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- Somebody told me on my first job,
try not to ever compare your career to anyone else's.
- And you listened?
- I've never forgotten it.
And it's a highly competitive field that we're in.
You know, you can get, if you let yourself,
I wish I could've played that, you know.
But if you eat yourself up like that,
you destroy something that's very important.
So I think it was a profound piece of advice
because its meant to me that I'm very subjective
about what I choose and I own it.
I own my choices.
- You do.
- You know good and bad, we're the result of all our choices
and we don't have any template, it's just what feels right.
- What felt right about the wife?
- Well first of all I thought it was fascinating,
just I'd never been asked to play a character like that.
But also, I had a lot of questions and I knew
I had to answer those questions in order to play her.
And the big one was why didn't she leave him?
Cause I thought initially that all the women would
jump up and say oh just leave him.
But it was so much more complex than that.
And I had to figure that out.
In order to play her without any kind of judgment.
And it was that journey, but I went into it not knowing
if I'd be able to figure it out.
I've been part of two films that took 14 years to make.
First one was Albert Nobbs and the second one was The Wife.
That was written 14 going on 15 years.
- Why did it take so long?
- It's called the wife.
I don't know, I think it was a difficult subject for,
and it was a real thing that it was actually hard to find
actors who wanted to be in a movie called The Wife.
It's two women writers, the novelist and the screenwriter.
And you know starring a woman or costarring a woman.
Woman editor, costumer designer, so that to me
was amazing serendipitous timing.
But it is a fact that it took 14 years to make.
No one wanted to.
And most of the money, if not all the money,
came from Europe.
- Interesting.
- Also your character in that film,
the importance of her voice, its so powerful.
- Yeah it's a very resonate story.
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You know what I think is important?
And I've thought a lot about it in the context
of the Wife and my mom.
Because my mom was a very interesting, very smart,
actually she never graduated form high school,
she fell in love with my dad when she was 18.
And she at the end of her life, said to me
I feel like I've accomplished nothing.
(sighs)
- I think about that a lot.
Because I think we have our children and all that,
and the nurturing natural thing that we do as women.
And then we have the need for personal fulfillment.
We need to feed our souls and our hearts.
And I think that's what our work does.
So you can do both, and I think both of them are tremendous.
Or not, but to feed your soul.
- You have a choice.
- And that's why I think we're so blessed to do what we do
because basically we tell stories and as we're telling
these stories, we're feeding and refueling ourselves.
And I think you have to do that for yourself.
- This actually made me want to have kids.
(laughter)
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- There's so many wonderful independent films made
and my definition of an independent film is a movie
that almost doesn't get made.
Because it's crazy.
But I think the long term is to get stories
that have a demographic that can then be viable,
to make more stories.
- Thank you for articulating what I was trying to say.
- That is the bottom line.
- Yes.
- And it's up to us to tell just great stories
that have fascinating characters.
- That move people.
- And help them get developed and help them get made
so that there is an audience for it, and that will lead to
more possibilities.
- That's the empathy.
- I mean promoting it as well, that's what we're doing.
You have to carry the thing on your back half the time.
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