The summer of 2008 was definitely one of girl power. In May, ultimate chick flick Sex and the City raked in record numbers of female viewers, proving that women can –and will- be significant economical forces when they want to be. This is the sort of tenacity the remake of the classic The Women is counting on when they premiere on Sept. 12. With an all-star cast including Meg Ryan, Annette Bening and Eva Mendes it seems there’s nothing stopping the movie about unconditional female friendship from becoming a success.
In a remake of the 1939 film, featuring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Ryan plays Mary Haines who on the outside appears to have it all – perfect career, perfect family, perfect life. When her best friend Sylvie (Bening) finds out that Mary’s husband is cheating on her with perfume “spritzer-girl” Crystal Allen (Mendes) she, along with their other friends Alex (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Edie (Debra Messing) and together they go on Mary’s process of putting her life together when it appears to fall apart.
We caught up with our leading ladies before the premiere to hear their thoughts on female friendship and stepping into the high heels of legends.
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Hollywood.com: Did you see the original movie?
Eva Mendes: I’d seen it before because it was a classic, and I’ve got a lot of questions today about what it was like to fill Joan Crawford’s shoes. I’m like “I didn’t even try to fill shoes – please don’t even put that in my head.” It’s nerve racking because it’s Joan Crawford – my God. And she killed it as Crystal Allen. But I didn’t allow the original to intimidate because that was it’s own thing and we were kind of doing our own thing. So I just appreciated it.
HW: Were you concerned about remaking a Hollywood classic? Did people dissuaded you? Did you have second thoughts?
Meg Ryan: There’s some observations that I think are kind of interesting in the movie. Sometimes we disagreed about [whether or not] she should stay or go out of the marriage – the X Factor being that she was in love with her husband. I think one thing in reading the script that I appreciated was that Diane [English, writer and director] was trying to make a case for both. I mean, I think this occurs in a woman’s life. It’s an enormous thing to happen, you know, your husband is cheating on you and what do you do and who are your allies and who comes to your aid? And all these things are, I think, relevant and equally true now, so it’s just a different observation, different observations on an age-old trouble.
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HW: Can you talk about your character’s goals in the movie. What did you want to wrap your claws around?
Eva Mendes: I like that- “claws”. Diane and I really talked about bringing some fun to Crystal Allen. We didn’t want to vamp her up and make her this evil woman with the arched eyebrows. We wanted to realize that she was actually very desperate. She’s not a bad person. She’s just desperate. Her time’s running out. She wants a piece of the pie. She’s not some husband stealer. She’s more like, “Look Mary Haines, you’ve had your fun, you’ve had money all your life. You have your kid with this guy, you have your houses. Let me have a piece of pie, just for a few years. You’ll get him back – just let me have him for a while. Let me get my piece of pie!” So I had more fun playing her that way. You kind of feel sorry for her.
HW: Annette, your character is hard as nails and mushy on the inside at the same time. Can you talk about what you wanted to say with her?
Annette Bening: It was fun to play a business woman – a woman who wasn’t a mother. And I really liked having a woman who was not conflicted about not having children. I like that. I have friends who haven’t had children – they’re so free (laughs). They can do what they want. And I thought it would be refreshing maybe to have a woman who wasn’t torn about not having children – she just really didn’t want them.
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HW: There’s a theme of women losing their identity in a relationship. What’s your take on that?
Meg Ryan: I think it’s definitely something women deal with still. And I think it’s men, I don’t want to generalize, but it feels like it’s easier to be more outwardly defined as a man than a woman. Women just find their value in a lot of other or different ways so if a woman is eclipsing a man out there in the marketplace or whatever, I think it definitely is trouble in a relationship. It’s something that needs to be coped with intelligently, as intelligently as you can.
HW: When your character finds out she’s being cheated on and she is adviced by her mother to stay quiet about it, she says to her “This is not the 1940s”.
Meg Ryan: Well there’s definitely a generational difference. I think what Diane was trying to say is that there may be a generational difference in how women cope with male infidelity. As much as it’s individual, it’s also generational.
Debi Mazar: I think women in the 40s used to have to shut their mouths. A lot of men were gay and had to have wives because it made them look good or whatever. Today, nobody really accepts infidelity. If they do, they have an ‘open’ relationship. That didn’t exist in the 1940s across middle America. People are more open today, but certainly nobody deals with infidelity well. Period.
Cloris Leachman: My mother said once, “I think it takes the pressure off at home.” You can’t blame them. It’s only one life. If you’re going to do it, then you have to justify it, you’ve got to say, they only have one life, let them have an experience or many.
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HW: Meg, when your character finally goes over the edge and eats a stick of butter, you can see the pressure she was under to be perfect. Do you feel that kind of pressure to be perfect, and also, did you really eat butter?
Meg Ryan: I’m not going to tell you – I’m just going to say ‘yes’. I was so happy to do that scene, because up until that moment in the movie, she’s just a sleepwalking person. And Diane and I talked a lot about her transition in the movie. She’s somebody whose life is falling apart all around her, she thinks it’s going perfectly but she’s asleep to a lot of it. I liked making her vulnerable in that way. She’s not a perfect friend although she thinks she is. She’s not a perfect wife although she thinks she is. She’s somebody who really isn’t coming through for herself or for anybody else. By that point in the movie, she’s just frustrated by the whole thing and just throws it all away. I personally don’t feel any need to be perfect. I think that’s kind of dull.
HW: When you don’t have one single man in this movie to react to, especially for Meg, how do you play the entire relationship?
Meg Ryan: I kind of have someone in mind, but I’m not telling you who.
Eva Mendes: I have someone in mind too, it would be funny if it was the same person
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HW: Eva, how would you describe your character’s costumes and how did they help you get into the role?
Eva Mendes: Well I would describe them as barely there, considering one was being in a bathtub, and one wearing lingerie. We really wanted to make sure that she was not a tramp. I could have really given it to you in a Brazillian thong, you know. And it would have been really vindictive. We didn’t do that because it was too obvious to go that way. She’s not that girl – she’s actually much smarter and much more calculated which makes her more dangerous. So for that one scene, we tried to make it a little classy. We didn’t show midriff. It’s La Perla.
HW: We have now a woman who will be running for the Vice President, but not everyone is standing up on a chair and being excited about it. What is your take, considering that Hollywood, in a sense, has been a leader in terms of creating opportunities for women?
Anette Bening: Well, I think that it’s exciting to see a woman chosen to be on a major ticket. The idea that people who voted for Hillary, who tend to be Democrats, would change and vote for McCain because of Sarah Palin seems to me bizarre – I’m sure there are some women who only vote because they want to vote for a woman, but I find that an odd idea. Because, of course, Sarah Palin’s politics are right of McCain’s. I believe that’s a fair statement to say she’s more conservative than John McCain. So whether she will rally more conservative people to get out there and vote, I don’t know, but I hope that the people that were going to vote for Hillary are voting for Obama.
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HW: What frustrates you about a lot of the roles you do get offered these days?
Eva Mendes: As I’m playing the other woman in this film, I think for me it’s the lack of range. I would be an idiot to have passed up this role, this opportunity to work with everybody and also to be a total supporter. It’s not like I don’t want to do these kinds of roles, they’re fun and I get to work with amazing women. But I want to get the same stuff Drew Barrymore gets offered, you know what I mean? She’s very girl-next-door.
HW: This movie is about girlfriends. What is a girlfriend for you?
Annette Bening: Well, I am really lucky because I have such wonderful close girlfriends in my life. And some of them are from when I was a little girl. We used to play pretend together. And then through my life, a few people I’ve really stayed close to. There’s a kind of sustenance that you get from your female friends that is so unique. And I know that, in so many ways, especially if I’m struggling with something or dealing with something, if I sit down with my girlfriends or one friend or have a lunch or a dinner or drink or whatever, a coffee, it puts me back on track. So there’s something really deeply sustaining about that.
Meg Ryan: I feel the same way. I have a very close tribe of girlfriends, who I don’t know who I would even be without. I feel that they’re particularly valuable because it just feels like it’s such a brave new world. There’s so many opportunities for women. And it feels like even more than looking up to a generation above me that this sort of like holding hands and going forward with my peers and everybody figuring it out at the same time and sharing what they know, is like so much fun and it’s such a valuable part of just the day. Even about how I parent my kids or how I have a career, too. All of that is something that I share with my friends and we’re all doing it in our own way. It’s like we’re sort of astronauts about it.
