Patricia on the prowl - interview with actress Patricia Arquette - Interview

Interview, Sept, 1997 by Graham Fuller

Patricia Arquette, an actress who's never been anybody's prisoner

Settling down can release the most unsettling sides of an actor's personality. As the scion of a free-spirited family and a single mother at twenty, Patricia Arquette gave every sign of being an unfettered angel away from the screen; on it there were evident constraints, an insistence on being preternaturally nice. In her best films before this year - The Indian Runner (1991), True Romance (1993), Ethan Frome (1993), Ed Wood (1994), Beyond Rangoon (1995), Flirting With Disaster (1996) - Arquette was Invariably sweet and vulnerable, sometimes plucky, often a victim. She may have tasted of peach and fornicated in a telephone booth in True Romance; she may have allowed Josh Brolin's FBI man to lick her armpit in Flirting With Disaster; but there were few hints of inner darkness, and fewer still of abandon.

Now, at twenty-nine, Arquette has been married for over two years to Nicolas Cage, and not coincidentally the wild woman in her has been unleashed - or, if you like, uncaged - on film. Just as James Stewart's marriage at forty-one in 1949 presaged the most interesting phase of his career as an irascible obsessive, so Arquette is now allowing herself to be cast against type, and the results are gloriously disturbing.

Our perceptions of Arquette were changed, perhaps forever, by her poised performance in David Lynch's Lost Highway, released in February. Sporting black bangs reminiscent of Betty Page's, or 1940s murderee Elizabeth Short's, she plays the passive wife of a strung-out sax player (Bill Pullman) who knows or suspects she has been unfaithful. She tiptoes around him - but too late; the thought of her in bed with someone else has driven him mad. He kills her, maybe. She's then reincarnated in her husband's febrile imagination as a platinum-blonde tart-cum-porno queen. The scene in Lost Highway where she brazenly strips for the gangster Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and his crew instantly wiped away Arquette's "innocent" rep. It looked as if the actress herself were shedding inhibitions via this soft,ore fantasy, getting something out of her system, unconsciously preparing the ground for the womanly roles awaiting her in her thirties.

Arquette as femme fatale may get at least one more outing, however. By the sound of it, next spring's Goodbye, Lover, in which she plays a Machiavellian young wife with a goody-two-shoes facade, playfully conflates the nasty girl with the nice one. And it comes with a perfect touch: Arquette's silver deco 'do here is the negative of Louise Brooks's iconic black bob. Before that, we can see her in a more responsible mode, as the stage actress who extricates her husband (Ewan McGregor) from a living hell in this November's Nightwatch.

GRAHAM FULLER: Something very bold and erotic seems to have been occurring in your recent film choices. It's as if you've decided to go against a certain innocence that you portrayed in the past by playing a couple of bad girls.

PATRICIA ARQUETTE: I think I did decide that. Women are such complex creatures, and that's what's exciting about being an actress. You can investigate the experiences of different types of women - including all their various survival mechanisms.

GF: And one of the key survival mechanisms is a reliance on sexuality?

PA: Yes. Maybe I never felt safe enough in my own life to explore that before, but once I did become safe and secure, I felt I could get into that sexual area.

GF: Does it thrill you to play women who use their sexuality in a dangerous way?

PA: Well, I've definitely met a lot of women like that in L.A., so I can't pretend they don't exist. And just because I myself haven't lived my life like that, it doesn't mean it isn't a popular choice for gaining power or prestige. I simply felt it was time for me to explore the female monster a little bit, although I think the two women I played in Lost Highway were very masculine in a way. They came across with this stereotypical male sexuality, and that's what drove the male character [played jointly by Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty] insane: It's his worst nightmare come true.

GF: Those two women were like phantoms, weren't they?

PA: There's all these naughty women in the Bible, so I thought of one of those characters as Salome and the other as Jezebel.

GF: Did you draw upon the femme fatales in '40s film noir?

PA: A little. David Lynch helped me work it out. As I said, I don't exactly know how to be a femme fatale since I haven't honed my life in that fashion. Nobody's born that way, and I needed help figuring out the dance steps. I realized the femme fatale is definitely a man-made creation, and that the best way of observing that type of heightened femininity is in drag queens, where it's embraced, adored, and exaggerated.

GF: There was a scholarly book published in 1980 called Women in Film Noir. It reappraised the femme fatale as a feminist role model. True or false?

PA: I think the experience is likely to be different for every person. I do feel badly that housewives and mothers who stay home aren't given more respect, though I don't think they should necessarily go out and become femmes fatales! I actually think they should be given some kind of doctorate for the huge job they do. And even today, I still think we're operating under a double standard where it's OK for men to be sexually promiscuous but women can't, All these things need balancing out.