Daily Archives: March 9, 2011

Australian actress Mia Wasikowska had, by any estimate, a pretty good 2010: taking the lead in Tim Burton‘s money-making “Alice in Wonderland,” followed by a part in the high-powered ensemble of “The Kids Are All Right.” Now Wasikowska’s the title lead in Cary Fukunaga’s new adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.” Talking with Wasikowska in Los Angeles, I asked her, only half-jokingly, if after “Alice” and “Eyre,” there are any other Victorian works of literature she’s due to star in next. She laughed: “I don’t know, we’ll see. Yeah, there does seem to be a trend.”

And it’s a trend fate seems to be endorsing. “I was reading (“Jane Eyre”) after I’d finished filming ‘Alice.’ It was the first time I went back to Australia without having to go back to school, so I was at a loss. I made a list of 10 classics that I thought I should read, and ‘Jane Eyre’ was on the list. … So I started reading it, and I was up to the fifth chapter, (when) I e-mailed my agent, and I asked, ‘Is there a script around? Is anyone developing the project?’ She said, ‘No, not at the moment.’ There wasn’t anything at the time, but literally two months later she e-mailed me the script. Then I met Cary. It was a case of really good timing.”

Wasikowska may have had great timing, but that didn’t mean that the film wasn’t going to present challenges. “The book is 500 pages of Jane’s internal monologue. Everything we know is because of what we’re being told (by) her, that she’s observing. She has so much going on in her mind. The challenge with adapting it for the screen is you’ve got a limited amount of time to have actual dialogue scenes, and you can’t have Jane talking to herself the whole movie. How do you transfer all of that thought and opinion and emotion and everything she sees and experiences that we hear in the book into a visual? How do we see all that stuff? It was a case of knowing precisely what she’s thinking in those moments and hoping that comes across.”

There were also moments where Wasikowska has to play up the bumps-in-the-night uneasiness of the material. I asked if she, at times, felt as if she were making a horror film.”That’s what I loved about it, because the book is incredibly dark, and the Brontës were really dark writers for their time, anyway. As female writers, the context of their book, there’s a lot of mystery, and it’s all about the unknown and the unseen and the stuff we don’t know. I feel like Cary did an excellent job of bringing in all that: all the mystery in it, and we’re not sure what is going on.”

–From my article at The Rundown

Even more terrifying for Mia Wasikowska than ”Jane Eyre“‘s moments of madness and horror? The combination of Victorian costuming and English weather. “There is no way that you can’t think about or be conscious of the costumes of that time. The corset really gives you an understanding of the repression that women were under. I can’t really bend down to pick stuff up, and you can only reach your arm up so high because there’s a flap on your arm. The restriction isn’t just here: It restricts your whole body. It’s excellent in order to really physically embody the character and understand that.” Wasikowska laughed. “As Mia, it sucks.”

Equally un-fun? Portraying emotionally tormented races across the windswept moors of England in the film’s opening moments. Was that as cold, I asked, as it looked? “Very cold,” she said. “I remember specifically, that was Day 2, and I think I got hypothermia. It’s not hard to imagine how horrible that would be, because it’s freezing and they have the rain towers pouring on you. Then the clothes weight an extra 20 pounds. It’s very, very cold. It’s hard enough standing on a moor dressed up in modern-day North Face clothes, let alone in the rain and in 20 pounds of petticoats.”

On a lighter note, I asked Wasikowska about her co-star Michael Fassbender, who plays Mr. Rochester. When doing scenes with Michael Fassbender, which counters his handsomeness more: What a jerk Rochester is, or those ludicrous sideburns? Wasikowska smiled. “The chops are all I have against the man,” she said. “It’s really funny. I had so much fun with Michael. He’s, as you know, an incredible actor. From the first day of rehearsals we got along so well, and we were able to encounter the intensity of the material with a lot of fun, and then take that energy and channel it into the scenes.”

Of course, it wasn’t all fun. Jane is, for lack of a better word, a feminist — even if she’s living in a time hundreds of years before that word even existed. And portraying that was an important objective for Wasikowska. “It’s rare even now for someone to have such individual thought and such strength of character, let alone in that time,” she said. “She’s such an incredible character, and she has such a strong sense of self and who she is and was born with an innate sense of self-respect. There’s something inside of her that believes she’s worthy of having a good life and being treated well and respected and finding her equal. She definitely won’t compromise herself for anybody else, which is so important for young women — and, really, anybody — to remember, because when you fall in love with somebody, you’re at your most vulnerable. It’s very easy for even people who are very strong to feel the need to compromise themselves for their partner or something like that. Jane never does that, and in the end she’s rewarded for it. It takes a lot of bravery to do that.”

–From my article at The Rundown