Chicago Tribune Interview with Neve Campbell and Malcolm McDowell 12/14/03

Think Hollywood's tough?
Neve Campbell goes to the barre for her craft in ambitious `The Company'
By Nina Metz
Special to the Chicago Tribune 12/14/03

    Consider this hypothetical for a moment. You break a rib. The pain is non-stop. Just inhaling and exhaling becomes a strenuous activity. Do you: (a) take a break from work, lay off the exercise for a while and couch it for some R&R, or (b) pound your body with the kind of intensive physical exertion that would be agony even if you weren't injured?
    If you are Neve Campbell, and the film you are producing and starring in is about to begin shooting, you suck it up.
    This time last year, three days before the 30-year-old Toronto native and former aspiring ballet dancer arrived in Chicago to begin work on "The Company," a loose collage of stories about the Joffrey Ballet troupe (opening Dec. 25), Campbell broke a rib. And then she carried on, as if nothing had happened.
    "I trained 8 1/2 hours a day for 4 1/2 months before I was going to go to Chicago to work with the Joffrey," she says. "So I was really nervous about it. I was working with my coach in L.A. on [one of the film's dance sequences]. We were learning it from videotape and we were doing one of the lifts wrong. [My partner] lifted me from my rib instead of from my hip and, uh, cracked my rib. Oh, it's really painful. I mean, I've had many injuries, but the thing with a broken rib is you can't breathe, because it's touching your lung. And you can't move and you can't sleep. So I was dancing eight hours a day, and then not sleeping, and then taking a lot of pain pills, and not breathing properly while I was dancing. So," she says with considerable understatement, "it was a challenge."
    For Campbell, the grin-and-bear-it attitude was a self-discipline she learned during her years, between the ages of 9 and 14, training with the National Ballet School of Canada, a serious-minded, high-pressure organization in which dancers of a certain caliber are groomed for professional careers.
    Before she landed in Hollywood, on the TV series "Party of Five" and in movies such as the "Scream" trilogy and "Wild Things," Campbell's aspirations were quite different. "I was going to be a classical ballet dancer," she says. "That's all I intended."
    But that changed once she hit her early teens. The stress of hard-core training had taken its toll and Campbell removed herself from the dance fast track.
    "I thought, I can't do this anymore," she says. "It's too hard. And I'm not sure if this is what I want. I just wanted to have a normal life. . . . So I quit dancing...And then I went to audition for `Phantom of the Opera' as a joke really. My friends were going to audition, and I'd never even heard of what it was, but my parents thought, `Oh, for auditioning experience just go in, whatever, just try.' "So [Tony Award-winning theater director] Hal Prince ended up casting me, and all of a sudden I was dancing professionally, and singing, which I had never done." And it sent Campbell down an entirely different path.
    "It never occurred to me that I would end up a professional actor," she says. "So when all of this stuff happened, when `Party of Five' happened and all this attention -- it was so foreign to me because it had never been a thought in my mind, you know what I mean?"
    And clearly, dance was still a substantial portion of Campbell's emotional life. Which explains her desire to make "The Company." "I really wanted to tell the story of a dancer, of a dance company," she says.
    Robert Altman, the film's director, says they studiously avoided any sort of hokey histrionics or melodrama. "I wasn't trying to do anything more than saying, `This is the life,'" he says. It's a life that Campbell calls "incredibly ruthless." But come on, more ruthless than Hollywood?
    "Oh, for sure it's more ruthless," Campbell says. "In Hollywood, I mean, yeah, it's a challenge to get roles and it's difficult, I know -- and I know I'm lucky, I'm one of the lucky 1 percent. But in dance, there are so few ballet companies and so few positions in companies -- and so many dancers. There's that, and then you're dealing with your body on a daily basis -- the chance that you might injure yourself for life. Every day."
    Campbell began the initial producing work on the film more than seven years ago -- "I originally had it at a studio and then I took it away . . . they wanted to make a movie that I happened to dance in, instead of a dance movie that I happened to be in" -- and recruited screenwriter Barbara Turner, whose credits include "Pollock" and "Georgia."
    Together Campbell and Turner, who is the mother of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, narrowed their vision to a company based in Chicago. The goal was to incorporate the dancers as the film's primary performers.
    "Neve didn't want the New York City Ballet -- New York had been done," Turner says, referring to "The Turning Point." The 1977 film, starring Shirley MacLaine, Anne Bancroft and Mikhail Baryshnikov, is one of the few enduring cinematic efforts, along with 1948's "The Red Shoes," to portray such a specific ballet milieu and the hardships of professional dancers.
    Campbell set her sights on The Joffrey, the 47-year-old troupe founded by Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino that has been based in Chicago since 1995.
    Over the course of two years, Arpino, an uber-eccentric who has served as the company's artistic director since Joffrey's death in 1988, allowed Turner and Campbell to spend time with the company, attending ballet classes and interviewing the dancers.
    Campbell's character is somewhat based on the experiences of one dancer in particular, Trinity Hamilton, who dated a sous chef and moonlighted as a cocktail waitress to make ends meet. Hamilton, like the other dancers, has a minor role in the film. She has since left the company to pursue acting.
    The script was enough to persuade Altman, nominated for an Oscar in 2001 for "Gosford Park," to join. "From the beginning, we kept saying [the film] needed to be Altman-esque," Campbell says. "Bob is the best, in my opinion, at creating worlds." In fact, Altman's resume is full of such examples: the world of country music in "Nashville," the world of fashion in "Pret a Porter," the world of Hollywood in "The Player."
    While "The Company" doesn't have much of a story arc, per se, Campbell's character does dominate the film, as does Malcolm McDowell's amusing, canny portrayal of a character based on Gerald Arpino.
    "He's his own man," says McDowell of the choreographer and troupe's tart-one-minute, effusive-the-next artistic director. "He is a demigod. Ruler of his own fiefdom. And he's got such a difficult job, just to keep the damn thing afloat. So I tried to make him funny. Not funny, ha, ha, but amusing in a fly-on-the-wall sort of way."
    Altman used the script as a guide. The exact lines, transcribed from Turner's interviews with the dancers, were chucked. "I don't always do that," Altman says. "I work the way I have to work. In this case we had three or four actors and about 40 dancers, and I didn't ask the actors to dance and I didn't ask the dancers to learn lines."
    As a result, McDowell was able to channel his inner-Arpino. "I ad-libbed so many of those lines," he says. "But they're all really his words." For his part, Arpino was hoping a big-name Italian actor would play his part. "I wanted Al Pacino or Robert De Niro," he says. "Somebody whose name ended in an `O,' at least." And while he thinks McDowell's performance is accurate, he says, "Malcolm enlarged it. I'm more subtly eccentric."
    But there was nothing subtle about Arpino's invitation to Campbell after filming wrapped. "I extended an invitation for her to join the company," Arpino says. "I said, `Neve, do you want to keep your pointe shoes on?'" Was he serious?
    "Well, I was serious because I knew it wouldn't happen," he says. "She's older and she's an established actress now. I would never advise her to go back into dance. . . . She could never become a prima ballerina or a soloist -- it's too late for her." Did Campbell give the offer any real consideration?
    "I did," she says. "Believe me, I did. But it would have meant giving up my [acting] career completely. Because you either dance or you don't. You're either doing it all day with the company, or you're not. And my [dance] career would only last another 6 years, if I was lucky. And I'd be dealing with a lot of physical stuff. And then who knows if I would be able to get back into acting afterwards."
    But the experience left Campbell with a permanent reminder of the Joffrey. She reaches up and rubs a nub on the right side of her torso. "Because I didn't let my rib heal, it calcified," she says. "So I have like a souvenir from the movie now."