Julia Roberts: Eat Pray Love / Джулия Робертс: Есть, молиться, любить / HQ
В августе состоялась мировая премьера (российская премьера 7 октября) фильма "Есть, молиться, любить" (Eat Pray Love), снятого по одноименному бестселлеру Элизабет Гилберт. Главные роли в нем играют Джулия Робертс (Julia Roberts), Джеймс Франко и Хавьер Бардем. Американский ELLE в сентябре вышел с фотографией Джулии на обложке, а также с большим интервью и тройной фотосессией, названными также, как фильм.
Я начал было переводить интервью, но первая его часть мне показалась настолько ниочем, да и само оно такое большое, что тратить на это время дальше я не стал. У кого есть желание и возможность читать на английском, весь оригинальный текст здесь же, после фотографий. Ну а фотографии посмотреть можно даже без знания языка :)
Julia Roberts: EAT Pray Love
Джулия Робертс: ЕСТЬ, молиться, любить
фотограф Tom Munro
Elle september 2010
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Julia Roberts: Eat PRAY Love
Джулия Робертс: есть, МОЛИТЬСЯ, любить
фотограф Alexei Hay
Elle september 2010
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Julia Roberts: Eat Pray LOVE
Джулия Робертс: есть, молиться, ЛЮБИТЬ
фотограф Carter Smith
Elle september 2010
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"Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort." We're taking Elizabeth Gilbert's words to heart this month as we celebrate the adaptation of her explosively popular memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, with a 21-page story featuring the film's star, Julia Roberts, profiled by writer Will Blythe and shot by renowned photographers Tom Munro, Alexei Hay, and Carter Smith, each inspired by a phase of the film's spiritual journey. In "Eat" Roberts turns up the heat, Italian bombshell-style, in a clutch of body-beautifying black dresses; "Pray" sees her meditate on clean shapes and rich colors (and one seriously fanciful frock); and in "Love" she's joined by her thoroughly lovable - if you ask ELLE - costar Javier Bardem for a festival of haute-hippie prints. Who says fashion can't help you achieve higher consciousness?
by Will Blythe
Lesson No. 1 for hapless celebrity journalists: Never ever ask an actress about looking ugly unless you know for sure she intended to. "So you allowed yourself to be ugly in Mary Reilly", I say to Julia Roberts.
On the suggestion of a very good friend (shortly to hear from me!), I have asked Roberts about allowing herself to be made to look unbeautiful in the 1996 Stephen Frears film, a revamping of the Jekyll-Hyde story. We've been discussing what it's like for an actress to get older, and I have been trying slyly, oh how slyly, to segue from that into a discussion about the tyranny of appearance, how ugliness is the final frontier of liberation.
I had heard, I continue, that Roberts had let her nose be artificially lengthened. Did that hurt?
Across the table, a disconcerting silence reigns. I notice that she may not be enjoying my appreciation of her daring.
It's brave, I add, when an actress takes risks with her appearance.
Maybe it's my imagination, but Roberts' eyes appear to be darkening, her nostrils widening (though not in an ugly way), and her flawless skin - she is the new face of Lancome - flushing. She stares me down across an expansive table covered with food she has lovingly chosen for our meal.
"I was not ugly!" she says.
And then, for good measure, she repeats the phrase, "I was not!"
Lesson No. 2: Ground your questions in thorough research. Try to actually see the films you bring up during an interview.
In time, I will scrutinize the Mary Reilly DVD and discover that Julia Roberts' nose is exactly its usual size. Her face appears unadorned, as befitting the part of a servant girl, but that's about as far as the radical makeover goes.
Roberts says, "I wouldn't have seen it that way, but, quick, make a point."
I am pointless.
But then, bless her heart, Julia Roberts rears back and honks out a laugh, the booming iconic Roberts laugh, a fliigelhorn of a laugh, delighted, exultant, and self-amused all at once, or so it would seem; the laugh I've heard many times in the movies, the laugh that she knows people think she puts on, just the way they think she trumps up her smile. That jubilant klaxon of a laugh signals that all is clear, that the tornado of my impertinence has whirled by, inflicting no lasting damage.
In fact, it may be that Julia Roberts is having at me a little bit, teasing, toying with me. Because that, I am discovering, is another of her traits. Julia Roberts likes to stick in the needle, then take it out and salve your wound with complimentary balm.
This will change your life," she says, offering me a plump pillow of ravioli.
"But I was starting to like my life the way it was."
"Then please, have a bite so you'll love me more," she says, "even though I came in late and grumpy." We are in Malibu, in a little roadside joint off the Pacific Coast Highway, not far from Roberts' home. And she did indeed arrive here a little fractious after a long photo shoot where everyone was cranky and low-energy and she didn't seem to be able to generate enough happy vibes.
She has been paid millions to carry the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which, with an estimated 8.5 million copies in print worldwide, clearly hit a nerve with its predominantly female audience. (It also clearly hit a nerve with Gilbert's ex-husband, Michael Cooper, who shopped around Displaced, an account of his own search for postmarital enlightenment.)
A text pings in from Roberts' husband, the cinematographer Danny Moder, whom she met on the set of The Mexican in 2000. They have three children, five-and-a-half-year-old twins Phinnaeus and Hazel, and Henry, three. "The children became the shooting stars of him, of that thing we have," she says. "How lucky we are that we love each other so much that we burst into three pieces."
She then reads the text aloud: "Sorry to hear how the day went. Wish I could be there." Are they a texting couple? "No. Normally we just make out," she says. "But he's in Toronto, working on a movie."
Eat, Pray, Love is a plucky tale of self-discovery: marital and relationship disaster redeemed by epic bouts of eating in Italy, by heroic meditation in India, and-finally, as if out of the hippest Barbara Cartland romance novel ever-by lovemaking in Bali with a suave, heartbroken Brazilian who says such things as "How many more sleeps until you come back to me? I'm enjoying falling in love with you, darling. It feels so natural, like it's something I experience every second week, but actually I haven't felt this way about anyone in nearly 30 years."
The movie is faithful to the book's fairy-tale-romance quotient. But according to Gilbert, Roberts wisely changed the focus of the narrative from that of a spiritual quest to a story about how difficult it is to get over a broken heart. "I mean, how long can you watch someone meditating?" Gilbert asks. The movie, if not the book, echoes Jane Austen in suggesting that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single girl in possession of spiritual wisdom and endless supplies of Neapolitan pizza must still be in want of a cute guy.
The story in many ways parallels Roberts' own history. Even though Roberts was happily married and a new mom when her agent sent her Gilbert's memoir, and even though she "was determined not to like something just because everyone likes it," she sat in front of her window, reading, and fell in love. Maybe she loved what millions of women have loved about the book. Eat, Pray, Love is about being faithful to an inner voice that gets you out of a bad relationship, that lets you eat a lot of pasta, that sanctions the solitary pursuit of wisdom, and that still ends with the arrival of lasting love. Of course, most women haven't seen their relationships- with siblings, parents, interesting men-speculated on so publicly. Even pop psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers had at it.
"Did you see what she said about you back in those days?" I ask Roberts.
"Well, that would be a no!" she says in a tone that could be read as either bantering or irked - or a provisional mixture of both.
"She said that you needed to prove that you were lovable to a man."
"What does that mean, mister?" she says, laughing. "I learned a lot of things, made a lot of great mistakes. I learned in my life that you teach people how to treat you. I hope that in our short relationship, I've taught you how to be comfortable with me."
"You've certainly taught me a lot about ravioli," I say.
Over the years, those "greatmistakes" sometimes had her asking for guidance from above.
"Do you pray now?" I ask.
"I do," she says.
She explains that her parents divorced when she was young. "My mother ended up Catholic, my father Baptist. I appreciate Catholicism-it makes me think of scrambled eggs, powdered doughnuts, and not getting to watch Flipper. But the quietness of it, the silent reverence, is not who I am. So the Baptist idea- the expressive appreciation for
the gathering, the community-that, I sort of get. To end up in the spiritual life with my children makes perfect sense, provided those two things."
"What spiritual life is that?"
"Very Hindu," she answers, leaning toward me to better display the Hindu necklaces dangling in profusion from her neck. "A lot of what I've discovered as an adult in a Hindu temple brings these things together. As a family, we go to temple and chant and pray and celebrate. I'm definitely a practicing Hindu."
In Hindu cosmology, the universe is perpetually created and destroyed, not unlike the careers of Hollywood actors. Souls can be reborn in dozens of other bodies. Roberts watches her daughter, for instance, and feels the presence of another, older soul. "My daughter sits in a certain way," she says, "and I know there's someone there I didn't get the benefit of knowing who used to sit that way. It's an honor for me to continue to shepherd that. I don't know who it is, but it's part of my duty."
She doesn't hesitate when I ask whether she remembers one of her own past lives. "I was a peasant revolutionary, certainly," she says, as matter-of-factly as if she were describing her morning commute. "I was the person who collected the firewood, the person who was totally informed, completely aware that bringing this firewood would make a difference."
And when this current glittering life ends? "Golly," Roberts says. "I've been so spoiled with my friends and family in this life. Next time I want to be just something quiet and supporting."
I think, naturally, of an Oscar for best supporting actress. But that can't be what Roberts means. "Do you mean like a nurse? " I ask.
"An ant farm," Roberts answers. "An ant farm. I mean, it would be great to come back as Lord Byron, but...."
Roberts' first religion might more accurately be said to have been acting. Given her family, she came by it naturally, as if she'd grown up in a traveling troupe of gypsies or carnival barkers.
Now 42, she's about the age her father was when he died. Roberts was then nine. She grew up in Smyrna, Georgia. Her dad sold vacuum cleaners; her mom was a secretary who later sold real estate. Their passion, however, was theater, and they ran an acting workshop in Atlanta. She believes that her dad would be proud of her, "amazed at me in show business," but that he "probably had higher goals.... He was more literary, more of a writer."
Julia was the baby of three siblings, including Eric, the oldest, the first of the Robertses to reach renown, for his early roles in such films as The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984); and Lisa, her older sister, who also acted and now produces. (She also has a younger half sister, Nancy.)
"They bathed us, they fed us, they clothed us," she says of her parents. "What else could we be? It's a powerful expression of faith in your parents. That and having no other skills!"
She cackles.
As a teenager, she says, she was not at all rebellious, describing herself, in fact, as "appropriately passive." She did no theater in high school but fell in love with acting after an English teacher screened the film Becket, starring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, which Roberts subsequently watched again on her own time in the library.
After high school, she followed her sister, with whom she had shared a room at home for 12 years, to Greenwich Village, where they rented an apartment on King Street. Julia worked at the Athlete's Foot at Broadway and 77th, right next to a Popeyes chicken. "The Adidas Country, our most popular shoe!" she says, safely removed from that line of work.
She didn't go to acting school, but it was only a brief time before she made a splash in Mystic Pizza (1988) as a small-town girl working in a pizza parlor. Then, in 1990, she assumed the role that would make her famous, that of a giggly, openhearted hooker to Richard Gere's high-class John in Pretty Woman, a performance that prompted the film historian David Thomson to call her character "the kind of adorable whore whom a respectable man could take to the opera and put through college; she was an Audrey Hepburn who'd give head."
The consensus since is that Roberts is one of those American actors - Tom Cruise is another-who connects directly with the public, like a politician going over the heads of legislators to the people, calling on some overwhelming force of personality that the camera knows first and the mainstream adores. Her movies are estimated to have grossed more than $2.3 billion.
Perhaps to preempt her critics, Roberts decries her lack of acting technique throughout our meal whenever I ask her about choices she made in a particular scene. "I have no acting technique," she says. "And there's nothing more boring than actors sitting around talking about acting."
She suspects that the camera captures what she has called her "destiny of joy."
But, she adds, "if someone came to me and said, 'I know exactly what it is you do,' I would beg them not to tell me, because I could fuck it up within seconds. I do believe that when you are born within the crest of a laugh, whatever that is," - and here she smiles as if to acknowledge the goofy poetry of the notion - "you've been given a gift. I've always had it. It explains my ability to prevail."
It's true that Roberts' charisma is monumental, says Ryan Murphy, the director of Eat Pray Love. A creator of the television series Glee, but he argues that her talents as an actress should not be underestimated. "She is a great movie star," he says, "the kind of actress that people project dreams onto and love and feel safe to follow anywhere. But she also knows every light, every angle. I never did more than two takes with her. If I said, "I want you to cry, and I want the tear to come halfway down your left cheek," she'd say, "No problem. She's technically brilliant in that way."
A couple of days earlier, I'd watched her making acting adjustments on the fly during the filming of Larry Crowne, a Universal production that she is shooting in Los Angeles with Tom Hanks as director, producer, co-star, and writer, about a middle-aged man who is downsized from his job and enrolls in college.
The scene, which has required all afternoon to set up, with a vast apparatus of production crew, actors, and extras, calls for Roberts to simply walk for about 10 seconds down the sidewalk of a college in Carson, just south of L.A. Roberts is playing the part of a teacher, albeit an exceptionally well-dressed one, in high heels and a white-and-blue Diane von Furstenberg-style wrapdress that she keeps wrapped together with double-stick tape.
As the scene is about to be shot, Roberts trades the ratty pink plastic shopping bag in which she carries around her downtime knitting for a leather briefcase, a gold-trimmed date book, and a large coffee. Hanks, in jeans, black T-shirt, and boots, calls her over for a last-minute consultation under the eaves of a classroom building. The two, who costarred in Charlie Wilson's War, touch palms flirtatiously. "Mr. Tom Hanks," she says.
"Do you know what this scene is about?" Hanks asks her.
"Nope," she says.
"You're thinking, I wish I could see Larry Crowne," Hanks prompts her. "Will I see Larry Crowne tonight? Think of something bleak. Larry Crowne is riding a scooter and he has cancer! Do a Brando! Something I've never said!" he tells Roberts with a laugh, suggesting that he's said this a time or two. He later tells me that Brando always said that it's better for an actor to have something in his mind as he is performing even the simplest of actions.
Hanks puts his hands to his head, pantomines thinking. Then he says, somewhat inscrutably, "Full-body wave, Sparky!"
If only walking in a movie were that simple.
Roberts walks down the sidewalk. She doesn't stop; she doesn't do much of anything. She passes by a tai chi class; assorted extras amble across the quad, notebooks, skateboards in hand. "Cut!"
"That was fast," Hanks says.
"I know," Roberts says. "I panicked."
She does another couple of takes, but with a difference. You can see her appear to be thinking as she nears the end of the stroll. Hanks says, "All right," after the final take.
"What do you mean, 'All right'?" Roberts says.
From under the eaves, Gary Goetzman, a producer, rides to the rescue. "Genius!" he yells. "It was genius!"
Roberts smiles. "That's more like it," she says.
Later, in her bathrobe, alone in her trailer, surrounded by knitting projects, including a cap she has just finished for Hanks and a sweater in progress for her son Henry, she says, "Tom is always quoting Marlon Brando. I'm always asking those guys"-referring to her directors-"to tell me what they want. The same with George Clooney. 'Name it for me,' I tell him, 'and I'll do it.'"
There's something sort of tomboyish about Roberts, I am noticing. She's the kind of girl who can hang with the guys, josh with them, and then dazzle them with the heretofore insufficiently noted fact that she has become quite beautiful while they were busy busting her chops.
During the filming of the Ocean's movies, Roberts was often the victim of her fellow cast members' practical jokes. "Those boys!" she exclaims. "I was the only girl there. One day
George Clooney put these giant potted trees in front of my door so that I couldn't get out to work. I pride myself on being punctual!
"You didn't want to leave your camera lying around, either," she says. "People were breaking into each other's rooms, taking them, and let's just say you didn't want your mom picking up your photos atWalgreens! Photos of unidentifiable body parts."
On the set of Eat Pray Love, Roberts enjoyed making sport of her Spanish costar Javier Bardem's efforts to deliver a convincing Brazilian accent.
"We make a link with humor," Bardem says. "Some words are funny to her. The way I say enlightenmente- she would make fun all day with that word. There is the nice relationship of the woman makingfun of the man and the man enjoying the woman making fun of him, but not throwing tomatoes in his face. It means she cares for you."
Bardem, in turn, liked to make Roberts laugh by pretending to be Al Pacino during his character Felipe's attempts to seduce her in Bali.
And tonight, the coltish actress decides that it's my turn for a little razzing. She has a keen ear for the cliched representation of herself, the standard Julia Roberts tropes that the press recycles. That charm, that laugh, that smile.
"You're probably going to describe me as coltish," she says.
Whoops.
"No, I wasn't," I say. "Maybe gangly. Not coltish."
"Is this interview going better than you thought, about the same, or worse?" she asks me.
Until we got on the subject of how ugly she was in Mary Reilly, I say, I had thought it was going pretty well.
I mention a story I've seen in which casting directors complain they're having a hard time finding actors who haven't been freshly Botoxed, thus limiting their range of expression.
"It's unfortunate," Roberts says, "that we live in such a panicked, dysmorphic society where women don't even give themselves a chance to see what they'll look like as older persons. I want to have some idea of what I'll look like before I start cleaning the slates." Furthermore: "I want my kids to know when I'm pissed, when I'm happy, and when I'm confounded. Your face tells a story," she says, "and it shouldn't be a story about your drive to the doctor's office."
Aging gracefully, she asserts, "is a combination of genetics and loving support-or the girlfriend who says, 'Are you fucking kidding me? What are you doing?' You need all these things in this society to leave yourself alone."
Getting older and facing her mortality "holds the appropriate fears and wonderments for me," she says. "But my fears are more parental. You make these people and you love them and you want them around for a thousand years, and you want to be there for them for a thousand years."
At this point in the evening, the Pacific fog insinuating itself around the restaurant, the confessions come easily, a drive-into-the-night intimacy of the sort that strangers experience on planes and long bus trips. We find ourselves talking about the unexpected shape a life can take, the way its disasters sometimes contain the kernel of redemption many years later.
"When you end up happily married," Roberts says, "even the failed relationships have worked beautifully to get you there."
"I think she's been actively searching her whole life for some kind of peace," says the actor Richard Jenkins, who gives a vivid, salty performance as the Texan in search of peace opposite her in the India section of Eat Pray Love. "And now she realizes that she's found it. And she's grateful."
Her family is the bulwark against the shallow world of appearances, the Hollywood world. Roberts is in that world, but not of it. Her "cocoon of girlfriends," as she puts it, comes from the industry's rank and file, the wives of her husband's colleagues and buddies. Her mother lives nearby.
"People think that for an actor, life is somehow different," Roberts says. "They project a more extreme context on your life, where either I was really unhappy or the happiest I've ever been, or so utterly in love or completely disenchanted by love. But everybody goes through the same beats."
I am reminded of something that Ryan Murphy told me about Roberts: "She doesn't have the narcissism that most actresses have. She's not driven and ambitious like most icons. In India, women in the tiniest, dustiest villages knew who she was because they'd seen Pretty Woman. And she would hold their hands and talk with them about their children. Her gift is empathy."
"If someone wants to present a scenario to me," Roberts says, "I will feel it deeply."
Her empathy is active, searching, engendering confession. During the meal, she has asked, when not busting my chops, about my siblings, about my vocation, my favorite books, my love life, even my sign. ("I'm a Scorpio," she says, "but not the type you want to kill.")
I tell her about walking in the woods by Orchard Beach in the Bronx, red-winged blackbirds, a marsh of tall reeds, water on all sides. She tells me about her ranch in New Mexico, desert rocks, standing outside at her wedding.
Everybody out there goes through the same beats. She seems to want everyone, even an acquaintance of a night, to be all right. She leans into the tape recorder, leaving a message for my girlfriend. "Marry him," she says.
She seems to want me not to be adrift. She says: "Didn't Socrates say that for a man's life to be complete, he needs to do three things-write a book, build a house, and raise a child? "
Did Socrates say this? I haven't the slightest idea. But Julia Roberts did before departing into the California night. It was a swell thing to say to a person who started the evening by calling her ugly.
© ELLE