Francis McDormand - Question and Answer Session

Francis McDormand - Question and Answer Session

Frances McDormand was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1957. In 1989 she received her first nomination for an Oscar, as a supporting actress in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, and in 1993 she featured in Robert Altman’s massive cast for Short Cuts. In 1996 she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role of Marge Gunderson in Fargo. In 2001 she earned yet another nomination for her work in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. She is married to Ethan Coen.

Frances McDormand: Probably about half the films I saw at the [latest] film festival in New York were digital and the other half were 35mm. I fear that some people may be taken advantage of. A digital film company and technical camera companies can say to young filmmakers, "Here's some money. Here's the equipment. Here's five weeks. Go make a movie."

I don't know if that's a fair way to do it, especially with that company giving the filmmaker equipment. Think of the profit when a $150,000 movie ends up grossing millions. Bad things can happen. Unfair things can happen. ...

I keep hearing about the flexibility of this technology, about being able to move around a little bit more. But I also fear a lot about it being enhanced later.

Question: Since you mentioned the future of film, I've been noticing that many recent American productions have been funded out of Europe. Do you think that this could be perhaps the beginning of a second new Hollywood wave of European film or European funding, making it possible to make these films that the big Hollywood studios simply don't want to touch?

Frances McDormand: I sit in the screening room, and before the film comes on, you sit through five different logos. Or today I saw a film and it said: A Spanish, Russian, French, German, British, Irish - you know, it just kept going - film!. I have also sat through films that had four different languages, so you've got two sets of subtitles. It's been extraordinary. I think that it is the future, and all for the best.

You know, it's a money-making industry. What is "commercial"? And is it necessarily a bad word? Does that automatically mean something bad? I don't think so. You want people to come see your movie, don't you? You can send it out into cyberspace on the computer and hope that it passes in front of people, but from my point of view it's still great to walk into an auditorium like this and see the seats full and see everybody watching a movie.

That being said, I worked on a distribution company's first production. They will be unnamed. We shot it in Spain, they hired a British director, all the heads of the departments were British, but the crew were Spanish.

Everyone on this really excellent Spanish crew had worked as head of their department on other films, but they were now working under British heads of department and so there was a bit of a cultural thing going on and also the director hadn't even learnt how to say hello in Spanish. Three months later he still didn't know how to say "Thank you" in his crew's language. It was a nightmare and a piece-of-shit movie because there was a concept of colonialism: We're going in and we're going to make the movie and we're going to make everybody come along with us, do it our way!

It was interesting because it was cross-cultural - a Spanish story with mainly Irish characters. There were Spanish actors, there were Irish actors, there were British actors, there was even an American actor. It was all in the mix.

The Director-Actor Relationship

Question: This is about the director-actor relationship. A lot of actors I know in film and theatre say they really don't feel safe emotionally with the director. What can a director do to make an actor feel more secure?

Frances McDormand: Well, that's so interesting, because I'm just starting to learn that as an actor. Twenty years ago, when I went in to meet a director I used often to be confronted first by the casting director. I still go to meetings with directors: "So, how can I please you? What do you need from me?" And I realise that I waste so much of my time not learning enough about the person I'm going to be giving that trust to.

As an actor, I know when I'm taking a risk and when I'm not taking a risk. If I'm taking a risk, then I need to know more about how to trust the director with my process, whether it be emotional, psychological, or physical. Sometimes you know you're going to put yourself in physical danger.

Because I was trained in the theatre, I don't need to really know if a director is good with actors. I need to know that a director understands the movie he or she is going to make, because I'm in a service position. I'm serving that director's idea and that director's film. So I need to know. I have worked with Ken Loach, I have worked with Robert Altman, and their boundaries seem to be elastic, they've thought of the fifty ways the material could be improvised... if they want to improvise. But they've always thought of all the ways that it could be done, and then they wait to be surprised.

So I need to know that the director recognises what the boundaries are, and the best way to tell me that is to tell me they know how they're going to edit it - that they're working with an editor who they've worked with before.

I have a prejudice against actors who are purely emotional amoebas. I think that there's a technique involved in acting once an actor has experience behind her or him, and they should know, as an adult, how to protect themselves.

A common mistake made by directors is to say, "I'm going to take you places you've never been before as an actor." Well, in this instance, let's say the film's based on an Arthur Miller play. If the director takes us to places we've never been before, then we're going to lose the experience of being in an Arthur Miller play that's been translated into a film experience. And he doesn't need to take me any other place than his idea of Brooklyn in 1950.

I really appreciate storyboards, although a lot of people don't want that kind of confinement. But at least give me a script! And I don't mean that just facetiously, I mean a literary piece of work, a literary document that I understand not only as a screenplay but that the gaffer understands as a screenplay, the caterer understands as a screenplay - so that everybody has a point of reference. After eighteen hours, or two months of night shoots, you can't see any more and you mutter, "Uhhhh, but I remember, I loved the script."

I think even Mike Leigh has an idea of a script and then improvises over a six-month period with the actors. So it's a commitment, it's kind of more like a theatrical commitment. Which is where he started - he began his career in the theatre. I think [he and the actors] collaborate on the process of writing the screenplay. But it's not to say Mike doesn't have control. He collaborates, but at the end he has control of it. What a great deal he's got going. He's also really smart at putting together a group of people. If you ask for six months' commitment from a group of actors, that's a lot of time. And so if they commit to that, you really have to commit?

I also think that's why a lot of people go back to work with Mike Leigh, because they become addicted to that kind of work. But then some of the most amazing performances that he's had in his films are from people, stage actors particularly, whose work you don't really know. But he gathers his actors together over a six-month period and he develops it during that time, and they each go out and do research, so it's much more like a rehearsal process in the theatre, I think.

Ken Loach doesn't always give a script to actors. When I worked with him on Hidden Agenda, he did give me a finished script, but there've been other projects like the Spanish civil war film, Land and Freedom when the actors received the script each day before they went to work. So as people died in the process nobody knew who was going to die that day! Which is really smart, because they were all living together in one place, and all in love with each other in various forms. And so when they went to the battlefield one of them might say, "You're going to get shot today," Or: "Shit! They're going! The poker game's fucked now!"

When I worked with Ken, I didn't know anything about him. I'd never heard of his work. At the time I was acting in a movie called Darkman, which was a Sam Raimi film, the same Sam Raimi who did Spiderman.

Liam Neeson was playing Darkman and I was playing the girl. At that time I'd spent several days hanging from handcuffs with tape around my mouth, waiting for Darkman to come and take me away. So when I read the script for Ken Loach's film, Hidden Agenda, I didn't grasp it at all. It was about the troubles in Ireland. It took place in Belfast. And it was really complicated, as that political situation is.

The next day I said to Liam Neeson, "Have you ever heard of Ken Loach? Because I've just read this script." And he practically genuflected. And he said, "Do anything you can to meet him." And I thought, "Oh, okay!"

So I did, and I met him. He talked to me for hours about [the political situation in Northern Ireland] and although I still didn't completely get it, I knew that it was going to be the antidote to the way I felt about hanging handcuffed with tape over my mouth.

The Coen Brothers

Frances McDormand: Before I did Fargo, I had worked with Joel and Ethan Coen twice... I met them on Blood Simple, and then I did their second film Raising Arizona, and they wrote Fargo with the character of Marge Gunderson specifically with me in mind. And I'm pretty sure. I might be taking too much credit, but I'm pretty sure. They write roles for a lot of their actor-collaborators, so it's not just because I sleep with them!

I say that and I've used that joke before, but in fact it has a very, very deep truth for me and for both of us. If you're a director and you have a relationship with an actor... you have two actors, you have two directors, whatever. At some point there's a question of nepotism, let's face it. And I think that as a young actor, for me, it was a very specific thing.

By the time Fargo came along, Joel and I had been together for twelve years, so I didn't care any more. Neither of us really cared. But what was interesting that after that, during the whole celebration of the film and the press launch of the film, people were constantly commenting, "Aren't you concerned that you only work with the Coen Brothers?"

I said, "What...! Have you seen my resume? I've worked with Robert Altman, Ken Loach, Alan Parker, all these and a lot of different people before that." But at the end of the day, if I die, and in the New York Times they take care and they say, "Marge Gunderson dies. ..." Okay, I'll take it as my epitaph.

I don't get involved in the process of writing. About the only process that I do get involved in the pre-production of a film that Joel and Ethan are casting, and that's only suggestions over dinner. We go to a lot of theatre together, we see films together, we talk about actors' work, so in that part of the process sometimes I have something to offer.

I didn't get involved in the writing of Fargo. They presented me with the script. They said, "We're writing something and we have a part for you in mind." I didn't get too excited about it, because I learned that lesson a long time ago. I would have liked to have played the part in Miller's Crossing. I was hoping to do the part in The Big Lebowski. You know what I'm saying? I always felt I was right for all the female parts.

So I got to a certain point where it was better not to read the scripts. But somewhere in my actor's soul I had a certain amount of anticipation. AnywayI read the script for Fargo... Okay, thank you so much. So when do we start? Because she comes in halfway through the movie. She's a big, brown, turd-like thing. She doesn't really seem to have a brain...

And it wasn't until the process of shooting the film that I realised what they'd given me.

Question: What about The Man Who Wasn't There, where... a very sexy role..?

Frances McDormand: Did you find me sexy?

Answer: Yes.

Frances McDormand: Oh, that's good. That was a really interesting one. They specifically wanted me to do that. I think what was interesting about that was that finally after kind of practising it in many, many scripts, they finally made a movie about a truly invisible man and they had that kind of theme going through a lot of their film, and they finally made it.

And they also finally made a black-and-white film. They'd kept taking the colour out of every film, asking themselves, "How far can we go? What colours can we get rid of?" All the way through, you know, actually de-saturating the film in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and then finally reached the point where they could make it a black-and-white film.

For me, Doris was a woman in a black-and-white movie, because it wasn't really a character. She was never really a character. For me, it was the blonde bitch in a black-and-white movie. And that is kind of fun to do. I really liked the scene in the courtroom. Because I knew Joel was like this. It was great.

And also because we've all worked with the cinematographer, Roger Deakins, so long. It was so great because he's a very unflappable character. You don't really see him much.

Reading the Screenplay

Question: I'm a writer and one of the most important moments is when the script is given to the actor to read for the first time. So I'm always curious about the way you read a script and you're reading for a particular character, or you're looking at a particular character. How do you read the script? What are you looking for? It's interesting that you said with Marge in Fargo, you didn't see a dimension...

Frances McDormand: That was specific. How do I read a script as an actor and know how to process it, and where to place it and if it's something I want to do? That was different because it was Joel and Ethan. Because I'd seen the roles that they'd written for other people, right? For John Turturro or Steve Buscemi, for example.

It's really hard for me to read scripts. I don't like reading scripts. I love to read, but I like to read novels and I do that for my kind of personal pleasure. So when I have to sit down and read a script, it's sometimes just torture for me. And I'm not sure I really know how to read a script. I know that I'm getting better at it.

Because I'm a female actor and I played a lot of supporting roles, I no longer read it for the part. I read it to see whether or not I think it's the foundation for a good movie. If I get to do a small supporting role, I want to know if it's necessary to the main protagonist, generally a male, sometimes now more females but generally men. So I need to know if the structure of the script cannot do without me. And it usually means because I illuminate something particular about the main male protagonist. Or there's some expositional reason for my character to be there. So I don't get cut out, basically.

Now I think that I read them more because I would like to do a larger role in a film. I haven't for a long time. I made the decision not to work that much because I'm a parent. So it's a lot easier for me to do a [small role] for a month...

But I've started to think, I'm getting bored, there's only so many small supporting roles - girlfriends, wives and sisters - that you can play, so I'm looking for a larger role and that is really difficult, because both for men and women the main protagonists are often the most boring characters. They have to carry such a load.

Question: I also come from a theatrical background and I've just started getting into film since last year. The rehearsal process in theatre is very intense: sometimes you can spend a month, sometimes...

Frances McDormand: If you're lucky!

Question: If you're lucky, exactly. But in film it seems to be a lot briefer. From a director's standpoint, how would you approach the filmmaking rehearsal process?

Frances McDormand: I think you should get used to not rehearsing. Or you do something like Mike Leigh does. That's the two extremes, right? Sometimes you don't have the whole cast to do a read-through of the script, so you have to keep all those little pieces in your mind - all the pieces of that puzzle, like I met that person in that city, and I met that person in that city, and that person in that city, and you put them together somehow in your mind and into the story you want to create.

Or you never compromise and the only people you hire are those who can rehearse. You see, I don't like to rehearse. Now, if it was with Mike Leigh, if I committed to that process...

In the theatre I love rehearsal. The minute an audience comes in, something starts to die, for me, in the process. I love the immediacy of rehearsal, the risk of rehearsal, the camaraderie of a cast. And then the minute an audience comes in, you can feel everybody [tense up] and they're watching their own back. And it's a human thing. Of course they do!

It's all about, "You like me? You like me?" I got that laugh, let me see if I can get that laugh again.

I was in so many audition situations when I was younger, where I was called back repeatedly for a film, and not cast in the film. And then in at least two instances that I know of, the finished film had lines that I'd improvised during the audition. In one instance the main female character had exactly the same hair that I'd had - at the time I had a really bushy blonde kind of curly thing happening! - and the actress, who did not have that kind of hair, was given that style in the film.

I remember after the second time that I'd auditioned with this director and not gotten the job, he called me in yet again. This time there was a point in the audition where he was asking me basically to dry-hump another actor on the floor while he was standing there with the video camera.

I was getting ready to do it and I thought, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Wait! Wait! Hold on, now! Hold on! How about before I do this we write down a little contract - so that if I don't get this job, I at least get a consulting credit in the film. Because I'm feeling a little bit taken advantage of here."

I know that he was using these call-backs as a rehearsal for his film. He was actually writing the script as he was going. It wasn't just about the rehearsal process, it was about getting actors that were gullible enough to come back over and over and over again without being paid, in the hope that they would be cast.

So I'm saying that it made me really mistrustful of rehearsal on movies. I feel a little burned in that respect. If you need rehearsal, it better be specific, you better already know what shots you need - at least from my point of view. You better already know what you plan to do, because you're not going to learn that much in a one-week rehearsal. I don't think you are.

Question: Do you work with a coach... ?

Frances McDormand: No, I think it's dangerous. I've worked with a dialect coach, somebody for accent. But not an acting coach.

Question: And why is it dangerous?

Frances McDormand: Because I think that a lot of actors - and some very, very well-known actors in - become addicted and co-dependent on their coach. It gets to be a very strange relationship and they feel as though they can't act without that person, and that's dangerous. I think that's really dangerous.

It also puts yet another layer between an actor and a director. There's make-up, hair, coach, assistant, manager. You know, it's like you just wave at each other.

Question: Why did you want to be an actress?

Frances McDormand: Why? I don't know how to do anything else. I feel so lucky! Not just because I've gotten to be an actress, but at least, at least once a week, you know, I say to Joel, "We're so lucky!" And it's for so many different things. If I have like the perfect piece of sushi, "Oh, my god! We're so lucky!" And then I've got my boy. He vomits in my hand. "I'm so lucky!"

Standing on the Sidelines

Question: There are some actors who never break character, who never leave the set, and others who just show up and improvise in front of the camera. Where on that sliding scale are you ... ?

Frances McDormand: I stand in for myself. I think that initially the reason they have stand-ins is so the actors can have a break, but also if you're changing scenes they can go and change their clothes and blah, blah, blah. I've done a lot of work with people's stand-ins. For example, the film that was recently here, Something's Gotta Give. Diane Keaton is the main character in the film and her boyfriend's played by Jack Nicholson, and he was hardly ever there, even for her. Jack has seasonal tickets for the Lakers' basketball games and so if they had a game at seven, he got there by... So I did a lot of my work with the first AD, who's not a trained actor.

So that's the two extremes. I stay on the set a lot. I don't like to be alone in a trailer somewhere far away. I like to be on the set. I've found that it's the easiest way to feel as though you're truly collaborating on the whole thing.

When I first started in film, in Blood Simple, there was a scene in it towards the end where there's a chase. My character thinks that she's being pursued by her insane husband, who has a gun. She's just seen her lover shot. She runs into the bathroom. And we shot that scene first in the middle of the whole end of it. And I'd just graduated from drama school. I didn't know how to do a movie, we were never taught how to do a movie.

So, I was standing there, I'd be having my coffee and my cigarette in the morning and I knew the scene, I knew what was coming up and then I started thinking, "She's hysterical. She's just seen her lover shot. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! How am I going to do that all day? I've got to do that all day! I've got to do that... I've got to be at an emotional pitch and then I have to keep doing that for fourteen hours! ... What am I going to do? What am I going to do?"

And I remembered that I'd just finished rehearsing a play in drama school, and the director had felt I wasn't at the right emotional pitch during rehearsal and she had gotten one of the other actors to hold me from behind. She said, "You struggle to get away, and when I think you're in the right emotional state, then I'm going to have him let you go." And I remembered how pissed off that had made me in rehearsal.

So I looked around the crew and the head grip had quite large biceps. Tom. He was also the oldest person on the set, he was around 42 at the time. And I went up to him and I said, "Listen, Tom. I know this is going to sound weird, but I need your help. If you could just hold me from behind, really hard, and don't let go of me until - I'm going to struggle, but don't let go until Joel says, 'Action!' and then let me go. And he said, 'Yes, ma'am.'"

So before every take, and then in between takes, I crawled under a table and then at one point Joel crawled in under the table beside me and he sat there said, "Okay, so the next scene is just a shot of your hand, so I just thought I'd let you know."

You see, I didn't know. I mean, I didn't know. Even if there was a close-up of my hand with the knife, I still thought I should be emotional...

Now I know better. At the end of the day you cannot do that for fourteen hours, five days in a row. If I am on a set, if I know that the next scene that we're shooting is about explaining to someone how I feel about just having to identify my lover who's at the morgue and ... the next scene ... describing how I feel or what I saw, I stay on the set; I sit in the middle of everybody working.

And that's enough, that isolation is enough, to put me in a place - because it's a very theatrical place, as we all know. You sit there and people are shifting tables, and they're moving stuff around. I've found if you put yourself in the right place they start moving you around like a table, or they're going to move you around like a light. They quit asking if you want a cup of coffee. They don't come anywhere near you with the make-up ...

I don't know why, but it's always a really, really intensely emotional thing for me, to take that kind of power and focus on a set where everybody's going someplace else.

Working with Untested Talent

Question: Do you ever act in films by young, comparatively unknown directors?

Frances McDormand: Yes, I just did one, actually. I wasn't paid anything. They flew me from New York to Los Angeles. Somebody had frequent flyer miles. Do you want me to tell you why I did it? Don't get any ideas! It's all about timing. You know why? It was the same thing as working with Ken Loach after Darkman. I just met this young filmmaker on the set of Something's Gotta Give. By industry standards there wasn't any more waste than usual, but there was a lot. I'm assuming that everyone here could probably make three films on the short ends from what wasn't used on that film.

So during that I met a guy [Sean Mewshaw], who was an assistant on Michael Ballhaus's camera crew. The guys on the crew said, "You see that kid? We're all going to be working for him some day." And I said, "Oh, really? Why? He makes a good cappuccino? Why do you say that?"

"No. He's smart," they replied. "He's already raised the money, and he's got a short story that he ..." And so, in passing, when he gave me my cappuccino, I said, "So, Sean, these guys think they're going to work for you. Why do you think they'd say that?... Why do you think you're going to make a movie?"

And he had a great short story. It was almost written like a script, and almost all dialogue. And he'd raised $20,000. And he pointed at all the people on the set who were going to work for him. And I went, "Mmm! Mmm! All right, well, keep me posted."

It was worth acting in that movie [Last Night, 2004]. I haven't seen it yet, but I think it's going to turn out well. Because I saw there was a sense of discipline and rigour on the set. For me it was also satisfying because it involved an interesting story. It was an interesting character.

But more than anything, I got to be a bit of a diva, which I'm usually not at work. But if I questioned a shot choice, I would say to him in front of everybody, "Do you need it? Do you need that shot? Why? Please tell me why, because, you know, I'm cold. They're cold. Tell me why." And if he couldn't, then we usually didn't do the shot.

Minnesota and the Coens

Question: Is the Minnesota accent there in the Coen Brothers' movies from the outset?

Frances McDormand: If you like Joel and Ethan [Coen's] films, you should read the screenplay. They're published by Faber & Faber in Europe, and really nice-looking little books. And you should have them because the films are faithful to the screenplay. For me, in my education as a film actor, it's been invaluable, because it transferred pretty much from page to screen.

That being said, it was in there. Every "ja" would be in there. The sense of the dialect was in there, because they're from Minnesota. They grew up in Minneapolis, so although they're Jewish boys and grew up in a Jewish suburb, they still had that music of the Swedish immigrants who moved to Minneapolis.

It's extraordinary. If you look on a map of Minnesota and it says "Sweden" and you drive there... Well, I did. Peter Stormare and I, who's a Swedish actor who's in the film - the blond one - he he and I drove to "Sweden." He picked out all these places on the map: Sweden, Stockholm, all over Minneapolis and you'd find what was pretty much a crossroad. That would be Sweden.

I grew up in small rural areas, all over the north and south-east part of the United States. So my character represents a certain kind of woman. And I think that it was also typical of a lot of things. I'm not sure that any of us knew that Marge would develop into what she developed into - for the film or for an audience. I think that for Joel and Ethan she represented the earth, and hope, fecundity, fertility. They really liked the idea of making me round - or letting me be round.. There was no feminist point for them in any way. Though I think they are feminists, they've said that they just don't make political points.

For me it was really fun to play a character who was pregnant but who had nothing to do with the plot, except visually. We sometimes even would say, "Maybe you could have trouble getting up out of your chair," and I'd reply, "No, no. I want to do the like classic pregnancy. I'm just going to be larger, not necessarily pregnant, I'm just going to be larger."

But, as I have said, I didn't know she was a comic character. We cracked up when we were making the movie just because sometimes you laugh when something feels so right. But it was never like, "Ho! Ho! Ho! Marge is so funny!" It was never like that. It wasn't until we saw it with an audience that you got the sense that [Joel and Ethan] started to expect something from that character, expected some relief from her.