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Annette Bening has received three Oscar® nominations to date, for "Being Julia" and "American Beauty" (Best Actress) and "The Grifters" (Best Supporting Actress). She won a Golden Globe® for "Being Julia," and was nominated three other times.
HBO:
When you read Phyllis Nagy's script, did you know immediately that you wanted to
play Mrs. Harris, and why?
Annette Bening:
I thought that Phyllis' script was completely original. I had remembered the case
from the eighties when it was a big scandal, but I didn't
follow it that closely. So when I looked at the script I just
thought it was a completely original way of approaching
the story, and that's what got me interested was the way
that she put it together, the way she approached it.
There was a certain sense of humor about it. There was
a certain style to it as well as a very sound composition
going from real life events to the court room to these kind
of interviews. And of course the character was so
compelling and such a woman of complications and
contradictions. And then when I met Phyllis I also
thought that she had a very specific take on a subject.
From the time that this had happened, people were
interested in making a movie of it. But it was tricky to
make a movie about Jean Harris because she's not a
totally sympathetic figure. Most movies are about people
that we want to celebrate, and to a degree Jean is
unsympathetic to many people. So I thought that Phyllis
had such an original way of approaching it that it was
worth doing.
HBO:
Tell us about Mrs. Harris.
Annette Bening:
Jean Harris is a woman of enormous intelligence, very well educated. And she is a
woman, like most of the characters that interest me, of
enormous complexity and has lots of contradictions inside
her. And because this is a real person, it's fascinating for
us to look at someone who like us has passions, has
fallen in love with someone and, in this case, went over a
line that most of us thankfully don't cross. And I think for
her it was of course devastating. You know she claimed
that she did not murder him. She claimed that it was an
accident and that was what the whole trial was about.
She was convicted of murder, but she said that it was her
intention to go and actually kill herself and that somehow
in this struggle they went through together, she ended up
shooting him accidentally.
But she was convicted of
murder and served twelve years in prison for it. But she
is a woman of enormous passion and I think one of the
things that intrigues people about Jean and certainly
intrigued me was so many of the things that she did
seemed to be contrary to her own interests. Yet she was
absolutely committed. For instance in the court room
when she was on trial for murdering Herman Tarnower,
her attorney desperately wanted to bring up all the
supposed terrible things that he had done to her, that
many people felt were justifiable to bring up and she
wouldn't allow that. She didn't want anything bad said
about him. Even when she was on trial for murdering
him. So, she is a woman that is an enigma. I could
never come to a conclusion about her.
As an actor my job
is try to play someone and to see the world through their
eyes. It's an enormous honor really to try to do that and
to not judge someone and to try as much as you can to
see the world how they see it. And that was a certainly a
challenge, because Jean's a very complicated woman.
HBO:
How did you deal with filming out of sequence often times?
Annette Bening:
I guess shooting a movie out of sequence is something that I now take for granted. I
know when I first started doing movies, I
didn't understand that at all and I thought,
how is this possible. Especially having come
from doing plays where you're going from
the beginning of the play to the end of the
play every time you step into it. So in
preparing for a film, that's certainly one of
the things that I look at very carefully as I'm
trying to get myself psychologically ready.
Emotionally--it's hard to talk about playing
emotion without sounding self indulgent as
an actor. So I try to avoid it.
But Jean was
sad, is a sad person in many ways. She was
suicidal. That's why the whole episode
happened. That made her a national figure.
So that is there. I wish I could play someone
and not feel any - of it myself. But I haven't
quite figured out how to do that. [LAUGHS]
But it is the job to be able to immerse one's
self and also at the same time to be able at
the end of the day to take the make up off
and go home and carry on. The real essence
of the job is to not only approach someone
from a kind of intellectual standpoint, an
analytic standpoint but also from a purely
emotional point-of-view. An intuitive point-
of-view.
There was so much material to look
at with Jean Harris that I had a lot of time
to research her because there were two
major books written about Jean. Both very
different points of view, written by very
smart female journalists. So that was an
enormous leg up right there. Jean is not a
people pleaser, I think it's fair to say. She's
someone who is not out to win people's
approval and so she there are a lot of people
that didn't like her. She was head mistress
of a very prominent girls' school. There were
a lot of people at the school who were after
her. Because she had been unstable.
HBO:
Was she a doormat? What made her the way she was?
Annette Bening:
I wish I understood what made Jean Harris the way she was. I'm not sure I know. I
think that it's a combination of her generation. Jean is
still alive and she's in her eighties and she was a woman
of that era, from the Middle West who was also went to
Smith College and majored in economics. I would say
that that would be extremely rare in her crowd of people
that she knew. And the neighborhood she was in and the
town that she was in, that was very rare for a woman to
be that highly educated. So I think she always
approached life in a very individualistic way.
I don't think
she was somebody who followed the crowd. And as
much as that is a blessing in life, it's also a challenge, it
gives one a certain deficit I think in approaching social
situations and approaching marriage and in approaching
career. I mean that was really a time when women didn't
have careers outside the home unless they didn't have
children. And she was someone, she had two sons. And
so she in a way was kind of a groundbreaker. But yet
during the time of the trial the feminist movement wanted
to make her a champion, and she didn't want that. She
didn't identify herself that way. She didn't seem to
identify herself in the way in which we might expect her
to. I don't know that I can explain her sense of self.
That's probably the key to Jean is the mystery of her
sense of self.
HBO:
What kind of man was Herman Tarnower?
Annette Bening:
He was a ladies man. He never got married and proposed to a number of different
women and then ended up being unable to follow through
as happens with Jean in the story. They meet, they fell in
love; he proposes to her and then ends up backing out
and really feeling he can't stay with that commitment
which broke her heart. But then she stayed with him and
he went on to have other relationships. She always
claimed that that was the deal and that she understood
that and that she was fine with it.
And that of course is
one of the things about Jean that always kind of either
enraged people or fascinated people or puzzled people,
was that she seemed very upset by it. But always
claimed that she wasn't. They traveled together. He was
an avid traveler before they were together, and when they
were together they went around the world. They went to
interesting places. I mean they were in Afghanistan in the
late seventies. They traveled to hard places and
fascinating places. But he was known as a ladies man,
and being a very charming guy.
HBO:
Sir Ben--what did he bring to the role of Herman Tarnower?
Annette Bening:
Well I think whenever Ben approaches a part he has this incredible combination of
intelligence and just an intuitive response. So he doesn't
over think things and I know him very well. I've done
other movies with him. And I felt completely at home with
him. Which I think is a good thing in this case. I think Ben
never judges a character, he just plays him. He played
him how he thought, how he felt he was.
HBO:
Jean Harris and Herman Tarnhower -- were they in love? Was it obsession? How
would you describe the relationship?
Annette Bening:
Well they were certainly in love. There's no question that there was a mutual
connection between these two people. And she was a
woman in her forties and she had two teenage sons. She
was divorced. So meeting Herman Tarnhower was a real
shock. And she just fell head over heels for him, and I
think to this day still loves him.
HBO:
Why is the story still relevant today? After twenty some years?
Annette Bening:
Well I think that the story is relevant today if we've made a good movie and if it
works. It's relevant because they're human and they're
like all the rest of us, Jean and Herman Tarnower. They
fell in love. They were having enormous difficulty. That
she became a scandal that was on the front page of all
the newspapers and that people wrote books about her.
She just couldn't believe it was happening. And there's
still I think a sense of disbelief that the whole thing
became what it became in her life. She was a quiet
woman. She was not a woman who sought attention.
HBO:
Do you think this movie will resonate more with men or women or do you think it will
resonate with both men and women?
Annette Bening:
I hope that the movie resonates with men and women. If it's a good movie, people
will like it. I want people to be interested in it. It's a
disturbing story. It's a disturbing situation. So this isn't
something that you go into you know wanting to just
entertain people. It's something that hopefully people will
relate to in some way. Because they've fallen in love or
they've done dumb things or they've stayed with
someone when they didn't quite understand why they
were staying with someone. It is a case where truth is
stranger than fiction. And the lives that these people
ended up living, I mean they were just like you and me.
People living private lives. Although Herman Tarnower
had become a celebrity, he was a well known man the
time that the shooting happened. So that's part of why it
became such a huge scandal.
HBO:
Was it obsession, was it love, was it jealousy? Was she a stronger or a weaker
woman for having loved him do you think?
Annette Bening:
That's a great question. I guess Jean would say that she - I don't know how she
would answer it. In looking back at the story one can't
help but feel this compassion for her and you just want to
say look if someone's treating you in this way it's not
good for you and you should protect yourself. But she
didn't see it that way. She loved him. She wanted him in
her life.
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