Melanie and the moralists

Interview, Oct, 1998 by Justine Elias

Strange girl, that Lolita.

The twelve-year-old "nymphet" - who can be read as either the victim or the ruination of Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita (1955) - has lost none of her power to shock. In Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation, the child heroine was portrayed by a very grown-up looking teenager named Sue Lyon, and the novel's sexuality was largely kept offscreen. Now, after three years of battles with studios, distributors, and would-be censors and three highly rated airings on Showtime, Adrian Lyne's Lolita has finally arrived in U.S. movie theaters. Its stars have already earned critical praise: Jeremy Irons as the tormented Humbert, Dominique Swain (who was fourteen at the time of filming) as the title character, and Melanie Griffith as the bitterly deceived mother who believes Humbert to be in love with her.

But the controversy over the film's dark subject matter - and its young protagonist - shows no sign of dying down. In a nation that prizes the innocence of children while still drooling over their sexualized images in movies, TV, and advertising, Lolita still threatens our ideas about desire in adults, as well as in children. Perhaps that's because Nabokov created such a seductive story about such a repellent subject, and because two very different film-makers have braved critical fire to adapt his work, more or less successfully. Equally complicit are the new film's stars, who never fail to make their characters, however flawed, into recognizable people. As the needy, vain, touchingly immature Charlotte Haze, Griffith gives one of her best performances, breathing life into the story's most disturbingly human element: the need for love and gratification at any cost. Lolita also marks a renaissance for Griffith, whose box-office popularity peaked in the late '80s. This fall she'll be seen in three more films: after a role in Woody Allen's Celebrity, she stars opposite James Woods in Another Day in Paradise, a gritty drama about drug addicts directed by Larry Clark (the maker of Kids), and she has the lead role in Crazy in Alabama, an offbeat comedy directed by her husband, Antonio Banderas.

JUSTINE ELIAS: Since this new version of Lolita got off the ground, we've seen lots of movies about precocious underage girls involved with older men. Why is Lolita more shocking than, say, The Crush or Wild Things, or thrillers like Scream and Halloween: H2O?

MELANIE GRIFFITH: You know what's weird about this? Nabokov is required reading in high school and college. It's unbelievable to me that there would be such a backlash against this movie. I mean, it's OK for us to have all these movies where people's heads are cut off, which children go to see, and then you can't see a movie that is based on classic literature? I can't trash a movie like Halloween: H2O - Jamie Lee Curtis is one of my best friends - but the idea of it is disgusting. I remember when I saw the movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the audience was screaming, just screaming and yelling at the screen. But there it was, in a movie theater; for some people, that was no problem. And then you can have porn on video, which sells more than any other kind of movie. That can be shown and Lolita can't be? Why? What happened? Who in the industry, what really powerful person just said no to us? This is supposed to be a free country. And this is a freedom of speech issue.

JE: Kubrick's movie is seen as a kind of flawed classic, limited by what could then be shown on film. In the new Lolita, the most obvious difference - aside from the more explicit sexual scenes - is that both you and Dominique Swain are younger than Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon were, and your Charlotte is a good deal more glamorous than Shelley's.

MG: But we were the same age as the characters are in the book. Nabokov likened Charlotte to Marlene Dietrich, so in that way the movie that Adrian made was truer to the book. The movie Stanley Kubrick made couldn't be that true to it because at the time it wasn't allowed. But look at last Tango in Paris - that was much tougher than this movie. I feel for Adrian because this movie is so beautiful.

JE: How did you like being a brunette?

MG: My hair was actually a dark red. In the movie I just did with Antonio [Crazy in Alabama], which he directed, I have black, black hair. And it was very cool because it threw me into character much easier.

JE: Charlotte seems to style herself after big-screen stars and on what she sees in her favorite movie magazines. And as the film begins, her little girl is becoming fascinated by those same images.

MG: Charlotte was one of those women who realized that Lolita, her daughter, looks like she used to look, and she, Charlotte, is no longer that. And I can almost see it - not that it's the same - with my mother [actress Tippi Hedren] and me, and with my daughter, Dakota, who's eight, who looks exactly like I did at that age, except she's much more beautiful. And it's tough. Well, not tough - it's just a little bit weird. For Charlotte, it was tough.