Jessica Lange peaks again in 'Don't Come Knocking'
Two-time Oscar winner talks new Wim Wenders project, revisits past career glories by Todd Hill

Source: Staten Island Advance
Date: March 26, 2006

There's no knowing, really, when a performer's career has peaked, but it would be hard for anyone to top the dozen years in film that Jessica Lange had from 1982 to 1994, including Lange herself.

Listening to the actress reminisce about her favorite experiences working in film, all from that period, is like getting a sneak preview of the script for the lifetime achievement Oscar she'll inevitably earn one day.

" I'd have to say Blue Sky with Tommy Lee Jones and (director) Tony Richardson, that was a treat. Music Box with (director) Costa-Gavras. Working on Patsy Cline, Sweet Dreams, with (director) Karel Reisz and Mr. (Ed) Harris. Being able to play Frances Farmer, working with (director) Sydney (Pollack) on Tootsie," recounts Lange during an interview in a Midtown Manhattan hotel room.

Lange is older now, 56, but her remarkably lithe frame still moves like a cat, her voice retains that feline purr she became famous for. And although she may work less now, like most women her age in American motion pictures, she allows that that's at least partly by choice. "I'm pretty selective, just because after 30 years, you know, why am I going to waste my time doing something that I don't want to do?" she said.

THE CRUCIAL SCENE

What matters is that when she does sign on to a project worthy of her time and energy, that she makes those moments count -- like the crucial scene she has in the new independent film Don't Come Knocking, now playing in Manhattan.

The film, a product of the German filmmaker Wim Wenders and Sam Shepherd, the actor/playwright who's been Lange's companion for over 20 years, tells the story of a washed-up actor (Shepherd), on the lam from a movie set, who wanders into Butte, Mont., to look up a lost love, a waitress named Doreen, played by Lange.
Doreen is now the mother of a twentysomething son from that affair, which colors the reunion, and although Lange has only a few scenes in the movie she makes them matter, particularly one incendiary moment between her and Shepherd, shot on the deserted, early-morning streets of Butte.

" Every time I have a script there's that one scene that kind of looms out there on the horizon that you know sooner of later you're going to have to play, and of course this was the one," said Lange. "The day we were shooting we blocked it of course, walking down the street, stopping here and stopping there, but there was no discussion of the velocity of it or anything like that. The first take it just kind of exploded. It surprised Sam and it surprised Wim and I had no idea it would go to that."

But apparently Lange knows from experience that this can sometimes happen. She recounts the first day of shooting 1994's Blue Sky, for which she would win an Oscar, with director Richardson. "He scheduled this huge, explosive scene between me and Tommy Lee where I like flip out and Tommy Lee has to chase me into town and kind of bring me back," said the actress. "I said to Tony, I said, 'God, I don't even know who the character is and you're asking me to play it.' He said, 'That's the best time to play it. Just play it.' Sometimes if you don't overthink it it takes on a life of its own."

STIMULI SPONGE

Lange doesn't give the impression of an actress who analyzes her characters to the nth degree, and if that is her she's not letting on. But she admits to being a sponge when it comes to external stimuli, like the experience of filming in a place like Butte, Mont.
"The town is basically emptied out. Once the last Anaconda mines pulled out that was the end of the town. It's like a ghost town in a way, and that whole emotional sense of place I think informed all the characters. It was by no coincidence that Wim set it there," she said.
"Wenders' background includes experience as an artist, so he has that painterly sense," said Lange." It's no secret I think that he was paying homage to (Edward) Hopper in the way that he was composing his shots. It has that kind of bleak American loneliness, that emptiness."

The conversation turns to the film Brokeback Mountain, from the Taiwanese director Ang Lee, another example of a foreigner grasping this aspect of the American psyche.
"I think when you come in with a fresh eye you see it without all the baggage that we bring to our own culture. I thought it was a brilliant film." (Suffice to say that Lange was not one of the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who helped Crash win Best Picture.) " I want to work with Ang Lee so much, I can't tell you," she said. Make no mistake, Lange is still working steadily, but they're small, independent. "No surefire things there," she said.

Lange's greatest trepidation with indie films is the reality that they often come with first-time directors, and you don't know what you're going to get. Said the actress, "When I think of the directors I worked with for a stretch of time, you were in the hands of somebody brilliant. Now a lot of times you're saying, 'Well, I'll take a chance on this guy who's never directed a film before but, you know, maybe he's got it in him'."

If it indeed comes to pass that Lange's Oscar-winning career has peaked, she knows very well where much of that blame will lie. "If you look at the mid-1970s right up to about 1990, when it felt like it began to change, there were more great women's roles. There was a handful of great actresses and we all had more than we could handle," she said. "There were a lot, they were great, and they were studio films. But that came to an end."

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