Back to the Good Old Days

Sitting in a sterile hotel room here, wearing a slick black leather coat, folksy actress Sissy Spacek sums up director Todd Field by calling him a “clever dickens.” She is referring to a trick Field played on her to get the reaction he wanted for a scene in his new film, “In the Bedroom.”

The issue here is not the trick but Spacek’s assessment of Field. Who in or out of Hollywood would say “clever dickens”? Who would say it without irony?

When Spacek says such things, she appears guileless, and she almost is. But there’s a little edge, too. For example, she says that acting is harder for men than it is for women because “we’re used to being told what to do.” And when Field says she was hands-on during production of “In the Bedroom,” so much so that she literally art-directed the house her character lives in, she has this to say: “It was very low-budget, and the production designer quit. We were glad.

“That’s not a nice thing to say, I shouldn’t say that. It was sort of all hands on deck, so I was not the only one. Everybody was putting in his two cents. Sending children out, too: ‘Go get picture frames.’ It was like the old days, where your limitations force you to become very creative. I think the set decorator used me because I could throw the film crew out of the room we were dressing.” The “old days” to which Spacek refers are never very far from her mind, perhaps because movies like “In the Bedroom,” made with no money or marketing tie-ins, are the nearest thing to the films she made in the ‘70s, among them “Carrie,” “Badlands,” “3 Women” and “Welcome to L.A.” Her career peaked at a time when an actress didn’t have to look like a runway model to land a job.

Freckle-faced, with light strawberry blond hair and blue eyes, she was arresting without stopping traffic. And on this September day, she looks much the same, though she’s now 51.

“In the Bedroom” might be considered a comeback for Spacek, though in truth she has never really been away. It’s just that she does one movie and/or television project a year, usually in a supporting role. A few years ago it was David Lynch’s warmly accessible “The Straight Story.” The year before that it was the grim Nick Nolte film “Affliction.” On television she’s recently appeared in “The Streets of Laredo” and “If These Walls Could Talk.” What distinguishes “In the Bedroom” from these movies is not that it’s more commercial--it’s not--but that Spacek is front and center. Here she plays Ruth Fowler, a vaguely patrician choral master who has settled in her doctor husband’s (Tom Wilkinson) Maine hometown and raised a son (Nick Stahl), who is now college-bound.

This leafy idyll is disturbed when her kid takes up with an older woman (Marisa Tomei) who has two children and is separated from her husband. Spacek plays Ruth’s resistance to this relationship and then her rage at the misery it causes without appealing to audience sympathy.

This woman is not terribly likable. She’s controlling, unforgiving and wound very tight. Wilkinson, on the other hand, is a teddy bear, and because the story is told principally from his point of view, viewers tend to side with him as their characters clash and their marriage begins to come apart. This perspective, which puts Spacek at a disadvantage, didn’t seem to bother her at all. She’s looking at the big picture rather than her own picture.

“She’s much more interested in the story and the script and every single character in the piece, from who would play her husband to the guys sitting around the poker table,” Field says. “She really has a very keen interest in how everyone affected the film and how every character helped every other and why and on and on and on.” Some of this interest inevitably turned mirror-like on herself and Wilkinson, especially on the disparity between where they come from and whom they play. After all, Wilkinson, a veteran British actor famous as a cast member in “The Full Monty,” and Spacek, a Texan, both play New Englanders.

“It was funny with my Southern accent and Tom’s English,” Spacek says. “I know Todd the first day of rehearsal was going, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ We were, like, yikes. We were a little panicked. Even Tom admitted how scared he was.”

Their fears turned out to be unfounded. British actors routinely adopt American accents. It’s rarer for Americans to speak in any but their own voice, or even to be asked to, but Spacek pulls it off. In fact, she manages to make viewers forget the luggage she carries from nearly 30 years in the business. Among those bags are the killer teen in “Badlands” and the telekinetic teen in “Carrie,” but easily the heaviest is her full-throated portrayal of country music star Loretta Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1980), for which she won a best actress Oscar.

“I used to tease Loretta and say, ‘When this movie is over, I’m going to get me a bus, get me a band, and I’m going to go out and sing your songs on the road,” Spacek says.

Asked if they are still in touch, she says, “Our paths cross, and we drop each other notes now and then. She’s had so much tragedy in her life the last few years. So I’ve been in touch with her, but you know how it is when you’re living in the modern world, trying to keep a career going and raise your children. You’re like the guy with all of the plates spinning.”

Spacek lives on a horse farm in Virginia, where she raised two children with her husband, Jack Fisk, an art director she met while shooting “Badlands.” They subsequently worked together on more than half a dozen films, some of which Fisk directed. Her older daughter, Schuyler Fisk, is an actress in her own right, having appeared in such films as the upcoming “Orange County.” “She makes the big-budget films,” Spacek says. “I do the art-house films.”

Spacek is not one of those actors who discourage their kids from going into the business, for the simple reason that doing so would make her a hypocrite. Naturally she has a keen sense of how difficult Hollywood is, though she says it was less so when she was coming up.

Spacek’s real longing, though, is for the days when women threw their weight around on screen. “I think that we all fantasize about that teeny tiny time in the film industry when women ruled, back in the ‘40s,” Spacek says.

“Glenn [Close] and Meryl [Streep] and Sally [Field] and Jessica [Lange] and I, we would like to have, just for a few years, just for the twilight years, we would like to have those ‘40s movies back.”

So what advice would she give an aspiring actress?

“Save your money,” she says.