"She proved that she had the acting chops to match her looks in a number of early films, but especially “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), for which she received a best supporting actress Oscar nod.
She attracted the interest of the tabloids when she first began dating her “Brokeback” co-star Heath Ledger, with whom she would eventually have a daughter, Matilda — and again in early 2008, when Ledger died suddenly. After a period of mourning and seclusion, Williams reemerged in a series of roles that brought her widespread acclaim — from the bare-bones indie “Wendy and Lucy” (2008) to the eccentric ensemble piece “Synecdoche, New York” (2008) to the Martin Scorsese-mystery “Shutter Island” (2010) — and, before long, she’ll be seen portraying another movie star who died far too young, Marilyn Monroe, in a biopic entitled “My Week with Marilyn.”
We focused particularly, however, on the pinnacle achievement of her career up to this point: her remarkable performance in Derek Cianfrance’s “Blue Valentine” (The Weinstein Company, 12/31, NC-17, trailer), a gritty, honest, adult drama about the complexities of a relationship. (To me, at least, it’s somewhat reminiscent of a play and film that preceded it by half a century, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”)
To play the part of a woman who falls in — and, six years later, out of — love with the same man (Ryan Gosling), a lot was asked of Williams — extensive emotional and physical nakedness, a quick weight gain, and even some tap-dancing — and, as anyone who has seen the film can attest, she certainly rose to the occasion.
Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst in "Dick" (1999)I don’t know if you feel this way, but at least in terms of how some of the awards groups responded, “Dick” was sort of a breakthrough on the film side of things, wasn’t it?
“Dick”? I don’t know. I didn’t know that. [laughs]
I mean, when I met with Charlie Kaufman about “Synecdoche [,New York],” he was like, “I want you to do this movie because of “Dick,” because I loved that movie so much.” So “Dick” blessed me twice. “Dick” was a double—wait. It’s really hard to talk about the movie “Dick” and then say a sentence and, like, not make it sound crude! [laughs] You know? “’Dick’ was a double blessing.” I don’t know how to say that. Please don’t make it sound like I’m being dirty. [laughs]
[laughs] I got you. So “Prozac Nation” was the other early one that I wanted to ask you about. It was pretty well received, I think, at least critically…
Wow, it’s so funny thinking about these old movies. I like it because it kind of puts you back in touch with, you know, your fighter spirit, because you were auditioning constantly, and being rejected, getting fewer jobs than you auditioned for—I mean, like, rejection was the norm, and getting the part, you know, was unusual.
And so thinking about, like, oh, “Killer Joe”, “Prozac Nation”, “Dick”—those were all things that I fought for, and it excites me, still, to kind of think back to them, because now my fight is in, like, different arenas. Like, now my fight is actually, like, in giving the performance. I mean, I have auditioned recently—I kind of actually enjoy it now—but when you talk about those movies, it just makes me remember how much I burned to do what now I kind of—I don’t take it for granted, but what now is, like, kind of, more everyday, you know? I don’t know, it excites me to think about the way that I used to feel.
Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams in a scene from Brokeback Mountain (2005)I don’t know if you were still having to audition by the time the next one that I want to ask you about came along, but I would imagine it’s the highest-profile role that you’ve played, or certainly one of them—“Brokeback Mountain.” There are still people who get into the equivalent of fistfights on the Internet, on sites like mine, arguing, “How the hell did that not win best picture?!”
[laughs] Really?!
Yeah. It’s five years later, but it’s like it happened yesterday. Anyway, that one I’m very curious to know what that one represents to you when you look back…
That one’s tied up in so many things. I don’t know. I always used to say that after I made that movie I felt like I could quit; I felt like I would be perfectly satisfied to, sort of, hang up my acting hat, and say, like, “I did that, and that’s enough,” like, “I can rest easy now because that movie was something I was a part of, and everything else is just, kind of, icing on the cake, really.”
Well, I almost feel guilty about asking you questions about “Blue Valentine” because I know how many times you’ve had to answer them over the whole year since Sundance, but I’m gonna do it and hope that you won’t mind. You talked about the relationship between a director and an actress—this one must have felt like a really long-term relationship, having been involved with the project for so long. Can you talk about how it first came to your attention?
I first read it, you know, just the normal way—your agent sends you it. There was nothing extraordinary about how it came to me, but then I read it and everything changed. I remember so many details —I remember where I was when I read the script for the first time; I remember when I met Derek for the first time; I remember—and I have, like, the memory of a firefly—what I was wearing; what he was wearing; what we ate; the things we talked about; the games we played; the weather. Like, it’s indelible, and it just, sort of, became my reason for living, was to make this movie, was to tell this story. And then it just, kind of, faded, you know, it went away, and I never heard about it for a long, long time.
And then it came back and it was the wrong time for me; and then it came back again and it was the wrong time for Ryan and the right time for me; and then it finally, at last, six or seven years later, came together.
And I’m glad—you know, Ryan and I always said, “Thank God we didn’t make this movie when we were twenty-two like we wanted to—thank God!—because we probably wouldn’t have been able to tell both sides of the story. And it’s really a testament to Derek, the director, because he always said— You know, when it would come back around, it wouldn’t be the right time for life reasons, for family reasons, for heart reasons, and he would always say, “You know, I don’t care about this movie; I care about your life. We’ll try it again.” You know? He never lost faith in me or in Ryan, even though we, kind of, danced around it for so long. He’s who really ultimately stuck with it.
Well, one of the things that I’ve been curious about since I saw the film was how you guys logistically approached the film. So often films have to be shot out of chronological order for financial reasons, but I can’t imagine how that would have worked on this movie because you have to get so into very different phases of their lives…
The movie is told in a non-linear way, but the first part of the relationship, when they’re younger and just discovering each other, we shot first; and then we had a hiatus that was supposed to be ten days but wound up being something like three or four weeks; and then we shot the present, when they’re married, entangled, and in a, kind of, pot of boiling water. We were supposed to have just a short little time off and then do our, you know, physical transformation into our older selves, and Derek, four or five days into the rehearsal, realized that we needed more time for a lot of reasons.
Ryan and I had a hard time fighting with each other—like, we built up this really beautiful thing, and neither of us were so quick to want to destroy it, so we weren’t fighting with each other like we should be fighting with each other—and then I also had this idea that I wanted to put on as much weight as I could, so Derek bought us time. I still don’t know how he did it or, like, who he convinced that this was, like, a good way to spend time and money, to take a month hiatus, but he did. He fought for us, and so we wound up having all this time to first of all gain weight—we had an eating contest, which I won; to also, like, live in this house together and to make memories in the house; and to learn how to hate each other.
During that hiatus, I know that you did a number of things to the house, some with and some apart from Ryan. It does feel like the house was very lived in, and I guess that’s because it was, so perhaps you can share a few examples of what took place there…
Let’s see. Boy, oh, boy, there was so much. I went to the mall and shopped for my clothes. We went to a family portrait studio and had our picture taken together as a family. We decorated the house. We threw our daughter a birthday party in the house. We made home movies in the house [laughs], which are, kind of, rad, and I hope they have, like, a life of their own, maybe, someday.
We slept in the house. We had to clean the house. We had to make a budget for how much we made each year and how much we were allowed to spend. Cooking. Cleaning. You know, basically, like, to learn all this stuff—it was all, really, to learn how to fight, you know, and, like, how a relationship gets mired in the details in the living stuff—who took out the trash last, or, you know, who’s gotten more sleep—to learn about, like, those discrepancies between our characters. What else did he have us do?
Michelle Williams in 63rd Film Festival of Cannes portraitI heard something about wedding photos?
Oh, yeah! So we were having, like, a really hard time learning how to fight with each other, so Derek decided that we should have a ceremonial burning of our wedding pictures. We’d gone grocery shopping, like, I don’t know, a week before, and as a surprise I’d put fireworks in the cart for Ryan-slash-Dean—like, I knew it would make him happy, so I put fireworks in the cart—and then he saw them, and then he went back and, like, got, like, the bigger fireworks set.
You know, it was just like that little stuff, but that’s, like, the perfect thing to fight about—like, I think it’s gonna be really sweet to buy him fireworks, and so I get this, like, thirty dollar fireworks set, and then he looks at it and says, “That’s not big enough,” and he goes for the hundred-and-twenty dollar fireworks set, and I’m like, “We can’t afford that!” You know? And, “Why do you have to top me?” Like, “Why does it have to be bigger?” You know, so that’s an example of where something can turn in a relationship.
He won the argument, so we had a hundred-and-twenty dollars worth of fireworks, and we put them in a wheelbarrow, and we put our wedding picture on top, and we dropped a match on it, and it exploded. And the crazy thing about it was that we watched our wedding picture burn, but the whole thing wouldn’t burn—it burned into a heart-shape around our faces in a kiss. I think Derek has the evidence somewhere.
Michelle Williams on the set of My Week With Marilyn 10.30.2010Well, tying into that, as an actress do you have any inhibitions about doing nudity or sex scenes? This one obviously called for a lot of it, and you’ve done it in other plays and movies, but is it something that you can ever not think about or is it always a little weird to have to reveal yourself in that way?
You know, it’s strange. You know, I don’t want to—like, I don’t get excited to do it. It’s basically just, like, a byproduct—like, I read a story, and then there’s nudity in it, and I see a reason for it, and I’m like, “Oh, well, darn it! I have to.” My fear of doing it, or my insecurity about doing it, or my ambivalence about doing it is overridden— Is “overridden” a word?
Yeah, I think so! “Overridden”, “overridden,” “overridden” —I hope so! If it’s not, will you put another word in there for me? “Overridden.” –is overridden by my desire to tell a whole story. And so I’m not going to let my feelings— My feelings about that aren’t great enough to stop me from doing something. Like, after “Blue Valentine”, I was like, “Oh, phew, am I ever done with nudity!” Like, “That takes its toll!”
And then I read this script that Sarah Polley wrote called “Take This Waltz,” and there’s nudity all over it, and I thought, “Well, here I go again.” You know? I swore I wouldn’t do it, but then I read a great piece of material, and my desire—my excitement—to play the part overrides it. And so I feel like my decision-making ability isn’t something I really have to question, you know? I mean, like, I question a lot of things in my life, but my instinct about choosing work or not isn’t something I’m gonna question. So I’m not gonna let the nudity thing really make decisions for me. Because I don’t have, like, a moral stand against it or anything.
Michelle Williams on the set of My Week With Marilyn 10.10.2010Does it focus on her whole life or just a part of her life?
No, thank goodness, it’s just a month. You know, it’s basically a month—maybe two months—in her life. I keep telling myself that over and over and over again. Yeah, two months, when she was married to Arthur Miller and making a movie in London called “The Prince and the Showgirl.” It’s a little-known film but you should totally check it out—her performance is just radiant.
I think so, because I’ve interviewed so many of these once-big stars who lived into old age, which is what you would think all of them would want to do, but the ones that we remember most—whether it’s James Dean or any number of others—are the ones who died young. Just about everybody from “Rebel Without a Cause” died young…
It’s true—yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, what is it? So it’s Natalie Wood, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Marilyn—
Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller driving in 1956It is weird…
It’s unsettling. It’s unsettling to me for some reason. I don’t know why.
It is. All things being equal, I think the better thing is to live a full, happy life, you know?
Yes, definitely".
Source: scottfeinberg.com
Jake Gyllenhaal in 'Love & Other Drugs' Press Conference - New York City on November 6, 2010. Pictures courtesy of Iheartjakemedia.com
Anne Hathaway in "Gotham" magazine, December 2010
“I recommend getting in bed with Anne Hathaway to any man,” said Gyllenhaall. “I’m lucky. I have had brief cinematic sex with her in Brokeback Mountain and again a number of times in this one.” 
