Nicole Kidman on making ‘Birth’ and why she chooses films that aren’t a ‘soothing bath’
just got much more meek and shy and light,” Kidman says. “I remember being surprised at the time at the voice that was coming out of me.”
Do you still have the script, I ask, where you could look at your notes?
“No, I throw everything out,” Kidman answers. “I shred them. Ooooh. It’d be like people reading my journal. I don’t want anyone ever reading those.”
So, every script?
“Shredded.”
“’Eyes Wide Shut’”? “Shredded.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard you relish a word like you’re saying “shredded” right now, I tell her.
“Well, it feels like baggage,” Kidman says. “It’s all just going to go sit in an attic or down in a basement. I’m a traveling actor and can live out of a suitcase. That’s how I approach life because I’ve always had to shove everything in a suitcase and move on.”
Kidman was finishing making “Birth” when she won the Oscar in 2003 for playing Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s drama “The Hours.” That year, she also appeared in Lars von Trier’s bruising, incendiary “Dogville,” the sober Philip Roth adaptation “The Human Stain” and the acclaimed Civil War epic “Cold
Mountain,” a hit nominated for seven Oscars. But even with all that, Glazer had been hesitant to cast her in “Birth,” fearing her celebrity would overwhelm a delicate, peculiar character study.
“I was nervous to cast her,” Glazer admits. “I needn’t have been. I underestimated her ability to become anonymous. To immerse herself fully. I’d seen her in ‘Dogville.’ I loved that she did that. And ‘Eyes Wide Shut.’ It’s that fearlessness which attracted me, seeking out filmmakers who would challenge her.”
Glazer did just that, noting that the making of “Birth” was fraught. The studio, he says, was “enraged by my daily script changes and improvisations,” often made because the scenes they had initially written were beyond the abilities of the young actor, Cameron Bright, playing the boy.
“So we’d shift the emphasis onto Nicole,” Glazer says. “Sometimes three or four pages of dialogue would turn up at her house at midnight to shoot the following day, completely different to the ones she’d prepared for. She’d arrive in the morning, never late, knowing the new lines perfectly and without complaint. She stood by me throughout. She knew I was searching for something and she protected me and believed in what we were doing. She’s an absolute professional and I am deeply proud of her performance.”
Kidman remembers Glazer’s “rigorous” reshaping of the script, a process she likens to Stanley Kubrick’s methodology making “Eyes Wide Shut,” a 400-day shoot that, boiled down, amounted to what she calls a “commitment to exploring the unknown.”
“Stanley would rewrite scenes that we’d spent six weeks shooting,” Kidman remembers. “And you just go, ‘OK. Great. How do you see it this time?’ With Jonathan, I’d get those pages late at night and it was glorious because the writing was so good. Great writing is easy to learn. That’s never a problem. When it’s not so good, then,” she laughs, “that’s another story.”
“Birth,” like “Eyes Wide
Shut,” revels in its mysteries. Even after the young boy’s story has been mostly debunked as a hoax, a few lingering questions remain. And Kidman loves that ambiguity because, as she often likes to say, “None of us knows anything.”
Which makes me think about mortality and the film’s contemplation on the supernatural.
“How are you feeling about the afterlife these days?” I ask her.
“I’m open to ideas and I change and shift and grow,” Kidman says. “There are times when I feel solid in my strength of who and where I am. And there are other times when I go, ‘Ooof, everything’s been removed and everything feels very tenuous and I’m not quite sure what’s what.’ And that has to do with having lost people very suddenly. I think that leaves you unsteady. As much as we’re all presenting ideas, none of us has the definitive power to know what’s going on.”
Kidman lost her father a decade ago after he suffered a heart attack, and he comes up often in our conversations. Grief isn’t finite. We talk about how we’d like to believe we might see our loved ones in another realm.
“I can feel him,” Kidman says. “So I’m very open to that. We just don’t know.” She pauses and then laughs. “But I guess we’ll all find out someday, won’t we?”
“Birth” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2004. Reviews were mixed and when the movie opened the following month, audiences mostly stayed away. Today, it holds a firm place alongside the three other movies Glazer has made – “Sexy Beast,” “Under the Skin” and “The Zone of Interest,” which won the international feature Oscar earlier this year – with Kidman’s performance now considered one of the best in a career full of superlative work.
“Movies that deal with uncomfortable subject matter will rarely be rapturously received because you’re dealing with things that don’t make people feel safe,” Kidman says. “They’re not a soothing bath.”
“Yes,” I agree, “and you’ve made a lot of movies that –”
“– are not soothing baths,” Kidman replies, finishing the thought, laughing. “They’re not lullabies.”
How does Glazer himself feel about “Birth” two decades on?
“I haven’t seen it since we made it,” he says. “But I do know it’s a film some people deeply connect with and that’s a gratifying feeling.”
As part of her AFI gala, Kidman sat for a pretaped interview discussing the entirety of her career. How did she feel after making that time-machine journey?
“I felt sadness and wonder,” Kidman says. “Definitely wonder. Like: How?”
She bursts into a goofy laugh. “How did this happen? So much of it is great memories. My mother said in her wedding speech – my second wedding – that Nicole’s always looked at the world through rose-colored glasses, particularly the past.” Kidman pauses, smiling. “I thought that was kind of nice.”
So where does the sadness part come in?
“The sadness is, ‘Aaaaw, I want to be able to do it all again.’”