FILM INTERVIEW: HILARY SWANK

The Prize Winning Actress On Her Role As The Inspiring Aviator

By: Team Buzzine

October 25, 2009

Aviator Amelia Earhart captured and held the world’s attention with her dare-devil, record-setting solo flights in the ’20s and ’30s.  Academy Award-winning actress Hilary Swank plays Amelia in the upcoming film of the same name, and Buzzine‘s Izumi Hasegawa gets the inside story from her exclusive interview:

Izumi Hasegawa: Did you have to learn anything about aircraft of that era?

Hilary Swank: I certainly did learn how to fly, because you can’t play Amelia Earhart and not learn how to fly. I learned to fly in a Cirrus, which is a new plane, but I did go up in the old aircraft — an open-cockpit plane, biplanes — which are very different and, interestingly enough, almost a little easier to fly than the ones that we now know with all the instrument panels that are very complicated. It was a lot of fun. I got to put the goggles on and the hat and the whole thing. It was really important to understand where her passion lies in flying.

IH: Did you get to fly an Electra?

HS: No. During my training as a pilot, I flew down deeper in Southern California, where one of the Electras that is still running today is, but it was going through its yearly maintenance so I wasn’t able to go up in that. And the one we had, at the time we were filming, neither Mira [Nair, director] nor I was allowed to go up in an aircraft for insurance purposes.

IH: Are you taking flight lessons now?

HS: I took flying lessons when I was learning to play Amelia Earhart, when I was doing my preparation.

IH: But after the movie was done, I read that you started to take classes…

HS: No, I took classes when I was doing my preparation.

IH: So you’ve got your license?

HS: To get your license, you have to fly solo, and obviously they weren’t about to let me do that. As it is, they didn’t want me to go in the plane to take flying lessons, and I just said I wouldn’t play Amelia unless I learned how to fly, so I do not have my pilot’s license. I’d like to get it, though, someday.

IH: Did you have any fear of flying?

HS: None at all. Those types of things don’t scare me in a way that I get physically numb or something. They scare me, of course, like any normal person. Like an adrenaline rush type of scare. I’ve jumped out of planes, I’ve bungee-jumped… I’m kind of a daredevil at heart. But I’ve always, from as young as I could remember, when I understood what a plane was, I remember watching them and thinking, “Where are they going?” And I’d daydream about all the places you could go, and I’d get maps and think about all the places I wanted to go. So flying, to me, was always something that I wanted to do. In fact, I did want to get my pilot’s license at some point one day. I just didn’t know that I would in order to play Amelia Earhart.

IH: Was it your passion for flying or your connection to the role that made you want to be an executive producer?

HS: There was definitely that connection that I have with Amelia — the kindred spirit of being an adventurer, her love of travel, my love of travel, the desire to have a dream and follow that dream, that passion to see it through in any way you can… But that wasn’t really the complete picture that drew me to her, and this is something I didn’t actually know until I read the script and I started diving into my work, but the other thing that I found really intriguing about Amelia was that this was a woman who made no apologies for living her life the way she wanted. That was so ahead of her time, and also very difficult to do now. I think if she was living in 2009, that would be something that we’d all find challenging. I find that we’re having our lives, and all of a sudden we may stop and say, “Wait a minute. This is what my parents want me to do.” Or, “Oh, I’m doing this because my significant other has an idea that this is how my life should be.” And we kind of lose sight, somewhere along the way, of what our paths are. I feel like she was not afraid to live that life for herself, and I think that’s very brave and difficult.

IH: How did you like wearing those fabulous gowns from the ’20s?

HS: All those clothes were spectacular, weren’t they? Kasia [Walicka-Maimone] did such a beautiful job bringing to life that era. It was a beautiful way of dressing and carrying yourself, and going out looking a certain way. But the great thing also about Amelia that I found so unique is that, in a time when women were wearing dresses and darkening their eyebrows and wearing dark lipstick and covering their skin, she was allowing her freckles to come out. You could barely see her eyebrows, she was so light-blonde. Obviously, she wasn’t wearing lipstick, and she created her own clothes. She designed her own clothes to be able to facilitate flying and all the things she liked to do. She didn’t like her ankles — that was definitely a part of who she was. In everything you read, she hated her ankles. It was something that she just despised in herself. So wearing pants, I think, was a part of that. From a very young age, she said to her mom, “How am I supposed to ride horses and hop fences and run around in this dress?” So her mom made pantaloons for her and her sister. She said she was looked at funny in school, but she didn’t care because she was able to live her life the way she wanted.

IH: Was her greatest contribution just pushing the technical boundaries of aviation, or was it more showing women they could do anything?

HS: Great question. I think it’s both. I think she was living in a time when living your dream was something mostly men did. It wasn’t something that women did at all. Or if they thought about it, it was far-fetched. So she would go and speak at a lot of universities about, “It’s great to have kids, it’s great to have a family, but you don’t have to do that because society wants you to do that. Go and pursue your career. Pursue your dreams. Pursue your desires before settling down so you can have the fullest, richest life imaginable.” So that was certainly something I thought was extraordinary in that era. But of course her achievements as an aviatrix were out there for us all to see. I don’t have to go on about what she did as a pilot. And what she did for aviation — her and Gene Vidal were really the two that created what we now know as the FAA today.

IH: Did you find the script at all deficient, with the technical background and the contribution that Gene and Amelia actually did give to the aviation industry? It seemed a little light in that area.

HS: We’re talking about a woman who did achieve so much and had so much going on in her life that it’s hard to tell every facet of that person’s story in two hours or less. I think you got a good idea of her connection to Gene Vidal and what brought their friendship together. But there’s only so much you can tell. We could have made Gone With The Wind with a little story break, but…

IH: Did you always know you wanted to be an actress, or were there other professions you were interested in as well?

HS: I think the very first thing I wanted to do was be an astronaut. That was at probably six, seven, and eight. And then at nine, a teacher of ours had us write this skit in front of the class and then perform it, and I remember performing it and something coming alive inside of me. I didn’t know at that time I could be a professional actor, and I had high hopes to still be an astronaut, but then I started doing theater and I recognized, at some point, “Wow, people really do this and you can make a career out of this,” and I embarked on that journey.

IH: In addition to your flying lessons, how did you prepare mentally and physically for your role?

HS: To me, I didn’t really see a lot of coincidences between Amelia and myself. In fact, I kind of shut the script and looked at the cover letter to make sure it was sent to the right actress. I thought, Wow, these are big shoes to fill. This is a daunting task for all of the reasons we just talked about and because she was this iconic image that we all know. There wasn’t fictional license that I had in order to play her. I couldn’t just play her as looking like myself or with long hair or the dark lips of the time, which is beautiful. It was very specific. So I got all the news reels on her I could, which there are 16 minutes of, and I studied them inside and out. The way Amelia spoke was very specific. The cadence in which she spoke was very specific. The period in that time, when people spoke like Katherine Hepburn, Amelia was so humble and didn’t sound as posh as that can sound. So figuring that out was really challenging. It took me over eight weeks. It was the most difficult accent I had to do in my career to date. So that was one. Studying her physically on those news reels was interesting as well. There’s about 45 seconds when she didn’t know the cameras were on, which was really revealing about how she spoke when it wasn’t heightened for publicity, which I found really helpful. And then, obviously, learning how to fly, which we spoke about. Then we get into the heart of who she was. There is so much literature on Amelia that you could spend years reading it, so it was really being picky about the things that I did choose to read. Obviously, Susan Butler’s book was one of them, and Elgen Long’s book on where she disappeared and all the calculations that go into flying — learning about that, understanding her childhood, which I think really makes people. The core of who we are, I think, really comes from our childhood and our makeup. And trying to read between the lines, because she was a really private person in the end. Even with her friends, with the letters that are out there, the correspondence between her friends and her family were very private, and she stuck up for her family and her father, even though he was an alcoholic and later really broke up the family and ruined himself as well.

IH: How long did it take to get all the freckles on?

HS: Good question. Just the freckles alone were probably a 15-minute process. There were different types of freckling that went into it.