Anne Hathaway Q&A
19 May 2009
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Anne Hathaway, 26, stars alongside Kate Hudson in the comedy Bride Wars. Hathaway plays Emma, a school teacher who falls out with her best friend, Liv (Hudson) when their eagerly anticipated weddings are scheduled for exactly the same time on the same day at their dream venue, The Plaza Hotel in New York. As the day quickly approaches, each tries to scupper the other’s plans for a perfect wedding day.
It looks like it but was Bride Wars fun to make?
Yes it was but it was a difficult film to make as well. We had a short shooting schedule and had to pack a lot of filming into about two months. But there were certain scenes I would find myself in the middle of where Kate and I would just be yelling at each other about something ridiculous like who gets what wedding date and who was going to move hers, and the absurdity of it always made me laugh.
And then of course at the end, when the war has gotten out of control and we physically confront each other, that part was so much fun to shoot.
Is that the scene when you have the fight when you are both in full bridal gowns?
Yes. When I got to that part of the script reading it for the first time, I burst out laughing because I had a vision of a cackling Kate Hudson in a wedding dress. You know each of us dressed in white, and there’s something a little punk rock about that I like girls behaving badly in wedding dresses.
Was that scene hard to do?
Well, we only had a certain amount of time in each location. That scene we filmed at around 3.30 in the morning. It was fine though. You know, I never let myself really think about how I feel when I’m doing scenes. I always try and focus on my characters because if I stopped to think about how I felt about it for two seconds I’d probably get scared and go home (laughs).
But with that one I remember feeling very lucky to be there. I know that sounds funny but female buddy comedies don’t get made very often and to have such a fun physical cat fight with a great girl like Kate captured on screen forever, well, I remember feeling very lucky.
One of my other favourite scenes is when you go orange in the tanning booth.
Yes, that was memorable! Kate has made me orange and so I retaliate by making her hair blue (laughs). I was excited about that because I don’t really have much beauty baggage I try to look however the character should always look. But one thing I can’t do anything about is the fact that my skin is very pale, so to get to make fun of that in a movie was great. And it works in the whole war.
But the makeup required, however, was not fun and it took an hour to put it on and then a lot of scrubbing and scrubbing in the shower to try to get it off again. I don’t want to think about how much water I wasted and sometimes I would scrub so hard I would reveal bone only joking. But it was just awful.
What was it like when you walked down 5th Avenue like that?
Walking down 5th Avenue a shade of bright orange was one of the most surreal moments of my life (laughs). We did that shoot a la Tootsie and the camera was hidden and so people just thought I was walking down the street completely orange. The cell phone cameras were coming out all around me
and I did feel like a bit of a freak but it’s all for art, I guess (laughs).
Did you really just walk down there among the public?
Yes, I just walked down the street. There were a few extras who basically walked in a circle around me so that we could do the shot. But for the main part we just had to put up a sign that said ‘hey, hope you like being in a movie, because you’re in one!’
Another memorable scene is when you dance, drunkenly, at the bachelorette party. Was that liberating?
It seemed that for my character that whatever was liberating for her was deeply, deeply humiliating for me! (laughs). It was actually fun to get up there and go ‘alright, this is how I dance drunkenly’ and know that it was going out in there in the world!
It was fun though to get up there and do that because it’s not something that I would ever let myself do and it’s certainly not something that would occur to me to do in front of so many people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an angel and I get a little crazy with my friends sometimes but I usually keep it contained. So to be out there in such a public way was new to me.
Do you think that the film has something to say apart from the comedy? Like the striving for perfection on a wedding day can get out of control andis beside the real point?
Yes, I think so and another concept that appealed to me was that my character Emma has spent her entire life dreaming about what kind of bride she is going to be. She had always imagined her wedding but had never stopped to think ‘what type of woman am I going to be?’
Emma has been very passive in her life and I thought that was an interesting difference, that she felt in some ways allowed to let her imagination go when it had to do with a single day but when it had to do with the rest of her life she wouldn’t allow herself to go there.
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