Vengeful mother Celia Lane (Rebecca De Mornay, right) tries to buy a gun from a street girl (Colleen Rennison) in American Venus. (TVA Films)
“It’s had a real mixed reaction from the States,” says Vancouver director Bruce Sweeney of his new feature film, American Venus. “At the Q&A after the screening in Toronto, someone in the audience stood up and said, ‘Well, I’m an American.’ And when that happens you think, ‘OK, here we go!’ They just stood up and said, ‘Are we supposed to take away from this that we’re all gun-toting, SUV-driving maniacs?’”
It’s an incident that still leaves Sweeney visibly frustrated; it wasn’t his intent, he explains, to be that unsubtle. Sure, American Venus’s central character, played by a pushed-to-the-extreme Rebecca De Mornay, is obsessed with firearms. Sure, she drives an SUV and comes from Spokane, Wash. But Sweeney always intended to make a film that “challenges our assumptions” about the United States.
American Venus is above all the story of a brutally intense and sometimes psychotic mother-daughter relationship. When Celia (De Mornay) sees her college-age daughter, Jenna (Jane McGregor), run off to Vancouver after her figure-skating career falls apart, she’s thrown into a terrifying emotional descent. Celia becomes a tyrannical, gun-delirious matriarch, and sets off to track her daughter down in Canada. When her weapon is snatched at customs, and she faces the thought of her daughter striking out on her own, Celia becomes entirely unhinged.
For Sweeney, American Venus marks a serious shift after three critically admired independent films. His third, Last Wedding — which one reviewer dubbed an “anti-romance comedy” — opened the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, but Sweeney was itching to make a bigger budget picture; he wanted a break from the small ensemble pieces he has honed since his 1995 debut, Live Bait. So he wrote American Venus, and landed his largest budget to date ($2.3 million) and his first Hollywood star (De Mornay). Sweeney spoke to CBCNews.ca about his new film and the difficulties of big-budget filmmaking at a coffee shop near his home on Vancouver’s West Side.
Q: Tell me about the process of casting a lead for a film with a budget of this size.
A: The distributor basically gives you a sheet of paper that has a bunch of names on it. And then they say, “Get one of these names and you can make your movie.” If you don’t get one of these names, you’re not going to make it. So we sent the script to Catherine Keener. She passed on it. Patricia Clarkson [from Good Night, and Good Luck], she passed on it, but loved the script. But these are super busy actors, too.
Q: And it’s their moment — they’ve been in some important movies over the past few years.
A: Yeah, absolutely. And Laura Linney. And then Rebecca was No. 4. We sent the script down [to her in Los Angeles] on a Friday. She got back to us on the Monday, which I was thrilled about. We had a meeting in Los Angeles on the Wednesday. And the deal was done on Thursday. After meeting Rebecca, I was really high on her, just because she, in my view, said all the right things. We talked a lot about our own families, our backgrounds. She’s got a schizophrenic brother; she talked a lot about that. And when she was a young girl, she spent years travelling around Austria with her mother in a van. At one point, her mom said. “I’ve met this guy, let’s go to Spain, and just travel around.” And Rebecca said, “Well, what about school? Shouldn’t I be in school?” Her mom said, “Well, no. You’ll get a way better education bombing around with us.”
We talked a lot about that [period in her life.] That’s what I want. The way I direct is I try to take the internal out and I try to make it as personal as possible, changing all the particulars, but keeping a lot of the psychological truths, and in particular keeping the behavioural truths. What I didn’t want to have happen was to get an actress who just says, “Okay, you tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” I want someone to open up emotionally, to draw upon that information to sculpt a character.
Filmmaker Bruce Sweeney. (TVA Films)
Q: Where did this story come from?
A: I guess I wanted to make a film about some things that I couldn’t reconcile in my own family, about my mother and my sister and their relationship. All families have issues and problems. Find one that doesn’t. In our family, we had some controlling-mother issues. At times it was so toxic between my sister and my mother — and yet it was so filled with love. It wasn’t a question of them hating each other, but they could certainly go at it in such a way that was really quite frightening.
Q: But skating and guns?
A: Skating and guns — they’re a writer’s conceits.
Q: The film is a very complicated portrait of an American obsessed with gun culture. Were you trying to say something larger about U.S. society today?
A: I’m hesitant to come up with phrases like, “I made this film after the events of 9/11,” or something. I don’t want to say that because it’s too heavy-handed, too ambitious, too wide and too unfocused. But in a certain way the character of Celia does represent America. The character of Jenna does represent Canada in some way: pale, thin, having anxiety attacks. That’s there. And also, I’m definitely a left-leaning person and I see things in America — police-force-of-the-world America — I’m not so fond of.
Q: With American Venus, you quite consciously left the ensemble style of your earlier work behind.
A: Yes, I did. But I’m quite eager to return to the way I made my other movies, which is what I found so frustrating on this movie. I just did not have the rehearsal time: it was a very intense shoot. It wasn’t very enjoyable for me. The thing that was so difficult for me to swallow was when you started to shoot and not everything was working. That made me really quite panicked. For example, there’s a whole big storyline on the daughter. I think probably 20 minutes of her story — in Vancouver, her friends, getting there, the whole deal — hit the [editing room] floor. And that’s a lot. But it just wasn’t working. And that’s a very uncomfortable feeling. I have never had that feeling before. Directing a picture, your mind is in a big cramp, constantly, and you have so many people firing questions at you, but if you’ve got a ton of rehearsals done and you’ve got the big issues all sorted out — like what the movie’s about — then you can handle all these questions.
Q: Did you just say your brain was in a cramp or in a clamp?
A: I said cramp, but clamp actually works, too.
Q: You just weren’t comfortable.
A: A lot of times at night I was a wreck. I was having panic attacks. I wasn’t sleeping well. My heart was racing.
Q: Because you weren’t in control?
A: Because I wasn’t in control. And because I was feeling things I hadn’t felt before on a movie set. For Last Wedding and for Dirty and for Live Bait, those films all didn’t have money. But because they didn’t have money, they had time. Nothing was done if it wasn’t ready.
Q: The whole American Venus model — short, expensive shoot; vehicle for Hollywood star — sounded problematic for you.
A: My next project’s already been green-lit — it’s a low-budget feature [New Oil] on Fort McMurray. I get to use who I want. So [Vancouver actors] Nick Lea and Vince Gale will be in it, and they live within 10 minutes of where I live. . . . I love Rebecca De Mornay. I had no issues with her. I didn’t feel as if I was selling out. I didn’t feel that at all. I felt a zest, a strong need to have more money to make a movie. . . . Sure, the McMurray picture is a return to the low-budget arena. But with that comes a certain peace of mind.American Venus opens Oct. 12 in Toronto and Vancouver.
Greg Buium is a Vancouver writer.
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