Making Waves in Her Debut

Four years ago, British actress Emily Watson was a member of England’s prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company, where, she says, she spent most of her time “spear carrying and pouring ale.”

In fact, Watson had never made a film before last year, when Danish director Lars von Trier gave her the lead in “Breaking the Waves,” which took this year’s grand jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and opens in Los Angeles and New York on Friday.

The film tells the story of a sheltered girl whose marriage plunges her into a harrowing confrontation with issues of faith, sacrifice and erotic love, and Watson appears in virtually every frame. The experience has already changed her life dramatically.

“I find all this attention confusing,” says Watson, 29, during an interview at a Hollywood hotel. “Of course, it’s flattering, but I think it’s bad for the ego and I fear for my character.

“The media is like a big vacuum cleaner that sucks you up on its own terms, and at the moment I’m trying to regather my energy because things are coming at me very fast. My husband [British stage actor Jack Waters] and I feel like we’re in the middle of a twister--we’re just holding hands and waiting for it to subside.”

The film, set in the early ‘70s in an isolated, devoutly religious Scottish coastal village, is a heady mixture of cinema verite, magic realism and kitsch melodrama that feels for the most part like a traditional morality fable. Occasionally, however, it seems to parody that form. It’s an intensely challenging film in every respect, and one would expect Von Trier to be on the road courting the media to see it safely into port. Such is not the case, however, which is why the film’s stars, Watson and Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard, have made the trip to the U.S. to promote it.

“Lars is an eccentric man with every phobia under the sun, and he refuses to get on planes, trains or boats, which makes travel difficult,” Watson says.

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“Breaking the Waves” was shot last year in Copenhagen and Scotland, and Von Trier endured a very long car ride listening to Dolly Parton tapes all the way, plus a ferry trip, to get there. Skarsgard plays Bess’ husband, Jan, and British actress Katrin Cartlidge (who won raves for her performance as a promiscuous Cockney girl in the 1994 Mike Leigh film “Naked”) is her sister-in-law, Dodo.

The story is set in the early ‘70s, Watson says, “because that’s when the North Sea oil rigs first appeared, and these hermetically sealed, repressed religious communities were invaded by an international cast of lads drinking beer and listening to outrageous music.

“Bess is an innocent girl whose goodness causes her tremendous pain,” she says. “She’s like a person without a skin in that she doesn’t know when to stop with any emotion, and in a sense she’s kind of mad--or not, as the case may be. One of the strengths of the film is that you’re never quite sure, because it treads a careful line between many ambiguities.

“People are constantly asking me what the film means. Is it a Christ allegory? Is Bess Mary Magdalene? Several feminists have taken issue with the idea of a woman sacrificing herself so completely for a man, but this isn’t a realistic movie. It’s shot to look like a home video, but it’s actually a larger-than-life fairy tale with the passions and tragedy of a 19th century novel. Lars happily points out that the film often veers into kitsch, yet the camera technique and the way the film is constructed subvert those qualities and give it an unusual rhythm that gets under your skin.”

The film’s cinema verite feeling is largely attributable to the fact that the camera work, by Robby Muller and Jean-Paul Meurisse, is all hand-held.

“Jean-Paul never watched rehearsals and his English wasn’t too good, so he was always in the middle of every scene trying to figure out what was going on, while Lars told him where to point the camera,” Watson says. “It was a very organic way of working that initially struck me as chaotic, but when I saw the film I realized Lars was 10 steps ahead of the rest of us all the time.”

Von Trier--the eccentric genius behind “The Kingdom,” a hugely popular television series set in a hospital that’s sort of the Danish equivalent of “Twin Peaks”--has been his country’s ranking enfant terrible since his debut film, “The Element of Crime,” was released in 1984.

Says Skarsgard of the 41-year-old director, who once publicly demanded the death of Ingmar Bergman so that other Scandinavian filmmakers could receive more attention: “Lars likes to provoke people and behave in ways he shouldn’t. As is evident in this film, he doesn’t accept rules, and although there were 28 producers on this project, Lars retained total creative control over everything.

“A 3-year-old could follow this story, yet there are so many layers you can never be sure of Lars’ intentions,” adds Skarsgard, who has been a well-known actor in Sweden since age 16, when he starred in a hit television show. “The point of the film isn’t to prove that God does or doesn’t exist. Rather, it’s a fairy tale about the power of love and faith, and it presents an image of pure love we should all aspire to but few of us will ever experience.”

Watson believes that because she had never made a film before, she adapted more easily to Von Trier’s unorthodox methodology:

“I had nothing to unlearn, but, still, I was scared. When the camera’s that close all the time, it just eats you, and the shoot was draining. I was a bit taken over by Bess, and it was an effort to put her away at the end of the day.

“In fact, I remember one day when I found myself thinking, ‘I wonder if I’m going to die while we shoot this scene.’ I was just losing my marbles,” she says with a laugh.

The most provocative relationship in the film, perhaps, is the one between Bess and God, with whom she regularly converses. Indeed, the dark events that culminate in the film’s final tragedy are the result of a pact Bess makes with God.

“For Bess, God is a stern, patriarchal figure who encourages her to do the right thing, but he’s like her best friend as well,” Watson says. “In a way, Bess is a megalomaniac in that she believes she talks to God and has the power to control events around her; at the same time, the fact that everything she does is guided by her faith is very moving. Lars is a Catholic so he does believe in God, but the film is ambivalent on this subject too, and suggests in no uncertain terms that faith can be very dangerous.”

Watson was born and raised in London, where her mother is a teacher, her father is an architect and her older sister is in architectural publishing. Watson didn’t begin to pursue acting until she was 22 and enrolled at the Drama Studio in London, after two years at Bristol University as an English literature major.

From there, it was on to those two years of spear carrying for the Royal Shakespeare Company, after which she began to land solid stage parts. Then a London casting agent brought her to Von Trier’s attention, and since then things have moved fast for Watson. She recently completed several fashion shoots, wrapped an adaptation of George Eliot’s “The Mill on the Floss” scheduled to air in December on British television and is in pre-production on an adaptation of the Julian Barnes novel “Metroland,” which co-stars Christian Bale and will be directed by Philip Saville.

For now, however, she is anxiously waiting to see how “Breaking the Waves” will be received in the States.

“It’s a very strong film, but some people hate it,” says co-star Skarsgard, who recently completed work on a film adaptation of the Hanif Kureishi novel “My Son the Fanatic.” “Some people find the film blasphemous, others think it’s misogynistic, while others dismiss it as cheap soap opera.”

Adds Watson: “Lars, however, says it’s a simple story about love, faith and the terrible mistakes people make.”