Young and beautiful, it would be easy to dismiss actress Brit Marling as yet another Hollywood starlet striding headlong to box office success on the back of her looks and charm. Yet Marling defies stereotype..
Young and beautiful, it would be easy to dismiss actress Brit Marling as another Hollywood starlet striding headlong to box office success on the back of her looks and charm. Yet Marling defies stereotype. On graduating from Georgetown University, complete with an offer from Goldmann Sachs, she divided her class with a valedictorian speech beseeching her peers to view their career options through the prism of passion rather than cold reason, advice she has followed to the letter. Arriving in Hollywood, where the only roles on offer were for the simpering blonde, she promptly sat down with college friend and aspiring director Mike Cahill and wrote Another Earth, a disconcerting feature marrying the science fiction trope of the discovery of a parallel Earth-like planet, with an intensely human portrayal of a girl trying to atone for an unforgivable crime. It is a film heady with atmosphere: exuding longing, misery and passion, and strikingly mature for a first work. Yet Marling does not view her path as unconventional, rather as an essential route to playing interesting roles. Indeed, as a writer she is enabled to create parts that far surpass her understanding, which then, as an actress, compell her to take a leap into the unknown and attempt to reconstruct that which is alien. Here, on the day of the UK release of Another Earth, she talks to AnOther about what angers, intrigues and inspires her about working in film.
How did it feel having so many different roles in the production? Did it feel like too many fingers in too many pies or was it amazing to learn about all the different elements?
My co-writer and director Mike Cahill and I came to doing all these things out of necessity, because we wanted to make a film and I was an actress who’d never been in anything before and he was a director who’d never directed a feature. Of course nobody was going to give us any money to do that, so it became a question of how are we going to do this? And so we both started writing. I had realised pretty early on when I moved to LA that when you’re in your early 20s and you have no experience, the roles that are available to you as a woman are ridiculous. You’re always in a bikini or nude, and running away from somebody with a gun, and I had to ask how do you begin to work as an actor without totally throwing away your morality in terms of how young women are being portrayed? So I felt like, if I wanted to act, I had this weird imperative to also try to learn to write so I could somehow be a part of the positive storytelling that’s happening for women.
"I had realised pretty early on when I moved to LA that when you’re in your early 20s and you have no experience, the roles that are available to you as a woman are ridiculous"
So you came to writing because you wanted to act, and you felt it was important to create your own stories rather than falling into generic stereotypes?
I think as an actor, it’s probably the most intoxicating to lose yourself in someone else’s story, because my point of view, even when it meets up with Mike or someone else, it’s limited. I've only a certain way of seeing the world, and as an actor, one of the most exciting things is losing yourself in someone else’s point of view. So I love that first and foremost. But writing certainly, in coming to learn how to write and to become a better storyteller, is such a thrilling opportunity. I think often when you’re writing, even if you’re a woman attempting to write a really strong female protagonist, you find yourself putting her into really weak situations, because we’ve all grown up on this cultural milk of woman as second-class citizen or woman as victim. So we have to actively fight against that and rewrite the narrative.
Is that what your character Rhoda is about? Were you writing her as someone trying to escape her sense of her own victimhood, and take control of her life?
Rhoda’s an interesting character because she’s not obviously strong. She’s been through this almost unfathomable experience of being an accidental killer – what do you do with that? – but I think there’s something quietly heroic about her and about the way she’s not looking away. And I think that’s something Mike and I are feeling culturally which is that there are a lot of strange things going on in the world, and everybody’s tendency is to look away from them. And Rhoda’s bold in that she’s confronting it head on. She’s looking right at it and attempting to construct a meaningful life out of the ashes of her former existence.
It’s really interesting what you said about looking at things that you don’t understand and that people are ignoring. Because I’ve noticed that there’s a trend in your work – that you are constantly putting yourself into a situation of infiltrating things outside of your own experience…
That’s so true. My films are all stories of being undercover, or espionage…what is this obsession with infiltration? I guess in some ways it’s because there’s this weird thing about the world where we live that the surface of things is meant to communicate so much. How you dress, how you act, how you speak, your Facebook page – these things that you take on supposedly communicate so much about who you are, yet they are so malleable and it’s so easy to be deceptive. I am always attracted in acting to the thing that scares me, the thing that unsettles me, that I don’t know how to locate easily. I felt that about Rhoda – how do you locate the profound pain and suffering of having accidently taken lives away? I have absolutely no idea, so I think the feeling is that you want to spend some time in your imagination trying to make that feel real to you. And then something about that – and maybe that’s why I’m so attracted to acting – gives you much greater empathy for everyone, for the human experience in general. You begin to understand where human motivations and feelings come from, and that endlessly fascinates me.
Another Earth opens in UK cinemas today.
Text by Tish Wrigley
