I felt like there is something so immediately frightening and scary and real about this script." It was nighttime, my nephew was spending the night with my daughter who was four or five years old and I went in and I crawled in bed with both of them and just like hugged them to my chest. "I read the script and maybe seven pages into it, the boy's abducted and I put the script down. When she read the script, Harden said the serious subject matter made her want to get closer to her family. And then he offered it to me a couple weeks after that." 'Clint Eastwood called Aunt Marcia at dinner time.' And we talked about the script and that I really wanted to be a part of it. My status in the family rose like a rocket. My 12-year-old niece is visiting from Texas. "I said, 'Should I call Clint and tell him I really want to be a part of it? Or do you think that's just so pushy?' And he said, 'No, I think anybody would want to know if you want to work with them.' I'd worked with him in Space Cowboys, so I called the office. Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn, and Laura Linney in Harden's involvement in the film made her a hero to the kids in her family. I mean, I would do anything he wanted me to do." "I will walk in the background and dust a table for Clint Eastwood and then walk out of the room. And everybody goes and everybody does the best they can do and listens as openly as they can."Īlso a frequent Eastwood collaborator, Linney got a bit more colorful about her commitment to the man.
You come camera-ready and he says action, it's like a race. So I knew to come ready and if you do that, then you don't waste four camera takes while you're still getting your lines down, while you're kind of feeling out where you are. And I probably would've brought my own hair if I'd known that they don't do that. See, I didn't know this about Clint so on Space Cowboys, I had just come from Pollock, so I had those bangs. And he's worked with his costume people and the hair people with ideas, but I brought my own wig, because I had long hair in it, so I brought that.
There's not a rehearsal period of developing the look of the character. "You come with whatever hair you want, whatever the accent you want. Harden confirmed what most actors say about working with Eastwood, no frills and straight to the point. And also there was a lot of hard work going on, but I loved being around them. They had a good time being with each other, they had a good time being in Boston. We'd be drinking tea and the boys are out. Marcia Gay and I were so funny because we were like the little old ladies. And they all have great mutual respect for each other, so it's kind of wonderful when you can go in and really play ball very hard and know that someone's going to catch the ball on the other end and know that someone's gonna throw the ball hard at you.
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So, they knew what a great environment they were in, and they were just as excited about the movie as Clint was. These are men who know what they're doing. These are not adolescent boys who don't do their work. These are all men who know what they're doing. That said, she was happy to be a part of the male-dominated film. If you want to talk archetypally or anything, I can't." I think it's more, not just being women, but I think that when there's a tragic event, I think the repercussions of how it moves through an entire family is really what it's about. "Questions like that are so hard for me, the importance of women. And also, I think that she's, in that final scene, a true avenue of some of the pathos of loss." So she's a catalyst for a lot of the action and a lot of the drama and a lot of mistakes. But my character, Celeste, holds the secret and it's torture to hold that secret. A film without women isn't real and in this particular film, Laura's character plays such a very different role than my character does. Harden, who plays the wife of molestation victim Dave (Tim Robbins), said it was the same as "the importance of women in life. So, where is there room for women in this story? Laura Linney and Marcia Gay Harden had the task of finding that. One guy was molested as a child, one guy lost his daughter, one guy has a marriage in shambles as he's investigating the murder of his friend's daughter with his other friend as the lead suspect. Mystic River is a story about men and their psychological problems.