Sissy Spacek, the muse of independent film-makers since her 1973 début in Badlands, still has the integrity she started out with. In her latest film - for which she won a Best Actress Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination - she even ended up working as a set designer, writes Richard Grant.
Sissy Spacek's eyes are mesmerising up close: almond-shaped, feline, a pale cornflower shade of blue, and slightly spooky. Her freckles are less pronounced than they used to be, back in her heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s, when she was the reigning muse of independent film-makers, and nominated five times for an Academy Award (she won an Oscar in 1980 for her portrayal of country singer Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter).
What drew the auteurs - Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph - to Spacek was her strikingly unconventional screen presence. With her tiny, waifish frame, her freckles and little girl's features, she looked like a runaway stepchild from a pioneer farm, but she held your eyes like a movie star. She fascinated you. You wanted to reach out to protect her, but there was something weird and unsettling that made you draw back.
In Badlands (1973), Spacek's first lead role, Malick used her as a symbol of the American heartland gone awry. In Carrie (1976), De Palma cast her as a tormented schoolgirl with supernatural powers. Those days are long gone now, and she has branched out into many different roles, but that pale, slightly unnerving luminescence is still there in her eyes. Even in more mainstream films, she is somehow set apart, as if in her own world. Her life outside work is laid-back, down-home, resolutely un-Hollywood. Since 1978, she and her husband have lived on a horse farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She drives a pick-up truck and grows her own vegetables. For all that, she is a movie professional.
We face each other across a coffee table in a Beverly Hills hotel suite. She's here to talk about her new film, In The Bedroom, for which she has just won a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination. She is sweet and apologetic, helpful and charming, and a good conversationalist. Mainly, we talk about acting, this extraordinary talent she has for becoming someone else. I want to know how she does it and what it feels like. Where, exactly, is her conscious mind - her self - when she is emoting in character? "For me, what I strive for is to be completely lost in the moment, to get swept away by whatever is happening in the scene," she says. She speaks with a soft, subdued, mellifluous Southern accent (she is from the woodlands of east Texas). "It doesn't always work. Sometimes, that conscious mind you talk about, and it sits right back here" - she touches the base of her skull - "will be thinking, 'That line was bad', or, 'I missed my mark', and then you're usually in trouble. You're falling back on whatever acting technique you might have learned through the years."
She has never performed on stage. Instead, her talent is for becoming someone else for a few minutes, then waiting two hours or so, then slotting back into character.
"I've always thought it's like catching a moving train. You see the tracks, you know the train is coming, you try to get up to speed, and when the train comes, you want it to take you away. What I live for in film-acting is to do a scene and then think, 'What just happened? Where am I?' You don't remember anything, it just was. Then they'll say, 'Okay, match what you just did, we're going to shoot it again,' and you're like, 'What did I do?'
"I don't start out thinking, 'I've got to become this woman.' I think, 'I've got to find this woman inside myself.' It's just a technique, a psychological trick, to use the experiences and feelings from your own life and convince yourself that they are hers. It's all just rig-a-marole," she says, with quirky Southern pronunciation, "but it helps you connect into the emotional life of the character."
At this stage of her career, with 40-odd films under her belt (if you count the made-for-TV work), Spacek is attracted to characters whom she doesn't readily understand: women who are hard to find inside herself.
She wants the challenge, the journey of discovery. Ruth Fowler, the icy, rigid, controlling mother that she plays with such devastating effect in In The Bedroom, is a case in point. "There was so much I didn't know about her. She grew up in a completely different place from me. I'm southern, she's north-eastern. She's very grown-up, very educated, very civilised. She's extremely reserved, which is so totally unlike me. As an actor, I try to live life with complete abandon, and just feel everything as intensely as I can. And be cognisant of what I'm feeling."
It is hard to describe the film without spoiling it for potential viewers. The setting is a small town in Maine, the genre is domestic drama. Ruth teaches choir at the local school. Her husband, played by English actor Tom Wilkinson (in a radical departure from his work in The Full Monty), is a dull, affable American doctor. In the face of harrowing events, they struggle to cling to normality, but it doesn't work, and dark, violent deeds ensue. The director and co-writer, Todd Field, is an actor (he played Tom Cruise's piano-playing friend in Eyes Wide Shut) and this, his first as a director, is very much an actor's film.
Spacek, Wilkinson, Nick Stahl (as their son) and Marisa Tomei (as his lover) are given plenty of time and space to explore the nuances and intricacies of their characters. But Field is not after big, camera-hogging performances.
Everything is subtle, muted, unhurried, rigorously unsentimental. One gets the feeling that Field would rather hang himself than commit a cinematic cliché.
For most of the film, Ruth keeps her emotions - anger, bitterness, grief, loathing - under strict control. It is uncanny how Spacek can do so little with her exterior, and keep us so minutely informed about the war going on inside her.
What keeps you watching, in large part, is wondering when and how she is going to explode. The first sign is a vicious, backhand slap that comes out of nowhere and cracks across the face of an undeserving Marisa Tomei.
Poor Tomei; when they filmed the scene, she told Sissy not to hold back, but she wasn't expecting eight takes. "She was a really good sport about it, but I felt awful. I mean, she had a bag of ice on her face, to keep the swelling down between takes. And that was our first scene together."
Ruth is not a likeable woman - even her husband and son don't trust her - and by the end of the film she has revealed her worst colours. Spacek knew she had to find Ruth's sympathetic qualities, or risk playing her as a villain. "I had to like her. I had to love her. I didn't see her as just a downright controlling, manipulative, mean person. In the end, of course, she becomes Lady Macbeth, but I think it crept up on her."
Spacek did the film for almost no money; a token pay cheque. When the production designer quit, saying it was impossible to do the job on such a tight budget, she stepped into the breach, along with Field's wife, and took over most of his duties, putting in 14- and 15-hour days.
This is how she likes to work: in the thick of things, busy and energetic, totally consumed. It makes it easier to get out of herself and into the character. When she wasn't decorating sets with begged and borrowed props, or hammering in nails, or sending her daughters out to look for curtains, she was interrogating Field about Ruth. "It took me the whole shoot to understand her. Even now, I'm still learning more about who she is."
The striking thing is how few bad films Spacek has made. Some of them didn't turn out as well as she thought they would, but she's never done hackwork for an easy payday. She's never appeared in a blockbuster, or a "vehicle" movie, which makes her more convincing than most actors when she talks about her artistic integrity. She has also been lucky, as she readily admits. Her talent was recognised early, her first film was a classic, so she has been able to pick and choose, rather than taking any work she could get. And one should never discount the influence of driving ambition, which she possessed in plenty.
After Crimes Of The Heart (1986), which collected Oscar nomination number five, she took four years off: she'd been working like a demon since Badlands, and her second daughter was on the way. It was time to put her energies into motherhood. When she started work again in the 1990s, it was in a different way. She averaged a part a year, usually in a supporting role, and often for friends.
Her husband has been a friend of David Lynch since high school, and in 1999 she played a supporting role in his The Straight Story, as the speech-impaired daughter of a man who drives 300 miles on a lawnmower to see his dying brother.
In other words, she's been living a relatively low-key life, tilted towards her two teenage daughters, the farm, the horses, the dogs and the cat. And now, with the success of In The Bedroom, she suddenly finds herself dealing with the full glare of the limelight, facing the flashbulbs again at the age of 52.
Already she has won the best female actor award from the American Film Institute; best actress awards from the New York and Los Angeles film critics' circles and a joint best acting award, with Wilkinson, from the Sundance film festival. As an actress, artistic integrity has been her goal. She stuck to it unwaveringly through the 1980s and 1990s, when so many actors decided it wasn't that important after all. It has taken a strong will, a shrewd intelligence about directors and scripts, and this driving, ambitious energy that hums beneath her surface.
A few days after our interview, I talked to Todd Field, who said he was amazed by Spacek's passion on set, the way she mined him for information about Ruth Fowler: "She wanted every detail of this woman's life, all the way back to her college years, and childhood. It is very, very rare to see an actor go after a character like that, especially after 30 years at the top of the business. Then, of course, I realised this was why she had been up there so long."
- (Guardian Service)
In The Bedroom is on general release