Inventing the future: spring has sprung for actors Liv Tyler and Joaquin Phoenix - interview with actors - Cover Story - Interview

INGRID SISCHY: Liv, you grew up in Maine, right?

LIV TYLER: Yes. My mom [Bebe Buell] and I lived in Portland, and my aunt lived in Yarmouth and still does, in a big white house with a barn and trees and a yard and a John Deere lawnmower that we'd sit on and ride.

IS: Sounds heaven.

LT: It was.

IS: And then -

LT: We were ready to take a step and move to New York. I was totally for it. We packed up a big U-Haul, drove to the city, and started over.

LT: Like The Beverly Hillbillies?

LT: [laughs] New York was fun as a kid. I loved to go walking. It was an adventure.

IS: What are some of those memories?

LT: I remember throwing my retainer into a garbage can one time and my room yelling, "Get your ass over here now !" And I had to dig through the garbage and find my retainer.

IS: Did you?

LT: Yes. We brought it home and boiled it so I could put it back in, but it became mutilated.

IS: No matter. Soon the photographers were snapping away, huh? How was it being a teenage model?

LT: A lot of it was fun, like playing dress-up. I'd feel ugly and awkward and chubby, and they'd transform me. Not that that makes everything better. Then my mom shopped the pictures around, I guess, and the agencies started calling. I wound up going with a little agency, Spectrum. It all happened really quickly. I started modeling for magazines like YM and Seventeen, and I did a couple of bigger things, like Italian Vogue. At a certain point I became really frustrated with it, like, Why do I have to go home after school and get dressed up and put makeup on my face and then go to a photographer's studio where there's fifteen other girls with their books and have to prove myself?. A lot of people don't think of it that way, but modeling's a hard job physically and emotionally.

IS: Of course, the paradox is how bad modeling actually makes a lot of people feel about themselves.

LT: I was always a little bit chubbier than everyone else. But I would feel pain for some of the other girls, who were so young and felt they had to be so skinny. They'd be living in the model apartments, totally wrapped up in this whole world. It made me more sad than anything.

IS: And then?

LT: I just remember saying to myself that I'd much rather do movies than modeling, and that it was worth a try.

IS: So what made you have any faith in it?

LT: I didn't really know anything about it. I hadn't seen many movies, or so-called good movies. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Star Wars and Night of the Living Dead. When I got more curious about the movies, I thought they were something you had to learn about and go to school for and read every book. I thought it was like putting a telephone together. Then I got my first part [in Silent Fall, 1994] - I guess I was fifteen or sixteen - which was really outrageous because I still knew nothing. I don't think I really learned how to land on my marks until after Empire Records [1995], 'cause sometimes I'll see a shot in that film, and I'm like, "Whoa, I just walked over to the corner."

IS: When do you think you began to have a deeper understanding about what films could be?

LT: Maybe not until I did Heavy [1996]. That's really when I got excited, and not threatened or terrified. I felt really comfortable and wanted to run through all my lines with [costar] Shelley Winters and watch every move she made. I'd been so scared to start with. The first day on set, the assistant director said to me, "O.K., that's your mark," and I froze. I was like, "What do you mean?" And she said, "Well, that's where you have to stop." And I said, "You mean I have to land there without looking at it?" I practically had a heart attack.

It was on Stealing Beauty [1996] that I started feeling acting was something I wanted to do forever. It made me feel [like] I'll still be looking for parts when I'm seventy years old. Working with Bernardo [Bertolucci, director of Stealing Beauty] was my first experience of being able to communicate with someone whom I'd think of as a mentor, who'd ask me my opinion and trust me and believe in me and allow me to do the things that I wanted to do. The film itself was also rare in terms of character. Most of the scripts I've read are the story of some man, and there might be a love interest or a big woman's part, but even so. . . .

JOAQUIN PHOENIX: We were talking about how we pick up these scripts and every time -

LT: Every single time -

JP: - they introduce a woman, it says, "a beautiful young woman." Every single script.

LT: But it's always a story about a man!

JP: Or if they're strong women, they're outlaws and they're killing men.

LT: Or they're women who have to go through so much and conquer the world.

JP: It's the same thing when films are about homosexuality. It always has to be an issue.

LT: The same thing with interracial relationships.

JP: There's never a movie where there's a black man and a white woman and they live together but it's not an issue. Why can't movies just show those things as part of life?

IS: And what is it about movie stars that makes us treat them like they're from another planet? Liv, I'm sure you experienced that at the Cannes Film Festival when you went for the premiere of Stealing Beauty last year.