Sam Fragoso: What’s the Flaubert quote you always use?
Michelle Williams: Ugh– “I want to live the quiet life of the bourgeois, so I can be violent and unrestrained in my work.”
SF: Why don’t we talk about that work? Because there’s a shift that happens, from naturalism to expressionism. Or, at least that seems like the aim in projects like My Week with Marilyn, Fosse/Verdon, and now, most recently, The Fabelmans. Was that the aim?
MW: That’s what happened to me when I made Marilyn. Before that, in my late teens and my twenties, I wanted to—because I was coming off of a teen drama—I wanted to learn naturalism. I wanted to tell the truth. And then, when I went to make Marilyn, I realized I was missing some tools in the kit. I hadn’t played someone who was far from me physically, and I had to unlearn myself. I had to break myself down, get rid of myself, and then rebuild myself in this person’s image. That work was so painful. It hurt to find new positions. I’d been assembling myself for thirty years, and all of the sudden, I had to change things that were inherent and structural. I started working with teachers in London—movement teachers, Alexander teachers, dialect—and I got so excited! The possibilities it would open up, that I’m not bound to myself. I became hooked on this kind of training and studying an external way of approaching a character.
SF: You have a quote, you said, “I wanted to make work that an audience member had to deal with, where there was less interpretation on their part because the interpretation was really my work.” What do you mean by that?
MW: I didn’t want people to be able to project things onto me. I wanted to make things that felt definite. And I’m interested now in both, for sure, but I didn’t want to be pure projection.
SF: And you felt like you were.
MW: Yes, and I didn’t want to just be that. Film is a medium where you are asking people to relate to it personally, so there’s an amount of projection that’s necessary in the audience-performer relationship. But I didn’t want it to be just that. I wanted to risk how much an audience member could love the person that I was making. I wanted to risk their love and earn their respect.
