[Interview] Naomi Totally Driven : An Interview with MovieLine

Naomi Watts on Fair Game, Short Attention Spans and How You Get to Know a Spy

by S.T. VanAirsdale, The Movieline Interview, Nov 2010

Naomi Watts freely admits she had a hard time getting to know Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA agent notoriously outed by a Bush Administration henchman in 2003. But it wasn’t because of what Plame couldn’t tell the actress in preparation for Fair Game, the new film starring Watts as the newly exposed covert operative. It’s because of the intimate yet necessary details of a marriage that, as a result of the scandal, nearly became some of the Iraq War’s most infamous collateral damage.

Watts and Plame finally sorted that out, of course. What emerged is director Doug Liman’s two-pronged tale of Plame’s struggle to protect her nuclear counterproliferation missions in the Middle East, all the while battling to save her marriage to the outraged former ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), whose critical New York Times editorial mobilized the White House against Plame in the first place. It’s a tricky balance Watts manages with typical aplomb — not that it didn’t take a while, the Oscar-nominee told Movieline during a chat last month in New York.

I met with Valerie Plame a few months ago, which was interesting to say the least. So we have that experience in common; what was your first encounter like?

The first one, we were both very careful with each other. We’d had quite a few e-mails and phone calls leading up to it, trying to plan something. She lives in Santa Fe; I live in New York. We figured out that it was 12 hours of travel door-to-door. I’d just had a baby; she’s got kids. So it was going to be really difficult. But she said, “We could meet halfway. How about Chicago? The airport?” I said, “At the airport? Who meets at the airport?” A CIA agent does! So anyway, we had a laugh about things leading up to it, and then we finally met, we met in kind of a noisy restaurant. So it wasn’t the best way to fall into it quickly. But we were very careful with each other.

We obviously have very different jobs, but they’re similar in that we study people. We’re always looking for nuance or characteristics or… you know. Just observing how the other operates. That’s part of her job, that’s part of my job. Very different in most respects, but we were both being careful. And she says this herself when you ask her how she avoided telling her friends [she was CIA], or withholding the truth about where she was all the time: It’s funny how willing people always are to talk about themselves. You can always just turn it back — always avoiding. So it was really hard to slip into it — to work out who each other was. I was wanting her to come forward, she was wanting me to come forward, and we both sort of wound up on the sidelines watching.

How long did it take to become comfortable with each other?

Not long. I think after the first meeting, we had one other meeting where it was a “careful” one, and then it was like, “Crunch time! I’ve got to get into this now.” I stopped thinking [twice] about asking the silly questions — well, interesting questions, though they may seem silly to her. Or the questions you’re tempted to ask a CIA agent; I mean, forget those. She’s not going to answer them anyway. Focus on who she was as a woman. Who is she? Focus on how she dealt with this level of betrayal, how she dealt with the conflict in her own home, the juxtaposition of being someone who lived in total secrecy and then had to speak out about who she was in public.

There was one dinner that took place — I think I’d already shot one day with her around. I took her to dinner and ordered a bottle of wine and said, “These are my questions.” And they were very personal, confronting questions. And she was fine answering them.

“With her around”? Like on set? Were you comfortable with that?

In the beginning… Well, look: It’s always scary playing a character who’s lived — who we’re all familiar with. Because you feel that you own them. When you feel like that as an actor, you want to possess that character; you want it to belong to you. And when other people know them, they feel they have ownership. So it’s scary! You want to get it right. Now, the fact that she was very much alive and there — not on a daily basis, but often, quite a few times — that definitely upped the ante. Yeah.

To the extent you could know Valerie as an ex-CIA operative, how much did you really want to know her?

I did. I really wanted to know her. There were things in the script that I wrestled with, like [how] she did handle it so well. She never lost her marbles. There’s that scene where she talking about training camp — “I never broke. I was the only one. They can’t break me.” And I couldn’t quite get my head around that, because I’m the person who A) would avoid the fight at all costs, and B) if I had to do it, I would fall to pieces.

You would?

I think so. You never know when you’re in that situation. You may be just totally driven.

Because I look at the challenges you’ve taken on, and the risks you’ve taken as an actor — even in something like this, as you just said. You’re playing someone who’s alive. It seems like you’ve never wanted for courage.

Yeah, I mean, it’s courageous, it’s risky. But to me it’s totally different. We have our comfort zones. And this wasn’t a “comfortable” thing to do; it was very scary. Taking on the White House? That’s a different kind of courage in my mind.

The film has some very political overtones, even activist overtones, but it never feels like Valerie is an especially political character — even as she’s politicized by others. How did you want to handle that dynamic?

I think the story that drives the film is the marriage and how that survived — great conflict, great ups and downs, very nearly coming to an end. That’s what spoke to me: How a relationship survives under such duress. We all know a relationship is hard no matter what, but put that into the mix, and how do you cope with that? And the fact that she spent 20 years living in virtual secrecy — to then go forward against every instinct she has and speak in public in honor of what she felt she should do for her country. But really it was driven by her husband. To me, that was a total act of love.

Why did Valerie come around all of the sudden? Was it to save her marriage?

I think it was that. And basically the information being give to us about why we were going to war — those 16 words that were told to us in the State of the Union address were contrary to the information Joe learned when he was sent to Niger.

Was this a story you followed when it was occurring?

It was something I was familiar with. I looking it up on the Internet every day, but when you turn on CNN and there’s new information all the time… and then, after the Libby trial, it sort of disappeared. But when I got the e-mail from Jez Butterworth — the screenwriter, who’s my friend — that he had written an adaptation of her story, of her book, I was very intrigued. I was very much reminded of it — but certainly [due] to the level of detail that’s in the script.

We have such short attention spans — Americans do, anyway.

The world! Everything happens so quickly, then we’re done with it, and we want something else. We crave more information about something else. But what stands out and resonates for me is that this story is always worth telling — whether we’re moving on from the Bush Administration or not. It’s two people. Two individuals took on a great fight, because their truth had to be told — what they knew. And they stood by it.