Why Mia Wasikowska is a secret star

Talented: Actress Mia Wasikowska. Picture: AP Source: AP

Megan Lehman, The Sunday Telegraph, reports

Soft-spoken and private, the gorgeously gamine Mia Wasikowska has largely flown under the radar at home while quietly taking over Hollywood.

And under that delicate exterior lies a somewhat mutinous soul.

Wasikowska admits she's drawn to rebellious characters and her latest role, as a preacher's daughter in John Hillcoat's Lawless, is no exception.

"It's not necessarily a conscious decision," she says. "But then, looking back at it, I guess there's a through-line where my characters are often at odds with their time and the expectations that are upon them and I find that really interesting."

From whimsical fairytale heroine to worldly LA teenager, Wasikowska's roles have shown an actress keen to explore the many facets of human nature.

And after a star-making turn anchoring Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland and critical acclaim in films such as Jane Eyre and The Kids Are All Right, the 22-year-old Canberra-born actress is fast gaining on her idol Cate Blanchett as one of the country's most sought-after stars.

Time magazine named her one of their 100 Most Influential People and she has won praise from Meryl Streep and her Albert Nobbs co-star Glenn Close.

In Lawless, we first meet Wasikowska's bonnet-clad Bertha Minnix petting a timid fawn and being properly pious and dutiful. But soon she's flirting with danger in the form of moonshiner Shia LaBeouf.

"(I'm interested in) the struggle all these characters have between how they're perceived and how they perceive themselves," she says.

The middle child of two visual artists, Wasikowska has a keen interest in photography and prefers an unfussy style when it comes to fashion, although she's currently starring in a Marie Antoinette-inspired campaign as the new face of designer Miu Miu.

She is rarely photographed out and about and her love life remains oddly unscrutinised, so how does she manage to keep such a low profile?

"I don't think I'm that interesting to (the paparazzi) yet. I never get bothered, I can usually sneak back home really easily. I just hang out with my friends and read books and watch movies, play with my nephew who's 1 1/2 now - all very simple things."

Her presence provides a welcome softer note in the blood-soaked Lawless, with its tommy guns and hooch-swilling outlaws. Based on real-life Prohibition bootleggers, the movie follows the fortunes of the Bondurant brothers, whose thriving backwoods operation draws the attention of crooked city cops.

Australian director Hillcoat's second collaboration with screenwriter-composer Nick Cave (after the Aussie western The Proposition) has a testosterone-heavy cast of A-listers including LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce and Gary Oldman.

Adding another touch of femininity is Jessica Chastain, as Hardy's love interest.

"The female characters in the story were a contrast to the more brutal elements in the movie," Wasikowska says.

She was particularly pleased to have so many Aussies working on the film.

"I continue to bump into Australians on set. Even the one I'm about to start filming (The Double, an upcoming comedy inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novella) - Noah Taylor's on that."

She has also wrapped horror film Stoker, in which she plays Nicole Kidman's daughter, and is to join Cate Blanchett in filming Carol, an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel.

"I'm really excited to work with (Cate). It still doesn't quite feel real."

- Lawless opens Thursday

Moonshine and vanity

 

Guy Pearce had some tonsorial ideas for his role in Lawless.

Philippa Hawker, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports

It’s the eyebrows you notice first. Or rather, their absence. Guy Pearce is one of the stars of Lawless, a period film from the team of director John Hillcoat (The Road, The Proposition) and Nick Cave, who has written the screenplay and co-written the score. Pearce has chosen to portray his character, a brutal deputy, as a man who has taken the notion of hair care to a whole new level. He is shaved and styled to within an inch of his life. Lawless is a rural gangster movie, set in Franklin County, Virginia, during the Depression. It focuses on a family of bootleggers plying their trade under the semi-tolerant eyes of the local authorities. But there's a new figure in the frame: Charlie Rakes (Pearce), a vicious and calculating special deputy who has arrived from Chicago and wants to hold the bootleggers to account, by any means he can.

The film is based on real events, although its original source is a best-selling novel, The Wettest Country in the World, by Matt Bondurant. His grandfather was one of three brothers who operated an illicit still, and he drew on archives and family stories for his account of a resilient family business with some very particular ways of doing things.

Pearce began to read the novel, then decided he didn't want to confuse details of book and film, and would focus completely on the script. In the book, Rakes was a local character, but Cave has made him a figure from the big city, a dandy and a violent man, as fastidious as he is ferocious.

''Nick said the reason he wanted to make me so judgmental and so vain and so disgusted by everything around him is that he wanted him to seem like an absolute outsider,'' Pearce says. ''He is entering a world he has no understanding of whatsoever.''

The Bondurant boys are stubborn men who barely seem interested in profit, and certainly don't care for conspicuous consumption. Tom Hardy plays the eldest, Forrest, a man who simply wants to continue bootlegging, without taking orders from anyone else, whether they are criminals or representatives of law and order. Convinced of his invincibility, he seems almost recklessly committed to doing things his way. Jason Clarke is Howard, the second brother; Shia LaBeouf is the youngest, Jack, who seems enthusiastic but ill-equipped for the challenges of the family business.

Pearce's notion about the shaved eyebrows was, he says, ''based on what Nick had said about the vanity of the character. The combination of vanity and disdain for the people he has come to deal with. It is an indication of his judgment of the world, and of his distaste for dirt and extraneous hair. I thought eyebrows were something he wanted to get rid of.''

Before shooting started, Pearce mentioned this idea to Hillcoat, who was slightly dubious. So he held back, until he arrived in the US, and started going through reference photographs of people from the period. Pearce was struck by the severity of some of the haircuts, in particular by the image of a man who had shaved an extra-wide parting into his hair. Opting for this, he pleaded the shaving case again. ''I said, if we take the eyebrows off, it's going to give this strange, nude creepiness, and John said, 'Yes, you're right.'''

There's also something about Charlie - his extreme dapperness, his sharp suits, his manicured, coiffed, controlled look - that proclaims who he is. It's a way of asserting himself, Pearce suggests: he is drawing attention to himself, in the same way a police siren proclaims the presence and actions of the law.

There were risks, Pearce acknowledges, that he could easily push the characterisation too far. ''Some people really hate the performance,'' he says, frankly. ''They go, 'It's so camp and over the top, what the hell were you thinking?' And other people say, 'This is brilliant, this is what happens in life, strange people end up in unusual places, and there's a total mismatch.''' For Pearce, the divided opinions are not an issue ''as long as I feel I am honouring what Nick and John believe is right''.

Thematically, there are some similarities between Lawless and The Proposition, Hillcoat and Cave's first movie collaboration, in which Pearce also starred. It is set in the Australian outback in the 19th century, but it is also the story of a group of outlaw brothers, and of a lawman determined to hold them to account (although on that occasion Pearce was one of the brothers). But there's not the bleak, visionary intensity of The Proposition in Lawless.

To Pearce, ''Nick has a fascinating view of the world. And doing The Proposition, I felt that I was inside a Nick Cave song. The script is the most extraordinarily written script I have ever seen. There's something so formal, and yet so free and limitless, about his work.''

He is also struck, he says, by the female figures in Lawless: Jessica Chastain, as a woman from Chicago, a cool and elegant refugee from the big city and the Mob, who becomes close to Forrest, and Mia Wasikowska, as a preacher's daughter who is wooed by the ardent Jack. They are strong characters, he says, but they are also the product of a deeply romantic vision: that's who Cave is, he says, ''even though there is this Prince of Darkness whirlwind that seems to surround him''.

The scenes of violence in the film are relatively straightforward for an actor, Pearce says. ''I'm pretty good at that stuff, and Shia was right into it. The great thing about working with someone like Shia is that he is prepared to fling himself around like mad, just like I was when I was younger. You can't have any limits on this stuff, although you've obviously got to be safe.''

The important thing, he adds, is that ''if you are ever going to do anything violent in a film, it has to be realistic, and it has to be original. And to be as scary as real violence is.'' If you happen to see it, you can't stop thinking about it. And that's something directors often forget.

What's notable about the violence in The Proposition, he says, was what came next: ''There was the short, sharp burst, and then the shock afterwards. That's what is really effective. In a lot of films, the focus is on the actual violence, and everyone seems to be quite flippant afterwards, as if it has just gone away.''

■Lawless opens on October 11.

Australian films prepare to storm Cannes Film Festival 2012

Source: The Sunday Telegraph

The Sunday Telegraph reports

Australia will storm the Cannes Film Festival with both barrels blazing this week and, yes, there will be blood.

A bootlegging western, a hard-boiled gangster story and an explosive Southern noir tale will see a posse of Aussies swagger onto the Croisette, gunning for accolades and attention in a festival pegged to be the most violent yet.

You want names?

Nicole Kidman vamps it up as a bleached blonde floozy in The Paperboy, Kylie Minogue turns auteur's muse in the eccentric French indie Holy Motors, Mia Wasikowska dons a bonnet to play an Amish lass alongside Guy Pearce's sadistic sheriff in Lawless, while the criminally underrated Ben Mendelsohn gets a chance to shine opposite Brad Pitt's mob enforcer in Killing Them Softly.

Cate Blanchett Will Star in Upcoming Terrence Malick Films "Lawless" and "Knight of Cups"

Michael Gioia, Playbill.com, reports

Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett will star in two upcoming films from director Terrence Malick, "Lawless" and "Knight of Cups," according to Deadline.com.

In "Lawless," Blanchett will star alongside Ryan Gosling ("The Ides of March"), Christian Bale ("The Dark Knight"), Rooney Mara ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo") and Haley Bennett ("Marley & Me").

In "Knight of Cups," the cast will also include Bale and Isabel Lucas ("Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen").

Both films, from FilmNation Entertainment, are currently in pre-production and will shoot back-to-back in 2012. Sarah Green and Nicolas Gonda will serve as the producers on both films.

Blanchett has been seen in Sydney Theatre Company's productions of Uncle Vanya, A Streetcar Named Desire, Oleanna and Hedda Gabler, among others. She won an Academy Award for her performance in "The Aviator" and was nominated for "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," "I'm Not There" and "Notes on a Scandal."