People-obsessed
Actress Kerry Fox joined the Campus panel “The Rules of Engagement” along with Swedish author and screenwriter Henning Mankell and 2008 Golden Bear winner José Padilha.
Actress Kerry Fox
New Zealand-born Kerry Fox got her first experience in film under the direction of Jane Campion in AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1990). There she played New Zealand writer Janet Frame, who, declared insane, alternated her life between writing and electroshock therapy. “In that movie Campion taught me to be brave”, Fox says. “Actors should lose fear to tell their hopes, for what we want to see in a film is what we feel when we interact with people”.
That same lesson enabled her to follow Danny Boyle’s golden rule when she worked for him in SHALLOW GRAVE (1994): “Do not hold on to your stories, be generous, share them with others”, Kerry recalls him saying over and over again. Since then, Fox has undertaken a prolific career that led her to shoot in Australia, Sarajevo, Kenya and London with filmmakers such as Gillian Armstrong, Michael Winterbottom and Patrice Chéreau. The latter gave her the leading role in INTIMACY, a role for which she won the Silver Bear for Best Actress in the Berlinale of 2001.
Where does she find the inspiration for her different roles? “I do not study film, I am not film-obsessed. I am people-obsessed. I am inspired by my relationships. I want to understand the truth of the person I am sitting with. People want the opportunity to speak, to tell their stories. That’s some sort of guttural, essential quality of being human. I find that thrilling and I need to be thrilled at work. My trade is me, so I don’t want to lose time, I want to know who to spend my life with.”
And what is her fellow actors’ role in that inspiration? “Acting is all about interacting. I can’t do anything if the others are not engaged with me and we are not in it together. I do not come to the shooting with a pretty plan of what I’m going to do, I simply respond to what’s in front of me. I have some ideas, but I simply learn live.”
The huge importance Fox gives to interaction with others is surely revealed in her view of the role of real physical contact in acting: “A part of any actor’s skill is to learn that body leads to reading the truth about people. Corporal differences are subtle but they are true, and it is important that they create a different response in the watcher”. Maybe that’s what led her to accept the challenge of embodying crude sexual scenes in INTIMACY, a movie in which she even had to perform real fellatio on a fellow actor. Her performance awoke a negative response in England, a response that – in her point of view – the Silver Bear helped to ease. “We need to keep risking. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we do not. But that’s part of the richness of life…” And this actress knows what she is talking about.
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