Katherine Waterston on Inherent Vice

Katherine Waterston is the daughter of Sam Waterston, who rose to prominence with the New Hollywood before becoming a household name with Law & Order. Pedigree doesn’t seem to have given the younger Waterston any unfair advantages, but over the last eight years or so the Tisch School graduate has built a respected career in theatre—she played Anya in an off-Broadway revival of The Cherry Orchard—and in supporting roles in films like Michael Clayton. Her appearance as the beguiling Shasta in Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice marks a significant breakthrough. We spoke a few weeks ago in a Toronto hotel when Waterston was traveling to promote the film.

JB: I want to begin by talking with you about something that’s kind of hard to talk about, which is tone. Inherent Vice basically begins with your entrance, so you set the tone. But is thinking about tone useful to you as an actor or just a distraction from playing the scene, beat by beat?

Katherine Waterston: When you work on scenes they tend to tell you what they need. When you start speaking the lines you can tell when they don’t feel right. When they do, it’s because you’ve found the tone that best serves the scene. In the way that Paul works, and the way I like to work too, we explore until the correct tone emerges. One of the fun things about working on this project is that it was based on a novel that changes tone almost constantly. It gives us permission to have a really sombre or scary scene with a joke in it. There’s physical comedy followed by very honest, intimate moments.

JB: Watching your performance I thought about Mary Astor in Maltese Falcon, but I also thought about Diane Ladd. Something about the way you direct your gaze while fingering the mouth of that beer can. Did you look to any models while developing Shasta?

KW: It can sometimes be too much pressure, to be hyperaware of what’s come before. But I did think about women of that period, particular from Southern California. I’m glad that you mentioned the gaze, because a big part of it is they way that they set their gaze. Cowboys have a similar thing, people who set their gaze on some distant landscape, or people who live by the sea. If you spend evenings watching the sun set on the ocean that does something to you. I notice it when I’ve been east for a long time and I come back to California, especially to seaside communities. I watched a lot of The Mod Squad before shooting. I thought that Peggy Lipton had something of a Shasta quality. Perhaps I took some comfort in knowing that [the actress playing] this quintessential California girl was actually an East-Coaster, like me. There was something remote about her. You think about all this before you get to work. Once you’re on set you try to forget it all.

JB: Did you feel like you always understood what Shasta wanted? Her duplicity seems to dictate certain turns in the story. I’ve seen Inherent Vice twice and I’m still not sure if I know what she’s after from beginning to end. Do you need to know?

KW: That makes me so happy that I don’t want to say a damned word. It’s been tough navigating these interviews, talking about making this movie, which is fun to talk about, while not spoiling the experience for the viewer. It’s a fine line that I had to walk, knowing what to express. When you read the novel you become closest to Doc’s experience. Reality becomes as suspicious to the reader as it is to him. I didn’t want to take away from that by being too direct.

JB: Between Shasta, Bigfoot and Doc, you’ve got three characters that in very different ways encapsulate this moment of transition in the culture. Shasta is a product of second wave feminism while also using her sexuality as capital. She seems both progressive and regressive in some way.

KW: To the degree that this is a standard detective story, she’s the femme fatale. But what surprised and challenged me was that she also had to be human, to have a warmth. There has to be more between her and Doc than this sexual hold that she has on him.

JB: Do you relate to Shasta?

KW: She’s very different from me, yet I felt I understood her before I even understood what was going on. It’s exciting to come across a female character that’s complicated and inconsistent and dynamic. So often there’s the good lady or the bad lady, the maternal force or the sex goddess. Shasta’s scared but trying to keep her chin up. She loves Doc but isn’t necessarily going to show it. There was so much in the novel and it was fun to try and cram as much in as possible.

JB: Were you told why you were cast?

KW: No. And I sure as hell didn’t ask because I didn’t want anyone to start thinking it was a bad idea.

JB: What do you think? What do you bring to Shasta that someone else might not have?

KW: It’s sort of impossible to know. Or maybe just too embarrassing to think about.

JB: Why embarrassing?

KW: It’s difficult to measure what things about you make you right for a part. When I was up for the part, I saw so clearly why it had to be me.

JB: I was going to say that when you don’t get a part, that’s when you always know what you could have brought to it.

KW: Right. When it’s about to be taken away you can see so clearly why everything in your life, every idea you’ve ever had, every book you’ve read, every personal thing that’s happened to you has all been leading up to this moment where you get to process this role and put it out in the world in a way that no one else could. Then they tell you that you’ve got the job and it’s like amnesia. All that stuff that was so clear to you becomes foggy and confusing.

JB: This seems like an interesting moment for you. In the last year you’ve had two films come out [Inherent Vice and Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves], each directed by one of the most exciting directors in the US. But I never really know if these films that mean so much to us as viewers mean the same to you the actor, if they have an effect on your growth commeasurable with our esteem for the work on screen.

KW: As an actor, being chosen by people you admire is incredibly encouraging. Because we’re just kind of these leaves blowing in the wind. You don’t know how it’s all going to shake down at any given moment. Even with people who are much more successful than me, you never really know. I was at a place in my career where I was pretty beaten down and struggling to get my hands on interesting material. So these encouraging events came when I really needed them. But what’s to be learned from getting to watch great directors at work or being around inspiring actors I feel like I probably won’t be cognizant of for a couple more years.

JB: When you see the finished product and see how your performance works as such a lynchpin in this story, do you learn anything from that?

KW: I’m so proud of this work. I feel lucky to be part of it. But I don’t think I can separate myself from the whole enough to take anything away from it. It’s a miracle that I can even watch it without running out of the room. It’s Joaquin that keeps me watching, because I know that if I look away I’ll miss him.

                        

Best of 2014: Inherent Vice

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is narcotic noir set in 1970 Los Angeles, which, by coincidence (?), are the year and place of Anderson’s birth. The film distils its source material—Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel of the same name—down to its cinematic essences while retaining much of its manic detouring and labyrinthine plot, which gets sufficiently knotty so as to render our comprehension to roughly the same level as that of Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), the film’s sandal-clad, frizzy-haired, perma-stoned shamus, a gumshoe with a compulsion for following a cryptic lead and a weakness for high-grade weed. Inherent Vice isn’t impossible to follow, it’s just gloriously over-complicated, laden with conspiracy (Pynchon’s favoured narrative device), and gushing ephemera. The times are a-changed, a-changing, a-curdling. Inherent Vice is a mystery, a comedy, a sprawling cultural study, and, in the best sense, a very American film, shaggy and baroque, beautiful and off-balance, spastic, slapstick and mottled with melancholy.

It starts with Doc receiving a furnace blast from his past in the shape of Shasta (Katherine Waterston). She’s been carrying on with a married real estate developer (Eric Roberts) who’s gone missing. She wants Doc’s help, but by the time she drives away from his seaside bungalow there’s already the sense that Doc’s job detail in this is going to be more than that of a skip tracer. He’s about to be plunged into a web of cunnilingual massage parlours, seafaring gangsters, errant musicians, Republican activists, dentists on the verge of a nervous breakdown, black panthers and white supremacists. He has allies, such as his nautical lawyer (Benicio Del Toro) and Deputy DA lover (Reese Witherspoon), and a charming, perhaps chimerical figure (singer-harpist Joanna Newsom) with whom he can theorize and who narrates Inherent Vice with protracted quotes straight out of Pynchon’s lyrically addled text. Doc also has an oddly antagonistic camaraderie with Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a flat-topped conservative and so-called “renaissance cop” who likes to kick the shit out of Doc when not fellating chocolate-covered bananas with cryptic fauxmoerotic menace.

The obvious cinematic precedents for Inherent Vice are Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998). In the former Elliot Gould is a product of the ’50s plunked down into the radically shifting ’70s; in the latter Jeff Bridges is a pot-blitzed product of the ’70s playing the bowling detective in Bush’s ’90s. What Inherent Vice shares with these films is a playful engagement with crime fiction tropes; the incorporation of drugs, coke and weed especially, into the paranoid fabric of its narrative strategies; and a deep interest in the physical and psychic topographies of Los Angeles. There is however an enormous distinction: unlike Marlowe or the Dude, Doc is very much a man of his milieu, “out of time” only in the sense that days are numbered for this idealistic New Age he emblematizes, with flower powered dreams going up in smoke as the Manson Family go on trial, Cambodia gets pummelled, hippies take up arms, and the city of angels is getting lorded over by land grabbers. Dutifully following Pynchon’s lead, Anderson mines So-Cal ’70 culture clashes for comic gold, but he’s also tracking the shift from Endless Summer to endless bummer with reverence, a recognition of something flawed but precious dissolving into a fog of increasingly dangerous drugs, reactionary authorities, corporate resilience and, perhaps, some weirder, older evil that gave birth to Hollywood and its Babylonian double.

The film’s incorporation of music speaks to Anderson’s respect for hippie dreams, alternating between the excellently uneasy Johnny Greenwood score and inspired choices of more or less contemporaneous records: the brilliant deployment of Can’s ‘Vitamin C’ to set the suspicious tone when our femme fatale first pulls away from the curb; the by-then ancient-sounding strains of Sam Cooke on a car radio; or the creaky odes of Neil Young (‘Harvest,’ ‘Journey Through the Past’) to buoy Doc’s nostalgic recollections of idyllic times with Shasta—a meta-theme subtly emphasized by Doc’s very Neil Youngish sense of personal style, the mutton chops and army surplus jacket. The cast uniformly succeeds at the daunting task of ushering Pynchon’s character-constructs into people with pasts: Brolin is a cartoon monster with a tender heart, while Phoenix is prowling the peripheries of lucidity, registering unease and disbelief with every exaggerated blink, as captivating here as he was in The Master, though Doc isn’t nearly as lost as Freddie Quell. The final moments of Inherent Vice could almost appear to restore order, except by now that we know better than to trust appearances and we regard order as some pacifying patina projected by the Man. Best to just keep driving into the sun. And to see Inherent Vice again as soon as possible—you might have missed a whole rabbit hole somewhere in the engrossing blur.

                   

Philip Seymour Hoffman, 1967 - 2014

Whether embodying a near shut-in, choking on loneliness, his body collapsing in on itself, or a master communicator and manipulator, drunk on his own Kool-Aid, given to sudden ecstatic gestures and charismatic dance, Philip Seymour Hoffman conveyed a sense of bearing heavy burden like few others could. He was imminently melancholic, weighty, the most corpulent yet full-bodied of actors. He rarely looked comfortable in his body, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t use it, often with tremendous nuance. He was Sisyphian. Which is to say that, no matter how elephantine the burden he carried, he felt it incumbent upon himself to keep going up that hill. He was never not doing something active and compelling, never resigned to playing mere attitude. I’m struck, now, by how often his characters’ burdens involved ingestible vice: bad food, alcohol, drugs. He played a gas-huffer, a heroin addict, Lester Bangs. He perspired need. He was an all-round gifted, hard-working actor, but at this especially he was extraordinary: desperation. I just wish that the way he died didn’t so closely mirror his work.

top: Boogie Nights

bottom: The Big Lebowski

You couldn’t possibly pay the slightest attention to interesting American movies in the past 15 years and not know him. The high forehead, vulnerable, pale, a seawall against which all manner of earthly pressures crashed. That voice, typically nasal, often sounding like he’d dragged it out of bed, the mattress sweaty and half-stripped, before bashing it on the night table on the way up. Those cupping paws that looked like they had to have the cigarettes pushed into them. The eyes—they seemed to change all the time, hard to soft, pinned to orb-like, sometimes sexy. I first saw Hoffman in Hard Eight (1996), Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut. He played an arrogant mullet trying to bend a craps table to his will through sheer bullying. By Boogie Nights (1997), Anderson’s follow-up, I was really paying attention. He was a chubby, anguished pubescent in a man’s body, under-dressed, not easy to cuddle, though he tried to kiss Dirk Diggler with so much closeted passion. A small but memorable role in The Big Lebowski (1998) found him more uptight, nervous and really funny. It made clear that there was no limiting his range; no matter the lack of movie star handsomeness he would break out from the character actor ghetto. In Happiness (1998), this burden I keep thinking about was already fully formed. He was so pathetic yet so watchable, savouring Todd Solondz’s writing, even when its comic despair felt a little cheap.

from top to bottom: The Savages, 

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, 

Synecdoche New York

As Hoffman’s boyishness fell away, which it did rapidly, he became a go-to guy for a certain anxious weariness, and his work increasingly seemed focused on finding truth in the grotesque, as though the only empathy worth earning was the sort that rose from weakness. In Capote (2005) he gave a precision performance that hinges on his insistence on giving equal attention to the titular character’s fascination with others and his ultimate ruthlessness. Capote won Hoffman the Best Actor Oscar, but that performance was easily bested only a couple of years later in, for example, The Savages (2007), as Laura Linney’s brother, or Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), as Ethan Hawke’s brother. We see him shoot heroin in that movie, and we see him die. He played the much-doubted priest in Doubt (2008), who you keep feeling for even when you’re almost sure he really is a pederast. He was the only one who could have starred in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York (2008), in which he’s attacked by his own sink, dates a woman in a burning house, and watches his adult daughter deteriorate before his eyes. He plays a nobody playwright who gets genius grant and decides to make a play about everything. Rehearsals go on for all his life. His character’s art becomes infinite, boundless, beyond the frame. Life itself. The film is unbearably sad, but I’ll be damned if Hoffman doesn’t make every scene feel relevant, forward-moving. It was his most Sisyphian role.

The Master

What I will admire most in this filmography is Hoffman’s mesmerizing, Wellesian convergence of hysteria and colossal confidence in Anderson’s The Master (2012), about a very American longing for self-made religion, and one of the great films of this young century. As L. Ron Hubbard stand-in Lancaster Dodd, Hoffman seemed older than ever, but that fatherliness made him eerily persuasive, repeating questions like a relentlessly applied balm to Joaquin Phoenix’s wounded Freddie, and later, in that strange and haunting final meeting between master and pupil, singing to Freddie about how he wants to get him alone on a slow boat to China. The Master also emphasized how much Hoffman could do with repressed anger, that scene where Dodd is so determined to shame a guy bold enough to confront him publicly by using only wit and a sense of wonder, yet he can’t help but suddenly spit out “Pig fuck!” The rage is always there, but he masks it with playfulness and ambition and that weird bonhomie.

I write all this to remember Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died of a heroin overdose last weekend at the appallingly young age of 46, leaving behind three kids, his partner, Mimi O’Donnell, and countless colleagues and friends. It is just so sad. He was a prolific actor who I’ve had the immense pleasure of spending much time watching, listening to, thinking about, writing about. I interviewed him only once. He could be prickly, and it wasn’t the easiest conversation, but it was rewarding. Our talk ended with the topic of death in Capote, and Hoffman’s last words stick in my mind now. “It’s like Capote has come to bear witness to all these 
deaths,” he said. “And the truth he discovers is that they don’t pass through him 
without leaving marks.”