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In Berlin with her new film, Cookie's Fortune, Liv Tyler shared a few insights about her role as a freewheeling southern belle. "On the page, she's a pretty ballsy chick." Tyler also paid tribute to her venerable director. "Obviously, to work with Robert Altman was a complete dream come true." Liv Tyler paints a balmy picture of life in the deep south of the US on the set of Cookie's Fortune, which screens today in competition. She arrived there having just finished shooting Eugene Onegin with Ralph Fiennes. "That was the most heavy material - constant sadness. I was wearing really constricting corsets all day. My hair was up here," (Tyler gestures towards the ceiling). "Then I went home, cut my hair off and five days later I was shooting a Robert Altman movie. I felt so liberated." |
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Tyler only had one quibble: she didn't like cleaning catfish. She and Lyle Lovett (who plays her boss at the catfish supplier) were given lessons in this arcane art. "It's the whole process," she says, squirming. "They take giant toe-nail clippers and clip the fins. Then they skin them alive. And it's real hard to do. You have to be really strong." She was so appalled that she talked Altman into changing her character. He eventually allowed her to package and deliver the fish instead. Tyler also struck up a rapport with co-star Charles Dutton, who shares her love of the blues. "I'd sing all these funny blues songs - Etta James, Billie Holiday - and he knew them all. So we'd hang out and sing them together." Fame doesn't seem to faze the young actress in the slightest. "I'm not Madonna or anything," she says. "You come here and there are bodyguards and you speed around in cars, but it's not like that most of the time. You just have to try to be grateful that you have fans at all." Geoffrey Macnab |