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Naomi
Watts, who portrays “The Ring’s”
profoundly creeped-out reporter-protagonist
Rachel Keller, still sounds plenty sore at the
ABC execs who axed her “Mulholland Dr.”
TV series.
“It
didn’t make any sense to me. We shot the
[“Mulholland” pilot] script. We didn’t
create something other than what was there,”
insists Watts. “They went, ‘David
Lynch. Yes. This makes sense. We did it before
[with Lynch’s ABC drama “Twin Peaks”],
let’s do it again. We believe in the material.’
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And
then when they saw it, they balked. They panicked.”
The
irony, of course, is that had the network embraced
Lynch’s 1999 pilot and greenlit a “Mulholland”
TV series, it’s far less likely that Watts would
now be one of the most sought-after movie actresses
on the planet.
The
transforming chain of events is well-documented. Some
time after the network passed on “Mulholland,”
Lynch wrote, shot and added to the pilot about 45
minutes of new footage generously peppered with R-rated
dialogue, nudity, sex, violence and general weirdness.
The
two young women at the center of the pilot –
wide-eyed aspiring starlet Betty Elms (Watts), and
the beautiful amnesia victim she tries to help (Laura
Harring) – are central to the “Mulholland”
movie as well, but in the feature their platonic friendship
quickly escalates into a steamy lesbian love affair.
If the film’s sudden embrace of graphic sapphic
interludes was not enough to disorient, Betty and
the amnesic Rita mysteriously seem to disappear into
a parallel dimension for the last half-hour of the
film, replaced by two entirely different characters
played by Watts and Harring.
“Mulholland”
hit U.S. screens on Oct. 12 of last year and ultimately
garnered a modest domestic gross of $7.2 million –
but the repurposed project also met with an enormous
swell of critical acclaim. Watts, for her part, was
named the year’s best actress by the National
Society of Film Critics, the Online Film Critics Society,
and the Chicago Film Critics Association. The National
Board of Review hailed her work as the year’s
“best breakthrough performance by an actress.”
The San Diego Film Critics Society and the Las Vegas
Film Critics Society awarded her best supporting actress
honors. The American Film Institute named her “female
actor of the year.”
The
actress’ unconventional ascension came at an
opportune time.
The
Drive To “Mulholland.”
Born in Shoreham, England, to a showbiz family (mom
was an actress, dad was a sound engineer for Pink
Floyd), Watts moved to Australia at 14 and soon began
taking roles in locally-made commercials, movies and
TV shows. In 1994 she traveled to the American Southwest
for her first major Hollywood role, dying her blonde
locks jet black to essay Lori Petty’s shy sidekick,
Jet Girl, in the sci-fi comedy “Tank Girl.”
Watts
was sufficiently encouraged to relocate permanently
to Los Angeles – but much of the subsequent stateside
work she found was in forgettable TV-movies like “A
Christmas Wish” and straight-to-video fare like
“Children of the Corn IV.” In 1997 she landed
a starring role in “Sleepwalkers,” a network
sci-fi series about dream researchers, but NBC cancelled
it after airing only a handful of episodes.
Another
TV project, the one that would change her life, came
virtually out of the blue. Writer-director Lynch,
who likes to cast from photographs, picked Watts’
head-shot out of a casting stack without benefit of
having seen any of her work. She got the “Mulholland”
call while visiting her mother and brother in New
York. A fan of Lynch’s work, she was quick to
fly home to Los Angeles, where she met with the filmmaker
in the jeans she wore on the plane.
Lynch,
his casting director and Watts chatted amiably, avoiding
shop-talk, and Lynch gave the actress a hug on the
way out. She was asked to meet with Lynch the next
day in “glammed up” mode, so she visited
her hairdresser and greeted him in a tight dress and
heels. More chitchat ensued, only this time Watts
got a script to take home. She was offered the role
of Betty two weeks later.
“This
was the easiest role I’ve ever gotten, and obviously
the best role. I didn’t audition,” she says.
“Normally, you have to jump through hoops in
order to get these roles, and always the good roles
go to the stars. But I just sat down with David a
couple of times and just talked to him and he offered
me the role. I thought I was the luckiest girl in
the world.”
“And
There’s Going To Be Nudity!”
Watts loved making the “Mulholland” pilot
and was disheartened when it failed to make the network
schedule. Subsequent plans to turn the pilot into
a movie seemed tentative at best.
“It
was going to be something and then not about five
times,” Harring told the Village Voice. “We
were on a roller-coaster ride for years. And one day
David called us over to his house and said, ‘“Mulholland
Dr.” is going to be an international feature
film. And there’s gonna be nudity!’ So we’re
all shaking his hand, but we’re like, ‘There’s
going to be what?’”
Asked
to confirm Harring’s tale, Watts says her memories
may be fuzzier. “I was at a meeting with the
three of us. I don’t know if that was the same
meeting, but he’s a bit of a jokester, David.
And we had been through so much turmoil as to what
this project would be or become and each piece of
information never coming to fruition or contradicting
the last one and it just was exhausting. It was so
exhausting. And then finally just as I was about to
completely check out from being invested in it in
any way, I got a phone call from David saying it was
gonna be a feature and I was like, ‘Are you sure?
Please David, I can’t take this anymore.’
“So,
when we went up to his house we had to read the script
together – you know, like turning the pages together
because he wouldn’t let it out of his house –
and he told us there was going to be nudity. But I
did negotiate him down from three naked scenes to
two.”
Was
Watts aware of the enormous unspoken sexual attraction
between Betty and Rita when she shot the TV pilot?
“I didn’t have any idea,” she admits.
“But Betty’s such a good girl, I knew as
I was turning the pages of the script that something
was going to happen. We didn’t know that I was
going to fall in love with, or have sexual relations
with, Laura Harring’s character, but I knew Betty
was going to go into some weird, dark and demented
places.”
Did
she politely ask Lynch why she was suddenly playing
a troubled actress named Diane Selwyn as well as Betty
Elms? “I would try and get bits of information
out of him, but after a few weeks of working with
David I realized it was beating a dead horse. He’s
not going to give you anything. He wants the mystery
to be there, not just for the audience members but
for the people who are there creating the story with
him. So I stopped asking questions and just trusted
him.”
While
she derived enormous creative satisfaction from completing
the movie version, Watts was paid only scale to star
in the new “Mulholland” footage – and
her finances were rapidly becoming an issue.
“I’d lost my health insurance because I
was not earning money in this country,” she says.
“I was flat broke and going out auditioning for
pilots, and some pretty shocking ones. I think I auditioned
for about six or seven and they were probably the
best of that year. A lot of them are on TV right now.
Thank God I didn’t get any of them!”
Though
the actress would have been grateful for a regular
TV paycheck at the time, being contractually bound
to a series today would mean turning down a lot more
of the big-deal movies she’s being offered.
“No
one was capable of casting me [at the post-”Mulholland”
pilot auditions] because I was horrendous! But it’s
just so funny, in retrospect: I was looking after
myself somehow. Because otherwise I’d be stuck
in some miserable TV show, playing the same character
every day and getting phone calls from people saying
‘Oh you were great in that movie, could you do
this? Oh, you can’t?’”
Rings
and Rings
“The Ring,” her splashy new horror-suspense
epic for DreamWorks, is the first of her post-”Mulholland”
projects to see release and reaches American moviehouses
on Oct. 18 – almost exactly one year after “Mulholland”
did. She marvels at how radically things have changed
for her over the past 12 months.
“My
life has gotten really big, and I almost don’t
quite know how to handle it. My phone rings now, it
never used to. It rings off the hook. I am working
non-stop and really on the best projects.
“Even
since I took ‘The Ring,’ things have changed.
It keeps mutating into something bigger and better
in terms of who’s approaching me now. I just
feel very, very lucky.”
With
everything she was offered when “Mulholland”
finally arrived, what made her decide on “The
Ring”?
“I
thought, a) yes, [“The Ring”] was an incredibly
good idea, but b) the character is really strong in
terms of what she has to go through. In ‘Mulholland
Dr.’ I was the crazy girl and the extreme opposite,
the sweetest girl on the planet, and both ending up
seeming slightly insane.”
By
contrast, her “Ring” character, she says,
“is just an ordinary girl in a pretty extraordinary
situation. She goes through quite a transformation
as well, which you don’t always get in a horror
film. She starts out as very focused on results, you
know, work work work. And she’s a mother, and
as far as she knows everything is existing perfectly
well, because her son’s doing well at school;
he’s not acting out in any way. It’s not
till the end of the movie that you realize that maybe
she hasn’t been such a good mother. It’s
about asking questions and being in the journey and
not just focusing on the results and goals.”
