Anne Hathaway is best known as the sweet teenage girl who becomes a queen in the two
Princess Diaries
films. Now she's moving to more adult films with
Havoc
and Ang Lee's
Brokeback Mountain
. Her character, Lureen Newsome, falls in love with Jack Twist [Jake Gyllenhaal], a ranch hand in a secret homosexual relationship with Heath Ledger's character.
UGO
: Do you think the sexual content is over-hyped in this movie?
ANNE HATHAWAY
: The thing I like about it is I think it's pretty evenly distributed throughout the film in both men and women. Usually us girls bear the unfair share of it. I don't think that there's anything shocking about it. I think it's very real and tastefully done. I didn't feel uncomfortable about it. Maybe it was shocking for my dad, but that's just because of me. I do think it's over hyped. The thing that really emerges from the film is that the men have such love for each other. Even as their sexual relationship slackens, their intimacy deepens. The film becomes about the fact that they have a connection together that they don't share with anyone else.
UGO
: Your hairdos in this film get a laugh.
ANNE
: What do you think? Should I go blonde?
UGO
:Your character was the most fashionable one in the movie. Did you work with the costume designer?
ANNE
: Yeah, we all worked with her. Lureen liked to be the center of attention. She was wild. She was a predator. She's a tough girl, but she's definitely a daddy's girl from Texas. She wanted to look good. So she was kind of doing her small town version of the big styles of the time.
UGO
: Did you keep any of the outfits?
ANNE
: No, but I did keep a pair of my cowboy boots. They're so comfy. I wear them everywhere, except today.
UGO
:Do you think a woman can always tell when her husband is cheating on her?
ANNE
: Luckily, I've never had to deal with that. But it seems to be that you'd need to have a really good sense of smell. In movies everybody always discovers it is because they smell someone's shirt.
UGO
: Lureen changes as the film goes on. Do you think that she's changing because she senses that Jack is cheating?
ANNE
: I don't feel right calling what Jack and Lureen have love, but there is a romance between them. There's a connection. I think they honor that. But once it passes, they realize they don't have that much in common and they don't know each other that well. There's a moment in the film when Jack is showing off the tractor and someone says "Is that the guy that used to ride bulls?" Someone says "That's the guy that used to try." You see this look of disappointment on Lureen's face. Then the next time you see her, she is the businesswoman. Lureen in the beginning is very young and alive and full. By the end she's ignored her soul for so long that she doesn't really know who she is anymore. She's a completely different person.
UGO
: Do you want to produce any movies for yourself?
ANNE
: I have penned Oscar award winning scripts, but I've only written the first two pages [laughs]. I'm always hunting for new material. Right now I have a lot of things going on so that's not my top priority. I actually just optioned a book called
The Gospel According to Gracey
.
UGO
: I'm sure that Disney would be very happy to have you keep doing films for them forever.
ANNE
: I don't know. They haven't asked me in awhile.
UGO
: But this and
Havoc
seemed like a really conscious decision to do more complex projects. Was that the case?
ANNE
: No, I don't know if you've noticed, but I work sparingly. Considering that the first
Princess Diaries
came out five years ago, I actually haven't done that many movies. I really wanted to wait and find roles that moved me. It's just interesting because up until I was 20, I was still interested in doing female empowerment and heroine stories. After that I was like "Hold on. Let's go to a new place." I went through so much in my own life that it had nothing to do with me trying to escape an image or being typecast. It just really had to do with me doing stuff that I believed in at that moment. I never gave any kind of credit to the whole theory of typecasting because I knew who I was before I made
The Princess Diaries
and I knew what I had to offer and I knew that I could always offer more than that film. I love that film, but it wasn't the most demanding of roles. I always wanted to go out there and get back to my character actor roots.
UGO
: So then the nudity in
Havoc
and in this film isn't you saying "I'm grown up."
ANNE
: No, do you think I would do anything that obvious? That's pathetic. If
The Princess Diaries
had required me to be naked I would've done it. It would've been the unrated version if Julie [Andrews] and I would've popped our tops. When the script for Traffic came up, every young actress in Hollywood auditioned for that. In the original script it required nudity and I auditioned for it. It's not something that I had any issues with, but because I made these movies that were family films, they appealed to a lot of people's moral sides. There's nothing wrong with that mind you. I think a lot of people assumed that those were my morals and they're not. I'm very different than the characters I've played in the past. I take it as a compliment that I played them well that people got me confused with them. But now it's time for me to be me.
UGO
: In the '70s an actress doing nudity wasn't the biggest thing in the world and it happened all the time. But nowadays there are whole websites devoted to you and
Havoc
.
ANNE
: I had no idea. There's a lot of horndogs in the world with a lot of time on their hands. That's what I have to say about that. The highest grossing film of all time,
Titanic
, has an actress baring her breasts in it. I've never been uncomfortable with it. I saw
All That Jazz
when I was eight. I didn't understand a lot of it, but nothing was shocking to me. I grew up studying classic painters. They certainly didn't shy away from nudes. I don't find anything morally reprehensible about it. I don't think it's degrading to go to the lengths of what art demands. I think it is different to pose in a pair of hot pants on the cover of
Stuff
magazine. That's something I'm just not interested in doing.
UGO
:
Havoc
is a movie written by an Oscar-winning writer [Stephen Gaghan] and directed by an Oscar winning director [Barbara Kopple]. Why did it go straight to DVD?
ANNE
: It was an ambitious project and there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen and sometimes that just happens. The best laid plans type situation. Maybe DVD is the best thing for it. It is a very different film and it has stuff that's objectionable. Maybe if people are really interested, they can seek it out on their own. Everybody has films that have gone straight to video. So this is my first one, hopefully the last.