She was 24 when she went to audition for the Coen brothers' debut movie Blood Simple. It was her first movie audition and she was just out of Yale University School of Drama, where, as a preacher's daughter, she attended on a scholarship.
Ethan was her age, Joel just three years older and they sat with a huge tray of cigarette butts between them, while they expostulated about story values. By the end, she got the lead role. Later, Joel and she married.
Several major careers were launched along the way (along with the Coens and Frances McDormand, the movie featured director of photography Barry Sonnenfeld, later the director of Men in Black and Get Shorty). Though McDormand continues to be associated with the Coen brothers, thanks largely to Blood Simple and Fargo, for which she won an Oscar, her career has fanned out.
Her breakthrough role was her Oscar-nominated performance as a Klansman's wife in Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning. Across the board, she is, along with her onetime roommate Holly Hunter, an actress of choice among Hollywood's better directors. Her parts include roles in Sam Raimi's Darkman, John Sayles's Lone Star, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Ken Loach's Northern Ireland drama Hidden Agenda, Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous and Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys. As well, she has played A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway and Oedipus off-Broadway.
Now she's 45, and this Fridaywill see the release of Laurel Canyon, the sophomore film from a young American director, Lisa Cholodenko. Cholodenko made a splash in 1997 with her debut film, High Art, a drama about a young student and her lesbian relationship with a troubled photographer (played by Ally Sheedy).
In Laurel Canyon, McDormand plays Jane, a boomer-aged rock 'n' roll record producer and a sexual free spirit. She's a source of major exasperation to her strait-laced psychiatrist son (played by Christian Bale).
When his fiancée (Kate Beckinsale) is attracted to mom's world, a family meltdown ensues.
McDormand, dressed in a white pant suit, with a travel case next to her packed for her flight home, is visibly weary from a long day. She's tired, and anxious to get home to her husband and son Pedro, and she makes no particular effort to be ingratiating: "What do you need to know?" she says, as she sits down and unscrews the top of a water bottle.
The question leads to another about her feeling about interviews:
"Well, I really like my work in this film and I want people to see it. And I want people to see Lisa's work because it's really good. But, no -- press has always been a bit of a . . . It was a bit of a shock when I learned it was part of the job, though it really isn't part of the job of acting. I don't mind having conversations. Love having conversations."
The conversation begins around the question of how a half-dozen actors -- English and East-Coast American, of different ages and from different performance traditions -- can be thrown into a mix to show a specific social environment of Southern California.
"What's interesting to me about Laurel Canyon is that it's about two worlds at the same time. One's cool and blue -- the medical world -- and one's warm and yellow -- the music world -- and the two combine.
"Kate and Christian are British actors playing Americans; Alessandro [Alessandro Nivola, who plays Jane's young rock-style lover]is an American playing British. I'm East Coast playing West Coast. I think that when actors work outside their dialect, it gives them a useful distance. That's perfect for the style of this movie, to either allow them more freedom, or [room]to be more repressed, as is required. It adds a dimension that you can play with."
For McDormand, creating characters -- with no discernible link to her own personality -- is what it's all about:
"That's my agenda. I don't impose it on anyone else, but it's what I care about. I was trained in the theatre and it's about make-believe and pretending. I've never wanted to be a movie star playing some version of my personality and never intend to be. If the major way an audience perceives you is through journalism or publicity, then you've shot yourself in the foot for playing characters."
Most of the time, she says, she carries very little baggage from role to role: "The only time I ever found a problem was when I went to Dublin in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire soon after Fargo and I remember feeling like the Irish audiences hadn't seen my theatre work, and probably little of my film work except for Fargo. I'm not everybody's idea of Blanche Dubois and if they'd seen me as anything, it was as [ Fargo's]Marge Gunnarson. I remember thinking, if they're expecting Marge, I'm in for a hell of a long night."
Though she says she's discovered her primary power lies in her ability to say "no," even that power is limited. Every female actor, she says, has to play a supportive wife or girlfriend at some point to make money. "I don't resent it exactly, but it's not always the most gratifying work. Pretty much, there's jobs and then there's my work. I've usually had the luxury of picking my roles, because I'm financially supported by my partner who works a lot, so I've never had to only play only girlfriends and wives, but when you get those roles, it's hard to raise them up.
"I kind of felt that about Wonder Boys with Curtis Hanson. In the novel, the character had a very interesting eccentricity but, because you can't make a five-hour movie, a lot of things got trimmed. I was intellectually fascinated by the fact that she was a 43-year-old woman, which I was at the time, who was married but pregnant by her lover. To Curtis Hanson's great credit, he got a performance out of me that was more than just about an intellectual fascination."
When it came to Laurel Canyon, she says, engagement wasn't an issue. Cholodenko had "poured a lot of her writerly juice into the character of Jane."
And McDormand had her own agenda in taking the role: "A couple of years ago, a lot of journalists were asking what I wanted to do next and I said, 'nudity.' When I was younger, nudity was an issue to be negotiated around. At 45, it was something I wanted to exploit in a certain sense. I wanted to play a character who is voraciously curious about everything and doesn't pay [in]consequences in her life."
Though McDormand rejects the idea that a performance can be bigger than a movie, to a great extent that's what happens in Laurel Canyon. As Jim Hoberman in The Village Voice wrote: "She makes the most of a role that allows her to swim topless, engage in three-ways and generally obliterate her mortifying turn as the maternal killjoy in Almost Famous."
Perhaps by habit, being married to a director, she tends to see the larger picture. Though Laurel Canyon is only Cholodenko's second feature film, McDormand already has a strong sense of her themes.
"I think some ideas will always be consistent with her -- the transgressive mentor is one. She also has a real strong interest in matters of compromising integrity, how far one will go to achieve one's ambition. She really likes interrupted sexual tension as a story-telling device. Nothing ever quite gets consummated.
"With Laurel Canyon, Lisa's intellectually referencing a kind of Bob Rafelson seventies' sex romp, but with more contemporary anxiety. I understand it personally because that's when I grew up; for the younger actors, I guess it's just cultural nostalgia."
And by the time the conversation comes to a close, and she's ready to fly back home and see Joel and Pedro, she ties the movie to the subject of being a parent:
"Our kids can't grow up in the same world as we did. I don't intend, for example, to get high with my son. I think it's a lot healthier to save your children from seeing you that way, and not to impose your nostalgia on them."
Liam Lacey