[Magazine Alert] Naomi on Delta Sky Dec 2012

©NW2005 FirstLook

From her breakthrough role in Mulholland Drive to her upcoming Oscar-buzzworthy performance in The Impossible, Naomi Watts talks about the big screen in December's Delta Sky Magazine.

[The Article]

Yes, she's beautiful. But it's Naomi Watts' trademark intensity that has made her a star.

by DEBORAH CAULFIELD RYBAK

Naomi Watts has personally experienced a hurricane (Sandy, 2012) and a major earthquake (Los Angeles, 1994), but this month moviegoers will associate her with a much different natural disaster: She stars in The Impossible, based on the true story of a Spanish family's harrowing experience in the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

"When I heard about another film being made about the tsunami, it didn't grab me right away,"she says of her initial skepticism about the movie. "Disaster films can often be a lot of running and screaming. But after reading the first five or 10 pages, I could tell that this story felt real and true. Yes, it was about this disastrous event that took place, but inside of that story was something very intimate about the family, and that really interested me.”

The tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people in 14 countries, and it was the fifth deadliest natural disaster in recorded history. Among the victims in Thailand was a Spanish family, the Belons, who became separated after gigantic waves washed over their hotel. Dr. Maria Belon was seriously injured and struggled to protect one of her sons while looking for her husband and two other sons. After hearing Belon tell her story on a Spanish radio station, director Juan Antonio Bayona decided to make Impossible, looking to Watts and Ewan McGregor for the lead roles when the main characters were changed from a Spanish to a British family.

"Maria Belon sometimes came to the set, and having her presence there just added to the weight of what we were doing,"Watts says. "It kept me focused and very strong."The actress, chatty and charming during a recent phone interview from London, had just finished up another day on the set of her latest film, Diana, about the last two years of Princess Diana's life. In many ways it's a dramatic shift from her role in The Impossible - and a measure of Watts's range as an actress. She's known for pulling no punches when it comes to emotionally wrenching roles.

Part of Watts' depth comes from doing her homework. But she says her first meeting with real-life counterpart Maria Belon was a bit nerve-racking: "I just didn't know what to say,"she says. "This was someone who had faced life and death, and I felt silly asking her questions. But Maria was really open to discussing it. You know, sometimes when people go through that level of grief or shock or trauma it's hard for them to talk about it, but it wasn't with her. Maria was just an open book, plus, she's a writer, so it was very easy for her to express herself.”

Bayona went to great lengths to realistically portray the tsunami - and what it felt like to be caught up in the catastrophe. He shot part of the film at the actual hotel in Phuket, Thailand, where the Belon family was staying when the tsunami hit, and he invited them to come along.

The director also shot some of the more catastrophic water scenes in a large water tank in Madrid - not Watts' favorite part of the process, given that as a teenager she had had a nightmarish experience when she became trapped in a rip tide. "I have a great fear of water and being trapped in the water, and we did a month on the sequence where we've stuck in the waves trying to find each other. It was not my idea of fun,"she comments dryly. "I mean, working with water is always difficult, and it certainly lived up to its reputation. It was a workout.”

The film's impact has already been powerful, emotionally and financially. Two audience members reportedly fainted during some of the more gruesome scenes of the catastrophe during a screening at this fall's Toronto International Film Festival. When it was released in Spain this October (it opens in U.S. theaters December 12), it quickly became the highest-grossing Spanish film of all time. "I think Juan Antonio made it a really great, believable, emotional film,"Watts says. "But you never know how an audience will receive it. It's always a gamble.”

Watts was born in southeast England and lost her father, a road manager for the band Pink Floyd, at an early age when he died of an apparent drug overdose. She moved with her mother and brother (the respected photographer Ben Watts) to Australia when she was 14. Although she's now based in New York, where she lives with partner Liev Schreiber and their kids, she still considers Australia to be her emotional home. She calls many of its actors - including high school classmate Nicole Kidman - close friends.

Watts acknowledges that there is a kind of Australian acting mafia. Besides Kidman, Hugh Jackman and his wife Deb are friends, and she considers Rebecca Rigg, who is married to The Mentalist star Simon Baker, one of her closest friends: "I'm godmother to their oldest child,"she says. She hasn't seen Russell Crowe or Cate Blanchett in "quite a long time,"but she considers them pals as well. "We do stick together,"she says. "You know, all these people have moved to America, and you don't have your family there, so you hang out together.”

Watts left Australia in her 20s to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles, where she landed roles in mostly forgettable films (Children of the Corn IV, Tank Girl). Then, when she was 32 - a "ripe old age" for an actress - she attained almost instantaneous renown thanks to her turn as an aspiring actress in director David Lynch's 2001 thriller Mulholland Drive.

Watts is pragmatic about her relatively late entrance into movie stardom: “I guess it just happened the way it was supposed to happen. And I wish I’d known early on that it was going to happen like that, but you never have that crystal ball, do you? If things had happened when I was younger, maybe I wouldn’t have made the right decisions and maybe I would have been pulled in the wrong direction. I think by the time you’re 30 you know yourself, you trust yourself a bit more and you get a sense of your style, your taste, of what you’re good at.”

Since that debut, her intense acting style and ability to play glamour girl or plain Jane make her a director’s perennial favorite. Watts has worked with everyone from Woody Allen to Clint Eastwood. As English film critic Peter Bradshaw once put it: “Watts’ face metamorphoses miraculously from fresh-faced beauty to a frenzied, teary scowl of ugliness.”

She works steadily—if not constantly—and has appeared in more than two dozen films since her big breakthrough. She grappled with great ape love in Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong—holding her own and then some against previous screamers Fay Wray and Jessica Lange. Her 2003 performance as a woman shattered after her husband and two daughters are killed by a hit-and-run driver in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams was palpably painful, and it earned her an Academy Award nomination. (Bayona told The New York Times that he believes Watts works well with Latin American directors “because we’re as intense as she is.”) She fought a devil baby in the megahit The Ring, the CIA in Fair Game and an unhappy marriage in The Painted Veil. Happily, during the filming of Veil in 2005, she met Schreiber, with whom she has two sons, Alexander, 5, and Samuel, 4.

Lest anyone think Watts only gravitates toward serious characters, she and Schreiber can be seen next month in the darkly comic Movie 43 as a couple who bully their home-schooled son so he can sustain “the full high school experience.”

Of her acting range and depth, Sean Penn (who’s acted opposite her in three films: The Assassination of Richard Nixon, 21 Grams and Fair Game) has described the actress as having “balls of fire in her pockets and they burn hot in any color she wants.”

Watts laughs—a bit uncertainly—when told of Penn’s comment. “How can I respond to that?! Sean’s got such great words and great imagination. It’s a really nice thing to hear out loud, but I actually don’t think of myself as fiery.” She pauses, thinking. “But the characters I play are definitely fiery and they have taught me things along the way.”