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May 2009 

Return to Table of Contents May 2009

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Interview: Rachel Weisz
Rachel Gets her Quirk on

Prepare to be befuddled, bewildered and bemused. Rachel Weisz’s conman caper The Brothers Bloom is a puzzle of a movie that had even its star perplexed


By Marni Weisz

Rachel Weisz admits she was confused while making The Brothers Bloom, a conman caper which will come out this spring. “Permanently confused,” she says.

 

Which is appropriate, since — for the most part — the audience doesn’t have a clue what’s going on either. That’s not a negative criticism of writer-director Rian Johnson’s (Brick) second film. You’re supposed to be confused, as are the characters.


Weisz plays Penelope, a thirtysomething hermit who has spent years and years living alone in her New Jersey mansion. Over that time, she has entertained herself by mastering one bizarre skill after another — ping-pong, skateboarding, juggling, making a pinhole camera out of a watermelon.



Rachel Weisz in The Brothers Bloom
 “There was a lot on the page in terms of unusual, bizarre, great dialogue,” says Weisz in an interview during this past September’s Toronto International Film Festival. “It’s very rare that a character as interesting as Penelope comes along, particularly a female character. You get the clever girls or the beautiful girls. Penelope is so many different things, she’s unpigeonholable as a person.”

 

Penelope’s seeming naiveté and her bottomless bank account make her a natural mark for the Bloom brothers, professional conmen Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and his younger brother, known simply as Bloom (Adrien Brody). Stephen concocts a complicated plan that will see Penelope travel to Europe with the brothers where she’ll put up a huge wad of cash to buy a rare book that doesn’t really exist. But for that plan to work, Bloom has to romance Penelope, and as the story progresses (the movie is very much about the art of storytelling), at least some of Bloom’s feelings for Penelope become real. Or, so we think…

 

And yet, when Weisz says she was “permanently confused” while making this movie, she’s not just talking about the script’s flips and flops. She’s also talking about being perplexed as to how to create a character that is so utterly eccentric.

 

“I don’t know anyone like Penelope,” she says. “I’ve never experienced anything like Penelope. It wasn’t like I could do research, it was just completely living on my wits.”


The role does seem like it was tailor-made for an oddball like Helena Bonham Carter, rather than Weisz, the English rose best known for her Oscar-winning turn in the earnest drama The Constant Gardener, as the adventurous Evelyn Carnahan of the first two Mummy movies, or the sickly heroine from the puzzling melodrama The Fountain, which was directed by her husband Darren Aronofsky.


But, the truth is, Weisz did draw on her own life to create at least one important part of Penelope.


“A lot of the clothes were mine,” she says. “We did a fitting at my flat and I pulled out these big, lace-up clunky boots, which I believe Penelope ends up wearing in every single scene. They’re just wonderful boots. As soon as I put them on I thought these are Penelope boots — and they go with almost nothing [laughs], which was perfect.”


She says that director Johnson (whom Weisz describes as “a bit like a character in his films”) didn’t give her too much instruction. At first, she thought he might want her to give a very stylized performance, because that’s what she’d seen in his first movie, Brick, a film noir set in a high school.


“And he said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. I want it to be dusty,’” recalls Weisz. “And I said, ‘What do you mean by dusty?’ And it turns out what he meant by that — he’s a very imaginative person, so he uses his words in odd ways sometimes — but he meant that he wanted it to be messy, naturalistic. In real life people don’t act in a polished, stylized way, we’re all over the place and messy.”


Shot in Serbia, Montenegro, the Czech Republic and Romania, the film has a lush Old-World look despite being made for relatively little money. “Shooting in Eastern Europe is definitely much cheaper than shooting in America,” says Weisz, “ so it meant that it was a low-budget movie that has incredible production value.”


With those beautiful settings, quirky characters and surprising plot twists, it also looks like a film that would be a lot of fun to make. For Weisz, the most fun was filming an intimate encounter between Penelope and Bloom, on a train, getting drunk, in a thunderstorm that has a powerful aphrodisiac effect on Penelope.


“We did varying degrees of drunkenness,” explains Weisz. “It went from very silly drunk to very serious drunk. I think what ended up in the film was very serious drunk because I think when people get drunk they can take themselves very seriously, which is funny.”


In fact, Weisz thinks that, often, the key to making good comedy is to play it very seriously. “Look at Sacha Baron Cohen,” she says. “He’s taking his characters in-cre-di-bly seriously. He’s committed. Peter Sellers, the same thing. It’s about commitment to what you’re doing.”  

 

Marni Weisz is the editor of Famous

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