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Polanski suggested that she try the Method. She began working "with this great teacher named Jack Waltzer. Jack teaches in New York and Paris. He studied with Stella Adler, Sandy Meisner and Lee Strasberg -- all the big honchos of the Actors Studio and the Method -- and I think he's the only one who pulls them all together and adds his own stuff. From scene to scene he made me ask myself, what is the essence of the scene and where do I know that from?

"You start to interweave your own experience and that of the character, and they don't even have to be reasonably similar. I worked for hours every weekend and every night trying to find threads of experience I could use, and learning a whole different way of approaching my work. It was obviously fruitful for me -- I'm still using it. You do sense-memory exercises about other places, other people. Then, when it comes time to do a scene, you don't need to do the exercises. You can think of one physical thing -- you can flash on a hat -- and you're in the scene.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

"If there's anything I think I could teach, it's these techniques -- and the lack of technique. I mean, there's a lot of junk you don't need to know. Recently, my husband taught some third-year theater graduate students, and of course they were all in their 20s and wanted to do Chekhov, with characters going through midlife crises. One young actress made an effort to move as if she were wearing a long dress, and it was getting in the way of her performance. As an actor, you don't have to keep proving that you're right for the part -- we'll accept you in it as long as you say the lines. If you're in period clothes, then you let the clothes do the work for you."

When I mentioned that "Topsy-Turvy" director Mike Leigh told me how important corsets were for his cast of Victorian characters, Weaver responded, "Yes, but when you put the corset on, it's on you: You don't have to act the corset being on you."

Weaver chalks up the relative lack of attention for "Death and the Maiden" to "a tiny distribution budget" and the continued backlash against Polanski for living and working in Europe rather than face sentencing in Los Angeles after pleading guilty to a statutory rape charge. "Roman is an amazing director," she said. "I was surprised when I saw his finished film. It was really my movie when we were making it, but Roman wanted a bit of 'Rashomon' in it -- he wanted you to see me through the eyes of the other characters, too, and think, 'Maybe she's right; maybe she's crazy.' And he was a genius -- a genius to do that." She feels that connects to what she admired about "A Map of the World": "The realizations are not programmed into the script. They happen as they would happen in real life, in a surprising way, and when you least expect them."

Although Weaver doesn't rely on source materials in the thick of a performance, she said that during "A Map of the World" she often felt as if her only real company "was Alice in the book -- it was as if she were the only one who could understand me. There wasn't time to find the places in the book containing all the scenes. But there were details I absorbed subliminally -- or maybe I made the same choices that Jane Hamilton did because I was relaxed and everything was working correctly. Like when Alice runs down the hill and sees the little girl's body in the water."

Weaver summoned up her memory of acting that moment: "I remember being slightly worried because you can't find the little one. But the little one has never wandered away before so you're not that worried. Then you're looking around when you see a little pink thing in the pond, and you don't know what happens next, you just go -- you're just trying to get down the hill as fast as you can. And when I went back to the book, Jane Hamilton had described how wildly and clumsily Alice had gone flailing down the hill." ("I ran like a blind person," the book's Alice relates, "stumbling over my own heavy limbs.")

Her description of that crisis illustrates her belief that "it's best not to know what you're doing. You have to trust yourself when you're actually shooting. After all, you'll never know when you've done the right work or enough work. You just have to let it go. As one actor said a long time ago, get out of the character's way."

Weaver did spend "a few hours" in the county jail in Racine, Wis., which she described as "a very helpful, dehumanizing experience. They take your clothes and you put on something other women have worn, and it's clean but it's filled with old smells. I saw where the prisoners see their visitors, and I realized how it would feel to be in for sexually molesting children, which doesn't endear you with the population there. It was an incredibly powerful assault."

Yet one of the more dynamic surprises of the film is that Alice's brow clears and she clicks into mental alertness after she's arrested. "Well," explained Weaver, "I felt that Alice was feeling so terrible about what happened that she was punishing herself more and more -- and when she's thrown into the county jail she doesn't have to punish herself anymore because she is being punished. She continually sees the absurdity of the situation. She goes back to her cell after her hearing and her cellmate is masturbating, and her look says, 'You've got to be kidding me.' It feels good to be punished, although the real punishment is being away from her family. She reads books not because she has time on her hands, but because she doesn't want to think about what her daughters and her husband are up to. She escapes into these books. She lives entirely in her head."

Next page | Spurning Woody Allen to play "a schizophrenic with a hedgehog in her vagina"