July 2004 | blackfilm.com | features | interviews

July 2004

The Bourne Supremacy: An Interview with Joan Allen

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By Wilson Morales

The Bourne Supremacy: An Interview with Joan Allen

In most of the films she's been in, Joan Allen has always played a strong character. Her characters never seem to have a moment of weakness. In "The Contender" when her character was running for Vice President, Joan played her with a conviction that can't be match. In "Pleasantville", her character challenged the "color" system and prevailed. In her latest film, Allen once again displays her penchant for strong roles as she plays Agent Pamela Landy, a woman searching for Jason Bourne in "The Bourne Supremacy". While promoting the film in LA, Allen spoke to blackfilm.com about her character and what makes Matt Damon special as Jason Bourne.

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT APPROACHING THIS CHARACTER AND THE CALL YOU GOT TO DO THIS ROLE, AND WERE YOU A FAN OF THE ORIGINAL ONE?

ALLEN: I hadn't seen the original. So I got the call first that they were interested, that they wanted me to do Pamela Landy. So I rented the original one and I saw it and that's how I got involved in it.

WHAT ABOUT YOUR APPROACH, DID YOU DO ANY RESEARCH?

ALLEN: I did some research. I read about this woman Stella Remington who was the head of MI5 in England. That was a helpful book to read because it sort of talked about a woman's experience in the super secret, their version of the CIA. So I did some reading about that and I also met with someone who had been in the CIA at one point in his life and sort of asked things like what kind of person goes into this sort of work.

AND WHAT DID YOU FIND?

ALLEN: It's a variety. It requires people who have a lot of different kinds of skills. I mean, you might meet someone who's great in languages and then you might meet someone who's great with technical things. So it sort of covers a wide sort of spectrum and you have to have people who, I think, are sort of risk takers and get sort of an adrenaline rush. The one guy that I talked with said that it gets very addictive because people are giving you literally bags of hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash or tens of thousands of dollars and you're distributing it around and you're in these exotic places. But it's also someone who has a lot of confidence and intuits other human beings really well.

DO YOU THINK THAT YOU'RE A RISK TAKER?

ALLEN: I don't think that I am. I'm not a huge risk taker. I think that for me I take certain kinds of risks, but if you look at me, you wouldn't say I was a big risk taker. I'm not going to jump out of an airplane and parachute and things like that. That's not really me.

HAVE YOU BEEN BACK TO CHICAGO LATELY AND DOES THAT HELP YOU IN YOUR CAREER?

ALLEN: I was back in Chicago. I was actually in O'Hare airport yesterday. I live west of Chicago, like eighty miles, and I was visiting my mom for a few days. But I go back at least a few times a year and I was at the Steppenwolf gala in May which was really raised a lot of money and the city is looking really great these days. It's really beautiful.

WAS IT DIFFICULT TO PLAY SO COOL, CALM COLLECTED IN THIS FILM?

ALLEN: It was a tricky character and it was more difficult than I thought that it'd be. The material, this kind of material and Brian Cox talks about it because he had been in the first one and it was helpful for me because he said, 'There's no fat on this material. There's nothing. You can't kind of fudge it.' With something that's more emotionally based, you can't sort of screw the line up a little bit and adlib and something. This is all just like really focused and driven material and it's technical and specific and you're giving orders and all of this stuff and I'd never really done that before. So it was an interesting challenge. It was a challenge. It was more challenging than I thought it'd be. I thought, 'You don't want to put me on "CSI." I won't do well. You don't want me doing that.' [Laughs]

HOW DID YOU OVERCOME THE TECHNICAL STUFF?

ALLEN: I would drill as much as I possibly could and had a wonderful director, Paul Greengrass, who would say, 'Just get this part of it right. It's going to be really fast paced anyway. I'm cutting it very, very quickly.' And we got lines sometimes like, 'It's lunchtime. Here are your lines for after lunch.' They tried to stop doing that after a while when they realized it wasn't working so well at least for me. So anyway, the director was really helpful.

HOW DO YOU CHOSE WHAT YOU WANT TO DO, AND DID YOU RESIST MAKING PAMELA SOME SORT OF GORGON?

ALLEN: Yeah. 'The Notebook' fit in nicely with my life. It wasn't far away from home. It was a lovely story with people that I respected who were doing it. So that was really the reason and in terms of the character, I think the scene where she sees the man that she decided against, you know, gave the character some complexity to me. But you were talking about Pamela. I just didn't want her to sort of be that way. I just wanted her to be effective and good at her job. She's more introspective about things, sort of always thinking and trying to figure out what's going on. Sometimes I think that you can be more effective and more powerful the less overt kind of force that you use. So that's been my take on it.

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE FACT THAT YOUR CHARACTER ISN'T THE GIRLFRIEND OR THE VILLAIN IN THIS FILM WHERE MOST FILMS LIKE THIS, THAT'S THE PART FOR A WOMAN?

ALLEN: Yeah. I liked the fact that she isn't one or the other. She's just a thinking person. and ethical given that world and I guess within the context of the CIA which I understand is stretching it a little bit. She's good at what she does and she's really smart. At one point, it was really interesting because in one version of the script, they wanted to put some kind of scene in where I say, 'Oh, I don't have a husband, and I don't have this and I don't have that,' and all the other guys in the CIA had wedding rings and stuff like that on. I just said, 'I don't want to go there.' I don't want to say, 'Because you're a woman and you have this position of power, of authority, you can't be married and you can't have children.' Actually, the guy who I interviewed from the CIA said that that wasn't really necessarily true. That you had to be like a nun, a CIA nun because you're a woman in this profession. I just didn't want to go there. I said, 'Lets not tell her history at all.' And I didn't wear a wedding ring, but I was like, 'I think that Pam probably has a pretty good time at some of these things.' I think that she enjoys herself [Laughs]. So she's not some kind of button down sexless sort of thing. I think that she just happens to be really good at her and she happens to be a woman and so that's kind of the way that I look at it.

DO YOU HAVE OBSERVATIONS ABOUT MATT DAMON AND WHAT MAKES HIM SPECIAL IN THIS KIND OF ROLE?

ALLEN: There's a scene that's not in the movie at this point which we shot and re-shot a few times between the two of us. So I did actually have the pleasure of working with him a few days on the set than actually ends up in the film, but not by many. It's only by just a couple.

WILL IT BE ON THE DVD?

ALLEN: It might be on the DVD, you might see it. This is the way we thought that it might end, but they sort of shifted it around so I did only spend maybe six or seven days on the set with him total, the whole time. He's so smart and so personable. I think that there's a vulnerability to him. I don't know how he plays Jason Bourne because the set of given circumstances are so complicated. It's like he forgot, but he really is a super killer and so you get into a situation and you do this. What's up with that? You're confused too. I think that I get this sense of torment that's not overplayed. It's very subtle. A tormented soul in this incredibly intelligent and subtle way. And I think that makes the audience really care about him. I mean, he's so wonderful to the crew and he's really personable. So on a personal level, he's fantastic and very, very smart. He's really, really smart in terms of the whole film and all of that stuff. I wish that I had more stuff to do with him in the movie. Maybe someday.

DID YOU ACTUALLY TALK ON THE CELL PHONE?

ALLEN: No, we didn't actually speak on the phone.

DID YOU GUYS HAVE ANY WRAP PARTIES ON THIS?

ALLEN: There were about five wrap parties on this because it wrapped in India, it wrapped in Berlin, it wrapped for the first re-shoot, it wrapped after the second re-shoot. So there were a few parties.

DID YOU GO TO ALL THE PARTIES?

ALLEN: I was in and out. I went to the one wrap party and Matt was even there. I went to the one wrap party after the first set of re-shoots or something like that. So we shot until midnight and they keep the bars open in Berlin. There's this weird rule because when the American forces were in there or something during the war, that was the one thing that they gave the troops, that they could keep the bars open. So you can stay in the bars all night, until dawn's early light. So we did that one night.

WHEN YOU APPROACH A ROLE THIS OR LIKE IN 'THE CONTENDER,' DO YOU FEEL THE WEIGHT OF WOMEN'S ISSUES ON YOUR SHOULDERS OR DO YOU SEPARATE YOURSELF FROM THAT?

ALLEN: I think that I do separate myself a fair amount. And I don't feel like am representing women. That's up to however people interpret it once they sort of see it. So I don't really go into it looking at it like that. That's the job of the story really, to sort of put that out there. I just try to do it the best that I can. I know that with 'The Contender,' I was concerned about being too much like a martyr, too perfect and stuff like that. That was something that did concern me. I didn't want her to come off as unrealistic. I wanted her to have some human qualities too.

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE FILM, 'THE UPSIDE OF ANGER?'

ALLEN: It was great. We had a great experience. It was written and directed by Mike Binder who did 'Mind of the Married Man,' and Mike and I had acted together in 'The Contender.' That's how I met him. I said to him, we were sitting behind a table like this when we were shooting, and I said, 'Mike, I know you do comedy. Someday would you consider putting me in one of your comedies,' because I hadn't really done much on film. So he wrote it with me in mind. So that was really, really cool, and Erica Christiansen, Evan Rachel Wood, Kerri Russell and Alicia Witt all play my daughters. So it's a comedy and my husband I think has just dumped and left the family. I am angry and drunk most of the time and setting a very bad example for my daughters and they're going through all kinds of things that I'm not paying attention to. Kevin Costner is a neighbor who starts hanging out more and more and he's an ex-baseball player.

AGAIN?

ALLEN: [Laughs] I was the ex-baseball player and he was the drunk wife. No. So he starts hanging out more and more with the family because he kind of has this lonely life of a single guy who's never gotten married and has a trashed out house and is kind of burned out. He hangs out with us more and more and sort of wants to have a relationship with me and I'm like, 'I don't know. I'm heartbroken over my husband that's left me.' It's really funny and it's kind of what happens to the family.

WHAT'S 'OFF THE MAP?'

ALLEN: 'Off The Map' is a film that Campbell Scott directed with me and Sam Elliot and J.K. Simmons, a wonderful young actress named Valentina de Angelis and an actor name Jim True-Frost. It takes place in New Mexico. It's about a family that lives off the grid on about five thousand dollars a year. Sam and I are married and he's going through a depression. The family is trying to figure out how to cope with it. This guy who Jim True-Frost plays is an IRS agent. We haven't paid our taxes for many years and he comes in from the outside trying to collect our taxes from us and gets stung by a bee. He has this horrible allergic reaction. I start taking care of him. He ends up starting to live with the family and he sort of gives up [his life] and gets totally sucked in by the landscape and starts living with the family. It's a beautiful film on the order of like 'Days Of Heaven.' It's that kind of a feeling type movie.

WHAT WERE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT THE CIA BEFORE YOU MADE THIS FILM AND DID WORKING ON THE FILM CHANGE WHAT YOU THOUGH ABOUT IT?

ALLEN: I hadn't thought a lot about the CIA to be honest. I'm glad because almost any film that you do is an opportunity to open you up and make you more aware of an area that you might not be thinking about. That's what is kind of cool, or one of the cool things about this profession. It's very complicated. There's a lot of stuff going on now too. I don't know how to comment on it really except that I know it's really complicated. I think that I am more interested in it now having played someone who's been a member of that agency than I was before.

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