Elisabeth Shue made her Hollywood debut in the original Karate Kid back in 1984 and went on to star in several classics of 80s nostalgia, including Adventures in Babysitting, Cocktail, and the latter two Back to the Future films. In 1995, she earned critical accolades – and a Best Actress Oscar nomination – for her gritty performance in Leaving Las Vegas. She’s remained selective about the roles she’s taken over the years, and this week she takes center stage as Sheriff Julie Forester in Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3-D. She was kind enough to chat with RT about her Five Favorite Films, as well as what it was like working on the new movie. Read on for the full interview.
Ordinary People (1980,
91% Tomatometer)
Ordinary People is a really important movie to me, because it was a movie I watched and had the spark of idea that I wanted to be an actress. Basically because of Timothy Hutton’s performance, and the visceral nature of that movie, the rawness of the emotion. I think at a young age — I was fourteen or fifteen — I felt like I could relate to him, and then this weird thing happened where I felt like I was him. While I was watching the movie, I felt like I was feeling exactly what he was feeling, and I thought, “Wow… I would love to be in a movie like that.”
Jaws (1975,
100% Tomatometer)
The other movie that was really influential to me was Jaws. I was only 12, and that I thought was real! I even thought Charlie’s Angels was real! There was such an innocence in our culture when we were growing up, as if this was real life, and maybe there are cameras watching that. [I thought], “They’re not fake. These aren’t actors. This is real.” I don’t know why our parents weren’t helping us with that.
The Godfather (1972,
100% Tomatometer)
My husband, Davis (Guggenheim), really turned me on to The Godfather as being the quintessentially best movie that was ever made. I started to appreciate why he loved that movie more than any other.
Forrest Gump (1994,
70% Tomatometer)
I really like Forrest Gump. I do think that’s a perfect movie in some ways. I love Tom Hanks in that movie. I’m really attracted to an innocence in some performances that really touch me in a deeper way.
The Shining (1980,
87% Tomatometer)
And The Shining! It totally freaked me out and made me never want to see a horror movie again.
Next, Shue talks about the harsh filming conditions she endured on the set of Piranha 3-D.
RT: You brought up Jaws… Is Piranha 3-D your chance to do something like that?
Elisabeth Shue: Yeah, isn’t that odd? I think we were all attracted to that idea… can we make the Jaws of this generation? Is it possible? You know, obviously it was going to be incredibly different. But the thing that we remember about Jaws is that it was so terrifying, but it was actually exciting, too. That’s how scary it was: you were excited by the fear, not disgusted by it. It wasn’t so dark, like a slasher movie; there was no slasher involved. It was just raw fear of a beast that you couldn’t predict. So I think there’s a little of that in Piranha that is exciting, and a pop culture, fear, fun movie.
And you’ve got Richard Dreyfuss, too.
We have that, too. And Chrisopher Lloyd, who is wonderful. He sort of brought back that excitement from Back to the Future (that’s another great movie, so perfect in its innocence).
Before you took the role in Piranha 3-D, did you know that Christopher would be working on this?
I did not know. I was the first cast, I have to say.
So you’re the one who attracted everyone else, right?
No, no! [laughing] But I took the leap. I took the full leap. Well, I didn’t fully because Alex (director Alexandre Aja) was attached. I think you’d take the full leap if there was no director attached and you decided to do this movie. Because obviously you could imagine many different versions. I did know that it was Alex, so it wasn’t a huge leap.
What was it about Alex’s past work that attracted you to this project?
What I trust with him is that he got the reality, that Spring Breakers being mauled by piranha would be done in a way that would be so visceral and real and awful, and kind of horrific. And would have humor. And would have that sort of campy element to it, because it’s still Spring Break, and Spring Break itself is absurd. So the reality of that was going to be there, and I knew that he wanted to heighten that. Because I was going to be forced to hold down the reality of the story, I was going to be the mother saving her children and trying to save the town, I needed to trust that he cared about that. From all of his movies, it was obvious that the emotions of the characters mattered to him more than anything else.
It’s got to be fun to do a movie like this, right?
It is fun. It’s everything. The first week, we all laughed that it wasn’t even like making a movie; the first week was like Survivor. It was like we were on the show Survivor and there were hidden cameras, and everyone was wanting to see who was going to break first, because we came from 80 degrees to 120 degrees. I had on big boots, polyester sherriff’s uniform, gun belt. And then we were on the water, all day long, with sun beating down, with no clouds to be seen, day after day after day. To the point that there was one scene, where I’m on a boat, telling people to get out of the water, and I had a short thing to say, and I couldn’t remember any line, at all. My brain had completely gone, because I was having heat stroke. And we were all drinking our own concoctions of water and Gatorade. But then our blood thinned after a week, and everyone settled in. Then I think the intensity of the conditions helped the movie. I think there’s an intensity to the movie that’s driven by the fact that we were all surviving a really intense experience in reality. That was real sweat out there! They weren’t spraying us down. Waiting for those shots of the massacre, you’d be sitting on this boat and there’d be ten half-dead bodies, and they’d be coming in and spraying blood and wetting them down, and then you’d be waiting and waiting and waiting on this teeny boat, with fifty bodies and there’s nowhere to move and there’s nowhere to go, and you just wait. There’s a lot of that that made the whole experience sort of mirror the massacre; the filming was almost as intense and the people getting chewed up.
What’s coming up for you?
I’m doing two smaller movies. One hopefully we’ll get into a festival; it’s called Janie Jones. It’s with Abigail Breslin and Alessandro Nivola. It’s a really wonderful story that I hope breaks through. And then I’m leaving in two weeks to go to Ottowa to work with Jennifer Lawrence and Max Thieriot and a wonderful English director, Mark Tonderai. We’re going to go and do a Psycho kind of thriller. More psychological, but in the horror genre, but not in the gory, bloody genre.
Piranha 3-D, starring Elisabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, and Jerry O’Connell, opens in the US on August 20th. Check back on RT as more reviews roll in.
