 |
 |
NEW YORK -- In her tense new movie The Strangers, Liv Tyler plays one half of a troubled couple terrorized by psychotic home invaders who target them at random.
It doesn't seem far-fetched to her.
"Things like this happen a lot. Sometimes it's completely random," Tyler says.
"My stepfather (singer-songwriter) Todd Rundgren used to live in Woodstock, N.Y., in the '70s and two people broke into his house and tied him and his girlfriend, Karen, who was pregnant with my brother Rex, to a chair. One of them pistol-whipped Todd, which was horrible. There was nothing really stolen and no reason for what they did."
Years later, in her teens, young Liv made a decision to stop watching horror films. The catalyst was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
"They had all those sequels, but part one was really disturbing. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with horror movies and I remember seeing Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time and I was just like, 'Okay, I'm done with the horror movie genre.' "
|
Famous last words.
For his minimalist feature debut -- working with his own script which inspired a Hollywood bidding war -- The Strangers director Bryan Bertino gave Tyler and her onscreen boyfriend Scott Speedman a list of movies to watch to get in "the mood."
"I watched Rosemary's Baby, and we watched Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis, which was wonderful, and Last House On The Left, a weird, dodgy movie."
Bertino was inspired partly by the idea of the Manson murders as experienced by the victims, and partly by an incident from his Texas childhood, when he was alone at home with his sister when would-be burglars knocked on their door looking for an empty abode.
"(Bertino) showed us things in an environment that was really specific to what he wanted, music and photographs," Tyler says. "That house was the house he dreamt of in his mind and he let us go into it and stood back and watched. He would see us so upset and disturbed, and he made it very clear to us that it was not to be campy or humourous. It was real and bleak and terrifying.
"It was just Scott and Bryan and I and our small little crew, an intimate experience for all of us, really emotional for everybody. There was never a light day. I'd come outside from my scene and my poor hair and makeup people would be standing there with tears in their eyes."
The Hulk a chance for Tyler to lighten up
Liv Tyler's next movie, The Incredible Hulk (which opens June 13), proved a somewhat lighter experience on a larger scale than did The Strangers.
"I mean, making a movie, no matter how big or how small, is an amazing, wild, wacky collaboration of a bunch of gypsies," she says, adding The Hulk "is the same thing, but there's a lot more stuff to blow up and a lot more time to take doing it."
The research for Hulk, which was filmed in Toronto, was a little less intense. "I went back and watched the television show, which my mom and I used to watch all the time. I would say the image of the lone figure of Bruce Banner with his backpack, hitchhiking, the misunderstood hero having to move on to the next town -- that feeling is in the film, though the story is completely different."
Tyler plays Betty Ross (the same character Jennifer Connelly played in the Ang Lee Hulk), and she credits star and co-scripter Edward Norton for giving her a role worth playing.
"I actually was offered the part but I had to decide if I was going to be in the movie before I read the script. So luckily the script was very well-written and Edward wrote a great part for me. I'm a scientist -- which is unbelievable, I know -- and he wrote great things for me to do."
Since then, a rift has developed between Norton and Marvel Entertainment, the latter of which edited the movie without his input.
Tyler says there was no trouble while she was there.
"The movie was a real collaboration for everybody. But at a certain point, Marvel put together the movie they wanted and Edward disagreed. But it's the same movie, there's nothing crazily different about it."