Guy Pearce Interview, Factory Girl

MoviesOnline recently caught up with actor Guy Pearce at the Los Angeles press day to promote his new film, Factory Girl, in which he plays Andy Warhol. Factory Girl imaginatively unfolds the comet-like rise and fall of Edie Sedgwick, the blazing superstar who became a quintessential icon of American pop culture. Sedgwick appeared to be an American princess, with her blue blood and her family money, not to mention her beauty, talent and charisma. But when she met up with counter-culture anti-hero Andy Warhol, everything changed. Suddenly, Edie found herself at the center of a revolutionary artistic universe bursting with sex, drugs, style and rock ‘n’ roll – and a mad rush for fame and fabulousness that was destined to spin out of control.

Arriving into the chaos of mid-60s New York, Edie (Sienna Miller) meets Andy (Guy Pearce) who sees in her untamed vulnerability the makings of an irresistible muse. Andy invites Edie into the wild world of the Factory, a former downtown hat factory he has transformed into a bohemian, creative paradise. Here, a rag-tag mix of musicians, poets, artists, actors and misfits gather to create art and make underground movies during the day and throw glam parties all night long. Edie quickly ascends to become the star of Warhol’s movies, an idol at the Factory and a media darling. She is on top of the world when she falls in love with a larger-than-life rock star (Hayden Christensen). But when Edit becomes caught between Warhol’s world of sexy surfaces and her new love, she winds up rejected by both – and once again, set adrift in the modern world.

With her dazzling style, vivacious spark and undeniable sense of cool, Edie Sedgwick found herself at the very center of a revolution in American pop culture. Branded by Andy Warhol as a counter-culture heroine when the counter-culture was everything, she became the statuesque icon of a generation – the one woman of her times of whom it was said that all men wanted and all women wanted to be. Her trademark image became a fundamental symbol of the ultimate modern American woman: electric, rebellious yet deeply vulnerable. Vogue Magazine even came up with a name for the revolution she represented – dubbing her a "Youthquaker.” Then, almost as quickly as she burst onto the scene, Sedgwick’s flame was extinguished – she died at age 28 from a drug overdose.

One of the most versatile actors of his generation, Guy Pearce made his mark over a decade ago playing a pretty young drag queen in THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT. The film was a critical and box office hit, becoming one of the 10 most successful Australian films of all time and receiving an Oscar, two Golden Globe nominations, two BAFTAs and numerous AFI nominations. Guy’s diverse array of roles since that time include Ed Exley in the slick crime drama LA CONFIDENTIAL and the complex amnesiac Leonard Shelby in the thriller MEMENTO, and most recently as Charlie Burns in John Hillcoat and Nick Cave’s IF-Award winning feature, THE PROPOSITION.

Guy’s other recent credits include TWO BROTHERS, from acclaimed French director Jean-Jacques Annaud (SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET), the HG Wells adaptation THE TIME MACHINE, directed by the author’s great grandson Simon Wells, the big budget adaptation of the Dumas novel THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and the drama FIRST SNOW, shot in New Mexico for first time feature director Mark Fergus. He recently completed production on DEATH DEFYING ACTS opposite Catherine Zeta Jones.

The filmmakers searched for an actor who might dare to play one of the 20^th Century’s most recognizable, eccentric and perhaps misunderstood icons: Andy Warhol. During his lifetime, Warhol would completely revolutionize American art, obliterating once and for all any distinctions between the supposed banality of popular culture and the supposed holiness of high, "museum quality” art. He turned every aspect of modern life – from the mechanical to the absurd, from food to celebrities – into immediately powerful paintings and multimedia pieces. Fascinated by the ravenous speed of pop culture and the commodification of modern life, he also famously and prophetically declared: "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”

Like Edie, his story was also one of deep contrasts. Raised in poverty by immigrant parents in Pittsburgh, Warhol would go on to become one of the wealthiest artists ever to live. (In 2006, a single Warhol "Dollar Sign” print sold at auction for $4.5 million and the hand painted "Small Torn Campbell's Soup Can" went for $11.7 million.) Even at the height of his fame, he continued to be the consummate contrarian – simultaneously a party-throwing socialite and a detached recluse; a shy outcast and a master manipulator of everything around him. He also had a yin-yang effect on others. It was said that Andy both inspired his friends and used them – sometimes simultaneously. His effect on society was equally contradictory – on the one hand, he attained perhaps the greatest commercial success and celebrity fame of any living artist in history, while on the other, the ultimate impact of his radical experimentation on the art world remains highly controversial and debated to this day. Here’s what Guy Pearce had to tell us about his latest role:

Q: Is it important for you to disappear inside a character?

Guy Pearce: I just feel like you go as far as it feels right to go, you know, I just wonder whether we all have different thresholds and for some people they go, ‘Yeah, I’m the character now,’ and you think, ‘You’re so not the character yet.’ And consequently you see people kind of play the same role in every film they ever do, and they do that pretty well, some people. I don’t know, I just find people, as Andy says in the film, so fascinating, and kind of endless qualities to people, so maybe I’m sort of, I don’t know, it sounds wrong, I was going to say maybe I’m a perfectionist or something, but probably no more than anybody else.

Q: But you not only have the real Andy Warhol, but all the people who’ve played him in films, how did all of those influences come together, what did you want to do and avoid?

GP: Well, all the research that I did, certainly in my mind superceded my perception of the other performances that I’d seen. And I felt like they were kind of different perspectives on Andy anyway, Bowie’s is the ‘80s and it’s after he’s been shot, Jared’s is during that period with Valerie Solanas, and the interesting thing about I Shot Andy Warhol which I think is great for the film is that you don’t kind of really get inside Andy too much, which I think helps us as an audience feel Valerie’s frustration with him. I guess that justifies shooting him (laughs) to a certain point. And Crispin (Glover), his moment in The Doors it’s such a trippy kind of thing anyway, so I felt like they were all different. I had seen them all before, I did watch them all again once just to kind of go, uh huh, uh huh, but then all the research stuff that I had, particularly all the audio recordings, Brigit Berlin allowed me to – and Vincent Fremont who takes care of all her work, they allowed me to re-record some of the phone conversations that she and Andy made. Andy and Brigit basically taped every phone conversation they had from the ‘60s onwards, so Brigit was obsessed, she was quite wealthy and had all this money to bug her whole house, that’s a whole other story in itself. So she recorded every phone conversation that she had with Andy, and I’ve become quite friendly with Brigit now, and she was wonderful as far as research goes, and so all that audio stuff just left everything else behind as far as my perception on other films. She said to me one day, I’d gone in and I got all these recordings of those two together and started working with them, and then she said to me one day, ‘Oh, November 16^th, 1971, go to the box and you’ll find, ‘I tell Andy Edie died.’’ And sure enough, I go to the box and there’s a tape, ‘I tell Andy Edie died.’ And their conversation is just – it’s so heartbreaking.

Q: Why wasn’t that in the film?

GP: There was a thought for awhile that it might have been something used at the end of the film, but I think – yeah.

Q: What was Andy’s reaction?

GP: He had a number of reactions. The phone conversation goes for five minutes, and there were a couple of moments that he’s clearly shocked and stunned by what’s happened. And his very first reaction is to go, ‘Who, what, where, how, why, who?,’ and he does an incredible job of evading the actual information. Then there’s a huge long pause – they end up talking about her husband for awhile, Michael Post, and then there’s this huge long pause and Andy says, ‘Does he get all the money?’ And then they get back into it again, and Brigit’s clearly not happy with that response, and then there’s another big pause, after they talk about some other stuff, and Andy says, and you can tell he’s about to cry, he says, ‘Gee, I just thought she was going to pull through and get well,’ or something like that. So in typical Warhol fashion, I think he didn’t want to attach to the emotional response and tried to evade it.

Q: How long did it take you to come up with the mannerisms and the accent?

GP: Well, I knew about the film in April I think, so I started reading and looking at documentaries and doing all the research, and then we shot in November, so I kind of had a good six months to really play around with stuff.

Q: Did you have a coach?

GP: No, there’s so much material to use, there’s so much footage, and there is many, many more hours of footage out there that I didn’t even get to see. So, no, I think using these audio tapes were a great help.

Q: Was there a big physical transformation, it seems his skin was a lot paler, he had different colored eyes, and he was slightly less built

GP: Yes, I did another movie since then where I stacked on about 15 kilos, so I’m a little bigger now than I was a year ago or so. Yeah, that’s right, he had a condition when he was a kid called Saint Vitus’ Dance. It was sort of a nervous condition, but it affected the pigment in his skin, so he kind of became this weird translucent looking ghost in a way.

Q: So they painted your face white?

GP: Absolutely, yeah. And he would also apply make up. I think in the film you see me pop some make up on. So there were a number of things that we did to try and get us closer to Warhol’s look.

Q: Sienna was saying that you guys did some work off the set, getting into the characters, can you talk a little about that and did you just live those characters for a few days?

GP: It’s hard to really remember, we really were in each other’s pockets for quite some time, Sienna and I. We met in England and really started to work on the script there, and there were still some things we needed to clarify in the script I think, and we were doing so much research. I read about thirty books on Andy, and she read how many books there were on Edie that existed. And we went to Pittsburg together, we went to the Warhol Museum, and they allowed us to look at a whole lot of footage of Edie and Andy that no one had seen really before, and just spent a long time together. We spent about six weeks together in New York for the first chunk, and then another huge chunk after that, and really we got on so well, and we were really supportive of each other, that I think we were just really eager to kind of, you know, ‘How am I doing, how am I doing,’ kind of stuff. So it was a great experience, because she was really open and willing to go the whole way, clearly as one should, and I was too. So it was actually a really nice reflection too I think of probably, potentially, the energy that might have initially been sparked when Andy and Edie found each other in the first place.

Q: Was it your impression that he was more of an observer or voyeur than he was an actual participant in life? That he just watched everybody else live, because that’s kind of what you get out of this movie. Or was he active in a lot of ways we don’t know?

GP: Yeah, I think he probably worked a lot harder than people realize. A lot of people that I talked to said you have to remember the amount of work that he actually did, and you go to the warehouse, Vincent Fremont/Warhol Enterprises, and you go to the warehouse and you go, ‘Okay, so he did a lot of work.’ And even though you see him on film, a lot of the time if they came to interview him and he was just sitting back on a couch kind of doing nothing, when the cameras went away, he got all the screen prints back out and he worked. He was a workaholic. But I do think he had a particular perspective on the world. I think he was so insecure about his own look and his own background, his own sort of history, that really he had such a fantasy about the life that he wanted to live, and the glamorous life that everybody else seemed to be living, particularly – on one end of the scale you had movie stars, and on the other end of the scale you had either drug addicts or politicians or whoever that happened to be, or just anybody walking down the street. I think he had a real fascination for – which I think came as a survival technique, based on his own insecurities about himself. I think he was super-sensitive, super-emotional.

Q: You’re also playing Harry Houdini in a movie, how did you approach that? Obviously there’s not video on him.

GP: No, I treated that completely differently. It’s almost a fictional fairytale anyway. There’s footage of Houdini and there’s audio stuff of him, but I decided to go in a completely different direction and really just work off what my own imaginative response was to the script anyway, I think, rather than really just trying to channel somebody, which is what I felt like I tried to do with Andy in a way.

Q: Is Death Defying Acts the name of the film?

GP: Yeah

Q: When is that coming out?

GP: I don’t know actually, because I think they’re still putting it together. We only finished it in October

Q: In the press notes it says you grew to love Andy’s work. What did you see in it when you finished the film that maybe you didn’t before?

GP: Well, a couple of things. One really was just having more of an understanding of the guy, so therefore looking at the work going, huh, I know about the person who’s behind that idea, who’s behind that painting, etc. But actually it was also about just accessing more work, seeing all the illustrations that he did through the fifties when he worked as a commercial artist, and that’s where he really worked, and worked, and worked, he’s such a beautiful illustrator and such a beautiful colorist that those drawings, beautiful drawings of shoes and cats and all this gorgeous stuff that he did, which clearly indicates that he is a brilliant artist. And I think that was his dilemma, he knew he was a great artist, as far as actually being able to be an artist, but then you can’t jump from commercial art into fine art without copping flack and even just trying to do it I think was difficult enough, so I think that really forced him to kind of look at art in a whole different way, and go, ‘Well, if I’m going to get in, I’ve got to get in in a different way,’ and go, ‘Well actually maybe that’s no more art than that anyway, so here’s a picture of a Campbell soup can.’ He kind of started off in a fine art sense with using the same products and things that he used in a commercial art sense. It was really strange, but he changed the way people look at the world.

Q: It said in the press notes you gave people cans of soup at the end of the shoot.

GP: It’s because I’m a cheap date really. I just wrote instructions, ‘If you get hungry, what you do is you open it and heat it up.‘ It was like a funny little thing to do, because I finished two weeks before everyone else, so I wanted to leave them with a little token.

Q: What was the movie that you got bulked up for?

GP: It was for Harry Houdini, it was Death Defying Acts

Q: Was that because it was a physically demanding role?

GP: It wasn’t that I had to build up because it was more physical, I had to build up because Houdini is built like a Sherman tank. I was 63 kilos when I made Factory Girl, and I was 75 kilos when I did Death Defying Acts. It’s interesting really to play the two characters back-to-back because Andy is so light, white, fey, everything about him is floaty and kind of light and not wanting to be noticed in a way, whereas Houdini was very grounded, very gruff, very deep voice, he’s very masculine, completely opposite ends of the spectrum, as far as physicality and a number of other things, both highly self-promoting, poor immigrants of the 20^th century, but aside from that they were pretty different.

Q: Did you do it here or Australia?

GP: In Australia.

Q: What surprised you most doing your research?

GP: Oh I think I really discovered how intelligent he was and how funny he was. I think he really had a great sense of humor, but the fact that he was – this decision of his to be one step ahead of the game and claim that maybe he was stupid, claim that he was ugly, all this kind of stuff just to sort of survive and, as I said, be ahead of the game, I found really fascinating. But I think his humor is what I was really surprised by.

Q: Are you a fan of the cats?

GP: Huge fan of the cats.

"Factory Girl” opens in theaters on February 2^nd. Be sure to also check out our interviews with other cast members including Sienna Miller.