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Patricia
Clarkson
Current Releases:
The natural
Patricia Clarkson has defied convention by gaining an Academy Award nomination for a “little” film called Pieces of April. Even more surprisingly though, the film was shot on digital video, traditionally the “poor man’s” medium.
In Pieces of April, Clarkson plays Joy Burns, mother to the eponymous April, played by Katie Holmes (“Dawson’s Creek”, Go, The Singing Detective). As the film opens, Joy who is battling cancer, is living in a small town; while April has moved to New York City and is living with her boyfriend Bobby, played by Derek Luke (Antwone Fisher). It’s Thanksgiving, and April (at Bobby’s urging) has decided to mend some fences with Joy, by inviting her family to spend the holiday with her in the city. So Joy, her husband Jim (Oliver Platt) and family set out on the long drive to NYC.
Of
course, it helped Clarkson’s cause that the writer and director
of the film was Peter Hedges, the award-winning scriptwriter of films
like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and About a Boy.
Clarkson says she knew Hedges for about a year before agreeing to do the film. There was however, no magic in her first steps towards doing the film. “My agent sent me the script,” she says, matter-of-factly. But from there, it was “what he [Hedges] did with the characters” that bowled her over.
“It shocked me,” she says. “I was reading it in LA, and it was like 2 a.m. New York time, and I almost woke my agent to say ‘I’m doing this!’; but I waited till the morning”.
When filming actually started though, there was precious little room to do anything except work. The total shoot was only 16 days, and as Clarkson explains, her “half” of the film was allotted only 8 of those.
“It was a blur,” she recalls. “I was sitting in a car with Oliver Platt for 8 days straight. That was our running joke – because we had no trailers – between takes it’d be like ‘You wanna go to the trailer’ and we’d go and sit in the car. We never left that car”.
The
lack of trailers for the stars wasn’t the only sign this was far
from a big-budget Hollywood production. As Clarkson tells it, “The
production assistant would go get lunch and we’d be like ‘Wow!
Tuna fish sandwiches!’”
“But through all those things, we were happy, because it was that kind of film. We were literally changing in bathrooms, and putting on the wig, you know – it was really brutal. And yet, for me to be playing this character was just odd. We were in such comical circumstances, wherever we were. Like these gas stations – we saw a lot of gas stations!”
Now it can be trying spending that much time in a confined space, but luckily Clarkson and Platt were well matched. “We’ve never worked together before,” she explains, “but we both live in New York and we both know all these same people; so it was like we were old friends.”
The decision to use digital video however allowed the cast a lot more flexibility. “It was great,” Clarkson says; quickly adding “For this film, it was great.” But the rush never let up. “We didn’t get much of a chance to rehearse,” she explains. “I mean, I’d spoken with Peter a little bit, but Peter knows me, he knows everything I’ve ever done. I think he cast us for those reasons. So we literally would just show up and do the scenes.”
They
say comedy is the hardest thing for an actor to do. Clarkson agrees. “They
are, you know. But that phrase is so odd and so strangely apropos for
this film,” she says, laughing. “A real comedy, a true comedy,
an adult comedy, is really hard to do”.
Her confidence in Hedges as a writer is unshakeable. “I don’t think it gets any better than Peter,” she says. And she has some glowing words for his directorial skills too.
“It [Pieces of April] is a testament to his talent as a director; because that’s really where Peter lives as a man, in this deeply emotional space – 24 hours a day. But he really kept us on that line between comedy and sentimentality. And what’s remarkable about this film is how unsentimental it is”.
“I mean, there’s a scene where I come out of the bathroom and I’ve just been really harsh to my daughter and it’s really emotional. I was thinking about [the scene] in a completely different way, but Peter said to me, ‘You’re going to come out of there, and boom, you’re fine’. He took all of that out – everything. And that was purely him, his direction”.
As for the finished product, Clarkson swears that Pieces of April is “everything” she expected it to be. “I wouldn’t even care if nobody liked it, because I’m so happy to be a part of it.”
David Edwards
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