Alberta's Feeling At Home On Deranged
Rita Zekas, Toronto Star
August 5, 1994
Alberta Watson Plays It Cool While Playing A Suicidal, Addictive Mom
Susan Sarandon passed on it. So did Jessica Lange, Judy Davis, Cybill Shepherd, Dianne Ladd, Bonne Bedelia, Mary Steenburgen and Isabella Rossellini.
An entire complement of "40ish" actresses turned it down, the chance to play the female lead in Spanking the Monkey.
They calculated that it was a bad career move, playing a mother who sleeps with her son in a low-budget film.
Faye Dunaway was 35 year old writer/director/exec producer David O Russell's last attempt at snaring a big name star.
She declined.
Russell reasoned philosophically that it was for the best. She probably would have had him fired anyway.
But Canadian actor Alberta Watson took on the role. Why would she want to tackle such a thorny issue, incest in your quintessential dysfunctional family?
"They sent me a script," Watson explained. "I enjoy independent or no-budget movies, it's a really collaborative effort, everyone is heard.
"I liked that it had complicated characters. That it was challenging. Why did this woman act out? We all have dark places we don't act out, hers were alcohol and pills. I wanted to see how real I could be. She's narcissistic and selfish, but you don’t end up hating her."
In the film, son Ray, a brooding 18 year old MIT freshman played by Jeremy Davies, is home for the summer and is forced by his overbearing absentee father (Benjamin Hendrickson) to cancel his plans to take a prestigious internship in Washington and nurse his deeply depressed mother (Watson), bed-ridden with a broken leg.
As Russell told The New York Times in a recent interview: "The actors had to make a movie about a very volatile subject with a no-name director for nothing."
It didn't give Watson pause, stepping in where other actors fear to tread.
"I don't understand it, obviously," she shrugged over a meal at fashionable Bistro 990, oblivious to the heads she turned
"I'm not a star where I have to worry about my 'image', what a pathetic place to be. It's part of the machinery in Hollywood that instills that.
"Hollywood plays to youth and beauty. Women get older and as an actor that means better. You have much more life experience at 40 than 20. Look at Susan Sarandon, her work is beautiful. She has a face that's lived in. I'd like her career, yes, thank you very much."
Watson is drop-dead gorgeous, not all blowsy or slatternly as she was in Spanking the Monkey.
Watson is "30ish". She's playing 40-44.
"I look like hell, I look rough, I don't care. It's not a glamorous role. I should look like s---. She's suicidal. I'm grateful they all passed on it."
The movie was shot in the dog days of last August, and Russell originally wanted to call it Swelter, but reconsidered, thinking that Swelter sounded like an Ann-Margaret TV-movie.
As for its present title, Watson said she didn't know it referred to masturbation.
She plays a mercurial mom: seductive, bitchy, accusatory, belittling, brilliant, conniving, ingenious.
"She's jealous of Ray's progress and career," Watson says of the character. "I think she allowed herself to stay stuck. Moving forward is hard work, a career is hard work and she doesn't want to work hard. She knows her husband is unfaithful but she lets things ride."
Russell stipulated that the mother-role actor had to be "earthy, authoritative, smart and also sympathetic."
And to work for a buck ninety-eight.
Spanking was made on the proverbial shoestring, a puny budget of $80,000.
It was shot in 26 days in Prawling, N.Y., near the affluent New York suburb of Larchmont, where Russell grew up. He used bits and pieces, donated ends of other directors' unexposed film as shooting stock and rehearsed and edited in his and his wife's Manhattan apartment.
Which makes it all the more of an accomplishment since Spanking won the Audience Award for the most popular dramatic film at the seminal Sundance festival.
It was Russell's first feature. Previously he had made two short fiction films both shown at Sundance.
As for star Watson, Alberta wasn't born in Alberta. It was a derivative of her father's name.
"My name is Faith Susan Alberta Watson. I used Susan till I did my first movie here, Power Play or Coup D'etat."
Born and raised in Toronto, Watson has been away from home for 12 years, first to Los Angeles, then to New Jersey, where she lived for eight years when she was married. Her ex was Italian/Irish from Queens.
She's been back here for three months, without husband, but with two cats and two dogs.
"I'm out of practice, I don't know how to date."
Power Play aside, Watson's other film credits include Zebrahead, Virus, Stone Cold Dead and In Praise of Older Women, for which she got a Genie nomination in 1979 for Best Supporting Actress.
She has a whole slew of TV credits: co-starring roles in Buck James and Island Son and appearances in Law & Order, Grand, Matrix, Street Legal, The Equalizer, Kane & Abel, Murder in Space, Hill Street Blues and King of Kensington.
She admitted that she was typecast when she was younger.
"I had my defences. I'd play harder edged. Now I've broadened out. I played a lot of professionals (in Buck James, she was chief resident at the hospital). Now I play regular folks who have their own set of problems. Playing a mom is terrific. I'm not one (in real life).
"I wanted to be an actor since I was a little girl but I went for the obvious choices – airline stewardess or nurse. When I was 15, I took an actor's workshop at Bathurst Street United Church. All the kids from Hair were there. We did skits, dance – it evolved into a little theatre company for about a year. I started acting at 19 when I got the lead in the CBC film, Honor Thy Father."
She's soon off to L.A.to see a man about a film.
"I resist going," she said with a resigned sigh.
She doesn't like L.A., doesn't burn to be A Hollywood Star.
The Sundance festival was the first time she screened the film with an audience. She was exhilarated by the response.
"I was petrified because the whole time I was shooting (Spanking), I thought it could go either way, be a real surprise or a piece of crap. I'd fluctuate. I thought we were doing good work. At Sundance, I was with the crew and some of the actors and we were knocked out. People went nuts, they embraced it."
Spanking was a taxing but fun shoot, Watson said. There's an especially goofy scene where mom and son are pitching cheese balls against the TV screen.