Julia Stiles and Stockard Channing play rival businesswomen in the Sundance Film Festival entry “The Business of Strangers,” but they are united in their wariness of Hollywood’s pressures on actresses.
“There are a lot of people — and I’m not one of them — who want to go to parties, they want to get dressed up, they think they should be seen, they think they should be photographed, and they have a sense of that being part of it,” Channing said as she and Stiles sat together in a Park City hotel suite. “They put a pressure on themselves to do that. And it may or may not contribute to their career; I don’t know. I just don’t live my life that way.”
“That’s one thing that bothers me,” Stiles added. “There’s an element now where being seen and getting dressed up and being a celebrity does supersede acting ability in a way. In my more cynical moments, I think people who make decisions on who they’re going to hire open Premiere magazine and go, `OK, that one looks good, so we’ll take her.'”
Channing, 56, had a 25-year head start in Hollywood over Stiles, 19, who is riding a wave of celebrity that the older actress never has experienced. Stiles first came to Sundance three years ago with “Wicked,” a dark tale in which she stars as a girl who kills her mother and tries to make it with her father. Her commercial breakthrough, “10 Things I Hate About You,” came out the following year. She arrived this year as the star of America’s No. 1 movie, “Save the Last Dance.” The contrast among her Sundance experiences is telling.
“No. 1, nobody cared that I was here [the first time],” Stiles said. “No. 2, I was like 16 and with my father, so I didn’t get to really enjoy myself that much. When I was here last time, I got to go to more movies. Now it’s a lot about press.”
That’s what happens when the almighty box-office gods have crowned you queen.
“People before last weekend were skeptical about the movie, and now after this weekend they’re like, `Oh, it’s wonderful. We love it,'” Stiles said. “But I expected that. If we’re going to be working in the confines of everyone-pays-attention-to-box-office, it’s good to have a movie that’s doing well.”
Still, Stiles and Channing weren’t shy about expressing their irritation about bouncing from interview to photo shoot to TV taping. The entertainment media beast has grown far hungrier than it was in Channing’s early days.
“I have a feeling that it’s even tougher on women in their teens and early 20s than it was when I was that age,” Channing said. “I think when you’re talking about the young gorgeous, which my good friend here has to go through, that’s tough. And then you get to my level where it’s like `Oh, you’re still here?'”
To Stiles, celebrity is “a double-edged sword.”
“I think the people who become celebrities in every aspect of their life, they become more and more distinct personalities, and it’s harder to forget about that when you see them on screen,” Stiles said. “So they’re not really actors anymore. When they come on screen, you think of who they are as opposed to what character they’re trying to play. So I definitely don’t want to get sucked into that. But on the other hand, it’s hard not to get sucked into that.”
“There’s celebrity, and there’s acting,” Channing said. “Sometimes they overlap but not a lot. That’s one of the problems. I think when I was coming into this business, there was even a kind of glorification of a kind of bohemian life that we don’t really have now. Especially for women it’s really oppressive. There’s a massive materialistic thrust: how you should look, how you should dress, what you’re wearing, and InStyle, and da da da. That takes up a lot of time.”
“Yes,” Stiles agreed.
“And I look at that generation of young women, and I think: Is that all they do?” Channing continued. “Constantly shopping, as opposed to maybe living a life or having experiences or traveling or acting? So that’s shifted.
“Maybe it’s just a temporary thing. We seem to be going back to the ’50s sort of movie magazine kind of stuff, where you had all those movie magazines where people were posing in kitchens.”
“The other thing is that nobody really shops for the clothes that they wear,” Stiles said. “Like premieres and stuff, they get sent clothes by designers so they end up being like walking mannequins, and it’s all about advertising.”
Is this something Stiles has rebelled against?
“I definitely don’t like being told what to wear, being told what to do, how to behave, and certainly I get frustrated. Like, we’re very similar at photo shoots,” the young actress said with a nod to Channing, who burst out laughing. “I really don’t like photo shoots.”
“We get cranky,” Channing added.
“Really cranky,” Stiles said, joining in the laughter.
“I’m probably pretty lucky I’m not coming into the business right now,” Channing said. “I wouldn’t do very well.”
The pair continued talking for a few minutes until the film’s publicist arrived to whisk them away. The photographer for InStyle was waiting.
Stunning work of art: Director Richard Linklater (“Slacker,” “Before Sunrise”) was visibly nervous as he chatted in the theater lobby Tuesday night before the world premiere of “Waking Life,” the most radical film of his career — and of this year’s Sundance festival. Linklater shot and edited this 97-minute film with live actors, then worked for about a year with 30 animators who digitally converted the action into animation and painted the images with individual flourishes.
The result may not be a mass-market film, but it’s certainly a stunner: an egghead-trip film in which a young man (Wiley Wiggins of Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused”) encounters a series of speakers sharing cosmic thoughts as he wanders through dreams within dreams within dreams.
The structure is free-form, like “Slacker,” and some of the ramblings are sure to try viewers’ patience. But a keen intelligence, humor and honest sense of searching are at work as the movie lulls you into a dream state, with the floating quality of the watercolor images creating a hypnotic beauty that perfectly serves the content. This is a movie not afraid of putting the art back into art film.
As “Waking Life” ended, the 1,200-seat auditorium was charged with a rare sense of “wow,” and Linklater, the jitters gone, took the stage to a standing ovation.
