KATHLEEN TURNER: ‘I STOPPED CARING FOR MOST BIG STUDIO FILMS’
Kathleen Turner and Wallace Shawn have brought major cred to Someone Else’s Wedding, but both are also grateful for finding this sort of script. The Missouri-born Turner, still best known for her Golden Globe-winning debut as the ruthless Southern belle in the dark erotic thriller Body Heat (1981), has spent much time in this city. In 2013, the Montreal World Film Festival honoured her with a lifetime achievement award.
“That was a very nice tribute, but it always makes me think I’m finished,” Turner cracks. “But, clearly, I’m still working.” And still able to be outrageous, as anyone who caught her tube work on Californication can attest. “I like indie films and have done several others like this one,” says Turner, who also made waves for her Golden Globe-winning turn in Romancing the Stone and for her Oscar-nominated work in Peggy Sue Got Married. “I so admire the whole festival and indie-film premise. It’s so much more exciting. I stopped caring for most of the big studio films years ago. I could probably guess the next line to every script I ever read. These films have become so boring and so predictable. (Someone Else’s Wedding) is just so much more enjoyable to me. I really like the spirit of this one. Sure, distribution can be a problem, but it’s changing. The beauty of this film is that it’s character-based, not plot-driven. That gives an actor a lot of freedom.”
Shawn doesn’t disagree: “This sort of film is really hard to make in the States now. It’s purely people interacting here. No green screen here. No blue screen, or any screen. And yet it’s done with beautiful production values. “And the relationship we have with the crew is more personal than I feel with many films I’ve done in the States. Which explains why several of us have come from far away to do this.” New York native Shawn is a multi-tasker, equally renowned for his essays, plays and comedic skills as he is for his acting in such films as the brilliant comedy-drama conversational piece My Dinner With Andre, plus The Princess Bride and several Woody Allen works, including Radio Days. One of his favourite film memories took place in Montreal in making Alan Rudoph’s The Moderns (1988). “As great an experience as My Dinner with Andre was, it probably could not even get distributed now. It could probably be made very cheaply, but it may not look as good or sound as good as what we did then. It was rather luxurious, even though there was only one scene. Then again, Kathleen and I could probably replicate that kind of conversation right now.” That would be rich. But Shawn seems skeptical about audiences or producers today wanting that kind of film.
“But I do get to play a different sort of character in (Someone Else’s Wedding). I’m usually cast as a nonhuman creature or animal, and almost never as a somewhat normal human,” says the grinning Oxford-grad, who may be referring to his role as Zek, the Grand Nagus of the Ferengi Alliance in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. “And he’s my boy-toy here,” Turner pipes. “We play teachers, although I’ve had to take a break because I’m unable to work since my breakup (with the Fisher character).” “And the boy-toy teaches math and biology and is a widower, a nature-lover into the ecology thing, and being with the vivacious, loving and charming character that Kathleen plays brings a little springtime into my later years.”