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