ONCE she’d decided to take on her gritty new role in Wild, there were a few things Reese Witherspoon knew she didn’t want to hear from movie studio executives:
“We want her to be more likable.”
“We don’t want her to use drugs.”
“We don’t want her to be profane.”
And so, Witherspoon says, she didn’t give them the chance.
She developed the film, which follows a hard-living woman’s path to solace and redemption via a long trek in the wilderness, outside the studio system under the auspices of her own production company, with private financing.
“And then I took it to the studios and said: ‘I’m not changing a word,’” Witherspoon recounts in an interview. “And I had three bids on it that day. And I think it’s important, you know?” she adds.
“You grow up, you change – I’m a 38-year old woman now, I have three kids, and I’ve lived a lot. It’s really important to me that the things I put out into the world are meaningful and thought-provoking. Otherwise, what am I doing?”
Wild, based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed, is a story of personal catharsis, and listening to Witherspoon, one gets the sense she was seeking a sort of professional catharsis by choosing it. The role, which has garnered significant Oscar buzz, includes difficult scenes depicting rough sex and heroin use. Witherspoon wore no makeup and spent days lugging a heavy backpack up and down hills.
“By far, it’s the hardest thing I’ve done in my life,” she says. “The physical aspects were really challenging – the elements, the heat, the cold, the water, the rain, 55 locations in 35 days, and carrying that backpack. And there was nothing else to cut to – just me.”
Emotionally, it was even harder: “One day I’d be getting divorced. Another, my mother would be dying. The next day I’d be using heroin. It was just non-stop – not even a roller-coaster, just a continual descent downward! There are always scenes that I dread, that I say: ‘That day’s going to be miserable’. And here, it was three weeks of that.”
Witherspoon’s director, Jean-Marc Vallee, calls her “a trouper”. As well he should: he noticed that the backpack looked too light and forced her to carry a much heavier one. “Then he just walked away, and I was like: ‘Okay…’” Witherspoon laughs. “You can see it digging into my skin. Because it really was digging into my skin!”
Vallee says that Witherspoon “went out there with no makeup, looking like nothing, on the trail for 65 percent of the film, looking like a hiker, with a heavy backpack on her back. I removed the mirrors in the makeup trailer and she didn’t look at herself.”
Witherspoon, who won an Oscar for 2005’s Walk the Line, says it was no accident that she chose such a film at this point in her career, a time that finds her veering away from trademark sunny, bright roles and romantic comedies.
“It’s something I consciously did for myself,” she says. Her production company, Pacific Standard, is specifically geared toward projects with complex roles for women.
“I was seeing sort of a deficit in leading roles for women,” she says. “It was just sort of the lack of complex characters, of interesting, dynamic women onscreen. I have a 15-year old daughter and it’s very important to me what she sees, in movies and television.”
Wild was an easy choice: “I read the manuscript in 24 hours,” she says, after receiving it from Strayed. “And I immediately called my agent and said: ‘I don’t know who this woman is, but I need to talk to her.’ It is absolutely one of the most important books I’ve read in my life.”
It’s important to note, Witherspoon adds, that Wild isn’t a “chick movie”.
“It’s (screenplay) written by a man and it’s directed by a man,” she says. “If it was a man’s story, I don’t think we’d be remarking that it’s a man’s movie. It’s a movie about humanity. About love and loss, sex and drugs, and how to find your way out of the woods. I think we all have this moment in our lives when we realise, no one’s coming along to save us. We have to save ourselves.” – Sapa-AP