films."
Fifteen more films like this one?
"I doubt if I or anyone else can make a film like this again," he said. "Film history has shown that this profession of filmmaker has destroyed almost everyone. You can be a cello player until the age of ninety-five. You can be a poet until you die, but the life span of a filmmaker is fifteen years, of making good things. Then they crumble into ashes. I am more than twenty years already. Of course, it has to do with physical strength. For my next project, instead of a film project, I will set out after this film festival is over and walk twenty-five hundred miles on foot."
Where will you go?
He shrugged.
INTRODUCTION
he story about Meryl Streep is that there is really no story. She is a great actress, probably the best of her generation, and has given one wonderful performance after another. The rest of the time she is an admirable wife and mother, utterly free of gossip, scandal, and even anecdote. Those stories that are told about her, even the funny ones, are essentially about how gifted she is, and how much people like her. That's it.
DECEMBER 14, 1983
How does an actress go about preparing to play another human being? And what if the other person's friends are standing by to see what you do? Meryl Streep has played realistic characters before, but they were creations of the filmmakers. Her new role is Karen Silkwood, who really lived and breathed and died a controversial death, and whose lover was standing by to tell Streep what he remembered and suspected about her.
"I didn't try to turn myself into Karen. I just tried to look at what she did," Streep said the other afternoon, slowly and thoughtfully. "I put together every piece of information I could find about her, all the legal hearings and depositions and appeals. I talked a lot with Drew Stephens, who was her lover. I met with her dad. And basically what I figured out is that everybody has a different impression of you. Your lover, mother, coworker, all have these varying and contradictory impressions, and what you get is not the portrait of one person, but of three or four.
"What I finally did was look at the events in her life, and try to understand her from the inside. She worked here, she saw this, here's what she did about it-concentrating on her experiences instead of whatever was going on in her mind. For example, Drew told me she smoked a lot. So do I, in the movie. I decided that for Karen, smoking was real important. There are times in the movie when she feels all alone and smoking is instant gratification. Once when she goes to visit her kids in Texas and she's unhappy, she reaches for that cigarette with a sort of desperation."
Streep's fingers reached for an imaginary cigarette. She was curled up in the corner of a sofa in a Chicago hotel suite. She had decided to come to the Midwest to promote her new movie, Silkwood, because she thought it might appeal more directly to the people out here. It's not so much the story of a controversial nuclear worker, she said, as about a working-class woman and what happened to her when she decided to make trouble.
"Karen Silkwood has come to stand for so many things to so many people that I had to start all over again in trying to play her as a person, not a symbol. I really don't think we can know much about people after they're not there to tell us. All their real, real secrets die with them. At the end of this whole experience of making this movie, I thought about those minutes before Karen's car went off the road, and I missed her. What a waste of life."
But you didn't want to "become" Karen Silkwood, in the sense that a Method actor tries to inhabit a role?
"Not really. But three weeks ago, when I saw the whole movie put together for the first time, I had a sort of a chill. At moments it really felt as if she were walking through the movie. And at the end, that last shot of Karen's gravestone? That's really hers. It's not a fake put up by the prop
Fifteen more films like this one?
"I doubt if I or anyone else can make a film like this again," he said. "Film history has shown that this profession of filmmaker has destroyed almost everyone. You can be a cello player until the age of ninety-five. You can be a poet until you die, but the life span of a filmmaker is fifteen years, of making good things. Then they crumble into ashes. I am more than twenty years already. Of course, it has to do with physical strength. For my next project, instead of a film project, I will set out after this film festival is over and walk twenty-five hundred miles on foot."
Where will you go?
He shrugged.
INTRODUCTION
he story about Meryl Streep is that there is really no story. She is a great actress, probably the best of her generation, and has given one wonderful performance after another. The rest of the time she is an admirable wife and mother, utterly free of gossip, scandal, and even anecdote. Those stories that are told about her, even the funny ones, are essentially about how gifted she is, and how much people like her. That's it.
DECEMBER 14, 1983
How does an actress go about preparing to play another human being? And what if the other person's friends are standing by to see what you do? Meryl Streep has played realistic characters before, but they were creations of the filmmakers. Her new role is Karen Silkwood, who really lived and breathed and died a controversial death, and whose lover was standing by to tell Streep what he remembered and suspected about her.
"I didn't try to turn myself into Karen. I just tried to look at what she did," Streep said the other afternoon, slowly and thoughtfully. "I put together every piece of information I could find about her, all the legal hearings and depositions and appeals. I talked a lot with Drew Stephens, who was her lover. I met with her dad. And basically what I figured out is that everybody has a different impression of you. Your lover, mother, coworker, all have these varying and contradictory impressions, and what you get is not the portrait of one person, but of three or four.
"What I finally did was look at the events in her life, and try to understand her from the inside. She worked here, she saw this, here's what she did about it-concentrating on her experiences instead of whatever was going on in her mind. For example, Drew told me she smoked a lot. So do I, in the movie. I decided that for Karen, smoking was real important. There are times in the movie when she feels all alone and smoking is instant gratification. Once when she goes to visit her kids in Texas and she's unhappy, she reaches for that cigarette with a sort of desperation."
Streep's fingers reached for an imaginary cigarette. She was curled up in the corner of a sofa in a Chicago hotel suite. She had decided to come to the Midwest to promote her new movie, Silkwood, because she thought it might appeal more directly to the people out here. It's not so much the story of a controversial nuclear worker, she said, as about a working-class woman and what happened to her when she decided to make trouble.
"Karen Silkwood has come to stand for so many things to so many people that I had to start all over again in trying to play her as a person, not a symbol. I really don't think we can know much about people after they're not there to tell us. All their real, real secrets die with them. At the end of this whole experience of making this movie, I thought about those minutes before Karen's car went off the road, and I missed her. What a waste of life."
But you didn't want to "become" Karen Silkwood, in the sense that a Method actor tries to inhabit a role?
"Not really. But three weeks ago, when I saw the whole movie put together for the first time, I had a sort of a chill. At moments it really felt as if she were walking through the movie. And at the end, that last shot of Karen's gravestone? That's really hers. It's not a fake put up by the prop
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