One-time wild child, Brad Pitt’s girlfriend and rehab patient, Juliette Lewis now just wants to make music. She doesn’t even like dating anymore.
Juliette Lewis answers the door of her temporary London apartment. Skinny white jeans, shiny red stilettoed ankle boots, mystic symbol jewellery, no makeup, no face surgery, and a rasping hello. Her West End play is just finishing and she is about to go on tour with her band, she says, by way of explanation for all the mess in the apartment. Shoes and CDs are everywhere. The Police’s Greatest Hits is playing; she seems unembarrassed. Everything about Lewis, the Police CD aside, suggests dark, dangerous, dysfunctional, but then it’s hard to work out how much her iconic part in Natural Born Killers is to blame for that perception. People tend not to remember her sweet film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, or the saccharine Evening Star. She says there is a huge difference between who people think she is and what she’s really like, but thinks that the two Juliettes might have merged recently. “Right now I’m a complete runaway train of non- conformity,” she says. “I like to joke, though, that I get younger as I get older.”
Lewis turned 33 in June; it seems slightly surprising that she’s still so young, but then she started off in movies early. She was a sullen thumb-sucking teenager opposite De Niro in Cape Fear, and it not only got her an Oscar nomination but also launched her Hollywood career as the perpetually strange girl. She was always on the edge, never the love interest, never quite lovable. “And I had less of a sense of humour and more angst because I was a nonconformist,” she says. “When I was 19 I would do photo shoots and say, ‘OK I’m ready.’ “I wanted to take pictures like Brando and De Niro, black-and-white portraits, no makeup, just me in my jeans ... and they’d have a rack of clothes and a makeup artist and I would be dumbfounded and say, ‘Why am I going to paint my face up? This isn’t me.’ That’s unheard of for a female so I’d end up just looking weird, and that shaped whatever public identity I had.”
Lewis talks with disarming intensity, which may be something to do with her being a Scientologist. All the Scientologists I’ve met are a bit like this: they look you in the eyes as if telling the truth is going to save them and you, and they are extremely well-mannered. One wonders what sort of intense epiphany made her chuck in a lucrative, if quirky, Hollywood career and turn rocker. She still intends to do some acting, but it’s her music that seems to most interest her now.
“It was a series of stages,” she says. “When I was a kid I was always musical and in acting I always used music to prepare for a part. I’d listen to [Pink Floyd’s] Shine On You Crazy Diamond and immediately you just feel something, and I’d stretch and connect. For Natural Born Killers I listened to Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile because it’s all guitars, imminent danger and brewing chaos.”
She knew she could sing nicely and proved it when she sang on the soundtrack for The Other Sister, a film in which she played a girl with autism. Singing nicely, though, wasn’t enough for her. “In the last decade I have written songs with various friends of mine and I was always putting off the music thing, even though I knew I needed to express myself that way. I was putting it off out of fear. I had no balls yet. Until the desire became so huge it outweighed the fear. I’ve done movies for 15 years. There is a security in it ... the trouble is, it was never fulfilling to me. Making movies can be really boring.”
“There’s an odd security about having a little travelling home and we all like each other so much,” she says. “All of us write on the road and the music is fuelled by love, not partying. Our version of partying is having a couple of drinks. My entire band dances, which is a rarity, and none of us do drugs. I approach the whole thing like an athlete for endurance and stamina. The show is fun for me. That’s the celebration. That is the party.”
It’s a rare thing when someone talks therapy-speak yet still manages to make you warm to them. Juliette Lewis believes in herself at least, so she makes you feel the same. There’s nothing cutesy and kittenish about her. She’s a proper cat – purring, growling and slinking.
For the full version of the article, see NOX05.
