iding the wave of Japanese horror hits morphed into English-language frightfests, it's time now for Dark Water. And taking the path trod recently by Naomi Watts in The Ring and The Ring Two and Sarah Michelle Gellar in The Grudge, Jennifer Connelly stars in Dark Water as Dahlia Williams, a troubled woman who moves with her young daughter (Ariel Gade) into a dumpy apartment on New York City's Roosevelt Island. Soon Dahlia must confront leaky ceilings, cascading water, leering teens, a volatile ex-husband (Dougray Scott), a neglectful property manager (John C. Reilly), an odd janitor (Pete Postlethwaite) and a ghost. About her only ally? A rather odd lawyer (Tim Roth)—he works out of his car and spins tales about a nonexistent family—who takes genuine interest in her plight.
Written by Rafael Yglesias (From Hell) and directed by Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries), Dark Water opened nationwide on July 8. Connelly (Hulk, Dark City, The Rocketeer), Roth (Planet of the Apes) and Yglesias recently talked to Science Fiction Weekly about the film.
Jennifer Connelly, in your last two films, this and House of Sand and Fog, you've played a woman in crisis. How do you convey that in a performance? And which role was more challenging?
Connelly: Oh, both roles were really challenging, I'd say, and both were really exciting to work on for that reason. This had a special challenge that I'm alone in most of the film. In so much of the film I'm alone, and there's no dialogue. So my character isn't defined by what I'm saying or what someone is saying about me. So a lot of work has to go into that to try to make as solid a character as I could, so that those scenes where the writing ends but the scene continues, so they didn't feel like just sloppy improvisations, but you still felt like you were with the same woman in those scenes.
Was the flooded apartment done with CGI?
Connelly: No, that was real water. Good, old-fashioned, practical effects.
Salles has said he wanted a real mother to play Dahlia. You are a mother of two young boys. How did that impact your performance?
Connelly: On the one hand, I think they're fictional characters, so of course it's not a prerequisite to be a mother to play a mother. Because you would do research and observe and do an impression. But certainly the fact that—I mean, I wasn't going to try to pretend I'm not a mother, certainly. The fact that I've been raising my own children for seven years certainly informs the way I did this. And, of course, once you become a mother, things like that scene at the end when she's fighting to save her daughter's life. ... I'm not sure I would have fathomed that sort of ferocity that I think one would experience if your child were to be threatened.
You lived in Manhattan. You currently live in Brooklyn, New York. Have you had any real-life house-hunting horrors?
Connelly: Oh, New York City is difficult. I lived in the same apartment that I thought was going to be a short-term apartment. When I moved in, I took it out of frustration. I was going to take this apartment over a funeral home, and finally people were like, "We will not come visit you if you move." I thought it was quite cool. I was like, "I'll be embracing my mortality. I'll be aware of it. I'll feel grateful every day." So anyway, I took this place and for 10 years I didn't move, because my lease would be coming up. I'd look for a week, for a few days, I'd get fed up, everything's expensive, nothing's what it sounds like it's going to be in the ad, and it was 10 years. Ultimately, I moved out of there, a family of four and my husband hitting his head on the beams in the loft that we were sleeping in. It was truly time to go.
Sorry, but we've got to ask: Any personal experiences with the supernatural?
Connelly: I've yet to see any ghosts that I know of. I mean, lots of people are haunted, but in the more abstract way.
Tim Roth, what appealed to you about Dark Water?
Roth: I wanted to work with Walter. I've been a fan of his and we met socially, about directing more than anything.
A while later, he sent this over and said, "Do you fancy having a go with this character?"
Your character comes in about halfway through the story. How much attention did you pay to the first half of the script?
Roth: Oh, I'm not a moron. You've got to read the script to find out what you're in.
All of the adults in Dark Water tell lies of various natures. What's with your character and his so-called family?
Roth: I actually am confused about it, and remain so. We did that intentionally, and we tried to leave it open to the audience. Because, on the one hand, he's really supportive of her, and whether he believes her or not, whether he believes she's bonkers, whether it's paranoia or a stretch she's going through [during] a separation, he rushes out and does his homework and he really tries to help her as much as he can. And then he's this fucking lunatic with this bizarre little lying world that he's set up. But then, at the beginning, she says something about the last 10 years. I think he went through some stuff [too], so maybe it's just a reaction to that.
So, to you, what would constitute a scary thing?
Roth: Just people you think are crap. When you meet with directors, you're looking at them—do I want to give this guy or this woman six months, or whatever, of my life? 'Cause when it's done, it's theirs. It's a director's medium. So they do what they want with you. And can you trust them? And actors—it's the same. If I'm going to do this scene, and this is really difficult stuff to do, can you do it? Can you hack it? Am I looking at somebody who's counting the number of close-ups they get, or am I looking at an actor?
And in Jennifer Connelly you saw ... ?
Roth: I think she's a proper actor. I really do. I think she's an actor first and a movie star second, which probably guarantees her a pretty long career, I would say.
What do you make of Japanese horror?
Roth: I haven't seen any. I haven't seen the original one of this, and I haven't seen The Ring and all that. I really haven't seen them.
Did you read the book on which Dark Water is based?
Roth: No. I probably will have a quick look at some of this stuff. I have a 20-year-old. He's really into it, so he's going to give me some stuff to look at.
Rafael Yglesias, how did you approach writing Dark Water?
Yglesias: I guess it was different because it was a remake of a film, which I'd never done before. In some ways that made it easier, because it was already in the same timeframe as the movie needed to be. But, actually, for me, it was really very similar to the kinds of themes I've always worked on. One way or another, the movies and even the books I've written were usually about someone's past staying alive in the present. And, of course, inherently in a ghost story, that's exactly what they are. The past is literally still alive. So I didn't really approach it very differently. Also, I felt, like, the original film was sort of an homage to Rosemary's Baby, so what I kind of did was think of it as though I was doing Rosemary's Baby again, in a different way. So I chose Roosevelt Island because that was about as different as I could think of from a chic New York neighborhood. And I chose a modern building instead of a 19th-century building. And I tried to people it with the same kind of slightly funny, slightly perverse characters that Rosemary's Baby had. So, in a way, it was easier because right away it started out as movie material, instead of a book or something like that.
Considering the current fascination with Japanese horror films and turning them into American horror films, how tough is it to be original? And now that we've seen a bunch of these films, how much harder is it when people are walking in ready to guess the twists?
[WARNING: Major spoilers ahead.]
Yglesias: Well, actually, if you're referring to The Ring, it's the exact reverse of The Ring. So, to me, all the twists were inherent in the fact that you'd already seen The Ring, because in The Ring they think they're in pursuit of a poor girl who's been abandoned, and, in fact, she turns out to be a demon. In our story, it seems that she's a demon, but in fact she turns out to be a poor girl who's been abandoned. So I thought, even built into [Koji] Suzuki's work, that was the answer. Originality is a funny thing. There are very, very few things that are truly original. It more has to do with recent memory. To me, The Ring is more a true horror film. Suzuki could probably speak to this better, in that you're dealing with a demon, with a force that is not a person, whereas even the original Dark Water is about a character, is about a specific ghost.
Perla Haney-Jardine plays both young Dahlia and the ghost, Natasha. Was that always the plan? Did you know that as you were writing, or did Salles make that decision on set?
[WARNING: Again, major spoilers ahead.]
Yglesias: Walter brought it up to me almost immediately when he signed on to do it. I'm not sure he was sure that people would notice on a conscious level. But nevertheless he wanted to make that it's really an interior landscape clear to everybody. The jokey way I like to say it is that it's story of somebody healing their inner ghost, in that it really is a mother who has been abandoned and has that abandoned child inside her and finally, tragically, solves the ghost's problem and her own problem by being the eternal mother.
Back to the top.
Also in this issue:
Ioan Gruffudd of Fantastic Four
