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
