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Jacqueline Bisset's Tantric Sex Lesson
When 60-year-old actress Jacqueline Bisset sat down for her first Fascination table read, she was immediately confronted by an overly intimate directorial view of ‘The Method.’
Monday, January 31, 2005
By Todd Gilchrist
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Bisset at recent 21 Grams preem
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Jacqueline Bisset is one of the silver screen’s great beauties, a leggy brunette who wowed audiences as Steve McQueen’s girlfriend in Bullitt some 37 years ago. Even now, as she sits on the edge of her 61st birthday, Bisset’s luminousness remains virtually untarnished by time; and in a role like that of Maureen Doherty, the redeemed widow in Klaus Menzel’s erotic thriller Fascination, she provides much of the necessary eroticism, even in scenes where it isn’t required.
Surprisingly, Bisset was very hesitant at the outset about taking on the role. During a recent interview with FilmStew, she admitted that it was only the director’s determination that finally convinced her to participate in the picture.
“Klaus came to see me through a friend of mine,” Bisset explains on a recent Friday afternoon. “I'm not someone who loves to be approached through someone else, because it's usually a waste of time and doesn't go anywhere. But in this case, he came back three months later and had the film ready.”
Bisset says she was impressed by the energy of Menzel, a German director who at the time was working on his sophomore film effort. “He's an incredibly enthusiastic person and very passionate about his story,” she insists. “He told me what he wanted to do with it and he had Adam Garcia and he had a cast in mind, which actually changed in the process of him getting the money together. I was like, ‘Okay, are you sure that we've really got the money?’ And we were off.”
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Co-star Adam Garcia
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“He's become a very good friend of mine,” adds Bisset. “I just think that he's someone who's got so much oomph and so much go get’em. It's pretty staggering to get a film made.”
Part of the appeal of shooting, Bisset indicates, was working in Puerto Rico. “I love Puerto Rico, [but] I had no knowledge about it at all,” she says. “It's definitely got two different cultures going on and I found it fascinating. There's a real American commercial culture going on there with fast food places and big malls and all the big stores, but somehow they're like a real separate, from my point of view, it's really divided into two different countries; the Puerto Rican side was a strong and central place, I found.”
The only problem, she says, was the humidity: “I'm not someone who rushes to those places because my hair goes curly, but I survived the humidity and actually started to really enjoy it and relax.”
The tropical locale notwithstanding, Bisset says that she was initially thrown off by Menzel’s attention to detail; specifically, that he wanted his cast to take a crash course in tantric sex. “He started the film with a slightly odd note because in the first rehearsal, when we had our first sit around the table he said, ‘I want you all to know about tantric sex,’” she remembers. “‘We want the lovemaking to be very this, that and the other.’”
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Evans at recent BAFTA awards
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“We actually sort of froze like, ‘Well, what's he going to ask of us?’ And he said, ‘I want you to have lessons.’”
Although Bisset and the rest of the cast had their own trepidations, Menzel persisted in his instruction. “He had a lady there who was a choreographer person, and I thought, ‘What's she doing here?’ And then we went through the script and he said, 'So I think now that you should go with so and so.'”
“ I thought, 'Bloody hell, I know how to do a love scene if I have to do love scene,” says Bisset. “I know that I have done a love scene. I don't know whether Alice [Evans] knows how to do a love scene, but Adam [Garcia] looks like he knows how to do a love scene.’”
Ultimately, the voice of experience - namely hers - prevailed, and the actors were allowed to, say, explore the subject on their own. “[I said,] ‘I think that we should take it from this stage. Let's just find out how we would do the scene before we have lessons on how to do love scenes,” she remembers.
“He looked at me like, ‘What do you mean?’ Bisset remembers. “My reaction was, ‘We're actors, this is what we do. Let us find our way to the scene before we get taught how to do that scene.’ Alice sort of looked at me like, ‘I think that I agree with you,’ and Adam was cool.”
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MGM
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Director Klaus Menzel (l)
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That said, Bisset is convinced Menzel’s intentions were, if nothing else, completely honorable. “Klaus is so enthusiastic,” she reiterates. “It was done as a gesture, a very loving gesture of ,‘Let’s take this to a level.’ But that first read through is very important and you don't really want to share it with people who aren't directly involved.”
People, one must assume, like her co-star Garcia, who plays her suspicious son. Indeed, Bisset says she pre-conceived that relationship before stepping on set with the young actor, even though on screen it appears strained to near the breaking point.
“I do a back-story,” she explains. “I was supposed to be crazy about my son in this film and I know that I disappoint my son in this film enormously and behave completely inappropriately. But at the point that I'm at in the story, obviously, I don't care about that.”
“I cared a week before and I will care again, but at the moment I'm in a situation where I'm caught up and I'm giddy,” she adds. “So my son's feelings be damned at that moment. That's the way that I'm behaving, anyway.”
Bisset says working with Garcia required very little mother-son quality time. “He's very easygoing and very easy to be around,” she reveals. “He's very serious working and I just go into a film going, ‘Okay, this is my son. I love him completely. That's it.' That's sort of the way that I approached it.”
The prospect of playing a sexagenarian mother who may or may not have killed her husband appeals enormously to Bisset, not the least of which because of her seeming years of insecurity as one of Hollywood’s top ingénues. “The thing that I've learned is that I'm not generally frightened, and I think that a lot of it's because I really don't care anymore about certain aspects of what people think of me,” she declares. “One needs to get the role right, but compared to the fear level that I used to have in the beginning when I started, which I actually think probably produced actual performances based on fear rather than from the script, I now feel very fearless.”
The character of Maureen, who has limited screen time to arouse suspicion for the audience, tested the boundaries of Bisset’s abilities as an actress, particularly since camera, stage direction and scripting all played an integral part in developing emotional ambiguity. “It's about being prepared,” she says. “I had to create a feeling that, ‘Is she or isn't she involved in the death of her husband?’ The innuendo has to be working in both directions; it could be innocence, or she could be guilty.”
“Some of those scenes in the early part of the film are not edited the way that the script was,” she explains. “Everything always shifts, so you might do your work and have just enough to do your role within the framework, and then maybe a third of it is taken away and now it stands in a different context.”
| “Maybe I'm a bit fussy about things, maybe I go overboard, but I'm like that in life,” Bisset concludes. “I set up things to think, ‘What could go wrong?’, just to be aware of it and then be brave. Get the fear over with in the beginning. Accept that you're frightened and then do it.” | |
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