Interview with Melissa Leo, Best Actress Nominee for Frozen River

Here’s an interview I did with Melissa Leo that is also running on wowowow.com

Melissa Leo has spent much of her 25-year career as an anonymous actress. Despite appearing on the long-running 1990s TV show “Homicide,” not many people could pick Leo out of a line-up. But that’s all changed.

Thanks to her role as Ray Eddy in “Frozen River,” Leo joins the vaunted “group of five” along with Meryl Streep, Kate Winslet, Anne Hathaway and Angelina Jolie as one of 2009′s best actress nominees. The independent film, written and directed by Courtney Hunt, follows two women forced into drastic measures to survive and provide for their families, Leo recently spoke about new-found fame at age 48 with
Silverstein, wowOwow’s correspondent and founder of the web site Women
& Hollywood.

MELISSA SILVERSTEIN: So my description of you is as a blue-collar actress —someone who just toils but doesn’t necessarily get the recognition. Would you agree with that definition?

MELISSA LEO: I call us work-a-day actors.

MS: Why did “Frozen River” resonate so much with “work-a day” people and throughout the world?

ML: I think everything worked. I’ve never been so intimately involved in the production of a film. And I do understand film from an actor’s viewpoint. And from this actor’s viewpoint, everything from the short, to the child the writer/director conceived and gave birth to in the midst of the project, worked to tell the story. And everyone that joined us in Plattsburgh joined us on the back of that script. Everyone loved it and wanted to actualize it. And we got lucky.

MS: But it feels like more than luck … Did you always sense that this could be like a potentially career changing role for you?

ML: Yes, I did. It’s not the only time I’ve ever felt it. But I certainly did with this. I really understood the juiciness of the role, my aptness for it, my aptness for the environment in which we would shot, and the joyful willingness with which I would help her accomplish the task.

MS: What’s also so interesting is how the film seems to be resonating even more now because of our bad economic times. It’s kind of like the people on the margins — these women’s stories — they just cut right to the heart of things. Do you agree with that?

ML: Yeah, everything was so just right. Before I met [director] Courtney [Hunt] they [the leads] were cigarette smugglers. Then lo and behold we read in the newspapers that people are moving in together in these tight times. This is where our picture ends, these two women have decided that perhaps one household will be cheaper than two. Artists know how to reflect the times just before they are the times.

MS: You just go along with the ride and you don’t judge her in her illegalities — because you could.

ML: Yes. Thank goodness. You could just look sideways at Ray the whole time because of what she is doing. But we have taken this film to Marrakesh, Morocco and to France – it’s spreading all over. The French love “Frozen River.”

MS: Really? Why do you think?

ML: Because of exactly what you’re just describing. There are issues of poverty and immigration such present-day issues. The heart of the film is about parenting, mothers doing anything they can for their children’s lives to be better than theirs.

MS: I also think the low budget and the smallness of it gave you a sense of freedom.

ML: Yes, you’re exactly right. That is an integral part of the film and definitely of my performance. We had freedom from that big machine of movie making.

MS: Talk about the big machine of movie making, you’ve done some of those. Tell us the difference.

ML: There’s joys and delights in all of it. There really is. There’s something when you get 200 people gathered together in a desert parking lot for a single purpose on a great big set. It is awesome to observe. And then there is this freedom in independent film. It’s tight and it’s uncomfortable, but there’s a very American thing of ingenuity of doing something from nothing. It’s magical and it’s wonderful. It’s delicious. Maybe filmmaking could turn into something where there is a greater balance of both of these things a little bit less waste and a little more sensibility.

MS: Have you worked with a female director before?

ML: Several times.

MS: Is there any difference working with a female director?

ML: The woman question is best answered by saying the women don’t get listened to. Women directors have got to repeat and repeat and repeat themselves and excuse the conversation between the sound man and that gaffer who were deciding what the shot should be. Women are so suited to direct film because of this thing that has now been scientifically shown to be — multitasking. Any female director that I’ve ever worked with worth her salt finds a way to get their attention. And it has to do with the way women have been doing that around the world since the
beginning of time. And that is with their intelligence.

MS: So you said to the Los Angeles Times on the day of your nomination, “Things will be different from now on. This morning perhaps my life has changed.” Do you remember that?

ML: I do remember that. It has something to do with the indelibleness of the nomination.

MS: Tell us what has changed. Have you gotten different offers that you think you might not have gotten before?

ML: This is definitely happening. Throughout this year even prior to “Frozen River” going to Sundance it has been building. And it’s just very interesting to me that it has timed out just so and allows me a degree of comfort with this auspicious nomination. I have been working toward it, clearly, without ever expecting that.

I don’t inform myself too much of what’s out there. I haven’t seen another film out this year — barely had time to. But I have seen, on many a billboard, Oscar-nominated blah, blah, blah. And I do have something between me and more lucrative employment. And I think that was what I was talking about. I’m also very clear and have said to my friends the same thing: I have not changed. But I do believe my life has.

MS: You got the breakthrough award this year at the Gothams. So what it’s like having a breakthrough at 48?

ML: Aren’t you just breaking through all the time? Quite frankly, I was honored. Maybe I can score a breakthrough when I’m 80 playing Mary Tyrone. I have no regrets for my slow, delicious career. And I’ve always managed.

MS: Hollywood does have an obsession with youth.

ML: You get goodies along with your Oscar nomination. Everything from lipstick to trousers to sandals to anti-aging creams. Those all go in a box that will go to Goodwill. Bless those women if they want it, they can have it. I would do nothing to stop my aging. Aging is growing up. When we’re children they want us to grow up, and then we get grown up they want us not to age.

MS: What is your experience with this lack of opportunities for women on screen and this obsession with the under-25 male market?

ML: I’m a big one for complaining a little less and doing a little more. One of the things that I do along the way is that if I feel a woman is underwritten, I will have a discussion with the filmmaker about her arc and who she is. And I learned this because Guillermo Arriaga writes such impeccable arcs for women, that I notice it when it’s missing. I’ve heard Ellen Burstyn talking about “Requiem for a Dream” how she guided the filmmaker [Darren Aronofsky] to make it right in terms of the woman that the actor is playing. And not like fussing and fighting about nonsense, but about content. What are we showing people?

MS: I thought it just amazing that “Frozen River,” a small, small movie nobody had heard about directed by women, about women, written by a woman, got the amount of Independent Spirit Award nominations. But then amazingly you got the two Oscar nominations. So what are your experiences and your feelings about the state of indie cinema?

ML: I think that indie film should take a long, hard look at “Frozen River” because it’s a great story. And the first thing I have to do is completely veer off everything you said you write about and say, it’s not a women’s film. As a matter of fact, it’s a film that defies genre, because it’s just “Frozen River.” And one of the great
frustrations in the industry is, you want to get another Angelina Jolie and you want to get another blah, blah, blah. And really what the art is there to do is to keep changing and expanding.

MS: Tell us, what’s next for you?

ML: Well, what I’m begging Sony Classics [the distributor] to do, is to go out across the country and talk to the people, who are reflected in the movie.  Maybe even in the malls where they do go to the movies. I want to have those women, and their families, see that film that is about them, that it is not using them. I think if they could see it, it would empower them.