’t deal at all with the human emotions of the puppets that they’re putting through their tasks, and then other people that are kind of all over the place and then fix it in the editing, and what I called the ‘cult school of acting,’ where you’re all expected to hang out on the weekend together, go to dailies, everyone knows each other and you get high, and whatever. That’s at one end, and then you’ve got Cameron‘s way, which is kind of a combination of a very human thing that breaks down the traditional structure of approaching how you shoot, but at the same time it’s very exacting. So you can collaborate to a certain extent with your wardrobe and your props and your dance steps and everything, but in terms of the script, he’s very protective and very exacting, because he’s thought about every word, very thoroughly. And that’s what it’s going to be… think there were a number of actors who could’ve played this part–there were two other names that were mentioned for this, way before me, and when he came to me to see me, it wasn’t a done deal or anything. We just kind of talked about it, and I was happy that he went against type and gave me a shot at it.”
