FILM INTERVIEW: MERYL STREEP & STANLEY TUCCI

Emmanuel Itier: (Julie & Julia writer/director) Nora Ephron mentioned that you first did a Julia Child impersonation for her one night after a Shakespeare in the Park performance. She went on to add that you’re now considered a box office star…

EI: So Meryl, has that changed anything about the choices you now make in which roles to take?

Meryl Streep: I bet everybody in this room could do their own version of Julia Child. To everybody, that voice was so familiar, and how do we know whether we’re doing her or Dan Aykroyd’s version of her? Everyone can pull that “bon appetit” out there. [Laughs] When Nora gave me the script, which was sometime a year ago, I just thought it was so beautifully written. I thought it was an opportunity to not impersonate Julia Child but to do a couple of things. One, for me embodying her or Julie Powell’s idea of her, which is what I’m doing — I’m doing an idealized version, but I was also doing an idealized version of my mother who had a similar jour de vivre – an undeniable sense of how to enjoy her life. Every room she walked into, she made brighter. She was really something. I have a good deal of my father in me, which is another kind of sensibility, but I really, all my life, wanted to be more like my mother, so this is my little homage to that spirit. That’s more what I was doing than actually Julia Child. The second part of your question, about choices — I seem to have more choices in the last five years than in the previous five years maybe. I really don’t know why that is, but part of me thinks it has to do with the fact that there are more women executives making decisions, because everything starts with what gets made and where the money comes from, so I’m sure they’ve had more to do with that than I really have.

EI: Don’t you have a dream project that you would like to do? With your box office clout, isn’t it something that you could get into production?

MS: No. Do you have an idea?

EI: What would you have liked to have asked the characters that you play in the film that neither of you, obviously, didn’t get the chance to?

ST: I’d like to ask them how they lived so long eating what they ate. I’m convinced that they both had two livers. I’d just be curious. I can’t say that I know what I would’ve asked them, but what I would’ve liked to have done is watch the interaction between the two of them in that little kitchen, either in Paris or in Boston, because to me, that was the most interesting thing. When you see that kitchen — we recreated it in the film — it was so casual and really very intimate. I would’ve just liked to have watched them put together a meal. That would’ve been a great thing.

MS: I think I would agree. I would’ve loved to have heard Paul’s voice. Julia’s is so vivid and she left behind such an articulate trail of her journey in the book that she wrote with Alex (Prud’Homme) in My Life In France and in her cookbooks. Her voice really comes through. I would’ve loved to have heard him because he was a great storyteller and his interests ranged across a wide variety of topics, and I’m sure he was a really interesting person to hear.

EI: The romance between Julia and Paul is so dynamic and great in this film. It’s so touching to see what you’re doing.

ST: Well, it’s pretend. [Laughs]

MS: Stanley and I are often on opposite sides in a very famous charades game every Christmas. We’ve been at each other’s throats like married people for a really long time — many years. [Laughs] We knew each other in that way, and I just sort of am in love with him from afar anyway, with the totality of the man, from Big Night to his acting and directing work and in every way. So is everyone who knows him. He’s just a real treat to work with. It wasn’t a tough job to imagine being in love with him.

ST: Well, we have to go now. We are in a hotel. Thanks for coming. [Laughs] For me, it was easy too. Probably most people in the world — I too — have been in love with Meryl Streep for many, many years. We’d done The Devil Wears Prada together, which was really fun, and we’d known each other a bit socially before that, so for me, it was awesome. It was incredibly easy. You also make it easy because you’re so comfortable. I’m always a little nervous when I start shooting, and I was very nervous to play around with that.

MS: Were you nervous when we started?

ST: I was so nervous. I was. You made me feel so comfortable. It was nice.

MS: You know what Nora did? She did what she called a costume test, but it was really sort of introducing us to our world. She took us up to the rooms which they built in the Paris apartment — that she built in Queens, or wherever they were — and let us walk around in our clothes. In isolation in your Winnebago, or whatever it is, you kind of have a hard time convincing yourself that you are who you say you are. When you walk into this world and the light comes in a certain way and the landscape of Paris — a photograph, but still — and here’s the man of your dreams, it all came together before we had to actually do it. That was a big day.

ST: Yes, I remember. Those actual physical elements really helped a great deal.

EI: If you had the opportunity, what chefs would you like to have over, and what would you like them to cook for you?

MS: Dan Barber.

EI: What would he make for you?

MS: Anything that was fresh up there.

EI: Stanley, any particular chef?

ST: My grandmother, but she wasn’t there. She was an extraordinary cook. There that night, there were so many of them, but Mario Batali.

EI: Did you do your own Julia imitation, Stanley?

ST: No, I never did. I would’ve been fired.

EI: Julia Child dealt with so many challenges in the beginning of her career. What were some of the challenges you both went through as you started out as actors?

MS: My challenge was committing to acting, thinking that it was a serious enough thing to do with my life. What are you going to do with your one wild life? I thought acting was sort of silly and vain, even though it was the most fun I had ever done. It remains that — ego can’t be good for me. It was just deciding. I remember thinking the first time someone said, “Well, what do you do?” and I said, “I’m an…I’m an…uh…actor.” Then I had committed, I realized, but it took a long time.

ST: I took it too seriously at first, and it took me a long time to understand that you have to be serious about what you do but you mustn’t take yourself seriously. That way, you’ll be happier, and ultimately, you’ll be more successful. You’ll be better at what you do. It was much easier after I lost my hair, to tell you the truth. I started to work constantly once I started to lose it, so I’m thinking about losing the hair on my whole body. That’s disgusting.

MS: It’s going to be repeated everywhere now and come back to haunt you.

EI: Meryl, how important was it to you that this film include McCarthyism at that time and the impact of that on this couple?

MS: I think it’s really hard for us, now, to imagine the kind of terror a lot of people lived under, where your entire livelihood could be taken away. I just saw a documentary that’s going to be aired next year for American masses about  (stage producer/director) Joseph Papp. It’s about the early days that he actually went to Los Angeles and worked in a school there. He was in the same class with Marilyn Monroe and these other really wonderful actors, and he was a socialist. I actually think he was a member of the Communist Party at some time or another, but people’s lives were ruined within a year. Within one year, that blacklist was a done deal and it was over. Betsy Rice — Carroll Rice’s wife — they had to move to England and never worked in this country again. There were so many people affected by it. I don’t think we have any sense of it now — how an association in a so-called free country prevents you from making a movie ever. That happened then.

ST: Particularly, I think, in a business where it was also very hard to make a living a lot of the time. So you had everything going against you, in a way.

MS: There are so many mysteries in Julia and Paul Child’s story, really, now that we know what we know about the OSS and their involvement in some kind of espionage or the CIA, or the early precursor to the CIA, to know really what it was. If you want to know what the question was that I’d like to know, that’s what I’d like to know. What did they do? And how did she write this 700-page cookbook in between smuggling secrets from the Soviets?

ST: She didn’t. J. Edgar Hoover actually wrote the book.

EI: What were some of the best bonding experiences you had over food, either on this movie or elsewhere?

MS: We bonded. I mean, I knew Stanley, but I thought, “Well, I might as well invite him over for dinner,” so he came and I decided I’d make something special, and it was not quite done when he arrived, and so he came in and completely took over in the kitchen.

ST: It’s untrue.

MS: It’s totally true.

ST: We tried to do it together, but we had too much wine. “Why are you doing that way?”

MS: “Is that what you’re going to do? Seriously, I’m just asking.” [Laughs]

ST: “Why do you hold it that way?”

MS: “Can I just…it’s okay. I can show you an easier way.” Boom. It was out of my hands. He’s just a great chef, and I’m a cook.

ST: You’re very kind. It was a fun night, but we didn’t eat until about 11:00 or so. My wife Kate came and said, “What time are we eating?” I said, “I think we’ll be done cooking about eight.” She goes, “We’re not going to make that.”

ST: I would’ve been curious to spend some time with Walter Winchell, not because he was the nicest guy in the world but because he was so fascinating.

EI: How hard or easy has it been, Meryl, to stay focused with all the success you’ve had in recent years? Also, can you talk about how challenging it was sustaining Julia’s voice?

MS: I didn’t think about it. I really didn’t think about either sustaining my career or my voice. I haven’t really thought about it. I’m like every other actor. I’ve been unemployed more than I’ve been working because of the nature of what we do. We just have a lot of downtime, even though it seems like you’re working, working, working. So I’ve never gotten used to either working or being out of work, so it’s a very uncertain life and there are only a few people that would sign up to be married to someone else doing that. My husband is an artist and he understands the vagaries of the job. I just take it as every day is a miracle, and I’m really glad that I’m still working and that people are not sick of me. Even I’m sick of me a little bit. [Laughs]

EI: How do you deal with all the accolades?

MS: Fortunately, the blogespshere supplies you with the other side of all the accolades. [Laughs] Just sign on and get humbled.

EI: Earlier, you had a hard time committing to acting. What were some of the other things you were taking seriously at that time?

MS: When I was in drama school, I was obsessed with Jonathan Schell’s book, Fate of the Earth. I’ve always been interested in environmental issues and I still am. That seems to me be worthwhile work, but over time I understood just what I think from other people’s work — we need art as much as we need good works. You need it like food. You need it for inspiration to keep going on the days you’re low. We need each other in that way. I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that you can make a contribution. I’ve even reconciled myself to the fact that even my children might choose this profession. They seem to be, and now that’s okay. Really I was pushing the sciences, but it’s just not going to happen.

EI: What were your favorite food memories — chefs and restaurants — from life in New Jersey?

MS: Great tomatoes, but my mother was the “I Hate To Cook” cookbook. Peg Bracken. I remember when I was ten, going up to a little girl’s house up the street, and she and her mother were sitting at the table and they were doing something to tennis balls, and I said, “What are you doing?” They said, “Making mashed potatoes.” I said, “What do you mean? Mashed potatoes come in a box.” They were potatoes. They were peeling potatoes, and I had never seen a real potato. My mother’s motto was, “If it’s not done in 20 minutes, it’s not dinner.” She had a lot that she wanted to do, and cooking wasn’t one of those things. My food memories…I think Julia Child really did change the whole… I recently found my knitting book at the bottom of a knitting bag from 1967. It wasn’t a knitting book. It was a magazine that had some knitting patterns in it and it was called Women’s Day from 1967. It’s filled with recipes and food ads, and it’s all Delmonte canned peas, Delmonte canned corn, Delmonte peas and corn, green beans, and all the recipes are like, “Take ground meat and put artificial mashed potatoes, layer it, top it off with tomato sauce out of a jar, put it in the oven and presto, it’s dinner.” This is how we ate. People forget. Julia changed the way people thought about cooking. It was great.

EI: What’s your greatest passion?

MS: Oh gosh. This week? I don’t have one.

EI: At 6’2″, do you think Julia’s tallness affected the way people treated her?

MS: Yes.

EI: How did you do that for the movie?

MS: I just wore high heels. [Laughs]

EI: That was it?

MS: Sure. No other tricks of the trade. [Laughs]

'Julie & Julia' is in theaters now from Columbia Pictures