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Groupie Mentality
Joined by director Bob Dolman and co-star Geoffrey Rush, actresses Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon talk about playing reformed party girls, not to mention working together for the first time, on The Banger Sisters.
Friday, September 20, 2002
By Sharon Knolle
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In 'The Banger Sisters,' Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon play a pair of legendary groupies from the 1960s who've taken very different paths in life. Hawn's character, Suzette, never left the Sunset Strip and the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, while Lavinia, played by Sarandon, has fled to the suburbs of Arizona where her wealthy husband and spoiled daughters have no idea of her wild past.
When Suzette gets fired from her longtime job at The Whisky (the bar made famous by such bands as The Doors), she heads to Arizona for a reunion with Lavinia. Suzette's former partner in crime, who is now a ladies-who-lunch type, is at first horrified that her family might find out about her groupie days.
Tagging along for the ride is a repressed writer, played by Geoffrey Rush, with familial issues of his own. Needless to say, free spirit Suzette shakes up everyone's lives for the better. The idea for the film came to writer-director Bob Dolman while he was researching the Jim Morrsion film that eventually became Oliver Stone's The Doors. The first-time director recalls, "I had encounters with a lot of people from that era, including the surviving Doors. But I had thought about doing something about groupies even before that. I was interested in doing a story that would be about younger groupies, and I had the idea of calling them the Banger Sisters. Dolman sat on the idea until his son's graduation from high school, at which point it occurred to him, "Maybe the groupies had gotten older with me as I'd gotten older and I wondered what would their lives have become." He quickly envisioned Goldie Hawn as Suzette, and Dolman was lucky enough that when pitched the project, she came aboard as a producer too. "It's a great character that was alive and chancy and a role I'd never done before. It was challenging," says Hawn of Suzette. Coincidentally, Hawn's daughter, Kate Hudson, happened to be filming her own groupie story, Almost Famous, when mom received the script for The Banger Sisters.
"I talked to her about the character," remembers Hawn. "And I saw her performance in 'Almost Famous,' which I thought was amazing." Hawn had her own on-the-road experiences being married to Kate's father, musician Bill Hudson. "He wasn't a rock star, but he was a bubble gum rock and roller for a while. And when I was pregnant with Oliver I used to travel with him, and my daughter called me the pregnant groupie," the actress says with a smile. Bringing in another renowned actress of the same age, Oscar-winner Sarandon was the next step. "I love that the two of them have never been in a movie together before," says Dolman. "There's something real fresh about that. They've both had such amazing careers, and done so many movies, yet they had never worked together." "Any time you're going to work with someone as good as Goldie, you're going to say 'yes.,'" Sarandon explains her easy decision to join the film. "A good comedy is so hard to find and I decided there was something in this film I could talk about for four days." The acclaimed actress brought something else to the Banger Sisters: her daughter, Eva Amuri, who just happened to be the same age as one of Lavinia's daughters.
"At first when Susan said, 'I have a daughter who's an actress and I think she'd be right for this part,' I was nervous because I didn't know who it was and it put me in an awkward position," recounts Dolman. "But I thought she was really perfect for the part and because she looked like her mother, I thought that was great. She only just turned 16 when we did it and I thought she brought a lot to it." Eva's performance as a spoiled, temper-tantrum-prone 16-year-old provide some of the funniest moments in the film. Indeed, as proud mother Sarandon points out, "After she did a read-through when it was still in the developmental stage, they were so taken with her that they made her part bigger." For her part, Amurri is getting used to the question "What was it like to work with your mother?' "It's a good question because how often does this occur?" says the now17-year-old, who began acting at age 14. She's planning to pursue a college education and continue her acting career, but without her famous mother. "For me it's important to prove myself and find my own projects so I want to wait a little bit before I work with her again so people don't think I'm just a tagalong," she says.
"I don't think it was a given that I would act but for me it was something I had always been interested in," Amurri says about growing up in an acting family. "I think they were a little cautious just because in this business there's a lot of rejection involved. But I think they understood that the person I am, I wouldn't be prone to being hurt much by that. In the end, they just understand that's what I want to do and they support me in my decision." Having lived through the 1960s, Hawn and Sarandon were able to bring their own outlook to the script. "I certainly had a lot to draw from, but it wasn't my life," says Hawn. "I was quite a workaholic at that time period. And I didn't drink or smoke dope or do any of that stuff at the time because that's just now who I was. I got married young and I wasn't like that. Although I did dance in clubs, I was a go-go girl, so I did live in that time." "I think everyone knows about my past!" laughs Sarandon. "For anybody that came of age at that time, sex, drugs and rock and roll were a significant part of everyone's development, and thank God. I don't think this movie's about one lifestyle or the other. I think it's asking the question, 'Can you be free and still have responsibility?'"
While the characters were as different as night and day, the actresses found they had a lot in common. "Susan's just as free as I am. I don't know what her past was, but both of us were married young. I would honestly say we had certain similar kinds of experiences. We worked together great," gushes Hawn. "I love her because there's no bullsh-t. I don't like bullsh-t. As my mother would say, I like to put my ass on the table. That's the way that I work. She's the same way. We worked on the script together, totally in synchronicity. We didn't disagree about anything. It was a magical time." Both actresses trimmed their fees to meet the $10 million budget, says Dolman and the novice director found himself relying on the expertise of his leading ladies to get him through his first feature film. According to Dolman the two actresses approach the work very differently. "Susan really doesn't start to perform until the camera is going. She really holds back until then," he says. "You see her working through what she's going to do from take to take. And so she gets better, so you do more takes with her. Goldie tends to prepare a little bit beforehand, so when she does her first or second take, she's pretty hot and throws herself into it. But you don't want to do as many takes with her, because she tends to peter out. So, there's a challenge how to get them to give their best together." As for Geoffrey Rush, Dolman fondly states, "He was more of an actor in the sense of a troupe. He came to work having really prepared and all the time on set he was in character and he stayed in character. Sometimes you could go to him at lunch and he'd be a little bit out of focus, and he'd say, 'Oh, I'm Harry right now.'" For the film, the Australian actor affected an American accent and realized that, as the third lead, he could get up to a bit of mischief. "There's a scene where she puts her hand down under the covers and says 'Harry don't move,' I had a banana down there," Rush laughs at the memory. "I thought, this movie is in their hands. I can do really naughty stuff in the back. And that's not a bad way of attacking it." The ploy clearly worked - at one point Hawn said to him, "You know, you remind me a lot of Peter Sellers." Concedes the theater-trained actor of Banger Sistersuot;It's not quite Beckett, but I always loved the image of this misfit groupie and this nerd, who meet in the desert and there's something very abstract about it. Bob told me he started writing this scene where he got Suzette down to Arizona to meet up with Lavinia and suddenly Harry just started coming out on the page. And he thought this would be a strange little cameo there to get her into Arizona, and then Harry started to take over, so it was nice to know that. There was something haphazard about it. I wanted the audience to think that I was going to disappear from the film after scene three." Instead, Harry reappears and begins to get a bit of the '60s spirit himself. "I like to think I'm the third Banger Sister," he smiles.
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