-Our first guest tonight is an Emmy-, Golden Globe-,
and Academy Award-winning actress you know from films
such as "Still Alice," "Far From Heaven,"
and "Crazy Stupid Love."
She's currently starring in "Bel Canto,"
which is in select theaters this Friday
and will be available on digital and On Demand.
Let's take a look.
♪♪
-[ Singing in foreign language ]
♪♪
-Please welcome to the show Julianne Moore.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
Welcome.
-Thank you for having me.
-I am thrilled to have you here.
This is one of my favorite books.
I love "Bel Canto." It's a beautiful book.
-A beautiful, beautiful book.
-And you're playing -- anyone could have guessed --
an opera singer. -I am, of course.
Yes, that's right. -Of everything you've taken on,
that must have been a very difficult task.
-Oh, it's so hard. I can't sing.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
-That was Renée Fleming's voice.
That wasn't mine.
But, you know, in order to do that,
you have to try to learn to sing,
so I studied with her coach, and I watched a lot of opera,
and I went to The Met, and I did all this
other stuff to learn about opera.
-Well, I was -- Because in that scene,
you know, it really pushes in on you,
and when I was watching it, I was like, "Oh, you have to --"
You can't just open your mouth and move it.
You have to make your whole body --
-Yeah, yeah, yeah. -It's not just lip-sync video.
-And that was particularly bad because it was outside.
So I would ask them to crank it up as loud as possible
so that people wouldn't hear me.
But because it was outside, we couldn't control the sound.
-So you were -- Were you singing at full volume?
I guess you have to.
-Yeah, it was pretty humiliating.
[ Laughter ]
-Was there ever a situation where people would say,
"Hey, you know what? You're not that bad."
-Paul Weitz, the director, would say that to me.
But I think he's -- -He's very nice.
I know Paul. He's very nice.
-Really nice guy.
But you realize everybody in the sound department can hear you
because you're mic'd, so they're the ones who are there,
holding the boom, going...
[ Laughter ]
-You know, for those who don't know the book,
it's this really, uh, sort of a --
you wouldn't guess from the title
and the fact that you're an opera --
it's this thrilling story about this hostage situation.
-It's based on a true story,
the 1996 hostage situation in Peru at the Japanese embassy.
There wasn't an opera singer there,
so that's invented, but it really is --
It's a political thriller and a love story.
-And one of the other wonderful things,
because of the actual real story,
it's also this wonderful multiethnic cast.
Because it was all these people trapped in an embassy who --
You know, there's --
You know, translator plays a huge role
because people can't communicate.
-And everybody spoke their own language,
so there's Japanese and English and Spanish
and French and German and Polish.
And there was an actress --
actually, a Guatemalan actress --
who just learned Spanish.
So she still spoke Guatemalan sometimes,
and it was an indigenous language.
It was amazing. And nothing --
you know, and Ken Watanabe plays my, I guess, boyfriend?
-Yeah, I'm gonna sign off on boyfriend.
Yeah. [ Laughter ]
-And he only speaks Japanese to me,
and I only speak English to him.
So there are times when we just don't --
we just communicate, you know,
in, like, boyfriend/girlfriend language.
[ Laughter ]
-You know, it was what made it such a beautiful book.
And, yes, a romantic thriller,
well-executed both on the page and in the film,
which is really nice. -Nice.
-You are -- just finished a film in Upstate New York with your --
that your husband directed?
-Long Island. Oyster bay, actually.
In Manhattan and in India.
We were -- and, yeah. All those places.
-And you had visitors --
When you're working on a movie set, sometimes visitors stop by.
They want to see the magic of a film set.
-Well, yeah, and, you know,
Oyster Bay may not seem like the country.
But it is deep, deep country, with lots and lots of,
you know, different kinds of wildlife.
-And this was -- This is an actual video you took
of the -- This would be craft service?
-This is late at night at catering,
after things are being cleared up.
-Okay, gotcha.
Let's see the help you got on the cleanup.
[ Laughter ]
-There they are, yeah.
[ Laughter ]
If you go -- They dip in afterward.
You see them going, like...
[ Laughter ]
"Wait a minute, wait a minute, one more thing down there."
-Yeah. They're like, "Look, we understand
this is a closed set.
We will be out of here in a second."
-Exactly. [ Laughter ]
-We're both gonna grab one more --
we're gonna grab two more things.
-That's right. That's right, yeah.
-You have had some interactions with the wildlife recently.
This was not your only one.
-Yes, we had a really, really exciting thing happen.
I mean, not just the raccoons,
but we had a turtle birth in our pool this summer.
-Okay, so, now, is that something
you only find out once the turtles are there?
-Yeah, yeah, yeah.
-Okay, so you don't see a pregnant turtle walking around.
-No, no, no. Nothing like that.
But they just -- they literally appear.
So what happens is, turtles crawl up,
they crawl into your yard and they lay their eggs somewhere.
And then, when the babies are hatched,
they crawl toward the nearest water source,
because they think that's their environment,
and it just happened to be our pool.
-Okay, gotcha. -[ Laughs ]
-So, it's interesting because if you'd have told me
how many turtles are born at once...
-You wouldn't know, yeah. -I wouldn't know.
That was over what I thought. [ Audience "Ohhs" ]
-That's a lot of turtles, right? -That's a lot of turtles.
-But that's nothing like, you know,
delivering your own child in a lobby.
-Right. -So I'm saying this turtle birth
is nothing to what you experienced.
-No, that's right. My wife had a baby in a lobby.
-That's right, yeah. [ Laughter ]
-And I think, like, I would just say that
that mom turtle did nothing compared to what she did.
-No, nothing compared to what she did.
-Like, that's beautiful grass. -Yes, exactly.
-Yeah. We were nowhere near your pool.
-No! [ Laughter ]
If she'd only had a water source.
-Exactly.
-That's right, you wouldn't have been in the lobby.
-As she was like -- She's like, "The baby's coming.
Get me to Julianne Moore's pool."
I'm like, "We're too far away. We're too far away."
-Not gonna make it. -"I don't know where it is!"
Uh, this is very exciting to me, as well.
'Cause, obviously, our kids are young.
They cannot be involved in our professional life yet,
but your daughter worked on set for the film.
-Yeah, she did. She was a P.A.
and an official --
-It was very nice to see that you did not --
This was not some situation where she was elevated
due to the fact that her father was directing
and her mother was in the film. -No, she's gonna work, man.
-She was working. -She's gonna work.
-This is her job right there. That is real work, right there.
-That's what she's gonna do. [ Laughter ]
-Fully... Fully holding an umbrella.
-Yeah. I was hot. -Yeah.
-I was super, super hot, so somebody's gonna do it.
-Yeah. And I would imagine that would
literally be the only way you could get your daughter
to hold an umbrella over you. [ Laughter ]
Is to hire her. -She's 16.
She's not gonna do that.
But, you know, she had a headset and stuff, too,
and so she took her job very seriously.
She'd be like, "Yeah, no, I have eyes on Julie.
No, she's right here." [ Laughter ]
"I got her. No. Oh, no, no, no. She's 10-1,"
which means that I'm going to the bathroom.
I'm like, "You don't have to tell them everything!"
[ Laughter ]
She's like, "No, I do. That's my job, Mom."
[ Laughter ] Yeah.
-Well, it's so lovely that it's a family affair.
All you guys and then a hundred turtles.
-Exactly. Just us.
-Just us. -Yeah.