Amy Brenneman (BYE-BYE LOVE; HEAT; FEAR; DAYLIGHT) is one of my best friends. That's why this interview is so short. Half of it was so intimate that you just would have gotten bored. I swear. It was just a lot of personal stuff about famous people we know and relationships and sex and nothing that you would have been interested in. Amy lives in Los Angeles with her incredible husband, Bradley Silberling, and their two dogs, Ruby and Maggy. When I visit, Maggy sleeps with me. Amy just finished filming NEVADA, an independent film directed by Gary Tiesche, and currently stars in GOD'S HEART, a play written by Craig Lucas and directed by Joe Mantello, which opened at Lincoln Center in March. The following conversation took place before DAYLIGHT opened. Again, it picks up in the middle of a really private conversation we were having that would be too inappropriate--I'm sorry, I mean too dull--to print here in its entirety.
Amy Brenneman: Not all confident guys have to be uncharismatic.
Anita Liberty: I don't feel like I have to go for boring.
AB: Yeah, yeah, you don't have to.
AB: No, that doesn't work. Then, I feel contempt. I remember I was dating this guy, and my therapist said it was unusual to feel this depth of contempt for someone you've known for three months. But that's just about not wanting to be there.
AB: And also not feeling good about them. Not feeling good about yourself because you're being duplicitous, selfish. You're getting something and you're not giving it back, because you're not feeling it. That's human, but that's when the lie is in just being there. I didn't want to go for boring...but it's such a natural human thing to go toward that black-and-white thinking, that there's this kind of guy and there's the other kind of guy and it's just not true. You just have to be with someone you're attracted to.
AB: Yeah, well, it's exciting at first, but it's about retraining oneself. Look, what attracted you to that other person is what you ultimately fight with. Literally.
AB: Last night I thought so. I mean, I enjoyed it last night. There were maybe 20 people in the audience. Gabby [Anwar] was back. She had to leave NEVADA early because she was going to Luxembourg to do this really awful submarine movie with Stephen Baldwin to make some money, and she was really dreading it. Last night she came back and I asked her how it was and she said it was awful, except for one thing. She got engaged to some nice American actor. Oh. They'd known each other for six weeks.
AB: NEVADA is just a really trippy movie and the first time I saw the end shot--I'm looking right into the camera--I just wasn't sure and then last night when I saw it, it totally worked. It was projected on the big screen.
AB: No, and it was on the Avid. And it looked like shit.
AB: Pretty much. I mean, that's sort of some of the problem, because there are moments where you go away from me for five to 10 minutes and some people get very antsy because they just want to be with me. Sometimes it's a hard balance with these other stories, because the other women have really great stories and they don't have as much time to tell them. And it's a hard balance. There's one particular moment where Brad goes insane, and we cut to this other story and it's right where my husband [in the film] finally shows up and there's a little bit of this story that sort of stalls that moment and Brad is like--we don't care, we don't care.
AB: Just while I was looping. I was just talking to my agent about it. I don't think any one thing picks you up totally. Sandra Bullock had been working her butt off for eight years [before SPEED]. America was like, "Oh, we love this girl." But the industry already knew that she was a nice person. The groundwork had been done. I don't know if tons of people will go to see DAYLIGHT, it's hard to tell. I can imagine a lot of people going to see it. I can't imagine nobody going to see it. I can imagine medium amounts or a lot of people. I think I'll come off really well. I feel like I'm doing what I was called upon to do à la SPEED, but in my own way. It's not like I'm imitating anyone and, especially at the end, it goes into these weird dramatic waters that usually these kinds of movies don't go into, so that's kind of cool.
AB: I think there's always a choice as to how far to play it in the reality. Because the true reality is that we'd be dead. The movie would never happen. But to sustain interest for two hours, there have to be moments of pulling back. Sometimes Rob [Cohen, the director] would be too much in the reality of it, like nobody would be joking around at this moment. And I'm like, who knows what would be happening? Maybe I'd be giving Sly a blowjob. Who knows? So I think finding that balance was always on our minds and I think that none of us really wanted to do the hokey SPEED thing or the INDEPENDENCE DAY thing, because oddly enough, with our set, we could play more reality than INDEPENDENCE DAY could, because stuff was there and we could work with it. Half the time we were experiencing it, in terms of the cold and the discomfort--it wasn't going to be put in later by computer. What I'm excited about is if people see me in this movie--and again, I don't even know about the American public, but if people in the industry see this--I think it would be a really great triple-punch if this movie comes out and I do fine and then I show up in NEVADA while I'm in rehearsal for the Craig Lucas play [GOD'S HEART] in New York. Now that would be very cool. I did this big movie, I did fine, people like me, but I'm doing these other things. Because frankly, if for whatever reason I didn't have anything else going on other than DAYLIGHT, I'm not sure that I would want just the opportunities that would come from that. I think that would be really limiting. So I think you show people you can do that, but you also show them what you're shooting for. It'll be cool.
AB: How do you feel about fame?
AB: Well, I've been thinking a lot about our conversation the other day, about why I get so emotional, so competitive about other people's successes. And I came up with some reasons. I was thinking about an experience I had in college with a friend who went out to Los Angeles during the summer between his junior and senior year. I was doing my thing with Bill [Rauch, artistic director of the Cornerstone Theater Company]. This friend of ours was just very clear and ambitious and really knew the game remarkably well for a 21-year-old, and he went out to L.A. and came back and had a different haircut and he was saying you have to do this in a certain way, and you have people who may not be your best friends, but you cultivate [the relationships] nonetheless. I just got appalled, because I couldn't have been into a more different thing at that point. And I was really freaked out and really judgmental and very threatened because I didn't know to what extent that was true. I knew myself enough to know that if I had to do that tomorrow, I would last two days. I didn't have it in me, but it always unnerved me more than I even wanted to admit. Because I always liked to think that I was totally different, and the truth is that I am, but maybe he was right.
AB: And I still can't do it. And to be honest, if I'm going to compete in fashionable, younger Hollywood, I'm going to lose. That's not my strength.
AB: None.
AB: Yeah. What threatened me was this guy's clarity of vision, which I've never really had in the same way. I mean, I've had a vision in terms of my craft, no one can shit on that, and I've always had a sense of where I was at in terms of that. But the career stuff, in a certain way, I've just reacted to things as they've come along, to the best of my ability, and kept myself out of the shit, which is 90 percent of it. And the irony is that I started receiving emails from this same guy a year ago, which weren't in complete despair, but in complete confusion: "Where am I in this, I've been doing this particular thing and now I'm not sure exactly what it is that I want to say to the world." In terms of the fame thing, I had this phrase pop into my head, in the car, that was like, "Fame's a fickle lover." It's so fickle. It loves you so much one day and you are the only girl and the very next day, it's moved on. And it's too painful to me to invest a lot in that, because I'm pretty powerless over it.
AB: Yeah, it is shocking. Totally shocking. I feel like I have to figure out how to have the flexibility to enjoy those moments and not get totally screwed. Because I do love it. And, be honest, fame's an amazing perk. You're slaving away, you might as well get some attention. But to somehow have the perspective to knowÐÐit's very Buddhist, to be honestÐÐthat it's going to end. We are going to die. And anyone who doesn't believe that is deluding themselves. I've been there, so it's not like I don't know what I'm talking about. And it's so painful for me that when it does end, I'm on the fucking floor. It's like, how do you have detachment and enjoy it for what it is, which is a ride with some lovely perks? Because you flip through those magazines, man--my industry has its expressionistic and artistic side, but one of the attendant industries to the movie industry is fashion and publicity, and they need new blood. It's this vampiric thing. It just is. And I don't know how to stay in it. I mean, I pay my publicist to keep me out of it. And when you decide to put yourself in it, you put yourself in it in a classy way.
AB: There are a fair amount of actors who work all the time and win awards and do their thing, who are not recognized on the street. There is a lot of my life that I live anonymously, and joyously so.
AB: My point is that some people don't believe in acting. Some people don't believe in acting as a craft. They believe in baring themselves emotionally, which is a lot of it. But the trick, for me, is even when I'm not clicking with someone, to do it. It's a fucking illusion. It's acting. It's not to say I'm a fucking genius. But there is a huge sense of acting for me outside of fame and Hollywood. Most of it, in fact. And I always liked plays better than movies. Now I pretty much like them equally. But I always got more excited going to a play. That's interesting, too. Because people don't get on the cover of Vogue doing plays.
AB: Here's what would have happened. I would have had insane affairs. I wouldn't have gone down the tubes, but my sense of boundary and self would have been completely off. I mean, I'm still working on it. You need to deliver. You need to do it. Other actress friends of mine ask me things like, "Do you ever, in your heart of hearts, think, 'What if I can't act, what if I can't do it?'" And I think, "No, I never think that." And that's a fucking miracle. And that's because of my work with Cornerstone. I will be challenged. I may not like a particular project or performance, I may not crack it. But I know what I'm doing.
