Ladies on big role at Sundance

Ladies on big role at Sundance

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Jason Isaacs and January Jones star in the film "Sweetwater," showing at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

PARK CITY, Utah â€" Several stars of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival stopped to talk to the Daily News about the projects that brought them to co-founder Robert Redford’s annual celebration of indie cinema.

For her role as an avenging Old West frontierswoman in “Sweetwater,” “Mad Men” star January Jones got in touch with her inner Clint Eastwood â€" and enjoyed playing a rugged heroine.

“I’d never seen a female character written that way, ever,” Jones tells the Daily News. “A character like Sarah is usually a man. This woman uses her femininity and her sexuality to lure men in and take them out. But there are comedic moments, too, whether it’s having a gun between my boobs or shooting a guy from behind.”

Jones, 35, was last at Sundance with a film in 2002, “mainly having fun and meeting people.” She says now that her “Sweetwater” role is one she could not have done as a younger actress.

“It’s a very specific set of tools I use as a performer here,” she says. She remember when “Mad Men” creator Matt Weiner called her “a very athletic actress.”

“I didn’t know what that meant, but I finally understand,” she says. “Not only do have I skills I didn’t have when I was younger, I also said in my twenties that I wouldn’t do nudity. Then I turned 34 and said, ‘Ah, I have no problem with that!’ Especially if it’s a story and character I believe in and director I can trust.

“As you age, you become more comfortable in your skin. I was nursing my baby up until I was shooting the film, so it was a very odd time for me physically. I was like, ‘Well, ‘the ladies’ have looked better, but I’ll do it.”
The feel of the 1950s was on the mind of Radha Mitchell as she filmed the Jack Kerouac drama “Big Sur.”

“As a culture, we try to get close to the passionate experiences of life, and to do that we have to explore things,” Mitchell tells The News. “Kerouac embodied that pursuit. He’s at a crossroads here, and so are we â€" are we more or less connected? Are we happy or sad? ‘Big Sur’ is about those things.”

Both Mitchell and her co-star Josh Lucas are old hands at Sundance. Lucas looks around the scene at Main Street and notes, “If Kerouac were alive now, he’d be a filmmaker.

“What’s important about a place like this film fest is, it’s for people with real vision who have worked outside of the system.”

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Kate Bosworth says tackling the dialogue was the biggest challenge in "Big Sur," a film about Beat generation poets.

Another “Big Sur” co-star, Kate Bosworth, found the jazzy syntax of the Beat generation a refreshing hurdle. Her boyfriend, “Big Sur” writer-director Michael Polish, used only Kerouac’s text for the film’s dialogue.

“One of the greatest challenges as an actor for this film was the language,” Bosworth, 29, tells The News.
“Obviously it was a period film, but there’s a Shakespearean kind of rhythm to the dialogue, and finding that was individual to each actor. You had to process and digest it and then reimagine it.”

Bosworth and Polish, who met while filming their movie, each have several Sundance appearances to their credit. This one has extra resonance for Bosworth, however.

“The difference this year for me is I get to wake up next to my partner in crime, my artistic partner and my lover all in one. It’s a special experience.”

Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen play two teenage girls looking for a lover in the New York-set drama “Very Good Girls.” At an event on Main Street in Park City for the film, the two young stars talked to The News about how their real-life friendship influenced writer-director Naomi Foner’s film.

“I showed Dakota around my high school, Campbell Hall in Hollywood, when she was 13 and I was 18,” Olsen says. The two have been friends ever since.

Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for The Branding Bee

Ashley Olsen (l.) and Dakota Fanning star in "Very Good Girls."

“We tried to film this movie during one summer, then had to postpone it a year,” says Olsen. “We loved Naomi and wanted to make it with her and each other, and no one else really.”

The film may mark a definite line for the young actresses, both of whom are students at New York University.

“I definitely am 23 playing an 18-year-old,” says Olsen. “I don’t know if I can do that again.
“If the most amazing movie about a girl in high school comes along, I don’t want to say ‘I’ll never do it again,” says Fanning, 18. “But there is something cool about doing a movie where what’s in it is actually kind of happening to you.
“I read this script when I was graduating from high school; I was accepted into NYU and was thinking about going to college, as is my character in ‘Very Good Girls.’ The movie did fulfill something in me in an abstract way.”

The two friends “just kind of hung out to prepare” for their roles,” Olsen says.

“Most of all, we wanted it to feel real,” adds Fanning. “I know what it’s like to be a real girl in a real friendship and go through those things. So if anything felt fake, it was like, ‘Let’s not do that again.”

Each actress has been at Sundance previously, but the thrill hasn’t worn off for them. As Fanning put it, “The excitement of having a film at Sundance never goes away.”