Written by:
Gretchen Lee
"I completely identified with Lucy," says Ally Sheedy of her lesbian role in the sexy new film High Art. "I had to play this part. I know this woman inside and out."
After reading an early script, Sheedy wanted the role so badly that she called the director at home, using a number she found on the front page of the manuscript. Director Lisa Cholodenko says she didn't actually know who Ally Sheedy was that day when she picked up the phone. Nonetheless, Cholodenko agreed to schedule an audition for Sheedy, who joined the cast just weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin.
It's a decision neither is likely to regret. The film is a favorite on the festival circuit, garnering a top screenwriting award at Sundance for Cholodenko, who also wrote the screenplay. And it helped lift Sheedy's career out of a slump that had dogged her for nearly a decade.
The former darling of the Brat Pack who endeared herself to millions in such films as The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire found it hard to stay on top in the silicone-enhanced world of Hollywood. High Art offers a Dostoyevskian look at the role of ambition in the lives of three women: Lucy, a fine-art photographer who has mysteriously dropped out of a successful career; Syd (played by Radha Mitchell), an aspiring photo editor at a fine-art photography magazine; and Greta (played by Patricia Clarkson), a washed-up German actress who is Lucy's lover of many years.
The three form a love triangle in a story effectively interwoven with Lucy and Greta's heroin addiction. Ally Sheedy sat down with Curve on the day High Art premiered at the San Francisco International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. Read on for her take on the movie, her career, her life and the perils of Hollywood.
CURVE: One of the really interesting things about High Art is that the sex scenes, even though they're not traditionally sexy, are very intimate. Still, it's not the steam-up-the-windows, rip-off-the-clothes kind of sex. How does that work?
Sheedy: The sex scene [between Lucy and Syd] is an important part of the script...and Lisa [Cholodenko] directed it in a really sensitive and very tender way, without veering it into any kind of sentimentality and without trying to soften it. If that scene didn't happen, the movie couldn't have continued...it's a defining moment. It wasn't "let's stop the movie, have the lesbian sex scene and continue the movie."
From my point of view, any lesbian sex scene in a "Hollywood movie" is usually filmed or produced by a guy who's got some kind of fantasy about what two women do in bed, and there's usually nothing about it that has anything to do with the movie. There's a very voyeuristic quality to those scenes. I'm particularly thinking about that Sharon Stone movie Basic Instinct.
The scene with Greta, on the couch--that scene for me was really complex, because it had to explain or at least give the audience some insight on what this relationship is really about... I asked Patti [Clarkson, playing the role of Greta] what she was comfortable with. But I really wanted to go for it. It had to be the real thing--not just pussy-footing around, so to speak.
There was a moment when I'm really turned on and I really want to go get into it, have sex right there on the couch--and Patti [Greta] passes out from heroin. I thought, "OK, this is the relationship. I have something that is still alive in me, still hungry and she is just drugged out, and it's frustrating."
CURVE: It's interesting to me that people often focus on how hard it must be for straight actresses to play lesbian roles...I can imagine that would be annoying to you.
Sheedy: You know, that question has come at me so many times... Most of the time, a male interviewer wants to know--you know, it must be so difficult for you to have to kiss a woman--because it's not a guy. (laughter)
CURVE: Maybe a male interviewer would prefer to believe it's difficult.
Sheedy: Yes, exactly! ...It's insulting. The question itself assumes that the absence of the man is a negative, is a loss for an actress, when actually that is not the case. (more laughter) I'm sorry, but it's not.
When the question comes from a straight woman, it's like she's terrified of the whole thing. So then it's like, "Oh my god, how did you get yourself into that...mode?" If I start saying things like, "women are beautiful, and they're attractive, and it's an actress I'm fond of, and it was the scene, and it was as easy as can be and I didn't have any problem with it." It really doesn't sit well. *The third point of view came from the guy who did the article for Out. Completely camp and over-the-top. I mean, this guy is very flamboyant, very gay, saying, "So, Ally..." and he says something about muff-diving and it was so offensive... Like he was making a joke of lesbian sex.
It's bizarre to me. They're like, "Well, obviously they're not getting any satisfaction, because the penis is absent"--the all-powerful penis...the two of them, the gay man and the straight guy, should actually be writing the articles because they're coming from a very similar point of view.
CURVE: What's the difference between someone who says, "I like your role," and someone who says, "You're really sexy," and confuses your role with your sexuality?
Sheedy: But I love that! When we went to the Toronto Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, we met this adorable pair of women. These two women made an incredible documentary called The Brandon Teena Story. Greta [Olafsdottir, the filmmaker who co-directed The Brandon Teena Story] came up to me after she saw High Art and said, "You know what, you make a really good dyke. I can't believe you're married, you just make such a good dyke." And I was loving it!
CURVE: You've talked in some other interviews about your mother being a lesbian.
Sheedy: My mother is gay. I guess you could have said that at one point she was bi, because she was married. Growing up, I was surrounded by people who were every kind of race, every kind of religion, every kind of sexual orientation--the only thing they had in common was that they were all left-wing radicals and activists...
I grew up without any kind of judgments...and always felt that the person I was going to fall in love with was going to be the person that I fell in love with. I never had a preconception that it would have to be a man or that it would have to be a woman...
I'm monogamous. I'm married to the man I fell in love with, but...I do find women incredibly attractive and beautiful, and even when I'm walking down the street with my husband. *He has this one friend that he did a movie with--she's a beautiful actress, I just love her face and after I met her I was like [whispering] "I just love Jordan's face, she's just got such a face on her. She's so beautiful and so sexy." He does not feel threatened by that. I have felt attracted to women and had crushes on women... I don't particularly like being categorized because my entire childhood was about not being categorized.
CURVE: So it must have been a shock to you as an adult to see everyone being put into their proper divisions.
Sheedy: Well, the first place I ran into that was Hollywood. I had a big problem with that and I continue to have a problem with it. I left... I don't like being involved in movies where the primary motivation is how much money it's going to make, how commercial it's going to be. With this movie, it's just a bunch of people pulling together their resources trying to make a story about real characters... It's a miracle that Lisa even cast me, because I had been living with a real stigma...for about 10 years I just wasn't working.
[In the 1980s] movies became very big and very commercial and women's roles became more and more plastic. I was told that I should have bigger tits, that nobody wanted to fuck me and that's why I wasn't being cast in movies. That I needed to change the way I looked, put on make-up, do things that I would not do because I considered them to be sexist and disgusting...Directors who were working in the '80s were: "We want ba-ba-boom!"
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