THE FILM STRIP: Disney's first black princess Anika Noni Rose gives recipe for real life prince
Also: In exclusive interviews with ‘The Lovely Bones’ stars Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon, they talk about filming this most difficult and emotional movie that they hope will raise awareness.
*Former Dreamgirl Anika Noni Rose is proof positive that dreams can come true—if you work hard at them. “I very much liked who Tiana was,” Rose told The Film Strip.
“I really understood her journey, what she was doing and what she was trying to do. I mean I come from a very small town in Connecticut. When I walked around saying I wanted to be an actress, who supported that? Nobody, except my parents. A very few people believed in me the way my family believed in me. If you want to do something that’s bigger than your environment, when you see the walls come up, you have to say I’ll just go to the left or I’ll build some steps and climb over you. I got Tiana and I like her very much.”
It’s one thing to be involved with a fictional character, but I wanted to know what her real life prince would be like and she was quick to respond without hesitation. “He has to have intelligence and wit. It’s important to me that people treat the people around them with respect no matter what we think their station in life might be."
“It’s important to me that we be able to communicate clearly. I think it’s important for this person to be able to hold his own in a room because I don’t think that people need to be attached at the hip all the time. He would have to understand this crazy business I’m in somehow. It’s hard for people who aren’t in the business to understand it but he would have to be open to understand that it’s very demanding.
“He would have to be spontaneous and love to travel. I love to travel and when we travel he just can’t be content to be on the beach. He can be on the beach for a few days but then you must be willing to climb a tree and swing across on a wire to the other tree and then repel down. So adventure is a part of it. And I like to do Zen, in varying degrees.”
Tony winner Rose, who starred alongside Jennifer Hudson in the film version of “Dreamgirls,” never imagined the ultimate dream of being a historic character. Being the first Disney black princess is more than a dream, she says. “This is like above and beyond what my dream was,” she gushed. “I feel very blessed and very honored to be able to bring this young woman to life and how lucky that I’m here in this time to be able to do it. I feel very lucky.” A doll in her own image was the icing on the cake. When asked if she knew this was part of the deal, there was a loud, resounding, “No.”
“Let me tell you,” she began, “I was so blown away when they whipped out that doll. Firstly, I had no idea Tiana was going to look so much like me. At a toy fair when I saw a trailer and then the doll, I was a weeping mess. What an honor. She didn’t have to look like me. She could’ve looked like anybody. They had so many renditions of what they thought she might look like. I was blown away by that and had not thought of a doll, and the pajamas and the sheets. I was just like excited to make a noise on a Disney film, a noise. I didn’t care what the noise was. I just wanted to be there because it’s so much a part of our growing up as America.”
Far from the kind, giving and understanding husband in “Julia and Julia,” an unrecognizable Stanley Tucci is seen in his most powerful performance yet in “The Lovely Bones.” It’s a fictional story but it strikes at the heart and psyche of every parent who have or have not lost a child to a murderer. “I play George Harvey, who is the murderer in the film, which we find out at the very beginning of the film,” Tucci tells The Film Strip.
“The film is almost sort of like a deconstruction of the events that precipitate the whole story. He had to be the guy next door, just a normal sort of middle aged man, and kind of innocuous, quiet, that no one would ever suspect that would behave in this way and that’s often what these guys are, who these guys are. He’s based on a sort of combination of a whole bunch of different people that I researched. His look, and demeanor and it was a frustrating, hard, painful experience. It was very challenging, which is why I wanted to do it.” But ultimately, I’m very glad that I did it. I didn’t want to do it at first, I was very resistant, but I also wanted to work with Peter (‘The Lord of the Rings’ Peter Jackson), and it was something I’ve never done before.”
With so much written in the press about abductions and murders, Tucci feels this film will definitely strike a chord with the public. “I think it’s every parent’s greatest fear, every child’s greatest fear, even though they don’t know it, but the parents know it. And, these are abominable crimes and horrible people. Hopefully it will raise awareness. I mean, we’re much more aware of this stuff than we ever used to be, which is really, really good.”
Playing the sassy grandmother was a challenge for veteran actress Susan Sarandon because the role is so unlike herself, she told me. “I wish I could be that self-involved. That liberated that you just don’t care if you hurt people’s feelings, that’s what makes those characters so much fun to play, that you wouldn’t in a million years say that, the kind of things that come out of her mouth.
“But I would like to think that I’m somebody who if things fell apart could move in and put in the muscle to hold things together, to be someone of action, to say, okay, snap out of it now, we have to go on living. I hope that I could do that. And she’s pretty funny. I mean, I guess every time you play a character you bring a lot of who you are to the character, right? And I was very flattered when they wrote to me and asked me to do it, because I had loved the book, I read the book way before I thought about a movie or anything. And I thought that it was such an interesting statement about the energy of a person staying around.
“heaven isn’t something I’m necessarily banking on, but this idea that energy can’t be destroyed, so when a person passes on there’s something of them around, I found very comforting. I also think that this is an emotional thriller, and so there’s a lot of scary stuff in it, which Peter does really, really well, Peter builds certain scenes that are just, you can’t breathe.”
As we talked it was interesting to hear a Hollywood icon express the same everyday fears we non-celebs have daily:
“I think once you’re a parent, what they don’t tell you is everyone says your life becomes so much fuller, but it brings death into your life, which is what I didn’t anticipate when I had my first child. I mean I never thought about death, I never worried about death, once I had a kid, that’s all I thought about. What’s going to happen to her, what’s going to happen to me, so you become completely obsessed with impossible scenarios, especially if you are a single mom, and you’re in a house and like what will happen if there’s a fire, like if you let yourself worry about it, you could go crazy. So I think that that changes you. Your mortality is suddenly there.
“You want to live longer to take care of your kid, you certainly don’t want anything to happen to your child, that’s a scenario you can’t even imagine. So I think that changes you from the very beginning, your priorities change, your awareness changes, your idea of your vulnerability, your child’s vulnerability just changes everything in your life. So even if you’re not thinking about a scenario specific as this, I mean you can’t help but change it.
“I’m the oldest of nine children, so it wasn’t like I didn’t take care of kids my entire life. But having your own child is just a whole other trip right? You’re not (xxxx-laughs) and as a woman, I think you, I think as a mother, you experience this, because you’re really the day in, day out, interpreter of that child, for the first how many years. More than your husband or baby daddy or whoever it is. You are the one that’s got that kid connected to you, so you’re really aware of that and somebody was at the screening that I saw who was very pregnant and by the time of the end of the movie, I don’t know who in their right mind thought it would be a good idea for her to see this movie, she was distraught. And even though I think it’s an emotional thriller, and it’s all about kind of a whodunit and everything, but as a mom you just can’t entertain a very, very pregnant mom.
“Besides the emotional and artistic reasons for choosing to do a film, there’s also the practical says Sarandan. “I’ve done a lot of films that either don’t get distribution, or they get dumped if they are getting distribution, it’s always really scary, even if you make a film that gets good reviews and you don’t know how to, what you said, I mean there are so many films that people discover on video much later that they love and whatever, so that’s always disconcerting when that happens, to everybody. So if you’re doing a movie with Peter Jackson if it’s a failure, it’s going to be a really interesting one (laughs). It’s going to be something that he’ll fight for, because he is somebody that has found a way to have control over all his product.”
