On a cloudy Saturday morning in downtown Toronto, actor-filmmaker Natalie Portman is wrapping up a string of interviews at the Intercontinental Hotel, an hour before the ‘Share Her Journey’ rally — underscoring the need for a climb up in opportunities for women in the field of entertainment. It is a cause she strongly believes in. “I’ve been really excited by a lot of changes that are happening and I’m definitely paying attention to where [they are] not happening as well,” she says, of the increasing gender focus in the film industry.
She has been most vocal about the issue, and participated in #TimesUp and #MeToo campaigns. During the 2018 Women’s March in Los Angeles, she spoke about the sexual objectification as a teen star and how she deliberately developed a nerdy, prudish persona to counter it. She brought to light the “rape-fantasy” that she got as her first-ever fan mail and how a local radio station had created a countdown to her 18th birthday when she would be legal to sleep with.
Portman finds the Toronto International Film Festival inspiring in how it has ensured gender parity, diversity and representation for a cross-section of people in cinema over the last few years. “It is incredible to be part of a festival that has been the leader that way. Contrary to some places where they are saying we are choosing just the best people and you know they all happen to be straight white men,” she laughs, tongue in cheek. No guessing who the barb is aimed at!
Eye on the awards
She has had a close association with TIFF from her first visit with Wayne Wang’s Anywhere but Here in 1999, when she was all of 18. Don Roos’ Other Woman (2009), Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), Pablo Larrain’s Jackie (2016) and her own directorial début feature, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015) have kept her coming back. This year she has not one but two in the festival line-up — Brady Corbet’s sophomore film Vox Lux and Xavier Dolan’s long in the making The DeathandLife of John F. Donovan .
TORONTO, ON - SEPTEMBER 07: (L-R) Brady Corbet, Natalie Portman and Jude Law attend the "Vox Lux" premiere during 2018 Toronto International Film Festival at The Elgin on September 7, 2018 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images)
Weekend catches her for an exclusive the day after the TIFF première of Vox Lux (that translates as Voice of Life ) in which she does a mesmerising, consciously edgy, and over-the-top turn as pop artiste Celeste who is leading a chaotic, violent and scandal-ridden life. The Oscar buzz for the 37-year-old actor has already begun, slowly but surely.
Portman started off in 1994 as a child who befriends a hitman in French filmmaker Luc Besson’s Leon. Over the years, her choice of films has been wide-ranging and eclectic — from Wong Kar Wai’s romantic My Blueberry Nights (2006) to a biopic like Jackie, from mainstream Thor films (2011, 2013) to an indie Garden State (2004). She is placed comfortably in the top league of Hollywood actors having won an Oscar as the troubled ballerina on the verge of a breakdown in Black Swan and two Golden Globes — for Black Swan and Mike Nichols’ relationship drama Closer (2004).
For the love of music
Dressed in a formal, off-white trouser suit with hoop earrings, Portman is more slender than you would have imagined, and immensely soft-spoken, while being just as firm and clear-eyed about her thoughts and ideas. I ask her if it is her most “performative” role since Black Swan , in terms of having to engage with another art form — there it was ballet, here it is pop music. She starts off by talking about the actual stage performance in the film. “There’s a show within the show of the movie... And then there is the stylistic thing; the expressionistic material and the fact that it is character based as against plot based. [Incidentally] It’s an entirely different style of acting than I did in Annihilation earlier this year; that was more interior,” she says.
Vox Lux is driven by sheer physicality, a distinct body language with which she walks and talks and sings and performs. She says she loved the operatic style of the film, the fact that there were long, steadycam takes that created room to explore, allowed her to play, come alive, have fun and be creative.
While the film world is all abuzz with pop star Lady Gaga’s sensational acting début in A Star Is Born , there has also been a lot of chatter about how Portman’s character in Vox Lux may have been based on the Bad Romance star, Madonna and other pop icons. The actor claims to have watched several documentaries on pop music for research, “to get the details, to understand what the lifestyle is like. I watched everything I could find”. However, ask her to name some and she skirts it. “It’s not fair. The character is such that people wouldn’t want to be compared to her and she is not like them. [The character] is not based on any one person,” she stresses.
Cause and effect
One of Celeste’s songs in the film goes, “ I’m a private girl in a public world ”. The film shows the dark side of fame. Could she personally identify with that aspect? “I don’t feel similar to the character; I don’t really like trying comparisons between myself and a character,” she says. There have been little things, however, like how strangers think they know who you are, having your privacy impeded upon. “That’s all stuff that I have had a taste of, but not to the same extreme,” she says. Married to dancer-choreographer Benjamin Millepied, with whom she has two children, she has tried to keep her private life away from the media gaze.
TORONTO, ON - SEPTEMBER 07: Natalie Portman attends the "Vox Lux" premiere during 2018 Toronto International Film Festival at The Elgin on September 7, 2018 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images)
The evening before, at the première of the film at Elgin Theatre, Portman, looking delicate in a peach gown, spoke persuasively about the commodification of culture, drawing parallels between a star and a terrorist and how they both need attention to thrive on. The parallels between art and violence is a running thread in the film as well, how a cathartic moment in the aftermath of violence helps create a pop sensation and how violence remains forever entrenched in her personality and life, physically and metaphorically.
It was an element central to the script from the beginning. “Brady’s [Corbet] first movie, The Childhood of a Leader , was in the period between the first and second world war. He wanted to make this about the big violent conflicts in this century — in United States, it’s school shootings and terror,” says Portman. She feels that what is unique about today’s forms of violence is that the media coverage has made their impact more huge and turned them into a commodity. “A hundred thousand would have died in a single battle in World War I. Thank God we don’t have that in the entire country in the entire year but the impact of violence is very extreme now. Violence has been turned into pop culture, violence has been turned into a new story you can sell. I thought that it was an interesting idea Brady was putting forward in the movie,” she says.
Hard-hitting narratives
In a recent interview, Portman referred to Vox Lux as her most political film. Wasn’t V For Vendetta more direct, you ask her. She counters by saying that one can find political things even in Star Wars where she was playing a leader. V for Vendetta might actually examine a lot of similar issues as Vox Lux (most importantly terror), but the latter is most political because it does not seem so on its face. “What if pop culture is political? What if the brands that you are buying and are being sold are about politics too?” she shoots back rhetorically.
Portman is known for supporting wide-ranging causes — from animal and child rights to environment. The Israeli-American is a Democrat supporter, Obama campaigner and a critic of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Legend has it that she had to skip the première of the film that established her in the public eye, Star Wars: Episode I- The Phantom Menace (1999), so she could study for her high school final exams. The Harvard graduate took four years off Hollywood to study psychology. “I don’t care if college ruins my career. I’d rather be smart than a movie star,” she is reported to have said. In a PBS programme, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria , she discussed microfinance; Zakaria later admitted that “she really knew her stuff”. Portman sees her engagement with social-political issues of the day as being driven by the fact that she is an aware and engaged citizen who happens to have a public platform.
However, she does not like the idea of art itself indulging in political messaging. “Art is inherently political. It makes you feel for other people, which is an act of empathy, and that is a political thing. We build narratives, that’s how cultures are built, politics is built. Building narratives is political in nature but I don’t want to make message movies,” she says emphatically. According to her, art is interesting when it tries to get more at the mystery and the truth. “It’s not about giving any answers but raising a lot of questions.”
