RADHA MITCHELL

Here's a Radha Mitchell interview i did several months back. It's a little old but it's still interesting and worth reading ....enjoy...

The tabloid magazine radar seems to fixate solely on Australia’s better known female Hollywood exports such as Watts,
Kidman and Blanchett. However, Radha Mitchell seems to be the quiet achiever having worked solidly in the US & Europe since the late 90’s, in a slew of high profile, critically lauded turns. Recently she’s headlined Woody Allen’s Melinda & Melinda as well as co-starring with Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland, in addition to any number of turns in ensemble drama’s with some of Hollywood’s best and brightest. A relaxed and down-to-earth person, in conversation one gets the impression that the distinct lack of media analysis is exactly how Mitchell likes it. She’s recently finished filming on Rogue, Greg Mclean’s Northern Territory killer-croc horror and follow-up to Wolf Creek. This month also sees the release of yet another lead turn for her, as the protective mother of an ever-so-slightly evil child in Christophe Gans’ (Brotherhood of the Wolf) adaptation of the gaming hit: Silent Hill.
Mitchell speaks highly of her Gallic director: “Christophe is fascinating to talk to and he’s got such a vast film vocabulary. He used to be a film critic and so although we were making something that’s kind of ‘pop’ and ‘cult’, I think his point of view on it was fairly intellectual most of the time.” She also seems enamoured by Gans ballsy yet oh-so-very-French ability to pour scorn on films and filmmakers alike for a career and then dare to set out to make films himself. Clearly the knives would’ve been well and truly out. Mitchell laughs: ”I think you’d really have to be able to pull it off because other people would have been listening to you critique them for so long. Christophe really did that with his first film Brotherhood of the Wolf; I mean if I were a 12-year-old boy that would’ve been my favourite movie ever. It’s such a boy’s own tale.” After seeing him work up close, Mitchell reflects on Gans distinctively Gallic angle on gore. “I think that Christophe’s style is distinctively French horror. It’s horror with style and it’s beautiful to look at. It’s elegant in its gruesomeness.” Gans is also well known for his obsessive eye for the minutia of the mise en scene. What is it like to work with a filmmaker whose eye is always on the details? Mitchell laughs: “He’s kind of like a French Hitchcock…if you can imagine a French Hitchcock? He’s extremely French, in that style is extremely important to Christophe. On Silent Hill we would spend seven takes on an imaginary snowflake falling on my cheek. Those sorts of details were incredibly important to him. The look of the film was something that we really couldn’t see at the time, I mean we saw the (video) splits and we saw the sets and the sketches but exactly how it was going to be treated and what it was going to look like was something I really didn’t discover until I saw the movie. It was something that Christophe would have to intonate and explain to us a lot of the time and sometimes he’d get really bored with having to do that (laughs).

You’ve just finished Rogue for Wolf Creek director Greg Mclean, how does working in horror compare with other film genres? “Silent Hill was an intense experience, highly focussed some days, running from monsters, opening doors and screaming, it kind of turns the rest of your life ‘off’, so I like that about it. Plus in telling the stories, you can vent a lot of your own stuff through them, which is great. The reaction to watching horror films is very physical and visceral y’know? you might even scream…. and when your acting in them it’s very much the same thing, it’s a physical thing to be attacked by a monster (laughs) But it wasn’t so much the horror that attracted me to Silent Hill, more the fantasy aspect of it. The fact that this could not happen in the real world, you know? This could only happen in a dream or in a hallucination but it’s not going to happen if you just walk out of your apartment. I guess so much of acting is emulating reality and making things as real as they can be whereas if you can make it like it can never be and like it never is, it’s somehow more exciting”.

Jodelle Ferland plays your daughter in the film; you have an interesting relationship with her where she is not only your loving daughter but also the embodiment of something quite evil. “Yeah, she’s such a phenomenal actress, that was quite an easy thing to do. She just sort of stepped into that devil character without any coaching from anyone, this weird head motion and strange way of speaking. All of that was her invention, no one told her how to do that. So that was kind of freaky (laughs)
For that reason, it was great working with her because she was compelling and always believable. But even when she wasn’t being that way, I was very protective of her around the set because she’s just this small creature y’know and it felt very natural to be doing that.” Mitchell has recently completed PU-239, in which Paddy Considine stars, as a Russian nuclear power plant employee dying of radiation sickness who makes a last ditch effort to raise money for his family by selling plutonium on the black market. She’s also currently filming an ensemble romantic drama Feast of Love for veteran filmmaker Robert Benton (Kramer vs Kramer). It seems that she’s been working continuously since her ’96 debut in Emma-Kate Croghan’s Love and Other Catastrophes. How does Mitchell feel about the life of an international actor, having repetitive, intense albeit brief working relationships with filmmakers and actors, usually culminating in moving on in order to start the process all over again? “It’s like going to Las Vegas. (laughs) You know? It is what it is. You go with the next episode. I guess it lacks the intimacy of continued relationships that are part of your life everyday, but it can become even more intense because it’s a small amount of time and everybody is focused on each other. Like the film I’m working on right now (Feast Of Love), I just met everyone yesterday and we were just talking about this actually. It is kind of like you ‘invent’ a family for that period of time. You don’t lose contact with people completely, well some people you do but most people remain part of your life and you move on to the next episode”.