From Piano Player to Porn Star: An Interview with Alicia Witt 08.03.00

What attracted you to the character of Cherish, a porn star whose AVN-award-winning performance is opposite a gerbil?
To me it was funny, because I’ve seen so many porno movies…

(Soda spurts out of my nose, tears stream from my eyes, gales of laughter…) Really?
Um, yeah…and the acting is so bad, it’s so over-the-top, but Cherish is a great character because she’s completely proud of herself. She takes great pride in this career that she created. I get the feeling that if I was telling her backstory, she probably comes from a dirt-poor family and never had anything. But she was a real opportunist, in a good sense of the word, who loved to flaunt her body and loved the fact that she got attention off of it. She considers this to be as important an accomplishment as winning the Nobel Prize. In her world, this is a great thing. She’s the best. She’s a great porno star.

Did you base your role on any of the porn stars that you have seen?
I didn’t base it on anyone in particular. I based it on the notion that these women, at least in the cheaper pornos, go way over-the-top. And it just appeals to the basest level of what is sexy. It’s basically like, “Look at me, I’m having sex, doesn’t this make you horny?” (laughter) It’s so funny. And I had the best time, but I have to say it was the most surreal experience probably I’ve ever had.

Did you do porno research?
I didn’t actually do research specifically because I had already seen a number of them. That’s why I liked the character, because she’s so funny. And the acting in these movies is so over-the-top and so far from being anything that’s remotely sexy. It’s like appealing to the lowest common denominator. Some guy who couldn’t get laid if he wanted to, who is like “Oh look, tits.” You know?

But you do watch a lot of porno…
I’m a fan of anything that’s odd. I think porn films are just plain odd. I love the fact that one of the biggest differences between men and women is that if a woman has a sexual fantasy, I think nine times out of ten, it has to be accompanied by the thoughts of what the guy she’s thinking about did earlier that day and having dinner and having a meaningful conversation and maybe some beautiful music playing in the background and flowers and this whole image, but she has to be able to connect something to his brain that she finds sexy as well. Whereas a guy can actually look at a magazine with a photo of a naked girl spreading her legs and he can get off to that. I could never look at a naked guy and find that sexy to that extent.

Have you ever seen a porno with rodentia?
No, I haven’t. I think its safe to say that this porno scene is probably the funniest porno scene ever put down anywhere. Although there was a porn film that I saw in the Czech Republic that came pretty close.

I’m sorry, the Czech Republic?
Yeah, I was doing a movie there about five years ago, and I had nothing to do. I didn’t speak Czech, so what am I gonna do but watch pornos right? And there was this porno film with two women having fun with a guy and it was some sort of bizarre fluorescent lighting and chromegreen background, so sterile and so unsexy. But to top it all off, there was a vocal track laid in of some other woman going “Ya! Ya! Ya!” But it didn’t match the rhythm of what the women in the film were doing. It was almost like a bizarre spoof of a porno. I couldn’t believe it. And it made me laugh to think that maybe somewhere out there was a guy watching it, getting off on it, thinking it was sexy.

How did you keep from laughing during the gerbil scene?
Between each take, we were busting out laughing. It was so much fun shooting that scene. But then, to make it even funnier, John put the scene up at the Apex, which is a real porno theatre in Baltimore. And, as you know, he filled the theatre with about thirty-five male extras and they’re suppose to be jerking off while they’re watching me on the screen. And I’m sitting there in the actual audience watching myself on the screen of a real porno theatre with thirty-five guys pretending to jerk off. It was so weird. (laughter)

Obviously, this role didn’t offend you, but are you offended by the way women are portrayed in many films?
Yeah, I’m offended -- not necessarily as far as sex scenes are concerned, because that’s the actress’ prerogative. If she feels like doing that, that’s fine -- but I don’t know why there are still so many scripts that I read that have the obligatory female love interest who has absolutely nothing to do. In fact, I’ve been in meetings for roles like that and I’ve sat down with the filmmakers and said, “Look, I don’t think this character is interesting. I would like to do this with it.” But that’ not of any interest to them because the character simply exists as a tool to move the story along. It’s very strange.

Is there anything else that offends you in films?
There are some things that really offend me in movies. I have a real aversion to gratuitous violence. I also find some action movies absurd to the point of insulting my intelligence. You know the kind of scenario where the lone gunman gets out and a hundred people shoot at him and he dodges every bullet and then whips out his Uzi and blows away every single one of them unscathed? It’s just absurd. And I don’t care what anyone says, I do believe that films like that have an impact on teenagers and other people not taking guns so seriously. Thinking it’s not such a big deal to shoot somebody.

How do reconcile that with being in Cecil B. Demented, which has a lot of bullets?
It’s violent, but I didn’t think it was graphic violence. It’s almost cartoonish.

Sometimes “cartoonish” is applied to the lone-gunman-dodging-every-bullet-unscathed movie…
I’m referring to the big, slick --You know, they’ve got the glamorous shots of the muscly, sweaty guy walking toward the camera with the halo light around his head and charging into the sunset and appearing as the Big Sexy Action Hero. And to go see one of those movies on a Saturday night and see people just mindlessly chomping on popcorn and absorbing it all into their brains and thinking that is entertainment. I believe independent films are actually getting much more of an audience these days because more people are getting tired of that kind of film.

It’s been debated since the MPAA started rating films thirty-three years ago, but don’t you still find it odd that a guy’s head can explode into a million different bits in the name of God and country and get a PG-13 rating, but show a glimpse of flesh and your slapped with an R-rating? Or NC-17.
That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard -- also language. Its amazing to me what you can’t say to get a certain rating. It’s just words. It’s just syllables stuck together and there are certain words that are supposedly so offensive that you will get a really harsh rating and yet you can show people getting their heads cut off and really disturbing violent images in a PG-13 film. I don’t know what that says. It’s a really bizarre message.

What do you think independent films do differently?
I think mainstream Hollywood definitely has made some fantastic movies, but the whole thing about a studio film is it is made with the purpose of making a lot of money. No matter what anyone tells you. The producers are making the movie because they want to get rich.

To me, that’s the biggest difference between independent film and a studio film. An independent film is made because the filmmaker has a vision. It sounds corny, but it’s true. The filmmaker has a vision, and he wants to tell his story. I mean, I’m sure he’d like to make money off of it, but if you’ve got a few million dollars to play around with and a bunch of actors who are really passionate and they don’t care about getting paid either, you’re gonna come out with a film that’s much more true to what you are trying to say. And it’s not going to have all the phone calls being made everyday to the studio heads and the ten producers who are trying to be in charge and trying to take power away from the director. The studio system is just much more of a business.

You’ve worked with some of the deities of independents, David Lynch and now John Waters. As opposed to the younger indie directors you’ve worked with, how do their years of experience help you as an actor?
The big difference is that John has done it for so many years that he really knows what he’s looking for at this point. A lot of times if you have a first time indie director, with few exceptions, they will see the film afterwards and wish they had done a lot of things differently. Because they don’t quite know what to say to the actor to get the result they want. They know something is missing when they watch the dailies, but they’re not sure what it is.

It takes awhile to learn the process and obviously John has been doing this for awhile. The experience itself was fantastic for me because it wasn’t as though he was preoccupied with every little nitpicking detail. We had a rehearsal process where we explored the characters and read scenes and discussed it and talked about group madness and cults and the whole mentality that happens when ordinarily sane people get sucked into something and they believe in it so strongly that they all lose sight of what is logical. So we set that framework and all of us got to work and just had an amazing time just having fun with it.

John Waters said he was aware of you not because of your quirky stuff or David Lynch, but because he wanted to cast against the type you played on “Cybill”?
That’s cool. He didn’t tell me that. That’s a surprise to me, too. I was just happy to get to work with him. He was one of those directors that I had always wanted to work with my whole career. And ever since I saw Serial Mom and then I went back and rented his older movies, and he’s just amazing the way he blasts holes in all the social standards and all the things that people take for granted. People have really funny characteristics, and he really makes fun of them.

But God, I think I sleptwalked through the last two seasons of “Cybill.”