MISS POTTER
Press Conference interviews with Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson, and Director Chris Noonan
story by Brad Balfour

January 2, 2007

Q: Which authors or books have inspired you, besides Beatrix herself--what did you think of as a writer and person?

RZ: I don't think she's weird. I had this conversation earlier. I don't think it's strange at all that she speaks to her work when she's in that creative place in her mind, when she's conjuring this world in her mind, this imaginary world. It's not strange at all to me. I love her eccentricities. I think she's brilliant. I think she's completely complicated in the most wonderful way, and I'd love to have known her.

In terms of my own stuff, that's really interesting. You know, I don't know specifically. It changes, you know. I pick something up and find it completely inspiring because it's a different kind of prose. I love Cormac McCarthy's writing. I love Charles Frazier. You could smell those words. I mean it's unbelievably rich prose.

I mean, what, do you mean like as a kid or do you mean now? You mean now. I like African-American writers and I like Southern writers. There are elements of the subculture that are exquisitely rich, just historically. There's a musicality to Langston Hughes' work that jumps off the page and it makes me need a pen. I need a pen. I need a pen. He's probably my favorite. And there's just so much emotion. It's kind of like in Latin cultures. You find this kind of passion for all elements of life. I find that the same in African-American writers, just this passion for things. Sorry. I need a pen. I need a pen.

Q: Renee, is this the type of movie your fans expect from you? Is it a conscious decision to make chick flicks?

RZ: I don't think this is a chick flick at all. I don't think it's a chick flick. I think it's far more complex than that. It's not meant to be female entertainment. It's an important, important story, and it's a beautiful story, and I don't think I've met a guy yet who's seen it and didn't connect to it, or cried. It's just real. It's a human story, the most powerful kind of story, to take advantage of the impact this medium can have in terms of moving a person--making you self-aware in a way, making you recognize something different, making you question things, learning something, growing as a person.

I don't think it's a chick flick. I think that underestimates it in a terrible way, and I don't think that's true, that there are people out there who have expectations of the stuff I do. And, no, it's not a conscious decision, but I'm curious, and I know that if I feel like I've been there before, I don't really have much interest in repeating myself and going there again.

CN: I don't think it's a chick flick at all. It's a love story, and in the contemporary mores of Hollywood, if something's got violence in it and a lot of cursing or whatever it's seen as a male movie, and if something's got a love affair in it it's seen as a female movie. I think that's an incredibly limited way of looking at things. I know so many men who have watched this movie who have been moved to tears by it and have got a lot out of it. You know, the world has moved on, and I just think that's a very outdated way of categorizing movies.

EW: Its very difficult to ask a question of an artist to ask them to define themselves by their place in the market. I think it just doesn't make any sense. You do things, make things you love because you have to. When a director that you have admired for years calls and asks you to do it, you say ok, ok, ok. I don't really think about that stuff when you make choices on compulsion to have an interesting life.

EM: I don't have anything else to say. I agree with everyone else.

Q:So what is your next movie--not a chick flick?

RZ: It's a psychological thriller ["Case 39"]. And an animated film, "Bee Movie" with Jerry Seinfeld who is hilarious and funny. But about "Miss Potter," I don't think it's a chick flick.

Q: As for you Chris, "Babe" was a huge international success, but we're only getting your second film in a decade-plus. Why so long?

CN: Well, I sort of sat in a hole, very depressed… No, not really. It's very hard to follow a success. It puts a lot of pressure on you and it makes you really want to follow it with something that's equally successful. I was offered many, many, many scripts in that period and every time I read one I got more down about what was on offer.

Q: Can you talk specifically about them or offer an example?

CN: No, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to slander films. But they all seemed to be very derivative, and that's sort of the nature of the film industry these days, it seems to me, maybe not so much right now, but in the last 10 years. It's very easy to get a film up that you can say, 'It's just like this film that was a success last year,' or 'It's a cross between these two films that were both successes last year,' than it is raising the money for a movie that is completely original and no one has ever seen anything like it before. That's the kind of thing I'm interested in more than I'm interested in remakes or rehashes of already made movies.

I found it very hard to find anything that I was interested in. I developed a couple of movies. I co-produced a movie in Australia for a first-time director and I kept looking and kept depressing myself by reading scripts. And this was the… I can't say it's the first script I read in that process that really moved me, but it was one of the first scripts I read that moved me because it seemed to be genuine. The emotions of the film seemed to be genuine. It seemed not to be a manipulative emotional film. It seemed not to just be pushing buttons. It seemed to be much more about the reality of life and I really, well, I shed a tear over the script and was immediately interested in it and pursued it from there.

Q: How long did it take from there?

CN: I guess that would have been about three years ago that I first read the script. A lot of time passes with most films, and this was just the latter stages of the development of the film. It had been developed already for about five or six year by one of its producers and its writer. So one has to be very patient in developing films.

Q: The issue of self worth. This is also a movie about people emerging into their true selves. Did you identify with your characters in that way?

EM: Wow. I think there is something interesting about that when [Norman] meets Beatrix; his brother is upset that they are going to publish the book and immediately she says, "Well it must be like this, this and this.' And, I imagine she must have been a tough cookie to deal with. So, when she meets Norman, he's so nervous about being a publisher that he immediately meets her demands or enthusiam with goals of his own, because they seemed to be a perfect match in terms of the passion towards her work. I don't know that it was about – I don't get the sense he was trying to prove himself.

CN: I'm going to be equally frustrating for you, because I don't think I have approached this script from the point of view of intellectual analysis of themes and that kind of thing. I think it's much more an intuitive process for me, and so I haven't got a ready answer for your question. I think that's the critic's job to look at the film and… you're doing the critics job by pointing out to us that this is a theme in our movie. It's not a theme that's consciously driven me through the movie, but it's something that I find very interesting, that it's there, and I think we all, as creative people, we instinctively arrive at decision as to how we make a story play.

Often the threads of those decisions can be brought together and a thematic line can be seen in them, but (it can) be one that wasn't actually intended. It wasn't one that we set out to do. But that's sort of the magic of the creative process anyway.

RZ: In what respect--[how did we show how she evolved]? Well, from the inside, when you're trying to make decisions about how to maybe show the evolution of a character throughout their life, you make creative choices about how to show that, on that day or in the way they dress, they're mannerisms, how they change, how they carry themselves a little bit differently, things like that. It's subtle and it's truthful in terms of making the choices for the moment. There are a few of them you have to plan in advance, like wardrobe changes for example.

For Beatrix, I spoke with Anthony [Powell, the costume designer] and we decided that when she was under her mother's influence she was going to be more uptight and more rigid and more formal. And as she begins to find her own legs, well, we're going to show that her clothes get a little bit less tailored, and she's going to grow a bit. You know, she's going to spread out. You know, with the landscape she's going to take up a little bit more space, not only in her life but to find her voice, and so her clothes should be the same to reflect it. There are subtle things like that, if you want to draw a parallel with the Norman and Beatrix characters.

There's a definite common bond there between the two of them, who kind of lived at home, kind of were the caretakers, kind of didn't have massive social existences, and they have this common denominator in this creative effort that they shared. That was part of their affection. He (McGregor) and I discussed it as being this thing that they shared in terms of finding their own. It was more subtle than that. It was subconscious. It was not something that either one of them was consciously aware of. They just started to collaborate and liked it. You have to be responsible and pay attention to that in some respects, but they're so loosely tied. It's more about being accurate on the day as per the script requires as per that moment in telling the story requires.

Q: One thing we find out about through this film is Beatrix Potter's environmental importance in England, how big a part she played in farmland preservation…

RZ: I'm going to skip that and go straight to talking about my sex life [laughs]. My mother would be proud. OK, let's see, what can I tell you about her environmental contributions? I was very surprised. I knew nothing about it. And just recently I was reading about the things that she did with the Girl Scouts, in terms of accommodating them, teaching them and helping them learn how to survive on their own in the wild, all sorts of things. I had no idea about the land. I just didn't know of the magnitude of the contribution that she had made in that respect.

I didn't know that it was responsible partially for the future of the farming and the (countryside-preservation movement). Obviously one begets the other, but I didn't know. Still, I can't tell you too much. I kind of stopped with gathering my information that pertained to this part of her life, because it was such a finite period and there was so much information. I could do better to pull Chris and Emily in on this, because they could help me remember with what they've collected. What was it, 4000-something acres she started to collect? She was a founding member of the National Trust . . .

CN: A lot of that land was working farms, so it's not virgin land or virgin forest or anything like that. It's much more that she fell in love with the land as it was in the Lake District, and just didn't want to see tourism develop there and that kind of thing. So she wanted to be part of this organization to preserve it.

RZ: She referenced feeling the encroachment. She definitely envisioned that it was going to happen inevitably if she didn't participate in something like that.

EW: I think for Americans to appreciate how important it is in the UK, if you visit there now, there are places with natural beauty, there are so many people there, and it's so small and everyone is so grateful for the small bit of preservation that has been done. It they had eaten it up, there would have been no wilderness now but for Americans it's a different thing because it's such a huge country but it is so important for the UK.

RZ: It does feel encapsulated. When you go there, it feels encapsulated, like there's a point of entry and a point of exit. Absolutely. When you get to the preserved land, or the English countryside in quotations, I didn't get that feeling, that endless sort of ongoing wilderness before you that you might get in Northwestern, er, Northeastern, uh, Midwestern America today. I feel it here, too, so I can imagine, because it is quite small and precious [England].

EM: That's why we invented the Midge in Scotland, which is a tiny mosquito 'cause that's why we're not up there. (Laughs.)

Q: Is there a statue of Beatrix Potter in England? Is she a national heroine?

EM: She's on the back of the 25 lb. note [laughs

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