Actress Anne Hathaway gets quirky for an unconventional genre-mixing film that promises big entertainment and huge monsters
SHE played an intrepid explorer in the sci-fi extravaganza Interstellar (2014) and was a druggie struggling with her addiction in the drama ,i>Rachel Getting Married (2008).
Hollywood starlet Anne Hathaway can also ooze elegance with a sassy edge as moviegoers witnessed in her portrayal of the Catwoman in the superhero adventure, (2012).
For her latest film, the 35-year-old actress ditches the glamour for a slobbery look (for as much as Hollywood will allow), complete with dishevelled hair, to play Gloria, an out-of-work party girl and alcoholic.
Titled Colossal, it is a combination of the sci-fi, action and black comedy genres, which also stars Jason Sudeikis, Austin Stowell, Dan Stevens and Tim Blake Nelson.
Gloria initially finds herself in relationship trouble with her sensible boyfriend, Tim (Stevens), and is forced to move back to her tiny hometown to get her life back on track.
While there, she reconnects with childhood friend Oscar (Sudeikis), a good-natured bar owner with a coterie of drinking buddies (Stowell and Nelson), and resumes her drinking lifestyle.
OF MONSTERS AND WOMAN
But this is where things start to get weird. On the other side of the world, a larger-than-life creature begins attacking Seoul, South Korea on a nightly basis, captivating spectators around the world.
One night, Gloria is horrified to discover that her every move at a local playground is being mimicked on a catastrophic scale by the rampaging beast.
When Gloria’s friends get wind of the bizarre phenomenon, a second, more destructive creature emerges, prompting an epic showdown between the two monsters.
Colossal eventually features an epic showdown between people and their inner demons, with just about everything having more than one meaning.
The quirky and wildly imaginative movie is helmed by Spanish filmmaker and screenwriter, Nacho Vigalondo, who has directed entertaining sci-fi films like (2007) and Extraterrestrial (2011).
It’s a twist on the Kaiju (Japanese monster) genre and a loving homage to the Godzilla series of movies.
Colossal represents Hathaway’s first creature feature and the actress reveals in an interview that Vigalondo, who also wrote the script, had wanted to make a Kaiju movie for a very long time.
“He found his way to me and I loved it,” she says of her introduction to the unique project.
“To cut a long story short, I was looking for something really different and I was really lucky since I got an interesting script,” she says, adding that she had met with the director and believed in his capabilities after watching his films.
”Then when Jason came on board, it all just kind of came together,” says the American actress, who was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Hathaway added that she liked the fact that this movie doesn’t really have one genre and kind of borrows from many different ones.
She says: “My character, Gloria, also felt like home, she felt like me in a lot of ways. And yet the whole thing was about monsters too.
“Gloria is a party girl with a heart of gold, who discovers that when she is in a certain location and gets drunk, a gigantic monster attacks Seoul, South Korea. Jason plays my childhood best friend, who I get drunk with a lot,” says Hathaway, who married actor Adam Shulman in 2012 and has a 13-month-old son with him.
“How surreal is that?”
Below, Hathaway talks more about the bizarre and unconventional film.
WHAT SPIRIT ANIMAL WOULD YOU CHOOSE?
My creature would have iridescent rainbow-coloured wings and be named Hug.
She’d hug you whether or not you wanted it, and is kind of aggressive.
It’d be fluffy and sparkly but with a scorpion tail, so it’s like, “I am Hug but don’t mess with me”.
WHAT MADE YOU PLAY THIS ROLE?
I like playing someone who’s clearly struggling but has a great spirit to her.
This isn’t an addict story in the traditional form — there’s a great deal of humour to it.
What appealed to me was the fact that she saw herself as a low-stakes drunk, who wasn’t hurting anyone but herself, then learns in spectacular fashion that it was not the case.
The movie goes into a place that you really don’t expect.
Honestly, I thought I was making a tiny little indie movie for myself that was going to make me smile.
Then the world changed so dramatically since we made the film and now it’s resonating with lots of people. We didn’t mean it to be a timely thing. We just sort of stumbled into it.
LET’S TALK ABOUT GLORIA AND HER ALCOHOLISM.
We do see her drink and pass out later but there’s never a big scene where she goes crazy, like dancing on tables.
Not every drunk is that way, where they go absolutely nuts. That is totally a cinematic way though. You get up and you make a fool of yourself.
But what happens when you are sort of a low-stakes drunk, where you don’t actually fall asleep but just pass out? You wake up and you’re just in that cycle.
I certainly had moments in my life where that was the case, so it resonated with me just a little more.
I mean there are a full spectrum of drunks in the world, and this is just one of them — this is an underserved representation after all.
WHAT DO YOU TAKE AWAY FROM THE MOVIE?
I like that it was a project that made me think but it didn’t necessarily depress me.
A lot of times when you want to look deeply into the existence of things or into our own journeys, they sort of get negative and bring you down in some way.
With this script, it felt like it was lifting me up and I liked that.
THIS FILM HAS DIFFERENT GENRES. HOW DO YOU PROMOTE IT?
It’s so hard because in promoting this movie, people will be like, “So tell us what this is all about,” and I just go “No, it is so much better to discover it fresh and unknowingly by yourself.”
I did say to people that if they love movies, they should just watch it.
Trust me, you will love it and see it with other people. You watch it in the theatre and you might just find yourself having a great conversation about it at the end.
ASIDE FROM RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, YOU HAVEN’T REALLY DONE A ROLE QUITE LIKE THIS...
I find it so funny because I have to check myself from making faces when people are like, “So this is a real departure for you” because this is the closest to me I’ve ever been.
I feel like it would not be authentic for me to say that I’m this all the time. But I’ve had long stretches of my life where I’m very much like this character.
I’ve always kind of been able to pull myself together for a movie or for something larger than myself, but there have been plenty of moments in between where you just feel kind of lost and you’re struggling with who you are and how you’re doing things.
The parts that make me uncomfortable are the ones where you have to play someone who seems like they have their life together.
Everybody’s struggling with something. So I was really psyched to find someone like Gloria, who is all these things that we usually don’t allow people to be, which is totally sweet and self-absorbed, and very, very caring but also self-destructive.
She hasn’t totally found her north star, and it’s a really unusual circumstance by which she finds it.
But I think that given the right context, we can all be monsters. And given the right context, we can all be heroes as well. I thought it was really cool to have someone in a movie that was both.
DO YOU SEE THIS AS A FEMINIST MOVIE?
My only hesitation about saying that it’s a feminist movie is that I think it invites a laziness of thought that doesn’t benefit the movie.
I think that for some people, it lets you gloss over some things. For some reason, “feminism” will unfairly sink things.
Earlier today, somebody asked me, “Is this a female revenge movie?” And I said to him, “I think that says more about you than it does about the movie.”
I don’t think it’s a female revenge movie because if you look at the movie, Gloria gives Oscar every opportunity to melt and become vulnerable, and he chooses ego every single time.
I think this is a movie that records a very accurate experience for women, which is people trying to control them, people believing they have a right to control them, people not trusting them to make their own decisions. But the reality is that nobody has the right to do that.
So, like I said, “feminism” is an easy word, but this movie is worth a deeper conversation.
And after saying all that, yeah I think it is a feminist movie. Feminism is about equality.
This is a movie about empowerment. But are movies about female empowerment necessarily feminist?
One of the best-selling points about this movie is that we have been having a conversation about it for two years and either we’re dumb or this movie just holds up. For me, it is the latter.
DO YOU SEE THIS MOVIE AS A METAPHOR FOR SOCIETY?
Nacho wasn’t trying to push any points or make a statement. He was just telling a story intuitively.
He’s got a wonderful mind that can hold a lot of different possibilities at the same time.
So I think because of that, he’s tapped into some universal feelings, which have just happened to have coincidentally become incredibly timely.
Two years ago, the alcoholism aspect of it would have resonated more vibrantly. And now, given what we collectively as a society experienced the last year, I think the way women are treated by angry men is really jumping out.
It is nice to find a film that makes you think without making you sad. Colossal will not make you sad!
Colossal is now showing in cinemas nationwide
Courtesy of TGV Pictures