The cast includes Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, Alan Alda and Blythe Danner, but it’s Mia Kirshner who gets the plum part in the new Costa-Gavras movie, “Mad City,” which opened Friday.
As the idealistic television reporter, Laurie, she undergoes the biggest character change, worshiping her cynical boss Max Brackett (Hoffman), learning all too well from him, then gradually turning into an angelic maniac who doesn’t seem to realize what she’s become.
“By the end of the movie, she’s doing what he would have done,” said the young Canadian actress. “She’s doing what Brackett taught her to do.”
Laurie and Max are taping a routine report from a museum when the museum’s angry, disenfranchised former guard, Sam Baily (Travolta), accidentally shoots an old co-worker. Laurie comes to the wounded man’s rescue, but Max doesn’t approve.
“When Max reprimands her, that kills her,” said Kirshner. When Baily takes children hostage at the museum, Laurie becomes a journalist with killer ambitions, fully aware that the story they’re reporting could mean big things for her career. Yet her naive manner never changes.
“I certainly would not have done what Laurie does,” said Kirshner. “But how many times does someone like Laurie get an opportunity like this? She’s in a boys’ club and she does what she can.”
In person, Kirshner displays the same kind of sweetness and professionalism as Laurie, though without Laurie’s duplicitous edge.
“It was hard for me to access that part of Laurie that is so malicious,” she said. She’s still not sure she got it right in the movie’s devastating final moments.
“That last scene was very difficult for me, but I could feel Costa rooting for me behind the cameras. You know he was consumed with this movie. With him, it’s always about performance first. He really respects actors, and a lot of directors don’t.”
As the script evolved, Laurie changed more than any other character. During rehearsals with Hoffman and the director, dialogue was rewritten and the role became richer.
One reason she responded to the part: Kirshner’s father is a journalist. She feels strongly about the responsibility not only of reporters but of the public.
“It should be compulsory for people to take media classes,” said Kirshner. She thinks more people would be aware of the superficiality of television reporting: “You can’t do a real story in 60 seconds. You can’t put a one-line tag on a story.”
To research the role, she spent time on the job with Chris Smith, a Los Angeles news camera operator who also became a technical consultant on “Mad City.” Kirshner learned to operate video and audio equipment while covering a helicopter crash.
“Sometimes to play a character effectively,” she said, “I have to have gone through what my character has gone through.”
This philosophy may even have helped her get the job. She describes her audition for Laurie as a disaster, though she thinks Costa-Gavras was looking for the accidentally unhinged quality she brought to it.
“I took the bus — in L.A.! — and I was really late,” she said. “I was so nervous I couldn’t stop talking. They thought I was being Laurie but I was just really nervous.”
Her next meeting with Costa-Gavras was so quick and casual that she didn’t know if she had the part.
“I thought, `I’m not going to leave this room until I know’,” she said. “Finally he said, `I want you to do Laurie. I’ve seen your work and I know you’re good.’ “
Born and raised in Toronto, Kirshner started at the bottom, doing tiny parts on such television shows as “Top Cops” and “Road to Avonlea.” She cried when she didn’t get a part in “Degrassi High.”
“There were lots of tears back then,” she said. “My mother told me not to take it seriously, and never to give up.” Not that giving up was much of an option: “I can’t remember when I didn’t want to act.”
Her big break in movies came when she was still in high school. She played a dominatrix in Denys Arcand’s “Love and Human Remains,” which was shot on weekends, and filmed a Gregory Harrison vehicle, “Cadillac Girls,” during the week.
Then Atom Egoyan cast her as a strip-club dancer in “Exotica,” she appeared as a psychic in “The Crow: City of Angels” and Internet sites started buzzing about her. Her mother keeps her informed about her fame in cyberspace; Kirshner doesn’t know what to think.
“It almost feels like it’s another person,” she said. “I feel like I’m watching somebody else’s life.”
