It’s safe to say that with two Academy Awards for Best Actress on her mantle (for Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby), Hilary Swank could definitely teach a course or two on screen acting. But in Freedom Writers, she plays a real-life schoolteacher helping at-risk Long Beach teens learn to respect themselves—and letting them teach her about what their gangbanging lives are really all about. And Ms. Swank schooled Hollywood.com all about her new film.
Hollywood.com: We’ve seen the inspirational teacher movies before. What was it about this one that inspired you?
Hilary Swank: When I first heard about this I thought, ‘Oh, there is Dangerous Minds with this white woman going into this school.’ I then kicked myself for thinking that and judging a book by its cover, which is the whole point of the movie. I mean, what’s not to love about this film? The same thing happened to me when I read Boys Don’t Cry, and the same thing happened when I read Million Dollar Baby, and it happened again. Maybe one in twenty scripts are good, but one in fifty I feel are something like this. I knew right away that I wanted to be a part of it.
HW: Is it nice to have that kind of power in Hollywood for you?
HS: Absolutely. All I want to do is make movies. I love my job, and I am so grateful when I get to do it. I just can’t even begin to describe the joy it brings me. To be able to take a script that can’t get made and say you want to do it–and then get it made–is incredible. Careers ebb and flow and it won’t always be like that, and it might come back. You don’t know what’s going to happen. So every single day that I get to do it, and every single day that a studio or someone or some financier in the world says yes because I’m a part of it, I am so grateful.
HW: How would you describe the woman you play in the film, the real life Erin Gruwell?
HS: What I love about that is that she’s human. If she were some perfect person it wouldn’t read, because there is no perfect person. I think one of the hardest thing about a biopic—especially if they were people that were known—is they’re portrayed in a way as if they were greater than [a real person]. I have a real problem with that. You hear stories of people who won’t let their stories be told, or people who already passed away and they won’t allow their stories to be told unless they do it a certain way, because they wanted to be portrayed a certain way. There are two things that I have to say that to that. One is that she’s incredibly brave, I think, for letting her story be told–all sides of the story. Two, I think you do realize that Erin is this incredible person. When you meet her, you see it’s true and it’s not like we portrayed her in this way, making her look better than she really was. She is really present, and just like the kids, you can see why they hit it off.
HW: Your character is so positive under the toughest circumstances, and as it gets harder, she’s more positive. Personally, do you get tougher as situations in your life get hard?
HS: I think that all of a sudden you think, ‘Oh, I understand this. I know how to deal with this now.’ But then you grow and you realize, ‘Oh, that’s not really the best way to deal with this or handle the situation.’ That’s just a part of growing up and trying to learn not make the same mistakes twice. That’s what life is, I think: just trying to figure out how to deal with it and how to maneuver through it all. Continually waking up everyday saying, ‘I have a choice in how I want to live my life’ and searching out the good is important.
HW: When you won an Academy Award for Boys Don’t Cry, did you develop the clout in Hollywood to make any movie you wanted?
HS: I thought with the success of Boys Don’t Cry that there was going to be a real shift in my career, but I wasn’t getting the greatest opportunities, and I was fighting really hard to be a part of things. I was getting scripts, but for some reason it wasn’t easy to get a movie made. Boys Don’t Cry was a critical success, but it wasn’t a huge moneymaker, so in the business world people didn’t see me as a huge box office draw. That was a real learning curve for me. Clint [Eastwood] said it best: you always aim for the bullseye, but you don’t always hit it. I think that’s something that is really good to remember. You can find a great script, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be great on the screen. You just try and do the best you can and hope it all comes together because this business is a real crapshoot.
HW: Did winning the second Oscar mean something different to you than the first?
HS: It’s probably the craziest feeling. It’s such a surreal, surreal experience. Feeling like an outsider–which I think most people do anyway–you sit there and feel like at any moment they’re going to go, ‘You! What are you doing here?! There’s the door!’ So you feel like at any second that that’s going to happen and when I hear people say my name on the radio or something, like, ‘Hilary Swank, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman.’ I’m usually like, ‘What? Did they just say my name?’ It’s a really, really surreal thing, and I triple take all the time when I hear something like that.
