To keep up with the myth of herself Meryl Streep has long chosen the technique of understatement. To the ecstatic ovations that welcomed her at the Cannes Film Festival, she responded with the sly air of someone who would have us believe that all that success, all that love, all that skill, arrived almost by chance, in the life of a lady who has always been very absorbed by family commitments: «I didn’t create a production company, even though I greatly admire my colleagues who did so, in reality I limited myself to producing children, my family has always taken up a lot of my time. I continue to depend on the offers that come to me, I don’t choose, I prefer to make discoveries by chance and I really like this.”
You have worked with the greats of cinema, what is the fundamental skill of a director?
«He must be confident, know exactly what he wants to say and communicate confidence to the crew. A director is truly great if he manages to make everyone understand how important it is to tell that particular story and how happy this can make both him and everyone around him.”
What advice would you give to an aspiring actor?
«I would tell him that if the first attempt doesn’t work, you have to move forward, keep the goal steady. Don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up. I say this in particular to women.”
What are the most significant results of the women’s movements of recent years?
«The number of interesting roles for women has increased, important things have happened, not only in Hollywood, but everywhere, in industry and commerce. There have been small corrections in behavior, improvements, there is more fear in committing abuses because we know that now they would be reported. In short, there has been progress, today the biggest stars in the world are women, perhaps with the exception of Tom Cruise.”
What caused the scarcity of attractive characters to be entrusted to actresses?
«It’s a problem of vision. Films are projections of the dreams of those who make them, and for males, be they producers or directors, it is still very difficult to be able to project themselves into those of women. He’s stronger than them. When I was shooting Ithe hunter I felt I understood very well the state of mind of the protagonists, Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, but that’s not the case for the males, they can’t find themselves in the female protagonists. The first time a man said to me “I know how you felt” was for The devil wears Prada».
Some, among his many tests, have marked stages of social evolution such as the mother of “Kramer against Kramer”. Why?
«That film was about a divorce, the author had conceived it as a story of revenge, he was mainly interested in the concerns of the father, played by Dustin Hoffman. But we were in the years of feminism, and this perspective didn’t satisfy everyone, so Dustin and I decided to split up and each write our own version of the crucial meeting between the two. It just so happened that mine won.”
He worked with Steven Spielberg. How would you describe it?
«An absolute genius, interested in staging in its most total sense, he always has everything under control, his vision, precise, in his head, the song he wants to sing».
AND How did it go with Eastwood?
«Very good, he’s a great author, we filmed The bridges of Madison County in 5 weeks, always starting at 5 in the morning, because he leaves himself time to go and play golf every evening. He never raises his voice, or at least he rarely does, only if someone makes a noise at the wrong time, when it happens, he is capable of really shutting everyone’s mouth.”
The shampoo scene in “Out of Africa”: what memories do you have of those shots?
“There were a couple of important things we had to watch out for, obviously the lions, but also the hippos which are much more ferocious. The shampooing sequence took a long time, Robert placed his fingers on my head slowly, someone from make-up had to intervene to explain to him how he should do it. That scene is incredible, we’ve seen a lot of sex in the cinema, that one didn’t show anything, but it was incredibly erotic.”
You have acted in many love stories, what interested you most in that type of stories?
«Yes, I’ve done a lot, but it’s true, they were different from the usual ones, often because the women I played had jobs, interests, just like men. For example in My Africa she is Karen Blixen, a magnificent writer.”
It was also Margaret Thatcher. What got you involved in that controversial figure?
«The fact that she was depicted in the waning phase of her political career, the film shows her decline and mental confusion, for me this was the magnet».
How can she always be so perfect when she plays a part?
«It comes easy to me, I can’t say why. When I’m on the phone, at home, for some business and maybe an Indian operator answers me, I’ve heard kids say “mum, you’re speaking with an Indian accent”. In short, it’s not a complicated thing, just a way to broaden the possibilities of playing people who are different from me.”
