LAWLESS
Jessica Chastain has had quite a year and it’s not about to stop. She speaks to James Mottram about her next project, appearing in Andrew Dominik’s violent prohibition drama Lawless.
S ince bursting onto the scene with The Tree of Life a year ago, Jessica Chastain is collecting quite a few treasured memories. Like her time on the red carpet at Cannes, holding hands with her Tree of Life co-stars Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. ‘I’d never done anything like that and they were very protective,’ she explains. ‘My whole body was shaking, and they were holding me up. Whenever I see a picture of that, it’s emotional because it’s the beginning of this journey for me.’
It’s a journey that has since seen this striking red-head star in a host of i lms – Israeli thriller The Debt, the sublime Take Shelter and Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus among them – and travel to the Oscars. Nominated for her breezy southern belle in last year’s breakout hit The Help, she took her grandmother to the awards as her date – another keep-sake moment. ‘Her mouth was just open the whole time – she was so excited. It was really emotional for me to share that with her, because she took me to my i rst play when I was a little girl.’ Her grandma aside, the California-raised Chastain, 35, has been very careful about who she exposes to the glare of publicity. Such as her younger siblings. ‘I have a little brother and sister in high school and none of their friends know that I’m in the business – still. It’s been very important to my family to keep it private. We don’t want anyone treating my siblings differently. I’ve also heard stories where it’s hard to go home for Christmas, when people start to know where someone’s family is.’
Still, it’s going to be harder to maintain this if she keeps going the way she is. Already this year, she’s i lmed Kathryn Bigelow’s forthcoming Osama bin Laden movie Zero Dark Thirty. Before that, there’s Lawless, a 1920s prohibition gangster i lm. The true story of the Bondurant brothers, Chastain plays Maggie, ‘the only gun moll in the i lm’, who hooks up with this trio of rural bootleggers. ‘They are not experienced with women,’ she notes, ‘though they’re very experienced with violence.’
Co-starring Guy Pearce, Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf, Chastain had a remarkable research resource close to hand. Having just worked with director Ami Canaan Mann on Texas Killing Fields, it meant Chastain had access to her father, Michael Mann. Useful, when you consider his last i lm was 2009’s John Dillinger tale Public Enemies. ‘He wanted to sit down with me, and he gave me books, and all this research he’d done. So he was very generous that way.’ Such has been the impact Chastain has made, in recent months she’s become as known for the things she’s had to drop out of. The Tom Cruise sci-i Oblivion, Iron Man 3, and Princess Diana biopic Caught In Flight have all seen Chastain attached, then not. Heading instead to Broadway next for The Heiress, one thing’s for sure – she’s not going to be pushed around by agents. ‘I’m the softie on the outside,’ she smiles, ‘and then you realise when you get to know me that I’m tough.’
Lawless is on general release from Fri 7 Sep.
HOLY MOTORS French i lmmaker Leos Carax is an acquired taste. Critically acclaimed but marginalised by any kind of real international success his trajectory through the 1980s and 1990s was marked by a poetic desire to depict love in all its torture, lust and ugliness. Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder without the work ethic his i lms i ll that slender cinematic gap between compulsion and delusion, madness and sentimentality towards the grand themes. Anyone who has seen his tales of debased amour fou: Boy Meets Girl, The Lovers on the Bridge and particularly Pola X can stand testimony to this. Holy Motors, his i rst major work in 13 years is the work of a i lmmaker slightly mellowed by the passing years but not seduced by the seclusion and meditative space that time has given him. In short, it’s every bit as bonkers as his previous forays. Essentially a blackly comic riff on theories of parallel universes, Holy Motors is deranged, compelling and beholden of its own curious outsiderness. Any i lm that features the great actor, i lmmaker, screenwriter, musician and singer Michel Piccoli and Kylie Minogue also deserves your attention. (Paul Dale) ■ Selected release from Fri 28 Sep.
ANNA KARENINA Keira Knightley reunites with her Pride and Prejudice/Atonement director Joe Wright for yet another attempt on the frequently i lmed Leo Tolstoy novel, a classic story of ‘girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy, girl- meets-train’. This time around, heavyweight stage and screen scribe Tom Stoppard takes responsibility for the adaptation, hopefully injecting the romantic, tragic dalliances of 19th century Russian high society with the panache he brought to Shakespeare In Love. And fresh from his unexpected success with Chemical Brothers-scored espionage drama Hanna, Wright is on form to pull out all the requisite visual stops. Some of the casting may raise an eyebrow, while Knightley has the porcelain look for Anna, Jude Law in a goatee is no one’s idea of Anna’s cold i rst husband Alexei, and Aaron ‘Kick Ass’ Johnson looks like he fell into a dressing-up box as her lover, Count Vronsky. However, Kelly Macdonald and Emily Watson lead a strong supporting cast, and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey has given the i lm a lush, warm, chocolate-box look, so Anna Karenina will at least provide an illustrated crash course for those who can’t get through the book. (Eddie Harrison). ■ General release from Fri 7 Sep.
23 Aug–20 Sep 2012 THE LIST 17