Jennifer Connelly

 

 

By Ingrid Sischy

 

Interview

December / January 2007

 

They may have put her in a cage, but here’s an actress who won’t be tamed

 

Ingrid Sischy: So Jennifer, where are you? Are you in the middle of a film?

Jennifer Connelly: Yes, I’m in the middle of working on Reservation Road, which we’ve been shooting in Stamford, Connecticut. But right now, it being Sunday, I’m in Vermont, with the family. I’ve been working nights and finished on Saturday morning and the kids slept in the trailer at work. As soon as I wrapped, we piled them in the car, in their pajamas, and came up here in the middle of the night.

IS: Was that your last day filming, or was it just the end of the week?

JC: No, it was just the end of the week. I’m due back at 4:45 in the morning tomorrow. We’re back to working days.

IS: Boy, easy life, huh?

JC: [laughs] I don’t want to make it sound like, “Woe is me, isn’t this horrible?” It’s a fabulous life.

IS: How many kids do you have now?

JC: Still just the two.

IS: How old is the youngest one?

JC: Stellan is three.

IS: The last time I “officially” saw him you were breast feeding him at the cover shoot we did together for our February 2004 issue.

JC: Yep, He’s moved on from those days. Now he’s running around from one really horrible store-bought superhero costume to another. You never know. Power Rangers. Batman. Spider-Man. It’s amazing that with such little exposure to these characters, they still really take hold of kid’s imaginations.

IS: He’s got a big week coming up with Halloween.

JC: Absolutely.
IS: How about Kai? He was a budding photographer when I last tuned in.

JC: He still takes photographs—

IS: If he keeps up the photography, tell him the next time we do a story, I’m putting him to work, okay? Then we won’t have to worry about scheduling the shoot. You’ll tell him to just take the camera and start shooting when you get up.

JC: [laughs] Fantastic. I’ll tell him.

IS: What’s he like?

JC: He’s still incredibly articulate. And he’s very interested in science, and very politically aware and environmentally conscious.

IS: A Brooklyn kid, right?

JC: Brooklyn kid, yeah. Interestingly, I think, in his community, with his friends, there are a group of them who are concerned.

IS: This is a perfect transition to the subject of the day: Africa. I’ve been noticing—as I’m sure you have as well—what a big subject Africa seems to be again. Just to name a few of the movies of the last couple of years or so, there’s been Hotel Rwanda [2004], The Constant Gardener [2005], The Last King of Scotland, Catch a Fire, God Grew Tired of Us, Tsotsi. . . . Now Blood Diamond is coming out, the film you star in with Leonardo DiCaprio. And soon we’re getting The Foolishness of God. Then in the fashion world, there’s Product Red, a new initiative organized by Bono and Bobby Shriver in which all these companies—Motorola, Gap, Emporio Armani, etc.—have been creating products designed to feed profits back to the Global Fund. Hey, Africa’s always been there, but it seems the rest of the world zooms in and out in terms of consciousness about it. I was born in South Africa, and spent my early life there, so maybe I’m overly sensitive about the ways in which Africa is often misrepresented, condescended to, or ignored. But now seems to be one of those times where it’s really lit up as the continent of the zeitgeist, doesn’t it?

JC: Well, I’m not really sure why the tide has turned that way, but I think it’s a great thing. Blood Diamond is pitched to a large audience, but there is real virtue in that in terms of public awareness. Our film takes place in Sierra Leone and tells the story of the conflict between the government and the rebels—the Revolutionary United Front [RUF]—and how the profits from the diamonds which were being smuggled out of the country were used to finance the war, which is why they’re called conflict diamonds or blood diamonds. The war was responsible for the massacre of scores of people, as was the horrific campaign of the RUF, in which they chopped off the arms of civilians. The RUF also used children as soldiers, kidnapping boys and girls and using them in support of their fight.

IS: The film illustrates how business can get twisted up in all sorts of political messes. But it also shows that there are ways not to do that.

JC: The bottom line isn’t that diamonds are bad and people shouldn’t buy or enjoy them or other gems. It’s just that there needs to be strong systems in place—like the Kimberley Process [which was instituted four years ago]—to regulate the imports and exports and to track certification to make sure that they’re clean. Otherwise, if a consumer were to buy a “conflict diamond,” they could very well be unintentionally participating in the debasement of children and these other atrocities, which no one would want.

Public awareness helps to create things like the Kimberley Process, which works to insure that what are known as “conflict diamonds” don’t reach the marketplace—it’s a method of certifying diamonds so that only clean, legal diamonds end up in the marketplace. It must be constantly enforced, of course, for it to have any value, but even with the loopholes it has still managed to reduce exports of these sorts of diamonds from about 4 percent to 1 percent.

IS: It’s great you’re clarifying all this because otherwise people might think that the point is that nobody should ever have a jewel.

JC: Absolutely. The challenge is in supporting the process [or protections] that are already there by making sure that there are inspections, and by having consumers make it clear that they want to be confident about where the diamond they’re purchasing came from. Hopefully, seeing this film will help explain why that matters.

IS: It’s all about consciousness.

JC: You know, there’s so much about this that I only have a very limited understanding of—so I’m sure it’s much more complicated than I can even fathom—but it would be fantastic if the countries with these incredible resources actually saw more of the profits. Before reading the script for Blood Diamond and signing on to the project, I knew that there had been conflict in Sierra Leone, but I didn’t know that much about the situation. My character is a journalist, so I felt the need to arm myself with as much information as I could gather, and I continue to do reading on the subject.

IS: Sometimes, also, it isn’t black and white.

JC: Yes. I know sometimes diamonds are smuggled out for reasons other than war—people are hungry and poor and trying to feed their families. It’s a complicated issue, and in some instances I’m sure diamonds have benefited communities, but it can also be pretty confidently stated that more needs to be done to support the Kimberley Process.

IS: Of course, the beauty of being an actor is that the job opens up worlds that one may or may not have known about before. It’s not an opportunity to go off and spend ten years in that place or really study the subject in depth, but it is a chance to constantly learn. Is that part of what makes the work so appealing to you?

JC: Yeah, I love doing research and the sort of preamble to shooting when I read lots of articles. What you do no each film is different depending on the subject matter, but the reading of books and articles required for this project was something I really enjoyed. I think this role is one of my favorites.

IS: You’re a journalist. Welcome to the fold. Talk about Maddy, your character.

JC: I thought she was really interesting. And when I was preparing, I met a number of women journalists who I thought were fascinating.

IS: Were they journalists like Maddy is? Journalists who go into war-torn territories?

JC: Yeah. One was a woman named Danna Harman who has written a lot for the Christian Science Monitor, and she had actually been in Sierra Leone around 1999 at the time the story takes place. I spent a lot of time with her, and she connected me with a woman named Elizabeth Rubin who had also been in Sierra Leone at the time.

IS: When I first started getting interested in photography, the photojournalists that really captured my attention were women like Margaret Bourke-White or Dorothea Lange, women who would head out on the road with their cameras. A life like that always interested me and clearly it does you, too—why do you think that is?

JC: It’s just the passion and dedication required. That sort of life is really difficult both physically and psychologically—they’re dealing with issues of safety, with loneliness, with separation, with witnessing horrific things, but being aware that they are also trying to do something to change it. With a woman like Maddy, I think that she’s hoping to ameliorate some of these situations, while also being aware that much of the time she can’t necessarily do anything on an individual basis. She’s there to report in the hope that, ultimately, her works helps to affect change. There’s that scene where she talks about exploiting someone else’s grief. She’s going to write about the grief and then hope that in the long run something happens because of it, while recognizing that in the short run her decision to write a story about someone else’s suffering is maybe going to benefit her; what a horrible conflict.

IS: It can be the same issue for an actor, though. Right?

JC: Yes, although not as relentless—for these people, this is their life, all the time. I was recently watching a documentary on James Nachtwey called War Photographer, and he talks about that a little bit. He’s standing in front of grief-stricken women who have lost their families, and he takes photographs of them and people say, “Wow! What an amazing photograph!” What a difficult thing to live with. You know, when were in Maputo, I spent time at an orphanage with a friend of mine—she was going, and I said I’d love to come along. And at the end of that experience, I thought, What am I doing? Is this selfish? Am I helping these kids, or am I doing this to make myself feel better? We form relationships with these kids and make them feel loved, and then we leave. It’s all so complicated.

IS: The problem is, even with all its complications, the solution is not to do nothing. Ideally, what we all do in our own work is find ways to throw light onto things.

JC: What was certainly the goal with this project, and I was happy to be a part of that and to throw myself into it in whatever way I could. I think sometimes just to raise questions is a move forward.

IS: Absolutely. And the truth is that if a question is raised in a Hollywood movie, it tends to empower the question. That is not to say that the weight of representing continents in extremely complex issues should suddenly be placed on the shoulders of actors, because that would be foolish. [Connelly laughs] This past summer there was a piece in the New York Times, I think, that described what some of these children warriors in Africa had gone through. It was a story, not about Sierra Leone where the RUF conflict is over, but about the Acholi war in Uganda. I remember there was a quote from one of them who said something like, “I killed and killed and killed; now I am scared of myself.” The speaker was about 18, and he’d been a kidnappee since he was 9—he’d done all this stuff that he just couldn’t live with, and here I am, a second-generation South African, and I confess I didn’t know this was still going on. I was shocked by it.

JC: It’s really shocking. I’ve spoken to a number of people who didn’t know that children were being used as soldiers around the world.

IS: Is this the first time you’ve played a journalist?

JC: Yes, it is. I’ve played a couple of wives and moms—I’m playing a mom in the movie I’m shooting now. I played a documentary filmmaker in Little Children. My character in House of Sand and Fog [2003] was just kind of in limbo. I played an activist in Waking the Dead [2000] years back.

IS: And Requiem for a Dream [2000]?

JC: She was a clothing designer.

IS: Looking back on your career so far, what movies are the ones that have really meant something to you? What are the ones where you think you’ve grown?

JC: There are many, each for different reasons—some of them for the work, some of them for sentimental reasons. For example, Waking the Dead was the first film I worked on where whatever I did felt like my own thing. I was really trying to make something of the part and threw myself into it, so that meant a lot to me. Plus, I was up there in Montreal with Kai, who was just a baby at the time.

IS: Were you alone with Kai at that point?

JC: Yeah, I was in the process of breaking up with his dad, so I was up there on my own with him a lot, and he was coming to the set with me everyday. It was a really special time for me—difficult but very sentimental and nostalgic. And I just loved the people I was working with.

IS: You worked with great actors on this film [Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounson], too.

JC: I did. I also loved being in Africa. We were there for nearly four months.

IS: Was that the first time you’d been?

JC: It was the first time I’d been to Southern Africa. I had been to Northern Africa, but only for a short period of time sightseeing, and I had been to Kenya—in Nairobi and Mombasa—but years ago as a teenager to shoot some commercial or something, so this trip was a different experience for me.

IS: Where did you shoot?

JC: Our first location was in South Africa, south of Durban, along the coast. We stayed in a place called Southbroom. It is sort of a golfing community with lots of security fences and manicured lawns—it’s gorgeous, really lush with beautiful beaches, but I found it to be uncomfortable. Mildred, this woman who worked in the house where we stayed, insisted on calling Paul [Bettany, Connelly’s husband] “Master,” which was uncomfortable for us. We found the paranoia about safety and security very strange. People didn’t want you to go anywhere by yourself. At the house where I stayed, the bedrooms were basically caged. There was a gate that you locked so your bed was behind a gate in your bedroom, separated from the rest of the house. And there were gates on the windows.

IS: That obsession with security is something I know well from growing up there. Where did you go next?

JC: After that we were in Mozambique, we stayed in Maputo, which I liked. It was . . . hold on a second . . . [speaking to her son, Stellan, who has just entered the room] Hi, sweetheart. What are you doing? You’re Darth Vader now? We were just talking about how you were Batman and Spider-Man and a Power Ranger. . . . Bye. [to Sischy] Okay, I’m back.

IS: [laughs] Back to Maputo. Fewer cages? Remember, they had a bunch of major movie stars, so that’s another reason they put you in cages. People would like to do that in America, too. [Connelly laughs] So you liked Mozambique?

JC: Yes. It was just a really different vibe.

IS: It has such a different history.

JC: Sure, Maputo is a city that’s really struggling in the aftermath of revolution, and it’s a mess in terms of basic things—water, sewage, poverty, orphans, AIDS. It needs help, but you feel maybe it’s going somewhere, and it doesn’t feel locked into this old pattern. Plus, it had great music and a thriving nightlife, and the fact that there weren’t walls hiding things like a pile of trash felt more honest. After that, I had some time off—the kids were over and Paul was over, so we travelled to Botswana, which as beautiful.

IS: Do you and Paul try to trade off projects, so you don’t constantly have to be apart?

JC: Yes. Paul wasn’t filming when I was over there—he had to do some press for The Da Vinci Code, so he had to leave a few times, but that’s generally how we try to do it. He’s actually leaving tomorrow to do a job, then I wrap up after another week or two, so I’ll be free to fly over to him and bring the kids.

IS: Is Kai in school, or is he homeschooled?

JC: No, he’s in school in the fourth grade, so that’s another factor. He’s also got a dad here in the States, and it’s important to us to support that relationship, so we don’t want to pull him away for three or four months. And it’s important to me that he has his relationship with his friends at school and with the school itself. We try and strike a balance. I try not to be selfish about it, though I would love to put them in my pocket.

IS: What can you tell me about the film you’re working on currently? Who’s directing it?

JC: Terry George—he did Hotel Rwanda, and In the Name of the Father [1993] with Jim Sheridan. I adore him—he’s a really great guy.

IS: And you play a mother who experiences the loss of a child?

JC: Well, the film is based on the book called Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz and it’s about two families—one that has lost a child in this car accident, and then the driver who is responsible. So it has both sides. It’s a great cast—Joaquin Phoenix, who plays my husband, and Mark Ruffalo and Mira Sorvino. Elle Fanning plays our daughter.

IS: What a serious little actress, huh?

JC: Yeah, really great.

IS: You were a child actress yourself?

JC: I was, though not quite that young. I think Elle has been working since she was a baby—that’s a different league of child actor.

IS: How old were you when it started?

JC: [laughs] The way you phrase it makes it sound like a horrible affliction or something, like a rash. [laughs] It started when I was 9 or 10, I think.

IS: And you wanted it?

JC: I don’t know. I didn’t actually pursue it. I don’t think I really resisted, but it wasn’t my idea.

IS: So I heard earlier that Darth Vader was in the room.

JC: Darth Vader was in the room, but he’s now walked out. I think he came in to show me his stern face and frighten me with his Darth Vader breathing. [laughs]

IS: And if I said to Darth, “Which character would you like Mom to be today?” who do you think he’d say?

JC: He’s been asking me to be Robin, as in Batman’s sidekick. He’s been trying to pawn that one on pretty much everyone in the family.

IS: Do you think anyone’s going to bite?

JC: No one has so far. [laughs] Sometimes he asks me to be different Power Rangers—never Red Ranger, he’s always that one—but he’s asked me to be Black Ranger.

IS: So he doesn’t give you lady parts, huh? Maybe he knows that’s your day job.

JC: He doesn’t like that part of my job. He doesn’t like the hair and makeup thing. He’s come to a couple photo shoots and he’s really outspoken about hair and makeup choices: “I don’t like that makeup! I don’t like that dress!” [laughs]

IS: Well, I hope he liked the dresses you wore for us.

JC: Actually he did. He came to that photo shoot and there were some fabrics that were left over that the stylist very kindly let him have and that we turned into capes. Now Stellan and I each have capes as a reminder of that day.