Susan Sarandon

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Susan Sarandon is one of Hollywood's best actresses. However, her ride to that status has not been the road most travelled.

In her 30+ year career, Sarandon went from the unlikeliest of starts as Janet Weiss in the cult classic musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show to garnering four Best Actress Oscar nods for the films Atlantic City, Thelma & Louise, Lorenzo's Oil, and The Client and winning one for Dead Man Walking. At age 61, Sarandon has built a fantastic career on making left turns and it's not just in the case of her noted political activism.

The first showing of that was for her notable role as villain Queen Narissa in the Disney animation/live-action hybrid fairy tale Enchanted. Now Susan makes her most radical shift in gear quite literally with her most unlikely role as Mom Racer in The Wachowski Brothers long-awaited film adaptation of the classic late 1960's Japanese TV anime Speed Racer.

The film could not be anymore different from anything Sarandon had worked on previously in her long career, as it was filmed almost entirely on green screen. However, even more challenging than that was working with the labyrinth minds that are Andy and Larry Wachowski.

'Even when they told me, I didn't understand what they were talking about. So I said, 'Stop, I'll do it,.'' she remarks, 'They were like talking techno because they invented everything, so you really needed to take a Kiekergardian leap of faith and say, 'Pepper, if I'm going to do something like this, it really should be with these guys.' Because they are the best and they also have a hidden, in the storytelling, passion for the things they are saying.'

'So in their storytelling, there's this hidden idea of the corporate takeover of sports and the value of the family,' Sarandon adds, 'They wanted the family to be very, very important. We were going to carry the emotional heart of the film because they didn't want that to get lost. But when they started talking technically about how they were using this and how Andy and Larry was coming in and they were doing this. I got very'I just learned to text recently. I'm a luddite.'

However, Sarandon says she was up to the challenge of working with spectacle-driven auteurs like The Wachowskis.

'If you put your ego aside, it's easy, but no, it's not easy,' Susan notes, 'It's just a different way. Don't you think' If you trust them and you have to jump, sometimes, jumping isn't that easy, but you know they're the best. If we had to work with green screen, they would explain. Sometimes we would forget what was coming before and what was coming after, in terms of flashbacks and things like that that they would have in their head and how it would look.

'They're very specific about playing it very realistically, very low, 'This is a moment when that happens,' she continues, 'And asking you to be very specific in your mind-readings and everything else, because they have the whole thing somehow held between their two brains. I love those guys.'

She also observed of how The Wachowskis as brothers work together as directors.

'The Wachowskis are very different from each other, yet the same. All their cultural, their points'they share them completely,' Sarandon notes, 'It's not like you get them confused as who's which one, because their personas are very specific and very different, but what they're interested in and their language and the films that they like and all their references are completely in sync, so I didn't see any. Any kind of disagreement ever. You'd get your notes separately from each of them and they didn't contradict each other. But they'd have a different way of saying it or kept something. They're very, very specific. You know where your parameters are.'

Sarandon also says she enjoyed immensely working with the film's incredibly diverse cast, including Emile Hirsch, John Goodman, Matthew Fox, and Christina Ricci.

'Kick Gurry had an amazing amount of positive energy,' she notes, 'It was a good group and we had an opportunity to meet actors from all different countries like Rain and Hiro[yuki Sanada] and Benno [F'rmann]. Rain was very special and so good at all those moves. He would pick things up right away and Benno, the German actor, was very interesting. It was like camp for the summer. We are the world.'

Susan is highly noted not only for her acting, but for her work as a feminist and liberal political activist. When we asked her how she managed to approach playing what is essentially on the surface an archetypal subservient housewife/mother character of late 1960's Japan, the actress claims Mom Racer employs hidden strengths that makes her an essential component of the family dynamic.

'I'm kind of moved by her relationship with Pops,' she says, 'He says she's her best friend. At 20, that probably would have sounded like a horrible idea, but now, at my old age, that's probably the way it has to work. More than anything, you have to forgive each other and you have to support each other and I think she isn't the artist that they are.'

'She's one of the people that recognizes what they do as art,' Sarandon adds, 'He's got the genius mind to create these things. The boys have the spirit and the fearlessness and they all are courageous. And she kind of fuels everything and she's not afraid emotionally, where as maybe the males in the family keep things closer to the vest and don't get emotional vocabulary that she has as a woman, as a mom. So it's a kind of nice balance and she chooses. When she does choose to put her foot down, I think they listen because she doesn't do it a lot. She doesn't have to really do it, because she finally says something. I kind of read it that she understands for all the blustering, macho stuff that's coming down. And underneath her, she's very vulnerable emotionally and she kind of takes care of that.'

On the contrary, Susan says the aspect of the family dynamic that was the hardest for her to grasp was characters like mechanic Sparky and the family's inexplicable pet, a chimpanzee named Chim-Chim.

'I don't know where these chimpanzees fit into this. All these other people that living in their house, I don't know where they came from!' Sarandon remarks, 'I'm that kind of person. There's always someone staying at our house for months at a time, for whatever reasons, friends or kids that are in a spot. And I think that she took in Sparky and Trixie's probably there and I don't know where that chimp came from, but Spritle is in somebody's pajamas and he came from somewhere, I don't know, but I don't think it's a big deal for him.'

She adds that working with a real-life chimp to play the role of Chim-Chim was the strangest part of working on Speed Racer.

'It was very funny,' Susan recalls, 'I don't know if there's an un-strange way to do a movie with a chimp that's a part of your family. We just kind of accepted the fact that that was the deal and we went forward. I think he had gotten excited when I was screaming. They told me that that's not really what you're supposed to do.'

'They try to top you,' she continues, 'A chimp never has anybody on the same level. You're either above or below and so they're constantly trying to figure out is where you are. He was flailing around a few times and that's the first sign that he's feeling tense.'

Susan Sarandon has had a long, diverse array of roles over her long career. However, as we closed, she quips that her favorite roles of all times to do are still always the antagonists.

'I just played a really bad mother with my own daughter, so that was really fun. I got to say horrible things to her,' Sarandon says, 'I think it's always more fun to play a bad person. Hook is always more fun than Peter Pan, because in your life, you try to be decent and you have that burden of sincerity.'

'You lift that away and all hell breaks loose and it's always more fun to play,' she continues, 'In Lovely Bones, I play this woman who says the most horrible things to her family and her grandchildren and she's drinking and smoking and it was a blast. So, it's more challenging to be good. Isn't that true always''