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WILD is a hard-hitting self-discovery drama based on Strayed's smash 2012 memoir of the same name. Courtesy Fox Searchlight.
- news.com.au
- 15 Jul 2014
- Entertainment/Movies
Reese Witherspoon did the hard yards to bring Wild into the world (Twentieth Century Fox) Source: Supplied
MEET Reese Witherspoon, Hollywood power player. Yes, she was big box office before, drawing hordes to fun fluff like the Legally Blonde movies and winning an Oscar for Walk the Line.
But this 2014/15 model Reese Witherspoon is making her own decisions and her own movies — fed up with finding the cupboard bare whenever she would ask studios what projects they were developing for women.
“When I got more engaged as a producer and started seeking out what I think is a white space in the market — creating great leading women characters in film — I felt much more inspired,” says the 38-year-old.
While stars’ production companies often turn out to be vanity projects, Witherspoon’s Pacific Standard thus far has proven true to her aims of finding original voices and making the company sustainable beyond her on-screen presence.
The old Reese ... As she appeared in 2003’s Legally Blonde 2. Pic: Twentieth Century Fox Source: News Corp Australia
And talk about great women characters: Pacific Standard’s opening one-two punch of Gone Girl and Wild has succeeded artistically, critically and commercially. Both films have also kicked up conversation, not just with their stories but their possible impact as far as filling that white space.
(Don’t get Witherspoon started on calling them ‘chick flicks’: “That’s a little reductive, to be honest. We’ve seen these kinds of films with men at the centre and we don’t call them ‘dude movies’.”)
The cherry on top: Both leading ladies — Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl and Witherspoon in Wild — are now vying for Academy Awards.
A lifelong devourer of books, Witherspoon snapped up the rights to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl before either was published.
“I’ve grown a little wary of seeing thin, poorly-written female characters on the screen,” Witherspoon sighs.
“I’ve read so many of them and seen so many great actresses be shunted to the side because the part doesn’t really merit their participation. Women are complex and they’re interested in seeing complex portrayals.
“Whether you like her or you don’t like her,” she adds of Gone Girl’s lead protagonist, “Amy Dunne is a conversation-starter.”
Witherspoon did discuss with director David Fincher the prospect of playing Amy, but both were going into production at the same time and Wild had taken a grip on her like nothing else.
Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl ... The first film to emerge from Witherspoon’s production company. Pic: Twentieth Century Fox Source: Supplied
Strayed’s book is the memoir of a 1770km hike she took to end a downward spiral of divorce, heroin use and anonymous sex that began with her mother’s death.
Woefully underprepared for the hike across the Pacific Crest Trail (which stretches through California, Oregon and Washington), Strayed battled with her hiking gear, lost toenails, encountered wild animals and dodgy men and went far too long without water.
Witherspoon admits to sobbing (publicly and loudly) when first reading Wild on a flight from LA to New York.
“It was one of the most beautiful books I’d ever read. It talked about big life issues: Grieving the loss of a parent. Death. Drug use. Sex. You name it, it’s in that book,” she says.
“The way Cheryl synthesises human emotion and puts it into words, it’s so beautiful; so many of the big ideas that I’ve thought for so much of my life, but didn’t know how to articulate.
“I was struck that this was an extraordinary heroine in that she ends this film with nothing — no man, no job, no parents, no opportunity — yet it’s a happy ending. She finds herself.”
If Strayed was untested before taking that hike, Witherspoon was equally untested at adapting a novel for the screen.
“I always had complete faith in her. I never doubted it,” says Strayed, who now counts the star among her close friends.
“Reese is so natural, she just has something ... She seems like a normal person when you’re with her in a room, but then she’s on camera and present in a way not everyone is.”
Witherspoon and husband Jim Toth at a 2014 Beverly Hills fundraiser. Pic: John Shearer/Invision/AP Source: AP
Witherspoon did have wells of pain from which to draw for her performance.
For starters, her 2007 divorce from actor Ryan Phillippe (father to two of her children, Ava, 15, and Deacon, 11).
“I’ve been through things publicly, I’ve been through things privately, that informed my character, really made me who I am,” she says.
Then there was that 2013 arrest for disorderly conduct after her husband Jim Toth (father of her son Tennessee, two) was pulled over for drink-driving.
Reflecting on the latter, Witherspoon called it “a moment where people realised that I wasn’t exactly what they thought I was”.
Wild is the film version of that “moment” — America’s Sweetheart busting out of the chains confining her to roles the industry or audiences expect.
“I had to make a choice to make a very raw, gritty, honest film because Cheryl was brave enough to tell the whole truth: the parts of herself that are palatable, the parts of herself that you go, ‘I don’t even wanna know that person, that’s so gross and disgusting’,” Witherspoon explains.
“She told you the whole truth so you can understand. I had to make a choice to be just as brave, just as honest, in the film.”
Requiring much bravery were the nude/sex scenes that flashback to Strayed’s drug-addled encounters.
Witherspoon didn’t discuss whether or not to do them with her husband, only with her French Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee.
Director Jean-Marc Vallee wanted to capture Witherspoon wrestling with her hiking equipment for the first time on film. Pic: Twentieth Century Fox Source: Supplied
She was emboldened by his treatment of a particular scene in Dallas Buyers Club, where Matthew McConaughey has two naked girls in his trailer. A scene the director calls “raw and tough”.
“It wasn’t about being salacious or titillating,” says Witherspoon, “it was to convey a deeper sadness.”
The transformation Vallee wrung out of McConaughey and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club was physically obvious — and it won each an Academy Award. Witherspoon’s Wild transformation was a subtler affair.
“It wasn’t a physical weight loss or something that drastic,” says the director.
Witherspoon with the real Cheryl Strayed (centre) and Wild co-star Laura Dern. Pic: Todd Williamson/AP Source: Supplied
“It was getting out of her comfort zone and accepting the fact we were going to serve the story. Let’s not show off, let’s not pull the focus with lights and make-up ... let’s do it the real way.
“So out there on the trail, she’s hard, it’s harsh. And yet ... how beautiful! How naked. How simple. You feel the humanity. She picked this project to embrace Cheryl’s humanity.”
Embrace it Witherspoon did, finding beauty in Strayed’s “willingness to show you everything, even parts that make her ... repellent.”
Encouraging but slightly less embracing was Witherspoon’s old-fashioned Southern mother, Betty.
“I sat with my mum watching the movie and she goes, ‘Oh, that poor girl’,” Witherspoon reports with a Tennessee accent and a giggle. “Every time we’re in those sequences where it’s the sex and the drugs: ‘Oh, that poor girl’.”
As it happened, it was nature, rather than being au naturel, that really tested Witherspoon’s mettle.
Witherspoon versus nature in Wild. Pic: Twentieth Century Fox Source: Supplied
In his quest for realism, Vallee refused to let her get in shape or have any foreknowledge of the hiking equipment before he filmed her trying to use it.
And the snow!
“It was a little chilly,” Witherspoon understates. “I’d be the person in shorts and a T-shirt, then turn around and everybody on the crew is in a parka and a hat.”
The subtitle to Strayed’s book read: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Some have suggested filming Wild has resulted in a similar enlightenment for its star and saved her career (even if she doesn’t end up taking home a second Oscar for it).
“Look, it’s great that people are noticing I’m very engaged with my work,” Witherspoon says.
“There was a period of time where I was not as engaged or artistically turned on. About three years ago, I was determined to take more ownership over the choices I made.
“It’s very important to me that the films I put into the world are an expression and extension of who I am.”
WILD OPENS TODAY.
GONE GIRL IS RELEASED ON DVD/DIGITAL FEBRUARY 4.
