The Bonnie And Clyde Of Indie Film - actress Chloe Sevigny and Harmony Korine - Interview

Interview, Nov, 1999 by Gus Van Sant, Natasha Lyonne

The movies can boast so few truly original talents that when a disarming filmmaker like Harmony Korine and an eccentric actress like Chloe Sevigny come along, they throw a curveball to those who want everything tied up in nice, neat categories. Together or apart, they have a habit of making the mainstream way of doing things seem incredibly stale

CHLOE SEVIGNY

One of the joys of the fall film season is watching the twenty-four-year-old girl played by Chloe Sevigny in Boys Don't Cry enjoy a multiple orgasm as her boyfriend (actually another girl, played by Hilary Swank) ministers to her with her tongue. Since Kimberly Peirce, the film's director, keeps a tight close-up on Sevigny as she shudders into heaven, there's no reason to believe Swank was even in the vicinity. The scene is saying, "Look how much more sensitive a woman is to a woman than a man could possibly be." But the abandon Sevigny communicates, with humor mixed into her expression of ecstasy, is strictly between her and us. It's the kind of naked moment - a true baring - that few American actresses in Sevigny's demographic are capable of making so playfully intimate.

Even without her climactic raptures, Sevigny gives one of those performances that you can't take your eyes off, which is not to detract from Swank's amazingly complicated portrayal of a man in a woman's body. Sevigny may not be the most technically polished actress, but her dreamily distracted presence suggests she's not so much "in the moment" as several leagues beyond it.

A onetime New York fashion magpie down from Connecticut, Sevigny acted for the first time in Larry Clark's Kids (1995), written by Harmony Korine, her personal Josef von Sternberg, and she was the soul and conscience of that bleak expose. Korine then cast her as a beacon of white-trash blondeness in Gummo (1997); in his new film, julien donkey-boy, opening this month, she's the Harpo Marx-like sister and confidant of a paranoid schizophrenic played by Ewen Bremner - and a girl so self-absorbed she goes ice-skating late into her pregnancy.

Wonderfully naive as a preppy nightbird in Whir Stillman's The Last Days of Disco (1998), Sevigny has no peer in playing girls slow on the uptake. Lana Tisdel, her character in Boys Don't Cry, is based on the young woman of that name who believed that twenty-year-old Teena Brandon (played by Swank) was a male - "Brandon Teena" - and embarked on a love affair with her. Teena was raped and murdered in Falls City, Nebraska, in 1993 by two men who also killed two others. (Tisdel survived the ordeal and subsequently had a child.) These events make for a harrowing yet lyrical study of transgender confusion and homophobia, in which Sevigny does a lot more than show pleasure.

Natasha Lyonne, a friend and fellow actress of Sevigny, asked her the following questions in the bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan.

GRAHAM FULLER

NATASHA LYONNE: What kind of beer do you have?

CHLOE SEVIGNY: A Pilsner.

NL: I don't know what that is - I'm not that cool. I'm having a screwdriver and some cold fish.

CS: Where are your questions, Natasha?

NL: I left them at home.

CS: Who's gonna listen to this tape anyway?

NL: I don't know - I feel like we're recording an album. All right, so I was watching that I'm Almost Not Crazy documentary [1984] about John Cassavetes, and Gena Rowlands talks about making sure you don't let all the stuff that happens on a movie set drive you crazy. A lot of actresses obsess about their look rather than focus on the work, but when I worked with you [in the upcoming If These Walls Could Talk Part II] I noticed you're really focused. You're notorious for being the queen of looking real good and yet you didn't seem to let that all stuff get in your way. Do you have any tricks?

CS: No, but when all's said and done I wish I had made a stink about the way I looked [laughs]. I've gotten into major fights with makeup artists in the past so now I just say something to the director and hope they'll intervene. I'm not one of those Method actors who gets into character months beforehand and starts preparing and improvising. As soon as I am in the clothes and in the hair and makeup - whether it's bad or good - that's when it happens for me. I find the character after the first take, not before.

NL: Do you want to continue costuming or are you focused on acting?

CS: I don't want to act for a while now. I usually work once a year. but this past year I did five projects, so I haven't had a second to breathe. I'd actually love to camera-operate, so I'm taking a class in cinematography at New York University this year. I was also thinking about calling up my friend Jean-Yves Escoffier, the cinematographer, and asking him if I could intern in his camera department a few days a week. I'm always endlessly fascinated with the camera and how it works. I'd like to continue doing costumes, too.

NL: That could be a cool movie - costumes, cinematography, Chloe.

CS: But sometimes it's hard getting into conflicts with the actors. When I did the costumes for Gummo, I was really excited to dress this one actor. But he came in the day before he was shooting his scene and looked at the clothes I'd got for him and said, "You know what? This isn't how I see my character. I don't want to wear any of it." I said, "Fine. I don't have anything else. We're working tomorrow and it's twelve o'clock at night and all the stores are closed. You can go topless and show your ugly ass-white chest. I don't give a fuck." And he said, "Fine, I will."