Lie Wit Me, Played by Lauren
photo submitted
To prepare for her role in Lie With Me, Lauren Lee Smith travelled to Toronto a month early to wander the streets and get a feel for the city. The new film, directed by Clement Virgo, opens today at Granville Cinemas.
Erotic Lie With Me eyes high art as an ideal
_ Lie With Me. Directed by Clement Virgo. Starring Lauren Lee Smith and Eric Balfour. Opens today at the Empire Granville 7 Cinemas with a Restricted rating.
John Goodman
jgoodman@nsnews.com
Lauren Lee Smith was absolutely terrified the first time she read through the script for Lie With Me.
Clement Virgo's film presented an excellent opportunity for the young Vancouver actress. It was also a big gamble - for much of the time her character, Leila, is naked on screen.
"I was a little bit concerned at first," admits Smith, 24. "I had never done any nudity before let alone a big love scene. Ultimately I think to be a really good actor you have to let all of your guards down and be raw and naked whether it's physically, emotionally, mentally or whatever. I hadn't had the opportunity to do that yet so I just knew that I had to get over my fears and insecurities."
Being a huge fan of the book the film is based on didn't hurt either. Virgo adapted Lie With Me from the novel of the same name written by his wife, Tamara Faith Berger. The story, saturated in sexual energy and straddling a blurred line between art and pornography, could only have been produced by someone intimately involved with the sex industry. Berger served several years in the trenches writing raunch for publications such as Sticky Buns, Buttime Stories and Bump & Grind. The woman knows her stuff.
Lie With Me rejects typical pornographic production techniques simply by narrating everything from a woman's point of view. Berger, who once wrote an academic paper called The Moral Pornographer, is savvy enough not to fall into the cliches of genre writing and raises her game to the level of Georges Bataille and other grandmasters of sin and skin esthetics. On purely literary terms the book could not be ignored and tapped an audience eager for something different.
"I was working in Toronto and a girlfriend passed along the book to me," says Smith. "She had received it from her girlfriend and we all just adored the book. A couple of years later I was in Los Angeles and my agent sent me the script and I was like 'Oh my God, this is the book.' Not only that but Clement is directing it and I know him."
Smith appears regularly on The L Word series, produced locally for Showtime, and worked on one episode with Virgo as director. However when she made her audition tape for Lie With Me she had no idea what the outcome would be.
The production team had been searching for their central character Leila for some time before Smith's tape arrived. Once Virgo saw the audition he called off the search and approached Smith to play opposite another rising young star, Eric Balfour, known for his work on 24, Six Feet Under and The O.C.
From the outset Smith had complete confidence in Virgo as a director. "He's very clear in what he wants and he's good at giving direction to actors. I put my trust in him 100 per cent which I kind of had to do."
To prepare for her role Virgo recommended Smith study several films that could help shape her conceptual approach to Lie With Me. She got copies of Hedy Lamarr in Extase, Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar, Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris and several films starring Isabelle Huppert. "She's now my idol," says Smith. "After I saw Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher I was hooked. To me she's one of the most beautifully striking women I've ever seen. She's so interesting to watch and she can do so much without doing a lot."
Note that all of the films Smith studied were made in Europe. Historically North American culture has had a thing about the representation of sexuality and gone to great lengths to avoid the subject all together. Like it or not Lie With Me aims to change that.
Perhaps because of its aggressive nature the film is much lighter in tone than the novel it is based on. Virgo packages the story as a modern take on romance with sunny Toronto acting as a backdrop. The film's effervescence is in stark contrast to another film Virgo references in his work - In the Mood For Love - Wong Kar-Wai's brilliant tone poem to Hong Kong. Lie With Me represents another side of eros shot in Super 16 on the streets of Toronto in June 2004. "I think Clement did an amazing job of showcasing Toronto," says Smith. "I've certainly never seen Toronto in such a beautiful, sexy way."
Berger was around the set for the first week of the month-long shoot, according to Smith, but for the most part she stayed in the background and let Virgo realize his vision of her material. "We had about a week of rehearsals beforehand," says Smith. "But other than that there was nothing specific as far as preparation goes. I went to Toronto about a month before we started shooting and spent a month completely alone wandering around Toronto and getting a feel for the city. That's what I did to prepare - I shut everyone out for a month."
The film relies heavily on the chemistry between the two lead actors to succeed as a love story. "Once I'd read with Eric I knew it was going to be a breeze," says Smith. "It would have been an entirely different film without him. We really had to put our trust in each other and become very close, very quickly. He made that really easy and I felt really safe with him. About a week before shooting during the rehearsals Clement and Eric and I made a pact that we would make this as honest and real as possible within our boundaries and I think we did."
Virgo wanted a spontaneity between the actors even though their actions were heavily choreographed. For the most part they stuck to the script but there was also room for improvisation within the set scenes, says Smith. "We would block everything out precisely to the dot and then make sure everyone was comfortable with what we were going to do. From there it was really letting us react (to the situation) and we had freedom within that."
Shooting in Super 16 gave Virgo the flexibility to capture the interaction with a cin‚ma v‚rit‚ feel. There is nothing objective in his approach to the story and we are meant to experience it through the eyes of Leila. The film actually opens with the camera trained on one of her eyes and then pans out. "Pretty much all of the scenes are these odd close ups to keep the whole thing in her space, in her mind - seeing the world through her eyes."
The opening sequence is an homage to Georges Bataille's erotic classic Histoire de l'oeil (The Story of the Eye, first published in 1928). Virgo intentionally distances his project from traditional pornography by giving everything names. His film has a rich subtext which operates on many levels.
Lie With Me received its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. "I was really nervous," says Smith. "I hadn't seen the film yet and I definitely thought that I would have to show up with my dukes up and be ready to defend myself. But women came up to me afterwards to say they wish this story had been told before. Women really identify with the character. It's not for the squeamish but for the most part we've been getting a really amazing reaction from people."
Since making Lie With Me last year Smith has gone onto work in as yet unreleased films with Tony Goldwyn (the Last Kiss) and Terry Zwigoff (Art School Confidential) as well as continuing her regular stint on The L Word. The series is wrapping up its third season next month.
As Lie With Me gets set to open nationwide today Smith looks back on the film as a great experience. "It was a really quick shoot and the most crazy, wonderful time that I've ever had. Eric and Clement were amazing - we were so close during that time. We were all in our own little bubble. I remember a couple of days after shooting I slept for about two days and then when I finally woke up I was like, 'Oh my God, what just happened? Where did those four weeks go? Who Am I?' "