http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/17/susan-sarandon-the-lovely-bones
Playing a glamorous granny may not top the wish-list of every leading
lady. But Susan Sarandon, newly single at 63, is unfazed by getting
older. On the eve of her new film, The Lovely Bones, she tells
Chrissy Iley why marriage was not for her, why she's getting into
tattoos and how laughter keeps her skin perfect
Sunday 17 January 2010
The first thing you notice about Susan Sarandon is how comfortable
she feels in her own body. She often talks about how proud she is of
her breasts, but it's more than that. There is something about how
connected she is to herself that makes her charismatic. She is
instantly accessible, perching on a little sofa in Claridge's hotel,
wondering why the green tea is brown. She is wearing black jeggings,
New Balance trainers, an oversized sweater with a cream lace shirt
underneath. A curious outfit, yet somehow you notice her not its oddness.
Her skin is flawless, her eyes huge and all-consuming. She is not
afraid to look at you and she's not afraid to let you look right in
at her. It's an open face. No slyness, no manipulation. She is
renowned for being a woman who doesn't fear most things and certainly
doesn't fear speaking her mind.
It is that truth-telling that later on in the interview makes us come
a little undone. But more of that later.
To start off we are embracing the fearlessness that makes her sexy at
any age, whether she is doing a lesbian love scene with Catherine
Deneuve in The Hunger, driving off a cliff in Thelma and Louise or
reinventing the screen granny as she does in her latest film, The
Lovely Bones. Leopard-skin accessories, Jackie O hair and racoon eyes
she's the sexiest thing in the movie, a meditation on death.
We've met before. The last time, she turned up feeling sick, had to
go and vomit halfway through the interview, but she didn't want to
cancel because it might have inconvenienced me. The show must go on.
Today she is feeling healthy. She talks about her new regime of
dehydrated fruits and vegetables, and her ping-pong club in New York.
Then she'll catalogue what drugs she's done and what exactly they do.
There is no self- conscious talking about the movie, even though
there's an awards buzz already for her.
She won an Oscar for playing the nun in Dead Man Walking. Her career
started off in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Following that, she was
Brooke Shields's hooker mother in Pretty Baby and went on to have a
long and tortured affair with its director, Louis Malle. She
specialises in every nuance of the mother role, making it in turns
forceful, sexy and unsentimental, and was the most unvictimy cancer
victim in Stepmom.
She's just come from Sweden, where she received a lifetime
achievement award, but is more excited that she met a table tennis
gold medallist "because I have opened a ping-pong bar in Manhattan
and I want him to come". Her sons Jack Henry, 20, and Miles, 17, have
both DJ-ed there, and it was one of the coolest places in Manhattan
before it had even had a liquor licence.
"Girls can beat boys, old ladies can beat young guys and little girls
can beat older guys. It's about strategy, and you can't get hurt…"
she says, her eyes spinning with excitement. Her ping-pong fever
started when she was working with an editor who was also making a
documentary about table tennis. "I wouldn't say that I play very
well, but I make it possible for other people to play well."
Facilitating, nurturing, making things happen, organising are all at
the core of her. The oldest child of seven, she's had a lifetime of
doing things for other people. But who facilitates her?
"Not enough people," she says with a dryness that comes right from
the back of her throat. "That's the curse of the confident woman.
Most people know that if you take care of yourself and open your own
doors, they stop opening them for you. It's harder to ask for help
because you get in the habit of taking care of yourself, and I think
you forget how to ask." Her eyes look searching now. "I am trying to
change all of that. I am trying to repattern myself now that my
youngest is out of the house." The change seems to scare her and
excite her in equal parts. The change is something she refers back to
many times. It's a big deal, a new her.
She peers into her cup of brown green tea. "I celebrated my 63rd
birthday and got blood tests and saw a nutritionist. I want to do a
pre-emptive strike on whatever is building up in me, so I'm
travelling with this dehydrated green stuff and red stuff and cutting
out all sugar and all liquor. I rarely drink, so that wasn't hard.
The bad one was bread. I love bread. I cheat sometimes. When I did
the play [Exit the King on Broadway] I got run down and was drinking
serious caffeine, so I needed to clean up my act. I'm very
susceptible to drugs of every kind. Coffee, it's great because it
gets me very up, but then I crash."
I tell her I find coffee comforting. She surmises authoritatively:
"You are probably someone who takes Ritalin to calm them."
When she says drugs have such an effect on her, what kind of drugs
does she mean? "I mean anything! I'm not really interested in
drinking. Tequila maybe, but champagne makes me fall asleep. It
doesn't take much. I love mushrooms and I've done those successfully,
but I don't like anything chemical. I didn't like LSD, and ecstasy
wouldn't agree with me. I like stuff you can smoke."
I tell her that the stuff you smoke makes me paranoid and depressed.
"Oh, that's sad," she says in a heartfelt way, as if she's running
through all the good times that I'll never have. "Everyone is wired
differently. Some people can do stuff that others can't. That's what
I told my kids. Some drugs can kill you. Some are not even worth
trying. Some are a lot of fun, so talk to me first."
It doesn't surprise me that seven minutes into our interview we are
discussing chemical versus herbal drugs in detail. Sarandon is
curious and open. Some things she just can't be bothered to hide or
be polite about. She once said it was her ambition to be the longest
working actor. She works a lot but doesn't need a star role, just one
with meat on it. She loved working with Peter Jackson on The Lovely
Bones because "he knew what he wanted. It was a very pleasant
experience. I've been on films where I didn't particularly like the
director, which wasn't the case here. You don't have to be best
friends with someone, but if they are passionate you respect them.
I've also worked with directors who are just trying to get to dinner.
They want their martini and to get out of there. And that's a
terrible thing. I've done a number of low-budget indie films lately
where the director has also been the writer and they have cut at the
behest of the powers-that-be the very things that made their movies
special, because they think homogenising it will make it appeal to
the most amount of people and it will make the most money."
Did she suffer by working on things that were quirky and got
homogenised? "Yeah. They're still waiting to come out," she deadpans.
She doesn't want to say which ones they are but Solitary Man, Leaves
of Grass and The Greatest are all indie films with writer-directors.
She's not bitter, just bemused. "I wouldn't have done them if
[certain] scenes had been cut. Imagine in that movie with Cameron
Diaz and Ben Stiller [There's Something About Mary] if the hair scene
had been cut out. Imagine people saying: 'Oh, that goes too far…'
"When I did Dead Man Walking people were trying to get me to have an
affair or the guy not to die. The whole movie would have been
completely different." In it she stays a nun and Sean Penn, the man
on death row, does die and it is, of course, brilliant. Did The
Lovely Bones make her think about mortality? "Well, I'm always
thinking about it… I think it was interesting to think about how
grief is processed. I remember talking to some firefighters' wives
months after 9/11 and them saying: 'I'm still angry. People don't understand.'"
We talk briefly about how grief, just like drugs, affects people
differently. We agree that the coping mechanism is to disconnect from
the pain until something in a movie you are watching or something in
a song suddenly reconnects you to it in an unexpected moment. "I am
just like that," she says. "I am so busy getting everyone else
through it that I don't luxuriate in whatever it is you have to go through."
The Lovely Bones is the Alice Sebold book that became a bestseller in
2002. For a lot of people, reading it was the way they processed 9/11.
"The reason so many people gravitated towards the book after 9/11 was
that it somehow helped if you believed your father had passed on and
you might be having a baby and somehow that he was somewhere
appreciating that. That there is some kind of continuum."
In the book, the parents of the raped and murdered teenager, Susie,
implode in different ways. The mother goes off to have an affair and
the father becomes obsessed with tracking down the killer. The affair
is cut from the movie. Sarandon gives a half smile. Another scene cut
from the movie was one of Sarandon's pivotal ones, in which she goes
into the bedroom where everything has been preserved just as she left
it and rips the sheets off.
"There's always the balance of what the director thinks is more
important, and he was focused on more than the family dynamic. Some
people get really pissed off with bereavement. Others can't get out
of bed. I know when my dad passed away I was much more objective.
There were things to be done and I felt I needed to do them."
As the eldest of seven she was used to taking charge. "They all
needed me and they all needed to get up and speak at the memorial,
and I really didn't want to because I didn't want it to be about me,
so I didn't speak. I was seeing my dad every weekend, but he wasn't
living in my house. I think unless you are living with someone you
can delude yourself."
Her agent of 25 years, Sam Cohen, recently died, too. "I did speak at
the memorial. I was flattered that they asked me it was very
difficult. You try not to just wail and at the same time you are
incredibly disconnected."
She is so disconnected she hasn't crossed out dead people's names
from her phone book. She uses an old-fashioned phone book. It's
somehow more vicious to cross them than to delete them from a mobile
phone. "I'm always telling my kids they should have a back-up,
because if you lose your phone everything gets stolen. I look at my
phone book and there is a whole history there. I don't cross out the
dead people. I hold on to T-shirts and gifts that people who have
passed away have given me."
A few months ago, when she performed Ionesco's Exit the King on
Broadway, which is all about confronting death, she turned her
dressing room into a little shrine for people who had died. "I would
talk to them before I went on, for perspective," she remembers. "They
were people I thought would like the play, like Bob Altman and Paul
Newman. I would say: 'Help me remember this is just a play and not to
take myself so seriously.'"
Did she feel they talked backed? "No, but I did feel good having them
there. I also had new little souls babies and pictures of my kids
when they were little and new babies that had just been born."
Does she believe that souls get passed on? "Maybe. I'm not so sure,
but the one thing that makes me believe that something goes on is
that I felt that I had already known my children in some way, before
they were born. When my daughter Eva was about three she asked me
when we'd first met, and I started to tell her the story of her
birth. She said: 'No, I remember when I wanted to pick you as my mother.'
"Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote the book about the five stages of dying
and she wanted me to do a movie about her life," Sarandon adds. "She
said that kids have the easiest time passing on because they didn't
have so many attachments."
The first time Sarandon played a mother she was 32, and that didn't
represent the milestone that it could have been. Even pain she seems
to cherish as a poetic experience. Her relationship with Louis Malle
sounds epically tortured. He was the director, she the actress. "I
learned a lot from him because he was from France and older. I don't
regret any of the relationships I've had, even the ones that
practically killed me."
She talks about sobbing for days and being humiliated, but never for
long. "I always believe that lovers and certain people come into your
life, as well as certain jobs. It may not be clear at the time, but
they come for a reason. Exit the King 120 nights meditating on
death. That definitely changes you."
Sarandon tells me she is going to change everything and that she is
looking forward to "repatterning" herself. "I have been living a
wonderful life, but I have to rediscover my voice. I have been a
function of my family's needs for such a long time. I have defined
myself as a mother first, always checking the schedules. I did it
with my siblings. My son said: 'You are the glue that keeps the
family together.' And I'm sure an element of that will remain."
It's like her whole life she's been trying to escape being the
caretaker, the responsible one. She's escaped into rebellious parts.
On films she can push boundaries, be daring.
She left home to go to Catholic University in Washington DC. "I
couldn't wait to leave home. I was always shy, but I knew there was
something outside. That was the main reason I went to college." Yet
she hadn't been in college long before she got married. Why did she
get married so young? "At that time you couldn't live together if you
weren't married. He was a grad student. I was 17 when I met him and
slept with him when I was 19 and got married when I was 20. How
backwards is that? I was a Catholic and I was living with my
grandparents to save money." Did she love him? "Oh yes, he was a dear
man, and very instrumental. I felt safe with him. He introduced me to
black and white movies and poetry. There's a huge difference between
a graduate student and a freshman."
There's an almost romantic yearning when she talks about this first
love, Chris Sarandon, whose name she kept. "It's a very good name."
The marriage didn't last because perhaps she wanted more than safety.
They both ended up having children and her son Jack is the same age
as his son Max. She describes it as if it's a life that could have been hers.
After the marriage broke down she had a kind of meltdown. It's hard
to explain exactly what triggered it; it seems to have been many
things. Perhaps believing that life was going to be certain and safe
and discovering it was not. At the time she decided she would get
through it without any pharmaceutical help.
"It worries me that people see pain as an alien thing," she says.
"There won't be any poetry if everyone is on such an even keel."
She only got married once, and not to Eva's father, director Franco
Amurri. She became pregnant in a miraculous accident: she had been
told her endometriosis would mean she could never have children and
she stopped taking the pill. She had not known Amurri long before
they became parents. Their relationship was never meant to last.
Sarandon then met Tim Robbins on the set of Bull Durham in 1988. She
never planned to marry him either. "I don't get the marriage thing.
When people ask me to support gay marriage they are asking the wrong
person." She seems to rail against being part of a couple. Playing
safe doesn't exist for her.
"My daughter talks about getting married. She thinks it will be
great, and a great party… My friend had a daughter who got married
pretty young. She was about 23 and it was a huge wedding and she is a
celebrity and her daughter is a celebrity and she said: 'It's a good
first marriage.' I thought: 'Fair enough.' A few years and one child
later she's not married any more." I think we can figure out that
that's Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson, but Sarandon does one of those
cartoon smiles.
Does she think she'll be with Tim for ever? "I have no idea." Cartoon
smile disappears. Does she want to be? "I'm not going to talk about
it." Cosy Sarandon disappears. The air is thick with something I
can't quite make out. Anger, it seems like. Everybody knows she and
Robbins have had one of the loveliest relationships. Or so I thought…
I wondered why a wall came down. She had been almost forensic in her
intimacy, and here she was, closed down completely. I couldn't
understand the sudden change of pace. She saw that I looked shocked
and offered: "I think I'm just very superstitious." There was a
silence during which neither of us knew what to say. Avoiding
questions doesn't come easily to her.
A couple of weeks later her US publicist announced that Sarandon and
Robbins had separated. For years people had marvelled at their
like-mindedness and revelled in the fact that she was 12 years older
than him and unfazed by that. "Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have
split up. Has the world come to an end?" one blog read.
And what of Sarandon? Is that why she wants to reinvent herself?
Unleash her old patterns? Radically detox physically and emotionally?
I wonder if the tattoo round her wrist, which looks like a ring of
barbed wire, is a symbol for relationship torture. "No. It only looks
like barbed wire. It actually says: 'A new dawn, a new day' to remind
me that every day you come into the world you are born again a new
person. I have a large one on my back which I got during the filming
of Lovely Bones. It's my kids' initials."
Typical Sarandon. Never does things in the right age or order. She
discovered tattoos in her 60s and has made tattooing a family event.
"My son Jack has one and my daughter just got one too when I had this
one on my wrist. She has the Latin words for being present and being
conscious written in typewriter script, and my son got a Ganesh."
So you all went together as a family?
"No. Just me and my daughter, and my son was very angry that I got
mine before his, but he couldn't think what he wanted. I left after
the matinée of Exit the King and met him at the tattoo place and went
back for the evening show, so I was there for most of his tattoo.
"I had given him a little Ganesh when he graduated high school and he
was going to travel around Europe. He was afraid he'd lose it. So he
had a duplicate of it as a tattoo. Miles doesn't have one yet, but he will."
Sarandon has never been able to be stereotyped. Playing a grandmother
in The Lovely Bones has not made her feel old or unsexy. "I think we
have to revamp the idea of what it means to be a grandmother. This
one is the anti-granny."
She is the only sexy, funny thing in the movie, and that is her
purpose: to lift it, to stop it from being tragic. "I loved the hair,
and the outfits were fabulous. The arc of my character is seen
through her hair. In the end it's limp and discombobulated. It was my
own hair by then. She didn't have time, and with grief your
maintenance just goes."
Sarandon looks good because she looks after herself. "Everything used
to be over by the time you were 40," she says. "When I did Bull
Durham I had just turned 40, and that was a great part."
She played a baseball groupie and felt very sexy in that role, and
it's special to her because it's when she first met Robbins. Does she
still feel sexy? "Yes, I am sexy. Someone said to me recently: 'Do
you think about ageing?' and I think: what's the choice? A lot of
what we don't like aesthetically about women who are fighting ageing
is fear manifesting. I don't think you should try to look 22 when you
are in your 60s. There is something odd about a woman who looks
younger than she did 20 years ago. I'm not against anybody doing
anything to themselves that makes them feel good, but aesthetically
some fillers and stuff make people unrecognisable. It's difficult to
watch somebody's face, to see someone who has lips that are
unrecognisable. I've never had fillers, and how can you get Botox
when you're an actor?"
Has she ever had anything done? "Yes, I had under my chin sucked out
once. I think we have to be supportive of each other, and if someone
wants to get implants or tucks you hope that that will be fine and
they will keep the essence of who they are and not go over the top."
Does she have a regime to stay in shape?
"I have a trainer for strength because I don't want osteoporosis to
come, and I do gyrotonic when I can. Young actors ask me: 'Why is
your skin so great; what is your product?' and all I say is: 'Stop
smoking, that's the big one.' And just not overindulging, and being
happy. Laughing does a lot for the face. Do the things you enjoy.
Surround yourself with good people. Denying yourself is not good for
the face. You can't be a bitter, angry person. Hatred is unsexy and
not great for your skin."
There has been talk of an Oscar nomination for The Lovely Bones. "I'd
love that," she says instantly, without any false modesty. "Acting is
really not that complicated. It's surviving as a human being that's
difficult."
--
The Lovely Bones is out on 19 February
.
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