May 16, 2013

Emma Watson: "To pick a role, I take an interest in the directors first and foremost"




Translated by Watsonuncensored. Credit if you use it.

"I love your t-shirt!", says Emma Watson, all smile, while sitting down in front of you, before taking her shoes off and folding her bare feet under her butt. Is the starlet relaxed? The fifteen minutes of interview her press agent allowed to Le Monde, at the end of which she'll refuse to pose for a selfie because she "doesn't know if she's allowed", will reveal, for lack of anything better, that this attitude is first of all a style.

And, style-wise, she knows her thing. Propelled in the star system at 12, when the world success of Harry Potter revolutionized her life of little British girl from a good family, Emma Watson has successively been an ambassadress for Burberry, then LancĂ´me. Since 2010, when the end of the wizard saga freed her from her alter ego Hermione (Harry Potter's female partner on paper like on screen), we saw her in Simon Curtis' My Week with Marilyn as a little costume designer, and in Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower as a sexy and cheeky highschooler. Every time played well.

Today, aged 23, the young woman knows where she's going. Her presence in front of Sofia Coppola's camera, for example, is not random. "I discovered her with The Virgin Suicides, and I admired all her films since then", says Emma Watson. "Actually, I consider them more like works of art. Sofia doesn't respect the Hollywood norms. She doesn't tell you what you should think, she leaves the audience make their own mind. Her films have a very specific style, visually really beautiful, which I love!"

"POSITIVE ATTITUDE"

The meeting with Sofia Coppola was this way. Through her agent, she sent a video to the filmmaker's casting director. "Nicki's role arrived later, like a consequence", she explains.

In The Bling Ring, Nicki is a young teenager, almost schizophrenic. Far from the schoolyards, she's home schooled by an enthusiastic and uptight mother. Masterfully played by Leslie Mann (wife of Judd Apatow), this mom only swears by the "positive attitude", watchword of some kind of sect she's the ambassadress of. Though, contrary to the rest of the gang, Nicki works. She's a yoga teacher. Why did the filmmaker choose Emma for this role rather than another actress? "Nicki is an actress before all. I think Sofia saw something in me while watching my videotape. And what she saw resonated with the idea she had of the character." It's complicated in 15 minutes to know more, especially as the young star already talks in the well polished way Hollywood professionals do. Smiles given at close intervals, remarks at the limit of inconsistency...

After Sofia Coppola, she has other targets in mind. "To pick a role, I take an interest in the person who directs the film first and foremost. I have a list... huge!" She names in order Danny Boyle, David Fincher, Ang Lee, Stephen Daldry... Directors whose names rhyme with Oscar, or at least a nomination to the Oscars.

Whereas Nicki, her character in The Bling Ring, is an integral part of a group, Emma Watson doesn't mingle, for the film promotion, with the other young actors who give their interviews collectively. She lives in a separate world. And she certainly plan on rising there.

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