ALISON PILL
J—Do you remember what inspired you to say that? “I’m going to take this more seriously now?” Was it a certain part?
A—It was an audition. I started coming down to New York before I moved and it was my last year of high school, maybe it was before then, but I just started coming down to New York for auditions and for theater, because I had never gotten hired or got auditions for theater in Toronto. Anyways, so I really wasn’t comfortable with theater, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I came down to New York and my agent took me to see Proof with Mary Louise Parker. And I was like, “Whoa! That’s what I should do, that’s what you can do on stage.” You can make weird personal choices; you can use your whole body. You can command that much. I went into an audition the next day and there was just a chair in the middle of the room and instead of doing what I usually did during auditions, which was just kind of perch on the edge of the chair and say my lines, I worked and memorized and used the chair. You know, trying to give myself some physicality, trying to sort of think about other things than just saying the lines right and hitting my mark. And that kind of flipped the switch for me.
J—Did it help you get away from yourself in some way? I mean, giving you a cast of things to do.
A—Yeah. Saying the lines and hitting your mark, you’ll probably do fine, if that’s what you’ve been doing the last while. You won’t get anywhere near the kind of power that somebody else can bring.
J—It’s true. I love the little things, the little doings, which communicate so much. Can we talk about Milk a little bit? What was that like for you? Did you audition?
A—Yeah, I auditioned for it and then I got it. [laughs]
J—And… The End? [laughs]
A—It was really neat. You know, I… [laughs]
J—…What was “neat” about it?
A—It was such a different shoot. I never knew what the camera was focused on. All of those scenes in the political office, in the mayor’s office, in wherever we were, we would just run them a few times and it wasn’t like, “Okay, now we’re doing this close up and then we’re doing a medium on this person.” It was like, “Run through it and we’ll set up some shots and we’ll do some stuff.” I never saw one monitor in the entire time we shot. We’d get ready in the morning and we’d go to set in this political office, which was actually where Harvey and everybody were during that time.
J—So, that must have inspired everyone…
A—Yeah. I got to meet the woman I played and her daughter and Cleve Jones was around on set everyday. We got to meet everybody who is still alive.
J—How was it working with Sean Penn and Gus Van Sant?
A—It was amazing!
J—I’m sure.
A—Gus doesn’t really say a lot and it took awhile for me to realize just what a light touch he has as a director.
J—By ‘light touch’ you mean…
A— I mean, the most you would usually get out him, if he was satisfied, was, “That was good”, and it took awhile for me to realize that was the highest compliment you could get. He’s like, “If I’ve moved on, that’s all you need to know.” [laughs]
J—Okay…
A—…And then I realized that the way he shot, the way he put everybody in a room together, the cast, and then kind of let it fly, just works when you put together the right group of people.
J—He doesn’t sound like he’s isolating people at all; he’s really bonding them. I feel as soon as you start saying, “This is your time for your close up,” it’s just sort of isolating, is it not?
A—And you stop kind of reacting in the same way. You stop leading your own character’s life.
J—Yeah.
A—Usually ‘cause you’re so focused on one moment or one thing, and in his way, it was like every moment counts.
J—How long were you on it for?
A—I was in San Francisco for about six weeks, I think? The whole shoot was two months and we had two weeks of rehearsal beforehand.
J—Well, the film was great. I loved it.
A—And Sean’s just a genius.
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