FILM preview
Point the finger
Having survived the dinosaurs of The Lost World, JULIANNE MOORE is back in indie-land for The Myth Of Fingerprints. Words:
Hannah Fries
Julianne Moore and Bart Freundlich have been livmg in hotel rooms for weeks now, promoting, dysfunctional family drama The Myth Of Fingerprints. They were planning to finish up with a romantic weekend in Paris, but somehow they don't feel like it. 'You know when you’re so tired you just can't do something?’ asks Freundlich.
The 27-year-old New York director is brimming wrth confidence. After spending three years writing The Myth Of Fingerprints, he pulled off the rare feat of getting his film made and the rarer feat of attracting a very fine cast of actors, including two-times Academy Award nominee Roy Scheider. Not so long ago, he was working in hotels and had only a short film and documentary to his name.
Moore - the red-haired star of Short Cuts, Safe and The Lost World — certainly thinks Freundlich has something speCial. When she comes to
join him on the sofa, the room takes on a soft glow. Six months pregnant with their baby, Moore swaps her famously glacral screen presence for an abundance of smiley enthusiasm. ‘l was attracted to The Myth Of Fingerprints by the script,’ she explains. 'lt's really beautiful, and everybody’s so finely drawn. There’s this diversity of voice within the schpt.’
Moore is not a snooty actress. Her previous movie was Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster sequel to Jurassic Park, and she says that studio films and independent projects are ’not that different in intent and purpose when you’re working on them’. The only films she won't watch are those ’vvith just men in them’. However, half an hour in the company of Moore and Freundlich leaves one in no doubt that, as artists, they are both drawn to complex, confused characters
’She's extraordrnary,’ says the actress of her character in The Myth 0/ Fingerprints, the hostile and bitter Mia. ’With a character like this, your expectations are that you’re going to discover what a wonderful, soft, sweet person she is - which you ordinarily do. But in this case, when she has a revelation, it's a minor one. I thought that was so real. It’s often a lifetime that leads up to somebody’s great unhappiness, not some seminal event that you can sit down and explain in a paragraph.’
The cheerful mood is unaffected by such words, and it seems a fair bet that Moore and Freundlich are looking
Hit or myth: Julianne Moore in The Myth 0f Fingerprints
to their future at the moment Today is Moore's last on the interVIew tow, and she plans to go home, prepare for the baby, and watch her next two movres come out — Boogie Nights and the Coen brothers' latest, The Big Lebowskr. Freundlich is set to take on a further fourteen Cities in ten days, and then he wants to finish his latest screenplay.
’l think it's bad to sit With the same thing for too lorirj,’ he says 'Like people keep their .—'\caderriy Awards on their dining morn tables and talk about that for the rest (if “it‘ll lives. I really am eXCIted to tic-t "'t to (form) something differi-iit
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