Anne Hathaway stars in ‘Colossal’
A nne Hathaway was looking for something different.
“I was in a little bit of a, I wouldn’t say rut, that would be overstating it,” the “Les Miserables” Oscar-winner recalls. “But I was having a hard time connecting with the movies that I was being sent for various reasons. I was in a little bit of a lower place than usual about my career; it was just an awkward moment in terms of transitioning from your 20s into your 30s. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, really, I didn’t know how to articulate what I wanted to do.”
Then she attended a screening of Ben Wheatley’s 17th-century acid trip “A Field in England” and, as is often the case when presented with a psychedelic perspective, inspiration struck.
“I just thought, I need to do something like that,” says Hathaway, who’s played everything from a load of princesses to Catwoman to “Rachel Getting Married’s” troublesome sister. “I need to make a movie that’s creatively ambitious and weird, and I don’t even know if it’ll be for everybody, but something that’s definitely for me. So I sent that request out to my team, and within a couple of weeks I received this script with a note that said ‘This might be too weird, not sure, but it might be good weird.’ And it was good weird!”
That script was “Colossal,” by Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo (“Timecrimes”). And is it ever a strange one.
Gloria, whom Hathaway agreed to play, is an inveterate party girl whose boyfriend, Tim (“Beauty and the Beast’s” Dan Stevens), kicks her out of their New York apartment after she staggers home one morning too many. Unemployed (and apparently unemployable), Gloria has no choice but to return to her small hometown. There she runs into a childhood friend, Jason Sudeikis’ seemingly nice guy Oscar, who gives her a job at his bar.
Things get a little bumpy after Gloria gets attracted to one of Oscar’s buddies. But that’s nothing — or is it? — compared to what’s happening in South Korea. A giant monster is appearing out of nowhere and wrecking stuff
in Seoul on an unpredictable schedule. As the world watches on TV and digital devices, it gradually dawns on Gloria that there is a way to know when the monster will rampage — because, somehow, she’s responsible for it.
Yep, you don’t see a lot of lost millennial indie/Kaiju hybrids around. The folks who made “Colossal” still aren’t entirely sure about what they’ve done, but they can agree that there’s a metaphor or two operating in their movie.
“Only two?” Hathaway chuckles. “Jason and Nacho and myself have been having a now going on twoyear conversation about this movie and what it’s about, and it’s fun now that people are seeing it to have their fresh perspectives on it. I still find the conversation very interesting. I love that if you just want to go and have an entertaining time at the movies, it’s a really entertaining monster movie, and if you want to unpack it, go deeper and think, there are so many metaphors in it. There are metaphors of addiction, control, empathy . . . there’s so many.
“Yet, I find a lot of movies that make you think about them make you feel sad, ‘Get Out’ being a notable exception,” she adds. “And I love that this movie makes you think without making you feel sad!”
Absurd as it is, “Colossal” certainly offered Hathaway an interesting, complicated heroine whose long-delayed personal growth is carefully delineated in between monster-versus-giant-robot battles.
“I liked that somebody who was so self-absorbed could also be so caring,” Hathaway says of Gloria. “I loved the idea that — it sounds like a cliché but it’s true — she’s full of contradictions. She’s self-destructive and yet she’s nurturing, she’s all sorts of things. The thing that wakes her up, I think, is that she realizes she can’t just live for herself, she has to take in the fact that her actions have consequences in ways that she really couldn’t have imagined.
“That really spoke to me. She felt really relatable and I just dug her. And where the movie went from there I just found unexpected. And you know, I read a lot of scripts, so it’s hard to surprise you. It doesn’t happen a lot nowadays. But this one did.”
Hathaway made “Colossal” while she was pregnant; her first child, with husband Adam Shulman, was born a little over a year ago. Since then she’s filmed “Ocean’s Eight,” an all-female reboot of the international crime caper franchise scheduled for a summer 2018 release, opposite the likes of Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Olivia Munn and more.
“Colossal” remains a very special project for her, though, weirdness and all.
“I believe that all of our actions, however small, have consequences and we affect each other,” Hathaway says. “So we have to be very careful about the things that we choose. I don’t see many movies that articulate that in such an imaginative way, or at all.”