She’s coming clean

HELENA Bonham Carter’s ethereal beauty that graced such Merchant-Ivory films as “A Room With a View” and “Howards End” has been hidden under makeup the last few years.

Under the guidance of her boyfriend, director Tim Burton, the lithe 40-year-old actress has played a wise simian in “Planet of the Apes,” a witch in “Big Fish” and an unglamorous, poor mother of a young boy in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” And she’s also spread her talent to stop-motion animated films, playing the lead role in Burton’s “Corpse Bride” and the eccentric animal lover Campanula Tottington in the Oscar-winning “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”

In the new drama “Conversations With Other Women,” Carter plays a contemporary wife and mother who meets a handsome young man (Aaron Eckhart) at a wedding. What starts out as a casual flirtation turns into a night of passion between the two as audiences slowly discover they share a romantic history.

Directed by Hans Canosa from a script by his wife, Gabrielle Zevin, “Conversations With Other Women” is presented split screen -- with one camera focusing on Carter and the other on Eckhart.

Meanwhile, Carter, who has a 2-year-old son with Burton, this year launched a fashion line called the Pantaloonies with swimwear designer Samantha Sage, featuring Victorian-style camisoles, caps and bloomers.

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What was your experience being on the jury this year at Cannes?

You know what? It was really grueling; I think every member of the jury -- we turned to ourselves and said, “How come this is so tiring? We are watching films here.”

But to watch 20 films back to back, there is no time to process them before another onslaught of information and visual, and what was so sad, I found, they were uniformly negative and depressing. So we went from the Second World War to the Algerian war to the Gulf War to the Irish civil war and then we would go to extreme poverty in Portugal, to extreme poverty in Glasgow, to extreme poverty in China. Apart from Pedro Almodovar’s [“Return”], which had humor and light and was a real fictional story, it was an undiluted hard diet.

Plus, if you are a girl in this business and you are in Cannes, you have to get the clothes and dress up and organize the jewels. The whole fashion industry has completely hijacked cinema. There’s too much pressure, and you are judged by what you wear. Having said that, [dressing up] is an essential part of acting really. I think acting is just a glorified form of dressing up.

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After playing an ape, a witch and a poverty-stricken mother, “Conversations” allows you to step out of the character roles.

I just loved it because the script was so clever, and I loved the woman and recognized the woman. I thought, “Finally, a three-dimensional woman and a mature woman too.” So many scripts have one-dimensional and two-dimensional women, and there is nothing to play. You have got these huge blockbusters, and they forget story and characterization. They spend all this money on special effects and you wonder where is the human heart or relationship.

We shot this in 13 days -- I’d love to do every film in 13 days, it’s so convenient. It was great because there was no waiting around. We just acted, acted, acted. In big films you just tend to wait and do a little bit of acting. We should be called waiters instead of actors.

There was no money, but what was priceless was the script, the characters, and I loved the way of filming -- having a camera on at all time and doing long takes. You do have to have stamina though.

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Because it’s basically just you and Aaron in the movie, did you get a chance to rehearse and find each other’s rhythms?

We had about a week where we really grilled through the lines. We couldn’t afford not to know them perfectly. It is probably one of the most satisfying jobs I have done. It was shot on high-definition video.... It is so much more actor-oriented.

It’s so ironic that in filmmaking actors get ridiculous privileges. We get the trailer, and we get the money, but at the end of the day, when it comes to the filmmaking, you are the last priority because [the shooting schedule is based on] location, so you are never shooting chronologically. With this one we practically did do it chronologically.

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Did you enjoy doing animation voices?

You do because you are so not hindered by anything. You are not hindered by what you look like. You get to ask to play parts, which are immaterial as to your looks. So you get to do some character acting, which I love. You have to imagine everything. It is like a willful psychosis. You have to invent, but it’s really fun, and then it is so exciting to see the puppet and what they do with it. They record you first -- you are kind of laying down the score they make that puppet dance to. Every vocal inflection is reflected either in the expression of the face or the body movement. It is really an art form.

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Are you and Tim going to be collaborating on another project soon?

Nothing foreseeable at the moment. It is never a given that I am in anything or everything that he does.

I have to audition, like for “Corpse Bride.” I have to try doubly hard to justify it because he doesn’t want to be accused of nepotism. We have to both feel that it’s the right artistic decision independent of the fact that we are together.

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With the release of the theatrical version of “Miami Vice,” I remember when you played a renowned surgeon on the TV show who falls in love with Sonny Crockett. And you were all of 21 at the time.

They thought I kind of looked older, so when I arrived they said, “Oh, my God, she looks like a child. Don Johnson is going to have a relationship with you and he’ll look like a pedophile. This is just horrendous.” They tried to put latex on me to look older. The whole thing was absurd.

-- Susan King