Polly McIntosh studied big cats and wolves to get a feel for her feral character. LUCKY McKee has had people walk out of his films before, he says. ''But it's the first time they've been running.'' There have been a few premature exits from his new movie, The Woman - most notably during its first screening at Sundance, when a spectator became extremely agitated and said that the film should be confiscated and burned. His outburst was captured on film, and has become a kind of alternative trailer for the movie. Some people assume that this was a publicity stunt, McKee notes; he says, wryly, that if he'd actually thought of it, it probably would have seemed like a good idea.
The Woman is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Friday before a season at the Nova. At first, there's a dreamlike, slightly unsettling quality to the depiction of the family at the centre of the story. Women in the audience tend to realise, sooner than male viewers, McKee says, that there's something wrong with this picture, that the brisk, apparently cheery father, lawyer Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers) is a man ''obsessed with control''.
Out hunting, Cleek discovers the title character, a fierce feral creature (Polly McIntosh). She had made an appearance in a 2009 film, Offspring - filmed by a different director - as part of a cannibal tribe; here, she's alone and, for a moment, apparently vulnerable. He captures her and keeps her tied up in a cellar on the property; his plan, he tells his wife and three children, is to civilise her. What he has in mind and how she responds to her imprisonment send the movie into bloody, dark and disconcerting territory. There's an escalation of violence, and an abrupt, grim plot twist that redefines a certain amount of what has gone before. Yet, for spectators who wait until the very end, there is also what McKee regards as a sense of hope.
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For McIntosh, a Scottish actress and former model now based in Los Angeles, preparation for her character involved far more than the transformation of her appearance. At the zoo, she studied gorillas, big cats and wolves, she hiked alone in the woods for four days, she says, ''and just pretended that it was my territory''.She researched ancient mythology: she needed a sense, she says, of how her character would feel about being taken prisoner. She kept pictures on a board that she could look at when she was in make-up, images that included photographs of hunting animals and of Sitting Bull, a symbol of defiance. And to sustain her, if she wanted to stay in an ''emotional or hardcore place'' for a scene, she listened to a lot of Bjork - ''she's so otherworldly and raw, so female … so liberating''.
Even though she thought there was a chance that she would reprise the character from the earlier film, she had some reservations at first, ''When I read the script, I thought, Christ, really … this is going to be hell, I don't want to do this. But talking to Lucky, who had endless notes, and was so helpful and collaborative, I knew I was going to be in safe hands, because we were both on the same page.''
She's well aware, she says, of movies that set up the situation of a woman trapped by a man, ''and they're generally done in a way that there's some erotic excitement about it''. That's the last thing she wanted anything to do with. She says a rape scene in The Woman ''made my heart sink a bit when I read it, but talking with Lucky about it, seeing the point that was made, I thought this is a scene that could be really powerful''. For her, it's a moment when the character realises, paradoxically, her own strength and her captor's weakness.
The Woman screens at MIFF on Friday and begins at the Nova on August 18. There are Q&A screenings with McIntosh and McKee at MIFF on Friday and at the Nova on August 9.
The Age is a media sponsor of the festival.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/movies/dark-tale-weaves-its-spell-20110731-1i66n.html#ixzz1TkNlm7s2
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