Annette Bening has never shied away from unsympathetic characters, from con artists to cheating housewives. Running with Scissors may take the cake. She plays Diedre Burroughs, an unbalanced mother so absorbed in her own therapy that she turns her son over to her psychiatrist’s family. She makes a lot of mistakes, but Bening doesn’t judge.
“A good actor doesn't judge the character,” she said. “None of us do. You have the luxury and the pleasure of just trying to get behind someone and say, 'Now, why?' That's the task. It's actually much easier to judge them. It's harder to then say, 'Well, why did they do what they do?' That doesn't mean that I can't still look at some of the things that she did and not feel horrified as a mother. I certainly do. The last time I saw it I just got a stomach ache. I just wanted to save the child. I just wanted to jump out of my seat and say, 'No. Wait a minute. Stop. Someone needs to protect this child.' But I think that's probably a reflection of the movie being a good movie because you feel that dramatic tension and for me it's worth it because of where it goes. He eventually does say, 'Okay, enough. I'm getting out of here. I'm going to transcend it.'”
Getting into such a character allows Bening to work out some of her own demons too. “I think that it's therapeutic. I hope it is. There are days it feels more like it's taking a toll, but I think that if you're at your best it's cathartic. I wish that I could always feel that. I did a play recently and I wanted to have that cathartic feeling every night and I feel like in a way that's what one should have, but some days you don't feel it as much and some days you feel that it's more of a wear and tear. It's so different on a film though because you're really only working on a given scene for maybe a day or two days. So you really only have to go down that road those times. It's not like repeating it over and over and over. So on those days there is an excitement even if it's a very painful thing. It'll be that thing of, 'What will happen?' That's the feeling. Maybe something surprising will happen, and that's what I want. I want to be off balance. I want to have that controlled anarchy because you are the author of your own out of control-ness. You want to find yourself on uncertain ground, not just playing someone who is unstable. Even with a stable character you want something surprising to happen hopefully because that's what the camera loves the most. That's what is great about film.”
Running with Scissors comes from Augusten Burroughs’ personal memoirs, so he was available to tell Bening more about his mother. “This is not his mother in my point of view. This is me playing someone that Ryan [Murphy] wrote about. This is an interpretation. This is a fiction and not a documentary about her, but it's clearly inspired by her, and so I had questions and he's so interesting to talk to. I don't know, but I think that as I've gotten older I've gotten more introspective and I've always been someone who looked at my childhood and my personal life carefully and as you get older you continue to go back to those stories and when you go back the way that you see certain events continues to change and who is highlighted at that Thanksgiving dinner or whatever event you're going back to in your childhood the main characters change and the themes change and what it all means changes. It's all kind of this ongoing search. It goes on your whole life. I think that he's someone who did it in a really penetrating way for himself and a life that had a lot of pain to it where he was not being protected when he should've been protected. He's got a lot to say and he's very articulate and he's very funny and I just find him fascinating as a human being to talk with on just about anything.”
Diedre Burroughs has dreams of being a famous, published poet. Unfortunately, she’s not that good. Bening is a success, and many other actors, both aspiring and established, look up to her.
“I'm very flattered and it means more to me than anything. It really does, and in fact probably to a fault. I was really thinking about this yesterday because I went to see the opera downtime which was just fantastic and I was thinking about how excited I get when I see something. I'm almost more of an audience than I am an actor. That's how I wanted to be an actress because I went and saw something in the theater and I thought, 'Oh, I want to be a part of that.' So I have to say that part of it is just watching people. Like when I was watching Alec Baldwin, for instance, on this picture I was thinking, 'How does he do that? How does he just walk in and do that when we haven't rehearsed. I don't think we've rehearsed.' I really did just watch him and I find that inspiring. I don't know if I can articulate this, but it's like one of the reasons that being human is so fascinating is that we only can inspire each other. We can't inspire ourselves in the same way that someone else can inspire us, and it's so funny that that's how it seems to be setup. I don't know quite why that is and why a story is the thing that sometimes can move us more than even our own lives. That's how we dramatize or fictionalize, sometimes non-fiction, whatever, but that's how we can experience what life means. So I think that she was someone who had all of those yearnings and all of that churning and why is it that one person has those churnings and interests answered and why someone else doesn't get them answered.”
Running with Scissors opens Friday.
