"[W]hile some people have difficulty verbalizing the intricacies
of their craft, listening to garrulous, gleeful Geraldine Page is like
racing around under a shower of gold coins with nothing but a small hat
to catch them..."
Joanmarie Kalter,
Actors on Acting:
Performing in Theatre & Film Today (1979), p. 5
"Though Geraldine Page is known for the strict attention she pays to the inner detail of a role, in person, she's sweet, chatty, loose, and light-hearted. During this interview, which was held backstage at the Eugene O'Neill Theater in New York, Ms. Page wore a long, wide floppy dress, no make-up, and chomped down a tuna fish sandwich as we talked. She very much enjoyed discussing her craft, relating old stories about friends, teachers and colleagues--all the while gesturing animatedly in the spirit, as she says, of 'a terrible ham.' Her high-pitched, fragile-sounding voice dips easily to a deep, resonant one, and then into a child-like whisper; she mimics accents perfectly; shifts her shoulders and head to assume the poses of her subjects--and does it all lovingly and with great relish....
"This
interview took place on two occasions a few days apart, both backstage
at the [Eugene] O'Neill [Theatre] in New York [City]. The movie Interiors, directed
by Woody Allen, had just been released, but by an interesting and
fortuitous accident, on the first afternoon we talked, Ms. Page had not
yet seen it, and on the second afternoon, she had...."
Kalter, p. 10.
JK: "When you accept a role, for instance, Eve in Woody Allen's Interiors, how do you proceed? Do you first study your own part or do you study the script as a whole?
GP: I
read the script, and while I'm reading it, I envision it as if I were
in the audience. And that's it. But I always hesitate to say that either
to students or to anyone who will put it in print; people will assume
that all you have to do is read something and then you can get up and
act professionally. You can't. If you put down first that I am a
graduate of a regular drama school, that I spent seven years in winter
and summer stock, that I studied seven years with Uta Hagen and two
years with Mira Rostova, and was at the Actors Studio for ten years,
then if I say I read a script, but it away and don't think about it,
it's not as misleading. The training that I have is in my brain and it
works on material in not-so-conscious ways. I have all sorts of
complicated, computerized knowledge stored away in the back of my mind.
When I do then wing it, a lot of work has been done that I wouldn't have
time to sit down and explain to everybody. That sounds pretentious, but
the only alternative is to be very cavalier...."
Kalter,
p. 17-18.
JK: "What was it about Uta Hagen's training that was particularly helpful to you?
GP: "...[H]er war against cliche is absolutely thrilling. She would say, 'People don't do that. That's what people on
stage
always do a a moment like that. The population of the world is so vast
and we're all different, and there are so many ways of acting.'
"She'd
say, 'You've read the script, but in life we don't know from one moment
to the next what we're going to say. We don't know what the person
opposite us is going to do. We haven't got it planned out.'....
JK: "....That's
one of the classic problems faced by an actor, isn't it? To give the
illusion that these lines and these actions are actually happening, and
not planned in advance.
GP: "There was another trick
she [Uta Hagen] taught us in that same vein. Because your character has
not read the script, you go through your score (she was always comparing
drama to music and noting how close they are), and whenever something's
going to happen, you persuade your character to expect something
different. That way your character is continually surprised. if the
person you're talking to is going to get up and go out of the room, your
character should expect that they're going to stay--and vice versa. It
helps give you the illusion of freshness. She taught us all these
wonderful, magical,
practical things."
JK: "You studied with Mira Rostova at the American Academy, too.
GP: "The things I learned from Mira Rostova were fantastic! It's easy for me
to remember them because they were very concise events learned at a
specific time, on a specific piece of material, with one sentence or two
that's indelible.
JK: "Would you give me an example?
GP: "I'd love to! I was doing a scene from
The Girl on the Via Flaminia,
and when I got through with it, she said, 'Geraldine...' (After every
scene she used to look as if we'd killed her; she'd sit for a long time
with her eyelashes on her cheeks and groan.) 'Geraldine,' she said,
you
pause before you speak to think whether you should speak. You pause in
the middle to think whether you should continue to speak; and you pause
at the end to think whether you should have spoken.' She was silent for
another five minutes, and then she said, 'People talk to each other.
Please do this scene again and
talk to the young man.'
"I
thought, oh, this is ridiculous. Here in this scene, this girl is in
fear of her life; half the time she's answering these questions, she's
lying, and the other half, she's telling the truth. It's a matter of
life or death. Any little miss or slip one way or the other, and she's
going to her doom. You just can't go blah-de-blah-blah. I thought, I'll
show her. So I started the scene the way she suggested and I found that
all the pauses I had made so clearly before were now taking place in the
middle of syllables. The character sounded so much more uncertain and
anxious. It was so exciting--the class was amazed; the scene was
terrific.
"And it was a similar thing when we worked on
Notes from Underground by Dostoyevsky. I played the prostitute and when her client asks about her life, she goes on and on about all the
tsuris
in her family. Everybody's blind and starving and dead and all these
horrible things. Well, I played it out and after everybody was bored
with the scene, Mira said, 'Geraldine, you have done a great deal of
work on the background, and this will not be lost. But my dear, you are a
prostitute with a customer and if you do not cheer up this customer and
make him happy, your madam will be very angry with you, and you will be
even more miserable than you are now.'
"By this time, I
knew enough not to question her. So we did the scene again and I was
sort of bright and cheery, and I told about my little brother and how he
lost his legs, and how we didn't have anything to eat in the house, and
how cold it was, and the roof leaked. And the more I tried to be
cheerful about it, the more heart-rending the scene became. The
prostitute was trying to cover up, or didn't realize that not everyone
had had such a horrible life. It became much more poignant.
JK: And
what have been the advantages of Stanislavsky's Method for you, of
trying to link your own personal experiences to those of your character?
GP: Well,
that everybody does, either consciously or unconsciously. Stanislavsky
was trying to get down what the best actors always do anyway; he didn't
invent anything. So even actors who sneer at the Method, are militant
against it, or conversely, have never heard of it, when they get up and
act, they use themselves. The Method is also a matter of who's teaching
it...
But what happens when you study
that aspect
of acting (no matter who's teaching it) is that you find more analogies
between yourself and the material than you thought you had. The Method
allows you to discover less obvious connections between yourself and
your character. You find some very deflected things that also relate. It
opens up a whole filed of connections you can
consciously bring
from yourself. You bring a lot unconsciously and automatically, but the
Method widens your perception; you can then add more of your own colors
to the tapestry of your character.
JK: Trying consciously to establish connections between yourself and the character enriches the unconscious process that would happen anyway?
GP: Well, it also depends on who's doing the work. For instance, you and I have seen actors who were so busy making conscious connections to their characters that they swamped the material; instead of enriching it, they smothered it. It can enrich if it's done right, otherwise it can hinder. People get so enamored with these techniques of exploring parts of themselves, that they forget what the object is. As an actor, you must do the fullest, best, most interesting interpretation of the
character, and not the the fullest, most wonderful exposition of your own discoveries of yourself. So, it doesn't necessarily help the end product all the time. But it's all fraught with interesting dangers.
Kalter,
p. 18-21.
JK: You haven't seen your performance yet in Woody Allen's Interiors?
GP: I
tried to. What I like to do, what is really good for me to do, is to go
to the dailies. That way, I can see exactly what happened the day
before so I can adjust my sights to see what I'm doing now.... I have
proved to director after director that I am very good and I'm quiet and I
don't start telling them how to do things. I just learn for myself. And
contrary to shaking my confidence, I always feel better. I say, 'Oh. It
wasn't as bad as I thought. Oh, I know what to do about that.' And so
I've had a marvelous time. But Woody, who is ... well, he
is paranoid.
He would not allow it. I thought I'd finally persuaded him and he did
say, 'Okay, you can look at the rushes. They'll be Saturday morning.' I
couldn't believe it. He's finally going to let me see some! Then on
Friday he said, 'Well, it's so close to Christmas and the projectionist
doesn't want to come in....' I never did see any of it.
JK: Did you find that a particularly difficult role?
GP: Well,
in a way. I felt I understood the character; that part didn't bother me
so much. But the execution of it was extremely difficult because of
pleasing Woody. I would do a scene a particular way and he would say,
'That's too ... I just don't believe that.' Me, the specialist in
realism? Then we'd go back and do it again and he's say, 'Ah, it's
just....' He doesn't have any of the Method's verbiage or even the
non-Method director's vocabulary at all. All he ever says is, 'Well, I
don't like it....'
JK: In other words, he didn't tell you in any specific way what he wanted?
GP: Yeah, he's say, 'It's still like somebody you see playing an interior decorator in the movies.
I
just want the woman to come in and put down her handbag.' It was
exasperating and very difficult; I kept trying to simplify and simplify
and take all the theatrical things out. But still he's say, 'No, that's
like on the stage. Just come in and put the bag down.' He didn't even go
so far as to say, 'Don't put the bag down like....' He would just shake
his head. I'd say, 'What' wrong with that? How much simpler can I be?'
I'd go back and do it again.
But what was wonderful was
that I agreed with his taste. When he said he didn't like it, I
believed it; I know that if I saw it, I would agree with him. That's
wonderful because you can't always trust those decisions, yet in this
case, I knew. When people tell me it's some of my best work, I'm very
inclined to believe they must be telling the truth. God knows, every
director I've ever worked with has tried in various ways to get me to
simplify, especially for movies.
JK: You were playing someone who was coming apart at the seams. Was it difficult then to do take after take?
GP: It was only difficult technically.
I
love to do someone coming apart at the seams over and over again. I
love it. What was difficult was doing it ever simpler and ever simpler.
Even if it was a happy scene, it would have been just as difficult to do
it as 'specifically' as he required. But that had nothing to do with
the character at all. As a matter of fact, one of the scenes I loved the most was going in and getting knocked down by the waves--and I can't even swim. By the way, is that scene in? Do I walk in the ocean in the movie? I loved that. I can't understand these actors who talk about how they live a part, how they suffer. The poor things. Why don't they do something else that they like better? What a bunch of complainers!
JK: But to act such an emotional role--doesn't it drain you?
GP: On
the contrary, it makes me feel terrific. There's something about
releasing all those tensions in acting that's very cathartic. It feels
really good. If you take a dance class or a singing lesson, for
instance, and spend that kind of energy, you feel great. I felt terrific after they dragged me out of the water.
What is a drag, what gets you down, gets you morose, is having to sit around and wait and do nothing--that is really killing. You get exhausted and irritable. But an emotional scene, even the most wrenching, is wonderful. It's a funny contradiction, but it's true. What drives everybody crazy is having to sit for a long time. And for that movie, we did have to sit. But we were a resourceful company, and we had Scrabble, we had backgammon, we had chess, a dart board, and Maureen [Stapleton] knew a wonderful word game that she had us all play. We had a wonderful time, and it distracted us from the fact that we had to sit for so long. We thought Woody was a stickler for absolutely having things right, but Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, would look at the sky all day and say, 'The clouds aren't right; they're just not right.' So we'd go back to our games.
PART II
JK: "What do you think about Interiors now that you've seen it?
GP: Oh, it's so compelling and I'm so pleased about my work in it. It's an unusual film. It's so spare.
JK: Did you picture your performance as you saw it?
GP: Well,
I worried about a lot of things, and I see now that I didn't have to. I
worried about the continuity of the character--for instance, exactly
when she had her first breakdown, how much time passed between her
relapses, etcetera. Woody told me not to worry about those things, so I
didn't. And when I finally saw the film, Rip [Torn] remarked what a
lesson it was. We all have a tendency to think that kind of logical
detail is so essential. But this movie proved that you can have an
emotional understanding of the story without worrying about all that."
JK: Are you generally satisfied with your performances when you see yourself in films or on TV?
GP: I
have a wide variety of reactions. Mostly though, I'm fairly pleased,
although some things I like more than others. But I like the
characterization in
Interiors. I like the choices that I made. I
really admired the degree to which I was able to convey that kind of
covered and restrained behavior, where everything had to be almost
unexpressed.
JK: I thought it was very interesting the
other day when you said that Woody Allen constantly told you to do less
and less; the character was, in fact, evading so many things, and so
that direction seemed to work very well for the role.
GP: And that's why, when things did burst out of her, they were irrevocable. She never let off any of her steam.
JK: How did you come by the facial expressions that you used?
GP: Who
knows? It's very hard to tell what knowledge and associations and
skills went into it because there are so many. I think they always come
from your subtext, your inner monologue; whatever it is that your
character is thinking at any given moment. That's more or less what you
see reflected in the facial expressions.
JK: Do you carefully plan out what the character is thinking?
GP: No.
I used to, but over the years, I have learned that if I preconceive
what the character is thinking, it's not going to be as interesting or
as varied as if I just go along and see what the character turns out to
be thinking at the moment. Usually, if a line of inner thought seems to
be working well, I keep it in. But if something happens to change, then I
explore it. And it's wonderful with a role like Eve in
Interiors;
she's reminiscent of a character in a Chekhov play whose inner life is
much more complicated than her outer life; it's just not expressed
overtly. While she has very deep, complex inner thoughts, all she's
doing is serving tea or something, yet her strong feelings come through
even in that very simple behavior.
One of my favorite
moments is at the birthday party when I'm sitting there but can't allow
myself to show how straining it is to be surrounded by my family. When
my son-in-law pours the champagne, I love the way it comes across how I
disapprove, how I'm suffering through this: just the merest, tiniest
fraction of a drop spills on my hand, but I wipe it off with such long
suffering. I like that.
JK: Did you draw on any particular emotional memories of your own for that scene?
GP: Oh,
I'm sure, but not in a conscious way. We've all been someplace where we
had to behave nicely even though people were driving us batty. We
couldn't protest, we couldn't get up and leave, we had to sit and put up
with it. I'm sure that a variety of those experiences merged in my
mind, rose up to that part of the script, and responded to it.
Uta
explained this one time in class when somebody was having a lot of
trouble and saying, 'I can't identify with this situation. It's too big;
it's too tragic for my experience.' She told us a story about getting
on the bus to come over to the study that day, and how she had been
going back to her seat when the driver said, 'Miss! Miss!' She realized
he was talking to her, calling her back because she hadn't put her money
in the slot. And she said the force of the emotions funneling through
her at that moment, of shame, of embarrassment, of wanting to murder
him, of feeling put upon against all justice, was enormous. There was
enough emotion raging through her on that bus, she told us, to take care
of this part, that part, and another part. It was a wonderful thing to
be reminded of; the kind of outsized emotions we can have over a small
incident. All an actor has to do is remember that. So you don't have to
be the kind of woman that Eve is to have lived intensely through the
same kinds of feelings.
JK: You don't have to have murdered to play a murderer.
GP: To play Lady Macbeth, you don't have to go out and find a king and kill him.
JK: I have the impression that, in fact, your identification with Eve must have been very remote.
GP: Yes,
I'm a very very different personality. The fact that she's so
completely neat, God knows, nothing could be further from me. I can't
keep my mind on neatness; neat types find me terribly lax. It's very
funny because I heard that Woody was amused--and maybe not so
amused--that it took me so long to get ready. I spent so much time on my
make-up, in making sure that every hair was in place. And he may have
thought that was a character trait of mine. But if I were playing
myself, we wouldn't have to do any of that. I'd be on the set saying,
'Get away from me with that powder puff and comb. Stay away. I'm all
ready.' That's something I have done when they've tried to neaten up a character I thought should be frowsy. But with Eve, I thought that if there were one little thing out of place, she'd just snap. And so I deliberately would not get in front of the camera until I felt that things were exactly as Eve would want them to be.
JK: Do you have any difficulty crying on cue? You really have leaky ducts in the movie.
GP: I don't have too much trouble crying, yet that 'on cue' business can be difficult. Sometimes I'll cry earlier or later, but not where the script says, 'She cries.' As for what it is I think about, there are so many things to make you cry in the world. It's endless. So many things to get upset about.
JK: Do you remind yourself of some particular image that will make you cry?
GP: You don't have to. If you go along with the story and you identify with the person you're playing and they're in a situation that is causing them grief and anguish, you just cry....
JK: What are the kinds of problems you encounter now?
GP: Well, most of my mental activity about acting goes into interpretation. It goes into working out an inner life for my character. That's what interests me most... Now, with a character like the one in
Interiors, I had almost no problem thinking up an inner life; it seemed very clear to me once I stopped worrying about the continuity....
