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One Day

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Photo by Focus Feature

Story : For 20 years, an idealist (Anne Hathaway) and a wealthy playboy (Jim Sturgess) reunite on the 15th day of July.

Opens August 19, 2011

 

Interview with Anne Hathaway

 

(Q) : When did you first read this novel?

(Ann Hathaway): I read the novel after I read the script which was December 2009, and lets see, I wrapped 'Love and Other Drugs', had a two week panic that I was never going to work again, and then I got sent 'One Day' and then it became a full frontal assault to get the part. So, I read it I think around December.

I can't believe I can remember these dates 17th and by January 2nd I had gotten myself to London and I was sitting at a club somewhere in London talking with Director Lone Scherfig, trying to explain to her why I ought to play Emma Morley and failing miserably. It was the worst meeting that I'd ever had. So, I just in desperation wrote down a bunch of song titles to say, 'This is where I think Emma and I overlap,' and so I communicated through other people's music.

(Q) : So, you're saying that you had to do a selling job on yourself?

(Ann Hathaway): Oh, yeah!

(Q) : Was it the fact that you were American or just maybe that they felt that you wrong for the part?

(Ann Hathaway) : I don't know, both maybe. Maybe another reason, but for whatever reason it took a meeting.

(Q) : But I'm sure you had other options on your plate, and so what was it about this script that made you want to chase it and want to do it?

(Ann Hathaway): Well, it's a really wonderful thing to find a character that's honest and complex and beautifully drawn and Emma was the most honest, complex, beautifully drawn character that I had found since Kim in "Rachel Getting Married." I shot that in the fall of 2007, and so clearly there are some times between the ones that you find.

When you find those I try to not leave any stone unturned until I'm given the opportunity. The problem is that then you get the opportunity and you're like, 'I got it! Oh, God, what am I going to do with it?' And then it becomes a whole other set of emotions that you have to deal with.

(Q) : Was this accent tougher for you than other British accents that you've done?

(Ann Hathaway) : Yeah. I've done standard RP a few times, in "Alice in Wonderland" and in "Becoming Jane."

(Q) : What's standard RP?

(Ann Hathaway): You had to, didn't you. I don't know. I don't remember what it stands for. The second word is, I believe, pronunciation, but I don't know what the R stands for.

(Q) : Royal? I don't know. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

(Ann Hathaway): Google it. Thank you, Google. So, with Emma it was a regional dialect that evolves over twenty years because we evolve over time and I speak differently now than I did ten years and ago and so I needed to find a way for the accent to grow with her, to reflect the time that she's been in London, to reflect her different jobs, where she's been and also I wanted to make sure that even though her accent changed that it reflect certain human truths.

Like, when people get drunk their accent comes out. When people get angry their accent comes out, which I had a lot of fun with, but when I saw the trailer cut together I was like, 'Oh, no. It sounds awful in this context. So, hopefully, or well, I've heard that in the movie it works. I haven't seen the movie yet.

(Q) : You've played a lot of romantic characters over the years. Can you talk about male and female relationships, how you perceive them?

(Ann Hathaway) : They're awesome.

(Q) : I know you have a lot of gay male friends?

(Ann Hathaway) y: Yeah. I have a lot of straight friends, too, straight male friends, too, but the majority of my friends are gay men. I've never had any sexual tension with them which I consider to be a personal failing. I'm going to do Judy Garland. I have to get on that. I think that, yeah, it's possible to be friends if you're a straight woman, to be friends with a straight guy and vice versa.

Yeah, sometimes there's tension that can get in the way of friendship, but usually that dissipates into what it's meant to be which is affection. I'm not the person to really answer this question. I've been in a rock solid relationship for three years and I'm a one man woman and so I don't really look at  other men that way. I'm terribly boring and loyal and true blue and all of that.

(Q) : What's intriguing in this story is that there's chemistry between Dexter and Emma, but that there's also all these impediments. Can you talk about that?

(Ann Hathaway) : Sure. I don't think that Emma and Dexter could've gotten together a day before they do. I think that they both had so much life to live and so many realizations to come to before they could be together honestly and openly. I think that he needed to learn how to appreciate her and she needed to learn how to appreciate herself. I think that was the most serious impediment.

(Q) : Jim Sturgess said that as you two got to know each other that you were swapping music. Do you recall any of the music that you gave each other?

(Ann Hathaway) : Oh, he totally got the short end of the stick. I gave him show tunes and he gave me this awesome indie rock music. He gave me a lot of Stone Roses. He loves the Stone Roses and he turned me on to Elbow, and for that I am enormously grateful. I think I turned him on to Bon Iver. Maybe I'm selling myself short because Bon Iver was so important for me as Emma. I listened to it constantly throughout this. So, yeah, I think that was the main swap. Bon Iver that way and towards me it was Elbow.

(Q) : What songs did you give to Lone to explain your feelings about Emma?

(Ann Hathaway) : A lot of Bon Iver. I mean, that album for Emma, 'Forever Ago', that feeling of heartache and then that song, do you know that Arcade Fire song 'Crown of Love', well the scene where Emma basically breaks up with Dexter as a friend and I was just listening to that song again and again and again because I don't know.  I can't even articulate why, but that song just sends me into a tailspin.

Then the song though that I thought captures Emma and Dex, particularly in their younger life, is a song by the Dirty Projectors that David Byrne did called 'Knotty Pine'. It's really cool. I think it's, like, 'Pine wood tied together, two whole lengths of knotty pine with a couple of nails put right on through.' I'm paraphrasing.

(Q) : You get to wear some dresses that rock in the movie.

(Ann Hathaway) : I do, don't I?

(Q) : And the way that you change from period to period, the haircut and clothes. Can you talk about that and how you found the character through the clothes?

(Ann Hathaway) : Well, Emma is not a girl who changes. She's a girl who evolves. She knows who she is, and she's actually not trying to try on new personas. She's trying to refine the one that she has, and so it was really fun to work on her look and figure it out. I think the pinnacle of her, I think that we have moments in our lives and for me the pinnacle of her beauty was when she was in Paris. She's just so free and so herself and is really letting her romance flag fly. She's in Paris. She's cut off all of her hair. She's wearing vintage that fits really well that I believe she probably even had tailored.

(Q) : Not the Mexican restaurant really.

(Ann Hathaway) : A far cry from the Mexican restaurant, and it was fun to kind of figure out where she ends up and then work back from there. Then Odile Dicks-Mireaux, the costume designer and I, we'd have these really fun conversations about what was the year that Emma found the right bra. You probably don't know this, but as a girl you have a year, you have many, many years where you do not where the right bra and then one day you find it, and like, doors open and doves flew through it. It's a life changing moment.

(Q) : What year was it for Emma?

(Ann Hathaway): For Emma it was right around the teacher years. During the teacher years I think she finds the right bra.

(Q) : Just getting back to the show tunes for a second. I was lucky enough in New York to see you do 'Carnival'. It was just a joy to see.

(Ann Hathaway) : I was a Twinkie when I did that.

(Q) : Are we going to see you back on stage again, and are there any parts that you've always wanted to play because you're at a particularly wonderful age right now?

(Ann Hathaway) : Unfortunately, the part that I've always wanted to play I think I've just crossed the too old mark. I always wanted to be Juliet, but maybe I can find, like, a forty year old Romeo and everyone will forgive us. So, that's one that I'd love to play. She's just fabulous. I was talking to someone the other day and they were trying to tell me that Juliet wasn't actually a great part, that it was fairly obvious and surface.

I just let him have it. I was like, 'What are you talking about? It's the story of a girl, of a heart opening and a girl who is as passionate as Joan of Arc.' That's another one. Oh, God, all the classics. It would be so much fun, just all the fun Shakespearean ones.

(Q) : Would you come back and do them?

(Ann Hathaway) : Oh, absolutely, but no one has asked me. I can't say that. I've been asked to do a few things, but the timing hasn't quite worked out. But I'm having a lot of fun working on Chris Nolan's 'Batman', the latest 'Batman' movie. I'm  having a an absolute blast doing it, but it's very big. The thing that's wonderful about Chris is that he's the most successful person in Hollywood at the moment, but his movies are Hollywood.

It feels like you're making an indie. He's actually a really alternative filmmaker. He just happens to have, like, a seven billion figure budget. I like to call him Hitchcock but just that he blows things up. After that I'm looking to maybe have a more quiet year next year. Maybe someone will hire me to do something like that.

(Q) : Speaking of "Batman", they just released your first official still photo, but you have a million people standing there with cameras. Yours came out and a hundred million photos of you on set from people who were just around there. How does that make you feel? How does that make everyone involved feel? Is that stealing the thunder at all?

(Ann Hathaway) : Honestly, it's disappointing. I think that everyone feels a slight frustration with it because those stills so undercut the work that's being done, and I think, no, no one is nervous about it. Honestly, like, wait until you see this movie. Chris is doing insane things in it and it's going to be marvelous and it's going to be way beyond what anyone imagines that it could be. I mean, you can't imagine the things that he's doing.

At least I couldn't until I read the script, and I was like, 'Really? Okay. You're going there.' It's Chris Nolan. Even the pictures that were released of me, that's not everything. He's not released everything. That's like a tenth of what the cat suit is. I have to say that I find it frustrating and I know that he finds frustrating, but I also think that he's having fun with it, like, spooning out secrets. He has a lot more control than you think.

(Q) : Can you talk about working with the director on this film and the overall feeling of this film which is more European than American?

(Ann Hathaway) : Yeah. I think 'One Day' does feel like a European film. I think there's something very universal about it though. Maybe it doesn't feel specifically more European or American, but just like a film and how marvelous. Lone is one of the smartest, funniest people I've ever met. I hope she understands it when I say that she's very Scandinavian which means to me that she has an enormous and deep and rich emotional life that she keeps very buttoned up.

So, her understanding of human emotion is vast, but she's very stoic, never cries, but is still wonderfully emotional. So, therefore she's unconsciously hilarious. Her understanding of Emma and Dexter, it was never straight on. She doesn't look at any scene from an obvious angle. It's always finding left of center ways and unexpected ways to communicate things, like, when we were doing the scene on the beach. For example, I walked away and was trying to find a way to cover my butt, and she said, 'Are you feeling nervous?' I said, 'No. I'm okay, but Emma, I think, walking away from Dexter is a little nervous to walk away from the boy that you like in a bathing suit in broad daylight.'

She goes, 'Okay,' and was struggling with it and she said, 'What if you did a cartwheel?' And by that point I had come to trust Lone and so I was like, 'What if I did a cartwheel?' So, then I decided to do a really bad cartwheel and it just turned out at that it was a much more interesting way to communicate nervousness and being uncomfortable in your own skin and goofiness. It was like that everyday, just like, 'How can we avoid the cliche?'

(Q) : Earlier you mentioned that after 'Love and Other Drugs' you feared you'd never work again. That was such a brave performance. Why did you feel that way?

(Ann Hathaway) : Oh, every actor, we're all a mixture of arrogance and insecurity. I'm actually not a terribly confident person. I'm just very professional.

(Q) : It's all fake.

(Ann Hathaway): I don't think it's fake. It's just professional.

(Q) : But you worry like that?

(Ann Hathaway) : It's always. Worry comes with the territory of being an actor. You don't come into this profession for job security and there's a lot of things at all times beyond your control. I'm play a pretty high level now and there's a lot of things beyond your control, and I mean, you can be doing fine work and people just decide that they're bored of you and then all of a sudden you don't get the opportunity to do things.

There are so many things and so it makes you appreciate the things that you have. It's so nice to have a script like this and a character like this. It's concrete and you go, 'Gosh, this is what I get to pour myself into,' and really the older I get the more that I appreciate these opportunities because I assume that they're going to become increasingly rare. So, you just try to live in the middle of them at every moment.

End.