Amelia

Written by Judy Sloane Saturday, 24 October 2009 08:51

Interview

We catch up with high-flying Oscar winner Hilary Swank, to talk about her new biopic Amelia.

Multiple Oscar-winner Hilary Swank is no stranger to playing strong female characters, having blazed up the screen in films like Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and Million Dollar Baby (2004). And her latest role sees her portray one of the greatest real-life heroines in history, ground-breaking female pilot Amelia Earhart who disappeared while trying to fly solo around the world in 1937. Amelia is directed by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair) and co-stars Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston and Richard Gere. But, as the actress explains, it wasn't just the talent involved that grabbed her attention, but that she continues to be drawn to roles of immense substance.

“I think that being an actor we’re constantly being objectified and things are thrown at us, what we look like and how we should look. It’s easy to look at yourself in those terms. I think that, ultimately, there are so many different ways in which a person is beautiful, and so to think that Amelia would talk about herself in those terms is so remarkable when she was so beautiful and accomplished so much, really achie ved so much, and was really speaking up for the inner quality of people who were facing adversity and inequality, and for women’s rights, so to just see that she was human in that dislike of herself.”

Amelia was obviously a huge inspiration for the women of her day. Do you hope modern women will take something away from the film?

“I think that she’s an inspiration to women of today too. That’s what’s incredible about this movie to me is that I have never had such an outpouring of people come up to me and say, ‘I cannot wait to see your film’. More than any of my other films I’ve ever been a part of. And I really have to say, I think what a lot of people know about Amelia is kind of what you learned in text books, but I think people also realize that this was a woman in a time when following your dream was a man’s job.

But even to take it a step further, I think this was a person who made no apologies for really living her life the way she wanted to live it, and I think that that’s something, if she was living in 2009, would be ahead of our time. I think it’s very challenging to live our lives on the path that we want whether you’re a woman or a man. So to me, I think, more than anything that’s what people are responding to, and it’s exciting to see, especially in the difficult economic times we’re living through. Seventy years after she was living still dealing with a lot of the same issues."

She didn’t pay a lot attention to people told her to put a lid on her ambition. Has anyone told you that in your life?

“Oh absolutely. I had one teacher who asked me when am was going to give up my hobby? Look, everyone is going to have an opinion and it’s difficult when you’re obviously pursuing your dream and you have people say – I had someone tell me I was too ‘half-hour’ when I was trying to get into drama. There is always tons of opinions. And some of them, neither of those, can be constructive, and I think you have to learn how to decipher which is constructive, what you can take in and actually help incorporate you into being a better actor or help you become successful, and the other ones that are silly that you just kind of push to the side and try not to take in. As actors we really wear our hearts on our sleeves, and so it’s easy to have that stuff that’s thrown at you be upsetting.”

Was there a lot of footage of Amelia that you could use as research?

“I know exactly to the minute how much [footage] there is out there! There are about 16 minutes of newsreel on Amelia and all of that is some waving! So the actual things that we have of her speaking are limited, and a lot of the stuff that we have of her speaking are when she had her public persona on. I found about 45 seconds of when she didn’t know the camera was actually on and so I got a little bit of an insight of her not public face, which was very obviously insightful for me and something I really grabbed on to.

I didn’t want to parody her, that accent was very specific, the cadence in which she spoke was very specific, the way she carried herself was very specific, as it is for all of us. If I were playing you I would want to break down your exact mannerisms. They were big shoes to fill, I couldn’t take a lot of fictional-license actually that I could probably take if I were playing you, so it was a daunting task and I felt like something that I had to really study to do justice to her."

What did you find the most valuable thing in your research?

“There were three things, one was what we have on her, the newsreels like I said, then the literature that we have on her, people writing about her, then the firsthand stuff of her letters and her correspondence between loved ones. But I’ll tell you, she was such a private person, as you see, that getting to know what she really felt was something that you have to read between the lines, because it’s not really on the page even when she wrote about it. So just getting her childhood, I think our childhood makes up a lot of who we are and how we carry ourselves in the world, and what her parents were like, and the gifts her parents gave her and her sister. Her father encouraging her and her sister to get an education, to learn how to write, she was a prolific writer, she was writing poetry at the age of five. But then he became an alcoholic.”

When you were exploring character, what were the elements of her personality that most surprised you?

“I really think that I didn’t recognize truly how unapologetically she lived her life. It’s something that I touched on. I found it quite remarkable, but at the same time she wasn’t threatening to people. She didn’t live it and say, ‘Screw you all, this is my path,’ and leave a bunch of people behind. She cared about people at the same time, she was really sticking up for people as we discussed earlier, and I found the more that I read about her, the more endearing she became. I just kept going, ‘This is someone I wish I could meet and talk to’, and again I think why people are so excited about her story.”

What actually happened to Amelia on her final flight is still a mystery – what do you think ris the truth behind her disappearance?

“I do believe she ran out of fuel. I know there are a lot of different ideas who what happened, was she kidnapped by the Japanese? Was she stranded on an island? But believe me when doing my press a lot of people say, ‘I don’t know if that was really the way you should have ended the movie,’ and I appreciate that there could be a lot of different ways. Maybe if the movie’s successful we’ll pretend she did land and make a sequel!”