Alexis was great. She was quite literal; she wanted to talk with me about each line and what they meant. She was concerned about showing that while Lolita is, on one level, teasing Don in a sexual way, she’s really trying to show a stranger who had a connection to her mother that there’s something missing for her in terms of a father figure.
And Sharon added some beautiful things. It was Sharon’s idea to be smashed up on top of Don in bed when they wake up in the morning; it was Sharon’s idea to, on leaving, kiss his hand. Her idea was, “What if we reverse the traditional gesture of a man kissing a woman’s hand, and I just take his hand and briefly kiss it in a little gesture to leave him with, showing that I’m not needy or devastated but that I’m appreciating a tender thing that happened between us, and whatever it means is okay.” And that was a perfect solution. I know it’s just a small thing, but all those add up in the film, so they were all considered as we went along.
Q: The other significant male role in the movie, besides Bill’s, is the part of Winston. Did you script the character with Jeffrey Wright in mind, and did the two actors meet up beforehand?
JJ: They didn’t, really. They only met when we first were doing wardrobe stuff and some test footage. That’s the first time I got to have them together.
I did have Jeffrey in my head while I was writing Winston, although Jeffrey’s such an incredible chameleon that it wasn’t any particular part of Jeffrey, except his ability to embody a character that I wanted to not be a stereotype. I wrote hoping he would be interested in creating the character based on what I had written – which he did.
While we were shooting, Jeffrey sometimes would be on his cell phone right before we shot a scene. At one point, I was disturbed and said, “Jeffrey, is everything okay? You were on the phone –” And he’s like, “Yeah yeah, no no; I call the Ethiopian Embassy all the time, and I make up questions to ask them out of the blue, just so I can hear the guy’s accent on the phone.”
We had talked a lot about an Ethiopian accent; it’s a little different from a generic – if there is such a thing – North African accent, and has a slight touch of South Asian to it. Jeffrey’s very meticulous, so he’d be on the phone asking the guy, “Are there any troubles on the Western border?” “No, I don’t know of anything. Why are you asking?” “Oh, I…” Jeffrey would hear the guy, hang up, and go, “Okay, I’m ready.” But, at first, I didn’t know who the hell he was talking to.
Q: Let me ask you about Sherry, and Julie Delpy. There’s an ambiguity about the character. She basically introduces the movie by leaving the movie.
JJ: We don’t really know what her motive is, and Julie was great to work with to make that natural. She has some admittedly ridiculous lines to deliver; the film has some intentional clichés in it, like the French girl’s name is “Sherry,” and a guy goes to see his dead girlfriend in the cemetery in the rain, etc. I tried to use clichés, not to subvert them, exactly, but to put them in the film and have them add up to something not predictably clichéd.
Movie Database
In Theaters
