Girl, interrupted

She drinks chai, doesn't watch television, spouts Scientology and is scared of the female form. Now she has decided to reinvent herself as a punk princess. Can anyone figure out Juliette Lewis? Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk has a go

Friday July 16, 2004. The Guardian

Just for licks: Lewis in rock-star mode :

"One time," Juliette Lewis says, "I wanted to get to know someone better by writing down questions to him ... These questions are more telling about me than anything I could write in a diary."

Juliette says this on an antique sofa in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills, a very white and vertical, Getty Museum house - stark and modern but full of her antique furniture - a house she's renting with her husband, Steve Berra. She's holding a handwritten list she's just found, and reads: "Did you ever stab someone or cut them intentionally with a sharp object? Do you like asparagus? Do you have a middle name?"

She drinks chai. She doesn't watch television. She loves playing cards. She uses fancy toilet paper that feels like you're using a cashmere sweater. In the basement is Steve's severed head - a very realistic replica left over from a skateboard video and made by the same team that made Juliette's pregnant stomach for the movie The Way of the Gun.

From the list, Juliette reads: "Do cats frustrate you as pets, or do you admire their independence?"

Over the past 24 hours, she's talked about her family, her father (Geoffrey Lewis), her career, the Scientology thing, getting married, and writing songs. The songs are important because after years of being scripted, these are her words now. She is focusing her career on her band: Juliette Lewis and the Licks.

From her list, Juliette reads: "Did you ever break a guy's nose? Would you say you won more fights than you've lost?"

In her kitchen, grinding coffee beans, Juliette says: "When I was growing up, what influenced me were all these musicals, like Fame. That was my dream. If I could have a school where they just sing and dance. So, Fame and Flashdance and Grease. Did you ever see the movie Hair? I was sobbing. That's a musical that kills me.

"Before being an actress, I was going to sing. And I always thought I'd maybe act on the side. I want to sing still, so I wrote songs with a friend who's a musician. The biggest fun thing is it's my words."

From her list Juliette reads: "Was there a time when you were mystified by the workings of your penis? Do you look more like your mother or father?"

She says:"Even at 18 I'd go, 'Where is the hidden rule book that says I have to be made up?' Because they'd have this hair and all this makeup. I was, like, 'Can't we just take a picture?' That's why all my magazine pictures from earlier are not made up and they're not raw. They're in-between, and what shaped me is what they called the 'alternative girl' or the 'kookie girl' because I couldn't vamp up at the drop of a hat.

"When I was younger, they'd have a rack of clothing I'd never wear ... They'd have a makeup person ... And I'm supposed to represent myself ? It was like this weird thing. I'd always wanted to be like my male predecessors, like Brando or De Niro. You take a man, and you just document him in a picture.

"What you exude, your sexuality, is just a part of oneself. So a manufactured sex appeal that includes an open mouth and lip gloss and bright colours, this is this American porn sex appeal that has nothing to do with sex. It's like blowup dolls. I could do that, very easily. It's not like I can't. It's just never been my objective.

"Now I realise you're selling things. So you basically become a rack."

She reads: "Did you date an older woman and what did she teach you? What's the first image you have of the female body? Does the respect factor drop when a woman has breast implants?"

Juliette says: "I had two dreams about De Niro when I was working with him. I think it was all in anticipation of this scene. Because this, in my head, was the big scene. In one dream, we were underwater in a pool and we'd come up for air. He'd go underwater, and I'd go underwater, and we'd glide past each other deliberately, like kids would play in a pool when they like each other. Like a flirtation. But I woke up from that dream, and I had a crush on him.

"In that scene, the little tango between our characters, all I knew was he was supposed to walk up to me, and then say, 'Danielle, can I put my arm around you?' He's supposed to kiss me in the script, but all Scorsese said was, 'Bob's going to do something. Just go with the scene.'

"Before that scene, I knew we were going to film the kiss part. I had just eaten lunch. It was catfish or something, and I was, like, 'Should I rinse my mouth out?' But I didn't want to, because that would let him know I thought about it. I don't want to act like I thought about the kiss. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. So I didn't. I didn't do mouthwash.

"And then I get to the set, and Bob is right near me, and I smell mouthwash. And then it dawned on me in that moment - I felt like such a little kid - because I thought, 'He's being professional. He's being considerate of me. He's being courteous.' But by then it was too late to go back to the trailer. I don't know if I was offensive or not.

"When you watch it, that's the first take. We did it twice. He puts his thumb on my lips. It's very intense because we're only this far from each other, and I'm looking right at him. He starts to put the thumb in my mouth, and she moves it away. And then he persists, and she allows it. And people after that kept talking about the sexuality and burgeoning sexuality at that age, and I never looked at it that way. I looked at it as: before he did the thumb thing he was listening to her, he was validating her in a way that her parents weren't, and then he did this sexual thing. But what you see in my eyes is, after she sucks the thumb and it gets pulled out, she's looking at him like, 'Was that good? Did you like that?' It's a pleasing thing."

She says: "His thumb was very clean."

From her list, Juliette reads: "Did you go to sleep-away summer camp? (Because some of my greatest childhood memories are from summer camp.) Do you like roller coasters?"

Steve Berra says: "A long time ago, I was on tour, skateboarding, and I bought Kalifornia at this gas station. I remember trying to imitate a laugh that she did in one of her scenes. It had blown me away. Just this one little laugh the character Adele did. It was so natural and truthful, and I remember trying for 10 minutes to laugh however she did it. I didn't know her. I couldn't figure out how the hell this person was so good."

A video of the movie is playing in their living room, and Juliette laughs, pointing out all the lines she just ad-libbed in the moment.

Juliette says: "On the page, my little character, Adele, had maybe a sentence here and there in a scene. So I met with Dominic Sena [the director] and was really taken with his energy and his vision for the movie. He let me create that character. Ninety per cent of what I do in that movie I made up there. That was like a turning point for me, acting-wise, because I had to really come to the table with something, really invent something. My first official character, that little Adele."

She reads: "What do you imagine happens to someone after the body dies? And do you believe that you are a spirit with a body or just a brain? The follow-up question is: How do you explain Mozart writing symphonies at seven? (Because I think that's a prime example of creative ability being spirit generated.)"

Juliette says: "When you have good actors to work with, you just sort of create this alternate universe of pretended reality. Sometimes, you want to put in an aside that goes, 'By the way, audience, it was really three in the morning when we did this scene. It was 30 degrees outside. And I brought you all of this despite all of that.'

"That Night was a movie I did before Cape Fear had come out. It was this 1962 love story, with a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Very endearing, very sweet. I was supposed to meet him in the middle of the night on a pier in Atlantic City. It was freezing, but it was supposed to be summer. You know, those hot nights. Meanwhile, I'm kind of blue. My lips go, 'Brrrrrrr.' So I had to hold them so I'm not chattering, plus be in a summer dress. You'd be in your parka until they said, 'OK, we're ready for you.' Then you'd take it off and say, 'Gosh, I'm so in love.'

"When I worked on From Dusk Till Dawn, the vampire movie, with George Clooney, he said, 'Gosh, all my friends keep asking, "Ooo, so you're working with Juliette. Is she really psycho? Is she really intense?"' And I'm the most opposite from intense. Maybe when I was young I was a bit brooding. Maybe I'll cop to that. My work is really a light process. I go in and out of it. When the camera's going, I'm on. When it's off, I'm off."

From her list, she reads: "Did the female anatomy ever mystify and scare you? (Because it did me, and I'm the owner.)"

Driving past the Scientology Celebrity Centre, she says: "The whole thing in Scientology, the big motto is: What's real for you is real for you. So there's not, like, a dogma. It's simply an applied religious philosophy. And there's little courses, like the Success Through Communications course. They have things you can apply to your life, but not like a falsity, not like a robot thing.

"You can see if it works, and if it doesn't. If it works, it works. It's something that has helped me a great deal."

From the list, she reads: "Have you ever been caught in a natural disaster? Did you ever own Birkenstocks?"

Just outside her bedroom door, looking at a framed, poster-sized picture of herself and Woody Harrelson from the cover of Newsweek, Juliette says: "With Natural Born Killers, I've appreciated as times goes by how that movie is satire and my character is a caricature, although I filled it with some real human emotion. But to me it's kind of campy. It's silly. It's exaggerated beyond what's real. I just had to give it some energy, like that whole beginning sequence - how sexy am I now! - where she's yelling. I have a big voice, so I can turn the volume up, but when we'd cut, it felt silly. Everyone thought I must've been so disturbed, but I wasn't."

About how people reacted to the movie and its violence, Juliette says: "You could homogenise everything, but you're still going to have your exploders, your guys who explode. And why is that there? I think since the 1950s, the increase in psychiatric drugs has turned that into a landslide. I did research - I actually spoke at some Senate meetings. But the drugs would be a much bigger problem for them to deal with, considering that you have six million kids from six on up on Ritalin. So they don't even want to look at it. They'd rather just say, 'Could you guys just please be less violent in the movies?'

"Here you have the famous Son of Sam guy, the killer. He said why he killed was the dog barking was giving him messages. Was the Devil speaking through the dog. OK, so do we lock up all dogs? Because of what that criminal says?"

From her list, she reads: "What was your favourite expression growing up? Or what was it closer to: That's so fresh; that's so bitchin'; that's so wicked; that's so rad; or that's so hot."

Juliette says: "To me, the three hardest things to do in acting are: one, sobbing, because I so rarely do that in my life. I may well up, but I don't sob. Laughing hysterically is another, where it says, 'She can't stop laughing.' And the third one is being surprised or being scared, like, 'Gosh, you scared me!' You have to think backward, like, 'When I get scared, what happens?' Oh, maybe my hands shake after the initial shock. It takes a minute to get your breath back. You work on getting to that place.

"To sob, I usually use the pressure or the fear that I have to do it, and if I don't do it, I'll fail. I'll fail myself. I'll fail my director. I'll fail the movie. People have this faith in me to produce. The frustration that I can't cry will lead me to tears."

She says: "I was doing Natural Born Killers, with Oliver Stone, and it was this scene with Woody Harrelson up on a hill, and we're arguing. And I'd just gotten my period that morning, and didn't sleep very well. I'd gotten about an hour's sleep, plus the pain of the woman thing, and we're arguing, and we cut.

"Woody's like, 'You want to do it again? I want to do another take.'

"And Oliver's like, 'Yeah. How about you, Juliette? You want to do it again?'

"And I go, 'Why? It sucks. What's the point? I suck. I don't even know why I'm doing this. I'm not going to get any better! It sucks! It's terrible!'

"And they look at me, and Oliver pulls me aside and says, 'Juliette, nobody wants to hear how you suck. Nobody here cares that you think you suck.' And from that point, I stopped doing that. It was such a turning point. Such a very good thing he did. He stopped me from catering to that little shit."

She reads: "Did you ever fall in love with an animal in a way where you wished you could talk like human friends? (Because I would fall in love with my cats and wish that we were the same species so we could relate.)"

At a party in Westwood, actress and screenwriter Marissa Ribisi watches Juliette and Steve eating chicken and says: "They're so cute together. They're like a coupla dudes."

Leaving the party, under a full moon, they take fortune cookies and get the same fortune: "Avenues of Good Fortune Are Ahead for You."

Driving home from the party, Juliette says: "All I thought about for a wedding was to have a view. We were outside on a cliff. It was the first time I saw him in a suit, and he was dashing. My view - because I had to walk this little trail that came out of this tunnel, because there was this park, then a tunnel, then this cliff - and as I was getting closer it was just this silhouette of this man with the sun behind him. It was incredible."

She says: "I kept thinking, 'Should I have the veil down or veil up? Veil down? Veil up?' I loved the idea of a veil, because inside it's like a dream. And that's what wedding days are like."

Steve says: "I didn't have shoes. All I had time to do was buy a suit so I didn't have shoes that would go with it. So I had to borrow my friend's shoes. We just swapped them on the cliff. For the pictures."

The VCR in their living room breaks, so they're watching Steve's skateboard videos on the bedroom television, and Juliette says: "When I first saw his skateboarding videos, I welled up in tears. First of all, the music is so beautiful, and he chose the music, the piano. It is so aesthetic to me, his gliding and jumping and defying the physical universe. Because that's not supposed to be done. You don't take an object with wheels, and jump off a structure. It's a defiance. It was the first time I was able to be awed by a partner in this way."

Upstairs, looking at a photo of Marilyn Monroe, Juliette says: "People have reduced Marilyn to a sex symbol, but the reason she had so much power is she made people light up. She had a joy. When she's smiling in a picture, she's a blend. She's in a female body, this beautiful woman form, but she has that child-love shining through, this kind of child-light that makes other people light up, too. I think that's what's special about her.

"There's a word for it in Scientology. What's common to children is they give off ... how they're able to uplift, their joy, it's called 'theta'. It's what's innate to a spirit. So in Scientology, a spirit is called a thetan, and what a spirit would give off is theta. It's what I would call magic."

Reading from her list of questions left over from that long-ago romance, she says: "Do you feel that we are all potentially Christlike? Do you have hope for humanity? And if not, how can you honestly keep on going in the face of that hopelessness?"

She stresses: "There are no right answers to these."

· Juliette Lewis stars in Blueberry, which is out on July 23. Her album, Like a Bolt of Lightning, is out later this year.

· This is an edited extract from Chuck Palahniuk's latest book, Non-fiction, published on August 5 by Jonathan Cape, priced £10.99. © Chuck Palahniuk.


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