Jennifer Garner

Emmanuel Itier: Did you train for this?

Jennifer Garner: No, actually. I did have to get back into shape because I’d had a baby. I think she was seven months old when I started the movie and I hadn’t really gotten into shape yet, so I did train. Just physically, I ended up training with the Boston University hockey team. They were doing their conditioning and strength training in the summer, so I just kind of joined in. That’s a great motivation, having a bunch of 22-year-old guys who are in great shape. You kind of go, Oh! That was fun. But as far as the fight is concerned, if that’s what you are referring to, normally we train ourselves silly, having the choreography down, learning the style, and I kept saying to my stunt double, because we’ve worked together forever and ever and ever, “When are we going to have fight rehearsals?” She and I like to be really prepared. And she said she didn’t know and they kept telling her we didn’t need them. And sure enough, the day we showed up, they said, “Okay, here’s the things: the camera is here, the camera is here, you need to get these couple of elements in, and then just bite, scratch, kick, just like you would.” Pete wanted it to be as raw as possible and knew I could do the choreographed stuff and wanted to make sure that I didn’t kind of rest on that, and just said, “You are going to be killed. What are you going to do?” And so that’s what we did. And at first, I thought there were a couple times where we were thrown against the wall and I thought I’d just let Shauna do that because it looks like it’s going to really hurt. But she said, “No, I can put a little pad here and it’s so fun.” So I said, “Oh good, I’ll do it!” And it was so fun. With all that stuff, you really get your adrenaline going.

EI: How was the gun training?

JG: It was fine. I didn’t like it. I don’t like guns in general. I don’t relish acting with them, even. I’d much rather do something more legitimately physical, but it was actually really helpful to learn what I was doing properly, because on Alias, while I used them quite often, it wasn’t something we had ever taken the time to say, This is what you are doing. We did with so many other things on Alias, but guns just got thrown in the second season by the time we were up and running. They handed me one and I always felt a bit Charlie’s Angels, so it’s good to learn the proper technique, and we all had a common vocabulary then.

EI: What caught your attention in this movie?

JG: I liked that you saw the situation from both sides–it wasn’t just black and white. And I liked that you saw all of the characters in their full lives. It wasn’t just a Saudi Arabian police officer–you saw him at home as a father and a husband. It just reminded you to not look at the stereotype, to not look at the accent or someone’s clothes. It just reminded you that everyone wants the same things, ultimately. We all want a safe and protected world for our kids, and that we actually have a much more common goal than we realize.

EI: How was shooting in a place where women don’t have a lot of rights?

JG: It was really interesting to play this woman that has worked hard enough that she’s at the top of her game. She’s respected at the White House with the top brass of the FBI. And while she’s still young, they take her training and her intelligence seriously. And to then be put in a place where you are not allowed to go to the grocery store without a male relative accompanying you, or are not allowed to have an education or all kinds of things that are kind of amazing, it was really interesting to play those moments of, Oh god, I’m not invited to the palace? And also, she accepts it. She’s a grown up. She knows what it’s going to be before she even gets there, but I do think that in that is a great reminder of the need to fight for human rights, women’s rights, and minority rights all over the world and keep it as a priority.

EI: How long were you away from your baby?

JG: Not for one minute. She was in the trailer so I was nursing, so I would just say I have to go. It was a bunch of guys so they were scared. If you just say “boobs” or “nursing,” they freak out and say, “Go, go, go.” So I would run down and take my gun off and take care of her, put her down for a nap, and I’d tell her I’m going back up. And I’d go back up and I’d get a text message from the nanny saying, “What was that explosion? It woke her up.” And I’d say, “Oh no!” And then she’d go home and my husband was there, so he was with her in the afternoon. This movie was great because I made it home in time to put her down and give her her bath almost every night.

EI: Aren’t you both working now?

JG: Yeah, but they don’t all happen at once, the way it seems like they do. I haven’t worked for a year, and Ben has been working on things, but not at work for a while. He did Gone Baby Gone, and I was in Boston with him. That’s why I was with the BU team. And then he came to Arizona with us and he started to edit. And he would edit in the morning and be with her in the afternoon. You are always overwhelmed by it, but when you get there, it kind of works out.

EI: Do you talk about Hollywood all the time?

JG: Almost not at all. Sometimes I’ll ask him, “People keep saying…” “Are you doing this movie?” and he’d say, “Oh yeah.” Or I’ll say, “I keep forgetting to tell you we sold the script for my production company.” And he’ll say, “Oh yeah.” And then weeks later, I’ll ask if I ever told him the story of the script we sold, and he’ll say, “Oh yeah, what is it?” We, like any other new parents, talk about our baby.

EI: Is ignoring the tabloids the way to stay out of them?

JG: He taught me that you cannot read that stuff. It’s poison. It’s horrible to read anything written about you. I would read the positive stuff if somebody went through, just to make myself feel good. But it’s too dangerous because one sentence will be positive and the next is just cutting your head off, so I just stay away from all of it. We try our very, very best to stay out of that world. We try to be boring.

EI: Is it important for your daughter to see you playing strong female roles?

JG: It is, but it’s also important for her to see me doing just a wide variety of things so I can’t say that every role I’ll ever do is going to be some kind of strident, strong female who is ready to kill or whatever she needs to do. But yes, I am attracted to strong women, both in life and roles. I think it’s because I want so badly to be one, and playing one makes me feel a little stronger myself, even if it’s cheating. It’s kind of a cheating way to get there. But I do think about roles differently since I have her.

EI: The most dangerous thing you’ve done off screen?

JG: I don’t like doing dangerous things myself. It would never occur to me to do anything. Now I’m more willing to and more attracted to the idea of jumping out of a plane or something, but I’ll wait until my kids are a bit older to do that.

EI: Would you like to do comedy again?

JG: Yeah, I would like to. I hope to do something like that sometime soon. It was really fun, and I’m ready to just have fun doing a movie.

EI: Working with Peter Berg?

JG: Peter is crazy as a person, and he seems like a total fool. He sets up pranks all the time on the set, like dumb five-year-old boy pranks. He’s an actor and now he’s a director, but now he’s dying for the attention of being an actor. He just can’t get enough of the camera. So the second the behind-the-scenes camera was on him, he would just turn into an idiot trying to show off for them. One time he said to the camera, “What do you do with an actress who isn’t behaving?” And then he turned and hauled back and punches me in the gut as hard as he can, and he’s a boxer. I was wearing a Kevlar vest as part of my wardrobe, and he thought that A) Kevlar protects you from impact, and B) that I would be wearing a full-on Kevlar vest. It’s a costume, plus the boob part was ripped out because I was breastfeeding and I needed to expand. Plus I had ice packs on, so it’s not like I’m wearing a real Kevlar vest anyway, and it wouldn’t have protected me. So there I am totally with the wind knocked out of me. I am a girl. I don’t like to be hit. I am in a fight scene, then I have adrenaline going and I can take whatever you throw at me. But other than that, don’t actually hit me! So of course, I had to reverse it and I called the medic over. Well, the crew did because I felt bad, but then I went along with it. Some of the cameramen called the medic and pretended to be checking on me and saying this rib might be broken. Pete was walking by still with the camera on him, and he saw me and he said, “Oh my God, what is it?” I said, “I’m sorry Pete, I think my rib might be broken.” And he turned to the camera and said, “Cut, cut, cut!” So he knew he was going to get in trouble. He was so nervous because Ben was visiting that day and they are friends, and he was just so sure that Ben was going to be mad. Ben could beat him up with one hand tied behind his back. That’s the crazy thing about Pete. Underneath all of this wild kind of behavior and this ADD thing, where he is watching the monitor and listening to Christina Aguliera on his iPod and eating a sandwich and text messaging his friends, he had such a clear vision of what he wanted and he was so articulate about how to get us there. There were times in the movie where we were all clear about where we were, what’s happening. And he was like a laser, always knew exactly how to bring more clarity to the scene–what kind of improvisation needed to happen in order to bring light to something or make something funnier. So when Jamie and I saw the movie afterwards, we saw each other a couple of weeks later and we asked, “Did you have any idea he could do that?” I had no idea Pete knew what was going on, and he did. He’s really incredible.

EI: Which director do you compare him to?

JG: He is like a Paul Greengrass because ultimately, he is such a storyteller. I know on the set of Bourne Supremacy, there were times that it seemed like utter confusion, but Paul Greengrass, it seems like, had that same kind of like, “No, I know the story and I know what he have and what we need to get.” I think Pete is goofier and seems more like a hazard, but ultimately he has the same kind of vision.

EI: Would you still make a promotional video for the CIA?

JG: Yeah, absolutely, because what I did was a promotional video trying to recruit the best people possible for the CIA, which, if there is one thing you want to have happen in your intelligence agency, it’s to have the smartest people possible working for them. So yeah, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

EI: Working with Jamie Foxx?

JG: I loved working with Jamie Foxx. Wait until you guys have him. You’ll think everybody was so boring until Jamie. He’s so incredibly warm, and he makes you feel like you’ve known him your whole life the minute you meet him. He’s kind of intimidating because he can do anything. He can bust out into song or do a comedy bit that will have you rolling, and then he’s such a great dramatic actor. He’s so talented and the perfect guy for the role, because he is such a quiet leader. I can’t say enough about him. He’s a wonderful man. He’s a real gentleman, really proper with the ladies. Sometimes I would say, “Come on.” And he’s like, “No.” He tows the line. And then he’s just a beautiful actor.

EI: You’ve played Russian before?

JG: In Alias, I did a lot of Russian. I loved it. It was hard.

EI: Were there a lot of improv scenes?

JG: I couldn’t believe how much of the movie was improvised when I saw it. Even stuff that I had come up with I had forgotten, because when I watched it, I know the script pretty well. When did I say that? I don’t even remember. I don’t think that was even on my coverage, and they just caught everything. Instead of: you shoot this way, you stop, you turn the lights around, you shoot the other way, you stop. He shoots with three cameras all going at once, never stopping, always rolling, to the point where we would literally be rolling and we would just go back to the beginning and do it again without ever cutting, and somebody would run in and change the magazine of film on the camera without ever cutting because there were two others going, so we would just go and go and go. It was fun. It kept the momentum up.

EI: How did the deaths of the crewmembers affect the mood?

JG: It was really the young boy, Nick, that was hit by the SUV that was the real heart, just heartbreaking. The other ones were unrelated to the filming, but they were tragic anyway because you lose colleagues and it’s hard to believe. But Nick, it could have happened to anybody. It was no one’s fault, just one of those accidents. He was young and beloved by the crew, and it was right in the middle of a really hard shoot. I kept having to go to the hospital with heat stroke. Everyone is having this rough time, and then for this to happen, it was just unfathomable. And Pete, I have to say for all the shit I give him, he was such a leader during that time. He really stood up and was a man and said…he just insisted we do this in Nick’s honor, and we did. I don’t want to give up halfway through and have it have been for nothing. So it really was a galvanizing experience, and one I don’t think any of us will ever forget. I’ll never forget that morning.

EI: How do you balance acting and motherhood?

JG: I don’t think any working mother would tell you the balance of it is easy. You always feel like you should be in the other place. Whatever you are doing, you feel like, I should be at home or I should be at work. In a lot of ways, it’s much easier for actresses. Certainly for me, I have somebody that works with me, Violet, that she LOVES and that’s been with her since the beginning, and it’s easy for me to say, “Hey, don’t come today. I’m not working,” or “Just come during her nap. I’m going to run out and have a meeting.” So I really get to maximize my time with my daughter, and that’s a huge help. And on this movie, certainly she was there. She was young enough to not even be aware that I was working. And today, she is home with her dad. We just, it’s a constant juggling act, like for anyone else.

EI: What about another one?

JG: I said kids because in my mind we’ll eventually have more, but not yet. I’m going back to work in a month. They’ll be shocked if you tell them I’m expecting. No, I am not. I look forward to it, but I’m not anywhere…you can’t schedule a second one, unfortunately, even if you tried to.

EI: How do you stay in shape?

JG: I only drink liquids. I don’t eat real food. It’s really important to me. [Laughs] No, I just had a burger and fries! You have to be able to think at these things. You can’t have a little salad and keep going. No, I try to eat in a way that makes me feel good, so if that means a little bit of chocolate several times a day, I do that. I try not to use food as a way to reward myself. I’ve gotten into that trap before. Ah, that was so hard–I better have a bowl of ice cream. And I try to be smart and sensible and consistent about the way that I work out. If you demand of yourself that you work out really hard six days a week, to me you can only do that for so long before you say, “You know what? Screw it.” So I just try to never go a week without working out at least twice.

EI: Your nursing?

JG: I nursed for 14 months and then she was like, “Okay, I’m done.” And I thought that’s probably okay.

EI: The biggest surprise of motherhood?

JG: I really thought that I would leap back to my job. I really love what I do and I would have assumed that this whole last year, I haven’t been pregnant, and I thought I would have worked straight through, and I haven’t felt that way at all. I now have to love something almost too much in order to say yes to it because I just want to hang out with her, and I didn’t anticipate that. I thought that I was much more careerist than that.

EI: Favorite song for 2007?

JG: I’m the wrong person to ask. Whatever Jamie Foxx did. [Laughs]