 |
HOLLYWOOD -- Only Alicia Silverstone would assume the lotus position while sitting in her figurative catbird seat.
That's actually what she's doing when I interrupt her, deep in thought, deep in the plushy confines of a hotel suite sofa.
Legs entwined and politely cautious, Silverstone is receiving me for a session at this mid-morning hour, simply because she has a job to do.
Silverstone is selling something. She's selling herself a little, and her movie a lot.
The self-promotion she seems to be saving for another time, but her movie, Excess Baggage, which opens Friday, is another matter to her.
The feature represents her professional manifesto. It's her non-negotiable breakaway statement.
It's 100% proof that Alicia Silverstone is everything but the clued out Clueless girl.
Certainly, she has less clothes consciousness and more sense than her Clueless Cher cliche.
She also has a great deal more power, too.
Not only is Silverstone the star of Excess Baggage, which is a comedy about a rich brat who fouls up faking her own kidnapping, Silverstone is the producer, as well.
Actually, Silverstone is the reason the Marco Brambilla-directed movie exists.
She liked the script's attitude, she forced the funding and she fought the fights to keep all the anti-commercial, off-centre bits in the film.
It's heady major movie industry stuff, requiring the painstakingly boring lifestyle of too many meetings, and not enough alone time that most 20-year-olds would find terrifically revolting.
"It was," admits Silverstone flashing a grin, "my own Vietnam."
She realizes what she has said then amends it quickly: "Well, that's not fair, but it was my own private war."
The fight, first and foremost, was over her choice for the Excess Baggage leading man, Benicio Del Toro.
Oddly enough, there was no problem with the other quirky choices including Jack Thompson as her dad and Christopher Walken as her dad's tough-guy assistant.
But the suits at the studio were adamant about Del Toro, who was mostly known as that real oddball from The Usual Suspects, and in their minds the most unmarketable under-30 actor in the business.
So, the studio guys were, like, no way.
"I was, like, absolutely," Silverstone says.
Between grimaces at the mention of Leonardo Di Caprio or Ethan Hawke, Silverstone got stubborn about Del Toro just before it was the play or walk away point.
Silverstone actually stared them down with those doe-eyes, then wore them down with her girlish charm, then finally mustered all of her post-teen resilience to tell them, "No Benicio, no movie."
After a series of corporate huddles, producer Silverstone got the "Go" word, and off she went.
Go girl, indeed.
Silverstone chuckles at the recollection as she sits cross-legged and at peace, because her superiors, despite her convincing victory, still worried about the tone and texture of Excess Baggage and, of course, their investment.
"Every day," she says of working on the Vancouver set of the movie, "I was still up against the mindset of people that didn't get the film.
"I really think it was easier for them not to understand, not to appreciate it that much.
"They didn't want to see that the truth is off kilter a little, unconventional, sometimes not even real. That was the whole reason for doing the movie."
So the question is this.
Silverstone is poised to answer.
How did producer Silverstone know that actor Alicia would be able to develop the necessary connection?
Especially when her co-star Del Toro inadvertently grabs a great deal of the screen time as the car thief who mistakenly drives away with Silverstone's brat in the trunk.
"You know chemistry is easy for me to manufacture," says Silverstone, who isn't bragging but explaining.
"I wanted Benicio because he can act. He's always been the best thing he's ever acted in.
"I wanted that -- his talent. I'm not interested in working with people who make me look good, and I'm not interested in making myself look good.
"I want to work with people I can learn from like Christopher Walken and Jack Thompson and Benicio.
"I'm an actor, not a movie star. That's what it is about for me. It has always been my bottom line."
That would be since modelling as a pre-teen, then working full-time as an actor at 15 in The Crush, followed by those Aerosmith videos, which led to her Clueless casting, which became the major marketing reason for her being chosen as Batgirl in Batman And Robin, which she describes as "the time a movie job became work."
Does that mean Excess Baggage was when the work became her job all the time.
She's nodding slowly yes as if recalling her coincidental acting and producing on-set assignments. "I even picked the music," says Silverstone out loud, finally.
"And I had to fight for that, too," she adds, referring to her mostly no-name pop music choices on the soundtrack.
It's like our Clueless gal has gone positively alternative.
Not really.
What she is, is positively in control of her own movie universe.
"I allow myself to be free," she says, "because I have no expectations about what my career should be."
Her personal life is another matter.
"I want to be a happy person, and I want to have somebody desperately in love with me.
"I want a partner to tread the earth with."
Lotus position optional.