Rachel Weisz fights for truth in ‘Denial’ and experimentation in her life

It wasn’t necessarily supposed to roll out this way, but 2016 was the year Rachel Weisz’s exquisite taste in filmmakers paid off. In Yorgos Lanthimos’ quirky “The Lobster,” Joshua Marston’s “Complete Unknown,” Derek Cianfrance’s “The Light Between Oceans” and Mick Jackson’s “Denial,” Weisz delivered four remarkable performances in completely different roles.

Weisz approached Lanthimos, who made waves with 2009’s “Dogtooth,” about wanting to work with him a few years ago. He was writing “The Lobster” at the time and offered her the role of the Short Sighted Woman, a character who breaks the cardinal rule against falling in love in a dystopian near future where the individual has few choices of his or her own.

“Yorgos is a totally unique storyteller. It’s a very, very low-budget, low-tech universe that I think is unlike any universe we’d ever seen on film before,” Weisz says. “It was just pure imagination, and he’s incredibly disciplined. I think direction is all about tonal control, and he really managed to sustain a tone that was very, very unique.”

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Rachel Weisz, Andrew Scott and Timothy Spall star in “Denial.”

Marston’s “Complete Unknown” finds Weisz playing Alice, a woman who appears to randomly run into an old boyfriend (Michael Shannon) at a dinner party. She’d literally disappeared from his life and in the years since the audience discovers she’s changed her identity a number of times, pretending to be a medical doctor and a research scientist, among others. Weisz was a fan of Marston’s breakout feature, “Maria Full of Grace,” and was intrigued by his penchant for making “experimental” films.

She recalls: “The idea of someone who changed personalities all the time seemed like a really interesting, quirky idea, and I wanted to work with Mike Shannon for a long time and it meant I could stay home in New York and seemed like a good idea.”

In Cianfrance’s “Light Between Oceans” Weisz portrays a mother in early 20th century Australia whose baby girl is lost at sea and is found by a childless couple (played by Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender) who mistakenly assume she’s orphaned. The “Blue Valentine” director is known for wanting his films to have a heightened sense of realism, and the period setting didn’t hinder his techniques.

“He does things like the scene when I go and see [Fassbender’s character] at the jail. He didn’t show me the set beforehand and it was a real jail,” Weisz says. “The first time he shot it I was being led down by a prison guard into the cell and I didn’t know where I was going. He likes the real life to imitate the art. He likes you to feel like you don’t have to act.”

Weisz says that in many ways Cianfrance shoots the first rehearsal, and she relished the experience. She notes: “Just shoot it. It doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t like having things too worked out before I do it, so it suits me just fine.”

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An Oscar winner for “The Constant Gardener,” Weisz was a fan of Mick Jackson’s HBO biopic “Temple Grandin.” “Denial,” her final release this year, is another true story for Jackson, but this time around Weisz is playing Deborah Lipstadt, an American historian who was sued for libel in British court by notorious Holocaust denier David Irving.

David Hare’s screenplay uses actual court transcripts for much of the dialogue, and Weisz tried to mirror Lipstadt as much as she could to facilitate the sometimes “documentary style” of the film.

“There shouldn’t be pressure playing someone like Deborah because it wasn’t like I was playing Elizabeth Taylor where someone [might go], ‘Oh, you got her wrong.’ She’s a celebrated academic, not a cultural icon. But as it’s more of a docudrama than a drama I decided to go in for a close representation of how she talks. And Mick Jackson wanted me to really look like her.”

After a stint this fall on Broadway in a revival of Hare’s “Plenty,” Weisz will reunite with Lanthimos for his next feature, “The Favourite,” and has Roger Michell’s “My Cousin Rachel” and James Marsh’s “The Mercy” waiting in the wings. These sorts of roles are a long way from the big-budget studio projects she appeared in earlier this decade, but Weisz has found a groove that few of her peers can match.

“The lower the budget, the higher the level of experimentation,” the actress says. “It’s more fulfilling to do good work. I don’t think it really matters who pays for it.”

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