Papermag
May 2002
Two observations come to mind after watching Human Nature: Either Patricia Arquette was raised in a hippie commune or she's just very comfortable in the nude. Wandering through the Central Park Zoo, the 34-year-old actress is demurely dressed in an I heart New York T-shirt, jeans and a long tan coat. She smokes clove cigarillos, which, because they're so long and she's so small, lend her the appearance of someone who's familiar with South American politics. But for the benefit of the pandas and penguins, she sticks to topics like unwanted hair, puberty gone haywire and how you can't always get what you want.
"Do you think he's molting for the winter?" Arquette asks, watching a brownish polar bear laze on a rock. "Those kinds of bears travel for miles. They do a good job here, but it's sort of depressing." The Zoo's a strange place to talk about relationships, but it's in keeping with the theme of Arquette's new film. A satire on the concept of humanity's purity in nature -- which is why, on a balmy spring day, we're conversing at a kind of wildlife preserve in the middle of Manhattan -- Human Nature is about how you can escape the city but how you can't escape yourself, especially if you're covered in fur. That's a stance the monkeys seem comfortable enough with, but it's something Arquette's character has to learn the hard way.
She's played women with problems before, but none of them have ever presented problems quite so hairy. In the new comedy, written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), Arquette stars as Lila Jute, a woman whose name sounds as Nordic as her hormones are unbalanced. Afflicted with a disorder that causes hair to grow all over her body, Lila endures a nightmare adolescence strangled by conventional notions of beauty, and she's convinced she'll be unlucky in love. (This isn't the sort of hair she can simply shave off, though she tries -- we're talking pelt.) Instead of self-destructing or bathing in Nair, Lila heads for the woods, lives naked and free, and becomes the best-selling author of non-fiction nature books, only to realize that a life without love isn't worth living. She returns to the city, depilates and is introduced by her electrolysist (Rosie Perez) to an incredibly repressed behavioral scientist named Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins) who's teaching table manners to mice. They fall in love -- or what passes for it in Charlie Kaufman's universe -- and, during a romantic walk in the woods, encounter Puff (Rhys Ifans), a wildman of the forest. Nathan seizes the opportunity to civilize Puff. He enlists Lila's help. Hijinx ensue.
The film spoofs our need for companionship
and desire for control. It also calls for a courageous amount of nudity.
Although Arquette's appeared naked onscreen before (see David Lynch's
droning desert meditation, Lost Highway), she makes it clear that
disrobing for the camera isn't exactly her favorite activity.
"I understand what's beautiful about being naked in this movie," she explains, sitting in the Zoo's Leaping Frog Café. "Even though it's a comedy and all of that, it's to show Lila's naturalness, to show her attempt to be comfortable with herself. That she ought to be able to be comfortable with herself. That we ought to be able to be comfortable being naked, and it doesn't have to be about sex. I would resent it if someone told me I had to be naked, or forced me. Making that choice [to take the role] agreed with my values."
With her snaggle-toothed beauty and winsome vulnerability -- the same qualities she's imbued with in any number of her characters, like Alabama Whitman, the ass-kicking blond of 1993's True Romance -- Arquette evokes a warm, sympathetic response from the audience, even if Lila's problems are so outlandish most post-pubescent people will find it difficult to relate. She's also a joker, evinced by her cry of "Anaconda!" as we're walking through the Zoo's rainforest area.
"She's exactly what we needed for Lila," says Kaufman, phoning in from his Los Angeles home, where he writes his magical scripts. "We didn't want Lila to be a joke, and we wanted people to be with her and it was always an issue as to whether we were going to have that because of her physical appearance."
Inspiring compassion for disabused heroines is one of Arquette's strengths. In Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, appearing opposite her then-husband, Nicolas Cage, she played a hard-bitten woman recovering from drug addiction; in 1999's Stigmata, she was possessed by ancient Christian demons while living in a stylish loft; and in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, one of her first roles, she played Kristen Parker, the teen who vanquishes Freddy Krueger to purgatory between sequels. "I was regurgitated by a snake," she says, laughing. "It wasn't all that scary, actually. I mainly had to lie in the snake's mouth for hours while they fixed its makeup." (When I admit that I've long thought that her portrayal of Kristen made the film the best in the Freddy franchise, she jokes, "Oh yeah, you're a Dream Warrior. I bet you like to do kicks and flips in your dreams.") She says she likes scary movies because they're good for dates.
"There's something really fun about being
scared," she says of her favorite fare, like The Exorcist and
Dawn of the Dead, noting the lack of solid fright films in the
theaters. "Yeah, we need some more horror movies. But I love Scream
2. I mean, my sister-in-law's in it, my brother, my dad was in it --
what's not to like? Come on! That's my whole family!"
The daughter of actor Lewis Arquette, and sister of famous film siblings Rosanna, Richmond, Alexis and David (husband of Courteney Cox), she's part of a Hollywood dynasty with credits that include everything from Crash to the 1-800-CALL-ATT guy. Born in Chicago but raised in a commune in Virginia, Arquette says she was an "introverted extrovert" from a colorful, close-knit family that, by anyone's standards, made for an interesting childhood. Her parents, both deceased, subscribed to two different faiths -- her mom was Jewish and her father converted to Islam. And as much as her brother David's known for his onscreen antics, her brother Alexis (also known as Eva Destruction) is benefiting from a successful drag career.
After bouncing around from school to school, Arquette left home when she was 15 to live with her older sister Rosanna in Los Angeles. "I don't like authority in general," she says. "We weren't supposed to question authority, and teachers could be sort of rude to you and that was acceptable. I didn't like that sort of double-standard. And I'm still not good with authority -- I've kind of accepted that about myself. This little dog isn't going to learn any new tricks any time soon."
Life with Rosanna was fun: She met Madonna on the set of Desperately Seeking Susan, enjoyed West Coast independence and built a film career from scratch. "I felt like I was too shy to do it, so I had to psyche myself into acting," she says. "I said I was going to give myself one year, from when I turned 18 to 19, and really try. Even if I failed every day, I'd still get back up and try again for one whole year. So I'd have tried one of my dreams, and if it didn't work, I'd go back to school and try another dream. But I got work." She also got pregnant (by musician Paul Rossi), and in 1989 gave birth to her son Enzo.
Arquette's protective of her privacy, a
quality to be expected from a woman who's lived very much in public. But
after wedding Nicolas Cage in secret in 1995, she says the media attention
became destructive and the marriage collapsed in 2000. Their courtship was
a fairytale -- Arquette asked Cage to prove his love by obtaining one of
pop culture's last holy relics, reclusive author J.D. Salinger's autograph
(Cage bought it at an autograph store) -- but the ending, though amicable,
was rough. "It's always hard to make that decision to get divorced," she
says quietly. "We've both moved on with our lives, and I think it's
important to honor the people we're with now, and concentrate on the
future." She refuses to complain about the dirty side of fame, but it's
clear that Arquette wants to keep her private life private. "I have this
strict sense of honor, and sometimes it feels like I can't defend what's
sacred to me from the world."
That, more than running naked through the forest, singing to woodland creatures or falling in love with a man so constrained by the rules of polite society he shocks mice into learning the difference between salad and dinner forks, is what Arquette found appealing about Human Nature. At its base, the film is a story about how people change -- willingly or not -- when they enter relationships. "It's about how you'll alter yourself to get what you want," Arquette says, referring to Lila's shaving mishaps while she struggles to keep her relationship with Nathan viable. "But it's also about how you don't want it once you get it -- you want something else. At the end of the day, you're screwed because you're left with yourself. And there's no perfect person who's going to distract you long enough. You can be in love and be lonely being in love because you're still there."
The film is the feature-length debut from French director Michel Gondry (who, coincidentally, also shot Björk's "Human Behavior" video), and is awash with near-human mice and a shimmering, hyper-real wilderness; the fantasy touches help smooth out the film's rougher, less-believable edges. "There are not so many actresses who would agree to do this role," Gondry says. "When we started talking about this, Patricia said that she'd have to get into better shape, but she was so beautiful I didn't want her to change that." Kaufman agrees. "We were all amazed how beautiful Patricia looked with the hair on her," the writer says. "When we got the first test photographs of the make-up, it was like, 'Wow.' It's really kind of lovely, I thought, if you can get past the preconceptions of it."
For her part, Arquette says that she had little trouble staying in character. Between manufacturing herself a merkin from one of Puff's thicker beards ("Everybody was like, 'What is up with your pubes? You've got a lot of pubes!' and I was like, 'Look, I'm not going to show my own pubes here!'") and contracting poison oak, she became the set's resident healer. Her naturopathic remedies both soothed and amused the cast and crew. "Sometimes characters come into your reality in a very strange way," she says. "Suddenly it was like, 'I need a driver! Who can go to this store in Long Beach? I need 64 pounds of Mugwort! I need 26 gallons of white vinegar! I need fresh lavender! They were all like, 'What the hell is she making?'"
Like Lila, Arquette's an earthy, grounded person with an appreciation for the natural world. In real life, she owned a flower shop "for a minute," has two dogs and a salamander named Sally. She's a devoted Malibu mom who gets up at 6 a.m. to make her son breakfast before school. And when she's not acting, Arquette jokes she "puts on a corset and cleans the damn house like every other American woman." She's involved in a variety of private projects, and is happy to be able to do public work she's proud of. "I identify with Lila," Arquette says from behind blonde bangs. "She has this aspect about herself where she feels like there's something that she needs to change or apologize for to deserve love. I've certainly felt like if I was different -- in this or that way -- my whole life would be different."
(Source)