Elizabeth Hurley (Rebecka Fairbanks, Belle Gunness)
"I think it’s been very nice in this movie to have the opportunity to play two people who are quite similar but also drastically different—I play an actress called Rebecka Fairbanks who travels to Romania to play “Belle Gunness”, a real life American serial killer who lived in the turn of the century, around 1908. She hacked to death about 43 men. You’d think she was quite a deranged person—on paper she sounds like a deranged person, but as a matter of fact, she’s actually quite together and quite straight in comparison to the actress I play, Rebecka Fairbanks, who plays Belle, who in fact is much nuttier in real life. So it was quite fun trying to distinguish their different areas of madness.
"Every film has the same challenge—location can play in all those parts in it. We’re shooting the film quite fast—it’s an independent film—and that in itself is quite difficult, can mean very long days. And we shoot very fast and we shoot six days---all those things made more difficult of course by playing two people, so you’ve got 2 characters to worry about, 2 sets of lines to worry about, and a huge amount of costumes in this film, an awful lot of periods costumes to worry about, and different hairstyles, and everything takes much longer when you’re getting into period dress—it takes at least 4 times longer than sort of dressing my way every day. So it’s been sort of exhausting in a way, but we’ve been loving what we’ve seen that we’ve shot so far. And both parts have been fun to play because, you know, so far I haven’t murdered too many people in my life, so it’s been fun to go out on a limb and do something silly with it.
"Jeremy Sisto also has 2 great parts to play in this movie. He plays a real life actor called Jake, who’s playing “Ray” who is Belle Gunness’ lover in the movie within the movie, and he’s terrific, he’s really nice. And it was very nice for me to have a real American to play opposite, so there aren’t too many people trying very hard to do good accents. I think we work very well together. He’s sweet.
"It’s always interesting when you work with directors who’ve done less than you, and it’s quite funny how that switch happens because when you start you’re a teenager—well, I started as a teenager, so of course I was the most inexperienced person on the set and it’s sad as you get older you find more and more young people coming in being less experienced than you, so it’s actually—I quite like working with a less experienced director, because it means they haven’t done everything already, and they’re not bored yet, and every day is a challenge. So from that point of view, it’s a good working dynamic. I like it."
Jeremy Sisto (Jake Fields, Ray Lamphere)
"It presents a few different challenges when you play more than one character in a film. In this film, we’re playing the characters that actually lived—a true story—and we’re also playing the actors playing them! So there’s a story that occurs in the film that is between the actors, and that story is embellished and is expressed somehow through the telling of the story within the film. And so it presented a lot of challenges, mainly just finding the different tones and the different styles of filmmaking.
"It was really nice to work with Elizabeth. I felt that she was working really hard to create those 2 characters, and it was something that I think all of us realized was a challenge, this film, to figure it out and make it work, and find an interesting way to tell it. It’s ambitious. This film is an ambitious film. It’s trying to do something artistic and interesting and it’s also trying to do something disturbing, hopefully with some thriller/horror aspects that keep you geared. But really it’s—I think it’s a strange movie because it has so many kinds of genres. One’s this classical sort of love story. In other ways it’s this kind of much more contemporary sort of thing with intrigue, and then there’s a thriller that’s going on, and then some sort of horror film, a killer—I mean there’s so many different genres and different types of storytelling that I think it’s definitely at the very least it will be interesting to watch…I know I’ll be interested in seeing it.
"The director, Duncan Roy, did a film called AKA, which was at Sundance a few years ago. It was very interesting, a tour of filmmaking sort of thing where he told the story in 3 different screens, simultaneously. And he is someone who really has his own voice, you know. He’s very strong-willed sort of—he’s an artist you know, and there’s not a lot of filmmakers who are artists these days."
Duncan Roy (Director)
"I came to the choices that I made about the film, the style choices, in 2 parts. Because it’s a film about the making of a film, I decided that I would use a documentary style for the making of the film, and a very strict kind of structured style for the film within the film. So I used very traditional techniques for the film within the film, and I made decisions based on classic westerns and scary movies I suppose. The colors that I chose, I chose for the 3 different kinds of [storytelling in the finished film]—I chose sepia for the real story of Belle Gunness. I chose a very warm color palette for the film within the film. And I chose a very blue palette for the documentary to make it seem as real and as edgy as I possibly could.
"The biggest challenge was just trying to go from a small budget mentality—tiny budget mentality—to a much larger arena. I think that’s possibly the biggest challenge I had because obviously I had never worked with such a large crew. I come from—my last film, AKA, was a tiny budget, with a miniscule crew and no lights and it’s a different kind of environment for creating, and lots of waiting around, which I didn’t have to do before, and you get into a different groove with it. And obviously I had never worked before with a famous actress like Elizabeth and you know there are extraordinary things to learn from Elizabeth, and she is a very enthusiastic and imaginative actress, and she has a great deal to contribute in every scene. And you know it was a very enjoyable experience."
Interviewer: "And Jeremy Sisto?"
DR: [jokingly] "Jeremy Sisto…I don’t remember him. Who is he again?
"Jeremy Sisto is great. He’s a really lovely guy. We had a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed working with him…pushing him into a direction that he wouldn’t have gone in normally. Asking somebody to play a dumbassed kind of American sidekick to Elizabeth—I mean it’s not the best role in the world. He did it incredibly well. I’m pleased and proud with what he did."
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