Julianne Moore on The Kids Are All Right

While doing promotional rounds for The Kids Are All Right, Julianne Moore gave us the scoop on her latest role, as one half of a lesbian couple whose life is upended when their teenage kids reach out to their sperm-donor dad (Mark Ruffalo). We learned at least four things about her:

— She and onscreen wife Annette Bening had easy chemistry. “Someone said ‘you have chemistry with Mark and Annette. And Stuart Blumberg, our co-writer, said ‘that’s because you’re pansexual.’ But you have chemistry with somebody because of a certain kind of luck—and I think desire too, to make a connection onscreen. With Annette, one thing we had going for us was that we’d both been in long-term relationships and we’re both parents. She has four kids, I have two, so this is not a paradigm that’s unfamiliar to us—it’s something that we’re living.”

— She prefers directors who take a step back. “With the really detailed ones, you’re like ‘well, you do it your way.’ I really do feel like it’s my responsibility to figure it out. I need to understand it myself so I can do my part of the job and be a conduit. Otherwise, they don’t want an actor, they want an avatar, a puppet. And the great thing about film is the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Everyone has something that they do well, hopefully, and I’m not going to operate a camera the way my friend Mitch can. You all have to operate with your strengths.”

— She helped recruit Bening to the film. “[Director] Lisa Cholodenko had a short list of people and said ‘What do you think about Annette Bening? Because she’s the one I really see in this.’ And I was like ‘That sounds great.’ And I didn’t know her, but I said I’d email her. So I did, because it’s a way to cut through—these things can take months. You send a script to an agent, somebody reads it, they pass it along…but you can get a response from a peer generally pretty quickly.”

— She’s happy to take on movies with marital themes. “When you start out in this business and you’re twenty-one years old you’re going to play a teenager or someone right out of college. Now I’m in my forties and I’m playing a lot of people who have dilemmas common to people in their forties, like being married for a really long time. Zadie Smith did this book on criticism, and she said that somebody had dismissed Steven Spielberg as being a family filmmaker as if family weren’t the major narrative in people's lives, and it’s a really great statement. There’s so much to mine in family and marriage and relationships. That’s all we do—aside from going to work.”

From: http://fashion.elle.com/