InsideOut Interview: Melissa Leo

by Amanda Schmidt / Owen Lipstein March/April 2009

No, she didn’t bring home the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her portrayal of Ray Eddy in Courtney Hunt’s “Frozen River.” But she did win the nomination. Plus an Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Female, a National Board of Review Spotlight Award, and the wildly enthusiastic cheers of so many of us—feats which may be just as sweet. Yet to spend any time at all with the 48-year-old actress is to realize that when you’ve been paid to do precisely what you love for as long as Melissa has, the award is obvious: It’s the work itself. And despite her numerous roles in films like “21 Grams,” TV shows like “Homicide: Life on the Streets,” and her work with colleagues like Robert De Niro, when Leo’s in the Hudson Valley, she’s just a local girl. And she’s not acting.

Amanda Schmidt: When we spoke last year with Courtney Hunt, the film’s director and screenwriter, she told us she would entertain the notion of another actress playing Ray, as others had suggested, only if they could find one better than you. In Hunt’s words: “And of course they never could.” Can you explain why you were so perfect for the role of Ray?

Melissa Leo: It’s nice to feel that, indeed, I am perfect for something. And it’s really true, because it’s not just the things that everyone now is able to get to know about Ray herself, but also that the playing of her in the conditions—with the circumstances [of shooting the film]—could not have been done by many. I have not only a tolerance, but an enjoyment of certain kinds of obstacles, especially in my work. I think that acting is the avoidance of, and way around, obstacles, and that then keeps the actor busy and alive.
So [I was able] to make sure that I didn’t get sick while we shot in the below-zero temperatures, and to make sure that there would be a continuity that I am acutely conscious of in the film, and learned a great deal about while I worked on “Homicide” all those years—when you jump from one thing to another, but need a seamless edit. And that’s something that makes me very proud: Editors for many years now have complimented me highly and thanked me for what I gave them to work with.

AS: For making their job so easy?

ML: Well, for assisting them in their job, basically, because it’s a collaborative art. And I’m aware that the cinematographer is working, and his gaffer with him, and his sound recordist; and that a lot of times the best of things can’t be used because they can’t be cut, because the hair is different and the scarf is different. And it makes a stilted continuity, because of the machine that makes the continuity happen when you have a lot of funds. When you have no funds, it’s best to truncate a lot of what we’ve learned to do to make movies. And I knew that I would have the ability to truncate the actors’ needs so that we could simply do the work, and that they could use everything they got because they did, in fact, have to use almost every inch of film.

AS: Really? There was almost nothing left on the floor?

ML: Almost nothing left over. So that is definitely a very important part of the story of “Frozen River,” and why I am perfect for it. And Courtney and her talent and her inexperience was exactly what the project needed, because she needed to remain open to the knowledge she invited to the set with her. And she knew how to hold to what she needed, and what she needed from them.

AS: Did the inexperience of Courtney as a first-time director make her more flexible?

ML: In a way it’s a flexibility, and in a way it’s the preparation she had for it. She had taken, quite frankly, all her life and put it into that feature. After we had made the short, she said, “OK, I’m gonna make this the ringer”—and very intentionally laid those things into the script that make it work. The screenplay nomination is probably more far accurate than my nomination.

AS: I think they’re both pretty accurate.

ML: Well I had the best role, I know that for sure. I haven’t seen the other films, but I’ll guarantee you I had the best role, without question. And [beyond a certain point], acting ability, in my opinion, is something on which you cannot be judged.

AS: I have to say, I’m not sure the other nominees in your category could have played Ray so convincingly.

ML: I don’t know, because I’ve never worked with any of those women. So I don’t know what their work habits are. And that would be the thing that, in fact, it hinged on. And that perhaps some of the issues that some people might have with Angelina’s performance, which I have not seen, has to do with her being caught in that great big machine, and perhaps not her own choices. Who knows?

AS: Are you saying that sometimes you get much better work from films that have far smaller budgets?

ML: You have more freedom to work. So depending on your own ability and consciousness and way of working, it can be a great gift. And many a fine actor talks about how a little machine is such sweet work. I mean, it can be the biggest pain in the ass, on the other hand—especially when you’re working on something that doesn’t have the quality on the page that you’d hope it would.

AS: You saw a lot of quality on the page. You pursued Courtney.

ML: I would hardly call it pursuing her. But I wasn’t gonna let her go. It had been deliriously wonderful to play Ray in the short, and to work with Misty and work with Courtney. And Courtney had spun it, then, into a feature that was crafted for Misty and me. And it was such a good story, and nobody had ever told her that it wasn’t a good story. It had such a power to it on the page.
At SUNY Purchase, [Professor] Joan Potter cemented for me the most important tool—the first tool for the actor is the script—even before the conversation with the director. No matter who is in the hierarchy of names and blah, blah, blah, [the quality] must come from the page first.

AS: How did you like working with Misty Upham?

ML: Misty is a gift to the performance of Ray, completely and 100 percent. Not only because of her performance of Lila, which is nothing like Misty “Giggles” Upham. She’s one of the most gregarious young women that I know. She’s acutely shy, as most good actors are. And on the other hand, once you get to know her, she is obscene and grotesque, and very funny and very bright, and very talented. And we would be in the car, and I’m well-known for my seriousness—which I have learned to reign into a helping hand, instead of a bitching moan—and I would get really serious, and she would so call me on it in the funniest ways, and at the most appropriate moments. Her timing is so divine. And she is so talented.

AS: Her character, Lila—a Native American woman—is so great because she isn’t a stereotype.

ML: And Misty is so grateful for that opportunity to play somebody who is not exactly that—some stoic, wind-watching [caricature]—and then there’s the self-oppression that comes up in her, because she thinks about playing these high-class Native children of the casino money-holders that live in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. But I say, Go be a doctor on “ER,” Misty. You know? Go be a techno geek in the Army. And that some way, if she pursued that kind of work, that kind of work might open to her, and that could change the world.

AS: So often we don’t create our own boundaries, but take on the ones that have been created for us.

ML: Exactly.

AS: Why is this movie so important to women, and for women?

ML: I hate to make a gender distinction with it at all, ’cause my greatest joy is the way that it is enjoyed across class, and race, and gender and sexuality. There’s something in it, and I think it boils down to this: that everybody’s got a mother. And that however pissed off we are at our mothers, that whatever the situation might have been, there is that connection to what that woman [Ray, in this case] actually did do.
And I think the thing that’s most delightful to note about the film, as far as women are concerned, is that Reed Dawson Morano shot it; and Kate Williams edited it; and we had two females, Heather Rae and Molly Conners, as producers, [along with] one fellow, Chip Hourihan, who had been with Courtney the longest of the three of them. And all three were completely integral to the making of that film. Bette on the crew, you know, and your various and sundry other women that tend to work the set, costumers and make-up people. And Courtney herself.

AS: Another Academy Award nominee, for Best Original Screenplay.

ML: Yes. And a week or so before the Academy Awards, we went to the nominee luncheon. So, all the nominees are invited from all the categories. And the point of the party is for us to file up onto a raised dais, and be announced and given a very grand and awesome certificate of nomination. And I’ve been asked several times now, what the most notable thing about it was. And it was that the few women who were up there were primarily actresses in the sea of men, in their dark suits, in which we stood. And Courtney was guided by the ushers into this front-and-center seat. And there she sat: f**king writer/director.

AS: Helping to break yet another glass ceiling.

ML: Way through and beyond it. And it’s not a fluke. There is a talent and a thought and an intention behind Courtney. She is very careful how she plays her game. So I don’t even fret for her too terribly much.

AS: You’ve worked on a lot of films that involve people who are local to this area, or that were filmed here. How do you like working in your own back yard?

ML: Well, the Hudson Valley is my chosen home, the place where I came to raise my boy. It had something to do with southeastern Vermont, where I was an adolescent and where I could imagine him being an adolescent; and it had something to do with being in New York state, with proximity to New York City. And it’s probably one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places on the planet Earth, in a simple, gentle, ancient way. There’s an ancientness about this side of the continent that the other side does not have. And so to be home and work is fabulous.
I love to go and be in a hotel, and be away from anything other than the work that I’m doing when I’m doing it. I’m, quite frankly, happy to work anywhere I go. And if it’s here, that’s heavenly; and if it just means that I get to come home here afterwards, it’s fine by me, too. I think some of the benefit of the backyard work is that it’s really taken people knowing me to be interested in working with me—and that somehow my name alone, or image alone, has not broken that glass ceiling. I’ve worked and I’ve had a great career, but it sort of takes being known somehow by the hirer.

AS: Yeah, it’s the big, sort of Hollywood PR machine thing.

ML: There is, there’s a whole thing that has very little to do with acting, in the end, that has to do with hiring and Hollywood, and it being the, you know, world center of film. Bollywood makes more movies, but still—Bollywood’s movies are based on what they learn from Hollywood. However, the film industry began in New York.

AS: How do you see the film industry progressing here in the
Hudson Valley?

ML: Here? The industry could do this all over the world right now. One of the films I was in, “Ball Don’t Lie,” was shot out in Venice, California. And it’s going to be the first direct-to-Internet release of a film. They have cut a deal with somebody. And I don’t even know if they’ve made a public announcement about it. But that notion of how many possible viewers—’cause when you push that button, man, it goes everywhere. So here in the Hudson Valley and out in Boise, Idaho, and wherever it might be around the world, the directors I’ve met in Europe, from Iceland, from a little island in Greece,
are making films locally, distributing worldwide. It’s the future of film for
the world and for here.

AS: That seems to be the way a lot of things are going, back to the local.



ML: It has to be done. It’s what my mother has shown me all my 48 years, she and my dad too, really, in many, many ways. We have lived conservatively, not only by necessity, but by choice. And we found a way for even the times below the poverty level to look more like survival than poverty. And it’s time for everybody to do that. And it’s really not so scary if we remember that when our mother needs to heal and get rid of disease, she burns the forest. And that is when the new growth that we are hoping, praying, and now have a hope in hell to pray for—that’s when new growth can begin.
So it’s OK. Hang tight. Make another plan. If you’re thinking about another plan, instigate it now. Do that thing that’s in your heart. Get in your boat and float in it.

AS: Yeah, this economy shift seems to be causing a consciousness shift, and some of us, for the first time, are holistically examining our values about what’s really important, and what we really want our lives to mean.

ML: And everyone will do that. As soon as they stop whining and screaming and crying and worrying, everyone will do that. ’Cause there is becoming a collective consciousness—there are so many [people] thinking the same thing right now, everywhere. We really are. And it doesn’t matter if I’m Caucasian and she’s a Mohawk. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re all here together, and there are a limited amount of resources. And I think we can be just fine if we recognize that, simply recognize that and live within our means. Stop wanting so much, and see what we have.

AS: Will a struggling economy make the success of small-budget films like “Frozen River” easier or harder?

ML: It’s very hard to say, because the thing with a small budget [is that] anybody can just pick up a camera, and so it can water down what film is. And independent [film] is a broader category, even, because there’s independent that has more money than I most of the time work with. But it can also push the envelope of what film is. The likelihood of putting “Frozen River” or something akin to it in the can is very small. I can look at projects that had quality and merit and worth, and I can tell you why you don’t know them.

AS: Why? Is there a common cause?

ML: Yeah, there’s a commonality: It’s not anybody’s game. And it takes certain kinds of collaborators to do the thing that works. And writers will hold their scripts because they’re afraid directors will change them, or they think they’re really directors and just wrote the script to direct it.

AS: So it’s not really about the money.

ML: No, it doesn’t have to do with the money. It has to do with the talent, and how it works together. And one of the things I really cringe at on a set is, I’ll say, “I’ve got to take a pee.” So [over the walkie-talkies] they call out: “10-100. Melissa’s 10-100.” Now everybody in a five-block radius knows that I’m urinating—and they use it so nobody knows you’re urinating!
But I brought up 10-100 to say the other thing they say across the walkie-talkies, which is “The talent’s on its way.” And I always sort of cringe, and think: Well, are we not joining quite a lot of talent that’s been working very hard for the last three hours? So when I say talent, I mean the talent of everyone there. It’s everyone there, not what the industry thinks of as talent.

AS: Did you ever see yourself with a nomination for an Academy Award?

ML: No. No, and I never had a wedding. I’ve never been married. And I never had a graduation.

AS: You didn’t go?

ML: Nope. In eighth grade I went through the process, and the headmaster told me just before that of course he wouldn’t embarrass me by not keeping me in the procession, but I would notice that my diploma was not signed, and until I completed that work... Oh, great, OK.
I have my GED hanging on the wall under my son’s very handsome diploma from high school. And college, I left before [graduating], so I’ve never had a graduation. The Woodstock Film Festival has included me in festival ceremonies over the years, and sort of taught me the ways of them, ’cause really, big or little or whatever, it’s sort of the same rundown.
People ask, “Did you dream about this, did you watch that?” I never really watched the Academy Awards, not that I haven’t seen them. I can’t remember who won what or any of that. I don’t retain information that way of any kind. And no, I have no reason to imagine that I might [win]. I like to keep my goals within reach—you know, with some distance, but obtainable somehow. So I have said, consistently, that no, I had never dreamt, never thought—
But I remembered, just this very morning, that when I was probably about 15-and-a-half, right after I finished my formal education. I had a dream that always stuck with me. It included all of those logos, from the mountain top to the statuesque woman in her robe, with the lion roaring. And it was me on the mountain with the torch. It was definitely me. And maybe that was “the dream.” I don’t know.