Natasha Richardson

Interview By: MarkPlante

Mark Plante@TheCinemaSource.com

Natasha Richardson a star of the stage and screen is also part of a Hollywood power couple; married to actor Liam Neeson. She sits down to talk to the Cinema Source about her newest film Asylum and the challenges that came with that role.

The film, which was originally suppose to be a big budget movie that would team Richardson opposite her husband Liam Neeson, took years to make and led to him leaving the project. Richardson has no hard feelings.

“Well of course it would have been entirely different…. I mean… I don’t know…I just think what’s meant to be is meant to be. It would have been a whole different ball game, but um, by the time we got to make it …um there had been so many set backs… it was such a struggle that I think he was just fed up with the whole process and he was never as passionate about it as I was. It was always sort of more my project then his. So when we got the green-light he was otherwise engaged. He was doing another movie.

When two actors have chemistry opposite each other, it is always a surprise because it’s not easy to find, and Richardson herself can’t imagine what it would have been like had her husband taken on the role of her lover in this film. The media seems so happy to point out that lovers have difficulty translating that passion to screen, but Richardson sees it in a different light.

“Do you think so? I don’t know why… you know all those theories. Some actors have chemistry toghether, some actors don’t. Whether you’re married, friends or hate each others guts. When you work with a really good actor that you feel entirely safe with you can take extraordinary risks that you can’t with an actor who you don’t feel safe with.”

And Richardson felt safe playing this part, feeling so much love for this conflicted, lost soul. She was eager to share that with an audience.

“Well just… she just… she lived in my heart and soul for so long I just empathized with her so much. I don’t know … I

can’t explain completely why… maybe something in my own life …maybe a sense of there…but for the grace of God go I… I think… there’s also women I’ve known who’ve whether out of addiction or unhappy marriages. Whatever…anyway… I just really felt for her,” said Richardson. “And I felt for a woman whose in this very suffocating stuffy class ridden society who has no outlet for her intelligence, her creativity, her sexuality. 1950s …even more in England then in America was a time you know where women worked during the war, then men were fighting the war and then they came home. There was no place for women in the work place. I’m talking about middle class women, obviously not working women. It was a very repressive time for women and they were ‘Stepford Wives’ a lot of them and I think then she just finds herself drawn madly, powerfully drawn to this man. The minute she goes for it it just spirals out of control.

Richardson came on to this project at an early time and was an executive producer on the film. She was eager to give herself to the director fully once the cameras started to roll and was always aware that a film is a director’s vision.

“Well you know, finally, it sounds like making excuses… it’s not… a film is a director’s vision… there are however much input an actor or actress can have it’s always there vision, there are elements of her character that are scenes in the novel that are not in a movie … not totally down to me… I just remember when I read it I just completely understood where this woman came from and I think a lot of women do” said Richardson. “I remember early on we sent it to a director… a very good director… who passed on it right away… said I just can’t do it .. said I can’t bear this woman… I was like what? What you can’t bear her? I love her. I sympathize with her. I think she lets appaling things happen. Is totally led by her heart, not by her head. I just get it. And so I wanted to put myself

in her position, you know share that with people in a way that hopefully in a way that they understand what happens to people in these circumstances.”

If Richardson is trying hard to make the audience love her it’s only because she does love her herself, but that is not a prerequisite to liking the movie.

“For me, yes. I don’t… I love her as a character. I don’t know how much.. I don’t know if …if David McKenize loves her in the same way I do. He has a different more analytical approach to the story then mine …which is a more emotional approach.”

Richardson has a strong work ethic that she inherited from both her parents who work in the bsuiness.
“I was brought up watching both my parents work ..who have a very strong professional work ethic and a way to behave… and do’s and don’ts.. and giving yourself entirely to the work you do.”

That work ethic came in handy when she had to film the spontaneous and very explicit love scenes in the film.

“The degree that these scenes went to… there was a couple of days I was upset…it’s um… I’d have to hurry back to the girls in the makeup trailer and have a bit of a cry because you just… it messes with your head.. it really messes with your head…to do that stuff..I mean which is all well and good between two people…consenting adults in a closed room. To do it with a bunch of other people, to really let yourself go… and you’re pretending. What’s the line? It does… It feels a bit defiling… but I can’t… I’m not complaining… because I wanted to play do this film and play this woman and I got to do it so I don’t want to sound like ‘oh yes poor little me.’ “

The film shot in a mental instiution that closed down just four weeks prior to shooting. Richardson felt that presence and is greatful for that and for being able to tell the story in the time period it was meant to be in.

“I think very much I don’t think this story could happen …when in the early days when I first approached Mason about this

movie… there had been talk atbig Paramount…when this was gonna be a huge big Paramount movie, of making it modern day and Amercian; and I think well then you don’t have a story man. I mean it’s so much about that particular moment in history…this suffocating English society. Now, if you’re in an unhappy marriage you get a divorce or you go out and get a job or you know all sorts of things just wouldn’t make sense. It makes for a more dramatic story that you literally, there are constricting walls built around this woman and then there is an explosion and ah, um, with catastrophic results”

Richardson is currently enjoying time off to be a full time mother to her family of two boys, but has a movie with Ralph Fiennes out this November called The White Countess.