Meryl STREEP: The hardest thing is to remain new

One of the central events of this year’s Berlin Film Festival is awarding the outstanding American actress Meryl Streep with the honorary Golden Bear. Besides, the premiere of the biopic The Iron Lady, where Streep played Margaret Thatcher, took place within the framework of the festival. The premiere was followed by a press conference dedicated to the film.

I’d like to ask you a simple question. The butterflies in your stomach still fly when you hear “the winner is” or something like that. I mean I saw you at the Globes and you we like…

“Shocked. I was shocked. Oh, I feel like that. It’s very odd to be in the position where people say you, ‘Oh, I think you are going to win something.’ Or ‘I don’t think you have a chance this year.’ And suddenly you feel like you are in a sporting event. And you haven’t signed up for it. You did some work in a film that you are proud of and you are hoping that people will go and see it. And suddenly you’re doing calisthenics to get ready for a super ball or something (laughing). It’s an out-of-body experience.”

Which was more difficult to play, the really powerful Margaret Thatcher, or shall we say, a retired one? Could you answer in this British accent of yours?

“(Laughing.) No. (My favorite word.) You know, when you’re doing something that you love, there was nothing particularly arduous about it. There was a great deal of satisfaction, focus, hard work and long hours, but it was not hard. It’s hard to be in something when you are acting with an animatronic robot. That’s hard. And with special effects and having to invent a whole world. And the world was invented and made real by Phyllida [Phyllida Lloyd, the director of the film. – Ed.], by Jim [Jim Broadbent, an actor who played Thatcher’s husband. – Ed.], and the actors that I’ve worked with, and I felt real there. So it did not feel hard. And what was the difference between the old and the young, the challenge was in making the same woman age. Because part of her life is very well chronicled, and part of her life is hidden from us. And to marry those two was a particular challenge, but again, Jim made it easy.”

The mask was so fantastic that at first I did not recognize you. I thought, this old lady plays very well. I can’t wait to see Meryl Streep. How was it to work with the mask?

“The makeup was really astounding, so beautiful job by my makeup team which was Roy Helland who has been with me since the first play I did in New York City right after drama school. So more than 35 years he’s worked with me. He’s done every film since Sophie’s Choice, everything. And his colleague Mark Coulier who is a British prosthetics designer. So together they made four decades of Margaret Thatcher, and we did three different tests. And each time they took more and more away. So, really, it’s a great deal of me, myself in certain light. You know that was important to me, to all of us, when the other actor who really gives you your credibility, who enables you to believe you, who say you are. That they look in your face and they don’t see makeup, they see a person. That’s what this team achieved. It was really wonderful.”

You are always believably different in every role that you ever played. What is your secret?

“I always think I’m playing sort of the same person (laughing). I find me there, what’s like me in this person. And I’ve been lucky in sort of tracking a number of different characters that have qualities that I recognize in myself. And I won’t identify the ones that coincide with Margaret Thatcher’s qualities (laughing). And neither will Jim. Or any of my colleagues. But I think, you know, even though we look different, we come from different places, we come from different cultures, we have a lot more in common in our interior lives than we care to admit. We all have a lot more in common with Margaret Thatcher than we care to admit. Our humanity, we share it, so it interests me to find those common notes. It’s sort of my life’s work in a way, just to find out.”

What did you learn about Margaret Thatcher?

“I came to learn a lot of different things about her that surprised me. She was also a chemist and she early recognized global warming, and she spoke about this to the US many-many years, 20 years ago. She never dismantled what the Conservatives in America consider the most shameful socialist program, which is the national health in the United Kingdom. She may have wanted to. But she never touched it. Many surprises.

“I just was interested in a three-dimensional portrait of the woman who sort of stood against the tide, was unreasonable, and autocratic. She never checked polls for the opinions that she had. This was very brave in 1979. A completely different world from the one we are living now.”

Do you consider Margaret Thatcher a feminist?

“I think Margaret Thatcher would be dragged kicking and screaming to the altar of feminism. But she was a feminist, whether she liked it or not. She opened doors for women. Certainly because she came out of Tory, the Conservative Party, because she came from that branch, she was particularly restricted in terms of gender, religion, class. The fact that she made it to the top of that club, broke ground, in their own ranks... Suddenly it became conceivable what had been inconceivable that a woman could sit in that seat. Credibly, it’s very hard for my own daughters to imagine the world, when it was out of the question. But when I grew up, there were no women presidents of corporations, very few got into law school, medical school. Nurses? Yes, there were nurses, teachers, there were good professions you could enter, but you could not aspire, there was a certain ceiling, that has changed, and it has changed because of women like Margaret Thatcher who just put their head down and went ahead.”

You have said that you understood Margaret Thatcher. What do you think of her political choice? What do you think of her personally?

“When an actor plays a character, it’s like taking on the persona, you don’t sit above it and judge it. If you do, you are doomed, because you’re discriminating. No, you’re doomed artistically. It’s like judging yourself, you don’t have that objectivity. And the film is not making that point, because it’s looking at her distorted reality from her own point of view. And her actual circumstances, what she touches, and who touches her each day. That was the realest part. So I don’t do that with characters. I don’t say, Oh. I like her, I hate her. You can’t be inside someone if you do that.”

Do you like especially playing strong women? Because the Iron Lady was not the first strong woman you played. And the second question will be: now that you are receiving a life-achievement award, how do you look back on what you’ve achieved as an actress?

“You see, I’ve already forgotten the first question, because I’m already on my life-achievement award (laughing). Strong women, yeah. I like playing all kinds of people. I do like to play people that are funny, occasionally. That did not happen in this, but I like… I don’t know. I don’t look at those strong women, weak women, vacillating women, oppositional women… I do like difficult women, or at least the ones that are difficult to understand. I do like translating them. And in terms of being here and getting a Golden Bear, I was very, very honored to hear that this was going to be awarded to me. And it’s kind of overwhelming to be honored outside of your own country, because still you are where you grew up and I grew up in New Jersey, in a town of 5,000 people. And to imagine that so many years later I will be on the stage of the most prestigious film festival and receiving a life-time achievement was like a dream. It really is like a dream. I’m trying to make it feel real and I’m trying to make it feel like me. It’s not quite there yet.”

How did Sophie’s Choice and your role in this film about Holocaust, how did they picture life? Do your roles affect you afterwards, at least some of them?

“I’m not sure. I think that what draws me to a project is the thing that is not articulable, it’s something direct like music, it goes in, I read a script and something resonate and I think: I have to do it. So that means it existed, this feeling, in me before I met the material and the material corroborates something I already feel. In terms of Sophie’s Choice and the Holocaust, I do know that when I was a little girl, my mother drop me up to a library one day, where I didn’t like to go, it was a rainy summer day, I think I was 10, and I opened the book, and I saw a pile of bodies in the book, and I took the book home and I said: what’s this? It was the first thing I had learned about the Holocaust. One thing was that shoes on the people – this is what I remember – the shoes on the body looked like sort of my mother’s shoes. Because that was in the 1950s. Those were modern shoes, and I thought: how could this happen in modern time? So that’s one thing that was probably in me when I met that material and maybe wanted to look more deeply at it.”

What is the price that you feel you pay for leading the career like yours?

“There are five contemporary art museums in Berlin. I would love to go to a contemporary art museum. I won’t go. It’s hard, you know, because I can look at something, and there are five people in front that are looking at me. I’m not complaining, it’s very good. But I miss a lot of art.

“Ironically, show business, plays, movies are much kinder to motherhood in a way, because you are constantly unemployed, so, you are home, and you’re home when they don’t expect you to be home. So, that’s also valuable.”

Question of The Day: Generalizing the questions of my colleagues, who have asked you what had been the hardest things in this work, I want to ask you, what is the most difficult thing in the profession of an actress?

“I think, to be new, to be fresh, to surprise yourself and other people. And to have sense, when you’ve been around for a long time that they are going to be so sick of me, because as an actor you are aware of everything, you are aware of everything in front of you, behind you, under the table, above it. You’re aware of everything. So you are aware of good things and bad things. And dealing with expectations is difficult. Sometimes people are intimidated to start working. I am intimidated to start working. Starting is the hardest thing. Starting a project. But as an actor you learn that your insecurity is your friend, and that teaches you about fear and fear is very important as something very human, if you don’t have it you’re in trouble. I don’t know, that’s my answer.”

It was interesting to hear about the fear. Because you were called the first actress in the world. You are cruising to a third Oscar. I would like to ask if you ever thought that you are overrated.

“Yes. I mean, of course, of course.”

I wonder if there are any contemporary actresses whose performances might be on a par with some of your best performances.

“Oh, there are only 180.”

Could you name a couple?

“No. Because then I will leave someone off the list. That will be bad. Everybody says about the golden age of Hollywood, but I think that the level of acting now is higher, deeper, more daring, more adventurous, edgy, don’t you? Because I do, I do feel that, just generally. Everybody who makes a great performance – and in this year particularly for women – there have been so many wonderful performances, many of them were not even nominated, for instance our co-star Olivia Colman made the film Tyrannosaur, which is absolutely breathtaking, and she has not been recognized for it. Extraordinary, fantastic, though very few people have seen it. Again, in any other year, if would have won every single award. So I said I was not going to tell names, but I just did. I do think that in every year we focus on a certain number of awards because of the machinery of publicity. And there are many others that deserve it and that’s your job to publicize them and make noise about them (laughing).”

You have a career lasting for more than 30 years. How do you manage? Is there a secret, or maybe advice?

“There is no secret. There is just forgetfulness.”

You’ve been working for over 35 years now in moviemaking industry. You have worked with the best directors. Do you feel like you contributed to writing a part of contemporary American film history?

“I don’t have a sense of it, you know. I just go, really like every actor, from one job – it’s over, I’m looking around: where, where, where? Where should I put my energy? What moves me? What makes me get excited again? It’s a weird life, an acting life, because you don’t have any sort of goal. You’re not a research scientist, who just thinks: isolate this enzyme, then that will lead to this, there will be a breakthrough, which will cure cancer or something. Actor just goes: maybe I’ll go over here. Or that will be good too. Year after year you just go from pillar to post, and there is neither rhyme nor reason in it, and you can’t plan anything. You certainly can plan children and that sort of thing. But I think I love this way of working. I think if I’d set a goal, all I would do was just disappoint myself. But by not having something way ahead that you are aiming for you just focus on here, now, and what you are doing here and now, and that’s what we all do.”