erin_broadley

"After I killed myself, I got a job at Kamikaze Pizza." That line opens Wristcutters: A Love Story, and sums it up. A low-income neighborhood in purgatory, that looks suspiciously like the industrial wasteland cities of L.A., is reserved for suicides. A depressingly blue-grey, treadmill reality where nothing ever changes -- exactly what they were trying to escape -- smacks the newly-dead in the face upon their arrival, and ultimately serves to convince them that there is literally no escape from the bullshit and pain of everyday life. The only hope of finding peace is to try to pick up the pieces and move forward. At Sundance in 2006, Cinematical's Karina Longworth called Wristcutters "a bold first effort, with a distinct, swaggering sense of style and humor that's hard -- even for a cynical blogger sick to death of indie 'quirk' -- to resist." I agree with that.

Starring as Mikal, a recently O.D.'d hitchhiker who meets two fellow travelers and sets off on an afterlife-road trip, is Shannyn Sossamon, of A Knight's Tale, The Rules of Attraction, and other films. Shannyn currently splits her time between drumming for her all-girl band WarPaint, playing a vampire on the CBS drama Moonlight and jousting with the rest of Young Hollywood for high-profile acting gigs. We spoke one night last week, by phone, and I have to say I was a little taken with her. Having just turned 29 (like me), she's an ambassador of double-edged LA chic -- at once diffuse and circumspect in her thoughts, sending out flashes of both an impish punk nature and the wisdom of an octogenarian bookseller. My kind of girl.

Ryan Stewart: Hello.

Shannyn Sossamon: Yeah, is this Ryan?

RS: Yeah.

SS: Ryan, this is Shannyn Sossamon. Are we doing an interview?

RS: Yeah, I was just waiting on your call. They said you'd call at 10.

SS: Oh, wow ... that's in a little bit. Um, I'll be close to sleeping then.

RS: No, no. 10:00 p.m., eastern. Ten minutes ago.

SS: Oh, you're in New York! Okay. I actually apologize for even calling this late, but they know that I like to get people to call me as opposed to me calling them, because if I'm left to it, it's gonna never happen. I'm just doing my thing and then when the phone rings, I get it. They forget that sometimes, and it bugs me. But whatever. I wouldn't have called late if I had known.

RS: It's completely fine. So what's going on in LA? What are you working on?

SS: Well, right now I'm working on a TV show called Moonlight, until December. And then ... I'm not sure. I'm just auditioning and figuring stuff out and seeing what's next. Really just kind of reading for stuff. I'll be doing a lot of press, probably, for One Missed Call, which will come out in January.

RS: Did you get caught up in that giant casting call for Justice League of America that happened recently?

SS: You know what? I did, actually. I auditioned for that. God, when did I audition for that? A long time ago. And you know what? It went well, but it wasn't right. I don't know what exactly they're doing on that.

RS: Never heard back?

SS: No, I did hear. I heard that it went really well, I just think that the director wants something else. I don't know. I know that the writers were like ... they even thought that I was perfect for one of the characters. They had sort of envisioned that, but the director wants to go someplace different, probably. You know, you get so used to it. You never know what it is. It could be something so simple, it's just weird.

RS: Right. It's hard to believe that it's been over two years since you filmed Wristcutters -- have you seen it recently?

SS: No. I've been doing a lot of press for it, so I've had to talk about it, but I haven't seen it.

RS: The reason I asked is because some of what I found most interesting about it are the rules it sets up. Like, for example, what would happen if the characters just killed themselves over and over again?

SS: That's ... [laughs] ... that's a really good question. I think ... I don't know. That character that Will Arnett plays does that, and you don't really know where he goes, after. It's just a place. I think they reference it for a second, basically. It's some place a bit worse than that, or something. It's just another place. It's like that.

RS: The place that they're in doesn't strike me as being so terrible. It's not bad. They're in a low-income neighborhood, basically.

SS: It's interesting that you say that. That's probably why people, distributors, had issues with taking it, because they thought it would be really hard to market, or troublesome, in the sense of, "Does it glamorize suicide?" because the place feels even kind of cool. There are cool songs playing in the bars and you get to fall in love, like the way that they sweetly fall in love. It doesn't seem that bad. And I'm not saying I agree with you, but it's something I can objectively see. But I think if you look a little bit closer, it's quite an ugly place. It's grey and really dull and the people they're stuck with ... everybody's kind of stuck in that numb place that they were in when they off'd themselves. I wouldn't want to hang out there for too long.

RS: Maybe because I'm keen on sci-fi/fantasy, but I was picking up on the fact that people can levitate and float in the air, stuff like that. It's a more magical world than the world of the living.

SS: Well, the little camp that Kneller was at is a special camp. That's a special camp because he kind of hangs out with angels and whatnot. So some in his camp could have been angels and some of them could have been suicide victims that were just sort of very special and got to hang out in his little camp. He gets the more quirky folk. But that's a special sort of area in the afterlife. The main bit, that you see, is the bit in the beginning, kind of before they meet Kneller -- where he works, the neighborhood, the grocery store, the streets. With as much time as they had, I think they're trying to reveal how not great it was.

RS: Do you have an opinion on whether or not your character off'd herself?

SS: I have a really strong opinion on it. I think the People in Charge mistook her overdose for a suicide because of her internal state at the time. I think when you go to inject yourself with loads of drugs ... let's just assume that anybody who does drugs that are hard is not in the best place, emotionally or mentally, to begin with, so she obviously was troubled in some way, whichever way that was. She was troubled. And then you do drugs, and maybe that time she did a little extra because she wasn't feeling so great or she was feeling really horrible that day because something bad happened in her life, whatever it was. Whatever was going on inside of her, maybe it wasn't the traditional drug addict boredom. You know, really depressed. I think she knows that no matter how depressed she was and no matter how high she wanted to get to escape, she did not purposefully, with a 100 percent sole intention, want to take her life. She did not wanna do that. She's frustrated. She's like, "No, no, no, I didn't mean to do that. That's not the same."

RS: It's interesting that we only get her point of view, and the point of view of the other "off'rs." Suicide is very much about the people left behind, and we don't get any of that point of view in the film. It was a little irksome.

SS: Yeah, well, the thing is that it's just a backdrop. The suicide afterlife is just a backdrop and it's more about the friendship and the love story. It's not really trying to "talk about suicide," the movie, at all.

RS: So the film has nothing meaningful or serious to say about suicide, as a topic.

SS: The only thing meaningful or serious is that you can't run from yourself. If you run from yourself, you're gonna be stuck with yourself wherever you go. It's not gonna solve anything. And in a subtle way, he addresses that -- look where Zia ends up. He ends up as the same person, except you're stuck in a place where you can't smile, everything's uglier ... it's a simple message, but he's definitely not commenting on it, one, and two, not making it seem like it's fun. But it's simple. It's not a deep, dark movie about people who commit suicide. I think it's pretty accurate -- I agree that you can't run.

RS: The subtitle is pretty bold -- "a love story" -- but where does that happen, though? Is the love story starting at the ending?

SS: I think the love story happened right when she got into that car and they locked eyes. That's what the movie tries to do, and I think it works. The way that they look at each other is kind of like, that sort of look where you can't even really look at each other because it's too uncomfortable, because you like each other and you don't even know that you do. It's more of an awkward, sweet, innocent kind of a connection, that's, again, awkward. It starts then. That was always a challenge for me as an actress -- I was constantly reminding myself that you have to show that they're falling in love. You have to want them to be together a little. We didn't really have any flirting scenes, any dialogue like that, it was just kind of when they were sitting next to each other, we needed to feel like they should be together. So it was more us having to play on the little looks and just really, energy. Just really believing it. The love story ... you're supposed to be fond of those two, right off the bat.

RS: Did you ever mess up any takes by smiling, since one of the rules of this purgatory is that smiling is impossible?

SS: I think I remember a couple. Nothing where there's some huge story to tell, but there were a couple of times. It was hard. There were a couple of times where, even in the take, it doesn't mess up the take but maybe you're in the shot and the scene is about something else, but you're part of it, but you're not talking, and someone else says something that was funny and you don't want to mess up a take, you don't want to be the person that does that, so what you have to actually do in the scene is ...there were times when I had to act like as if my character was turning her head, because I couldn't show that I was smiling and I wasn't gonna be the person that was messing up somebody else's take.

RS: Sounds like it was pretty light on the set.

SS: It was really light. It wasn't like we were all jumping around, giggling all the time, but it wasn't dark. It was rushed, and it was really hot because of the desert. But it was fun. I had a lot of fun doing that one.

RS: I wish I would have already seen Life is Hot in Cracktown, so I could compare and contrast. I bet there are lots of similarities.

SS: Life is Hot in Cracktown, my agent saw it, and he said it was really dark. It's night and day. Life is Hot in Cracktown has, like, people raping people and pissing on them afterwards. Life is Hot in Cracktown is fucked up. I mean, Wristcutters might as well be rated PG, if you want to ask me. It's really not heavy. It's heavy if you want to dwell on where it's set, the backdrop, but it's not a heavy-toned movie.

RS: I don't know, I had some heavy-toned conversation at dinner, after I saw it.

SS: Oh yeah, okay. I see what you're saying, sweetheart. I'm not gonna take that away from anybody. Absolutely. And that's good, the movie should do that. I just mean that you're not dragging the audience through this fucking ... like, my friend said I shouldn't even see this, because I have a kid, but Funny Games is coming out -- he produced it, he's the same guy who produced Wristcutters -- and he said it is so disturbing, this movie. I heard the original was really good and disturbing as well, and it's pretty much the exact same movie. Same director, same movie, same thing shot for shot, except with American actors, but it's just brutal. And I want to see it, just because he's telling me not to see it. Of course I want to see it. But Wristcutters doesn't do that. And I don't know if Life is Hot in Cracktown is as brutal as Funny Games, I just know that the script was brutal. It was like, people having their kids go sell drugs for them ... just gnarly.

RS: People are gonna freak out if they see Superman hitting the pipe.

SS: That's true. That's funny, I forgot. Superman, what else has he been up to? I didn't even see Superman, honestly. Was Superman good?

RS: It's ponderous. It's like the story of Jesus, with two or three action scenes thrown in. It's a big religious parable.

SS: Got it.

RS: I didn't bring up Jesus to transition into this, but since we're talking about death and suicide and all of that, do you believe in an afterlife? Don't answer if you feel that's too private or whatever.

SS: It's not that it's too private, but sometimes you do interviews with journalists at press junkets and things, and they don't really want the answer you're going to give them, because it's long or it's a whole other conversation, but I do have an opinion on it. I don't think there's a place. And I don't think Goran thinks that so literally, either. I don't think there's a place, a specific place, that we go to. I don't think that. I think your soul just keeps carrying on and you go through different experiences and you carry your karma. You carry your past experiences, whether you remember them or not. That makes a lot of sense to me, that your soul carries on and on and on and on and on, until its learned its lesson and it can be a piece of the whole. I don't have a specific visualization of a heaven or hell or anything like that, no.

RS: I don't really have a response to that, but it's interesting.

SS: Yeah, I could go on for a long time about it. I love to talk about that stuff.

RS: So you're sort of a metaphysical type.

SS: I've never used that word to describe myself, but maybe that's what it is. I like things that are very deep and other-worldly and magical. I have a hard time keeping myself grounded on the Earth, because I naturally sort of live in a much deeper realm, but if you're part of this world, you have to be able to function in part of the physical world, and sometimes I have a hard time. I'm often daydreaming -- about things that are very real -- but you have to be able to function. I have to work on that. But yeah, human psychology, the occult, past lives, you know, soul work and energy work ... all of that stuff. I'm very, very interested in that.

RS: Do you seek out opportunities to explore that through acting work?

SS: I wish. I will, as I get more opportunities, I will. I'm still sort of in the 'paying my dues' process. I'm trying to work my way up. I'll be very well-suited for things like that, I think. I'd like to do a wide range of things, but I know that's something I'd be suited for -- stuff that's just a bit more mystical.

RS: Tim Burton?

SS: Or David Lynch. Or people we don't even know, stuff that hasn't even been written yet. Maybe there's someone out there who hasn't even done it in a way that we've ever even seen, you know? Something new. Something brand new.

RS: In my Googling of you earlier, I saw that you're pretty heavy into drumming for your band -- are you a lyricist?

SS: I haven't exposed any lyrics of mine yet. That's coming last for me, for some reason. I write music. I write a lot of music. I love music and I'm always going to be playing music and exercising that within me, because it's a big part of me, but lyrically, not just yet. I haven't put anything out there. If I record an album, that'll be when it happens. I'll proudly put an album out.

RS: You have a lot of stuff in the can, but what are you shooting in 2008? Anything lined up?

SS: Yeah, but I won't say. I don't want to jinx it. There's something I'd really, really love to do that could be a possibility. That would be December and on. I'd love it. And it would help out a lot. Great script. Just wish me luck on that one.

RS: If you tell me what it is, I'll wish you luck on it.

SS: I don't want to tell you!

RS: Actually, if you told me where it was shooting, I would probably know.

SS: Australia.

RS: I'll see what I can dig up. My thoughts are going to be burdened tonight, with all this talk of metaphysicalism and wrist-cutting and all of that stuff. I'll never get to sleep.

SS: Awww, then go see a good movie. Have you seen Lars and the Real Girl?

RS: I saw it.

SS: How was it?

RS: It's good, but audiences react in different ways. He brings this doll to the dinner table at the beginning of the movie and half the audience goes along with that conceit and half of them don't.

SS: Is it funny?

RS: Not really. It's not a big laugh riot. I talked about that with the director, too, and he didn't care in the slightest about it being funny. He invests all his energy in the relationship. It's kind of a Harold and Maude thing.

SS: Ooohhh, interesting. Oh, that makes me want to see it even more. If it was too in-your-face-obvious, like 'Oh, he's got a sex doll, ha ha ha', it would be boring.

RS: What about you? What have you seen lately?

SS: You know what I liked? 3:10 to Yuma. I've seen 3:10 to Yuma and Eastern Promises, and then, right when Jesse James came out, I started to get really busy so I couldn't see it. Like, right now, my list is Jesse James, Lars and the Real Girl, Elizabeth, Across the Universe, We Own the Night and there was something else. Milos Forman. When does that come out?

RS: He had a film released earlier this year, Goya's Ghosts.

SS: Maybe I'm mixing up the titles.

RS: I can help you cross off one of those -- Elizabeth is one of the worst movies of the year.

SS: [Gasp] Bummer! Why!?

RS: It's hard to explain. It's like a Bollywood movie or something. Shameless melodrama, no attention to historical accuracy whatsoever, just a lot of big, brash speeches and bombast and Sir Walter Raleigh hanging off the mast of a ship while waves crash behind him, and so on.

SS: Did it seem like he was trying to do that on purpose?

RS: I have no idea what he was thinking. I just know it stinks.

SS: How is Cate Blanchett?

RS: Well, it's not that she's bad, but even Cate Blanchett can't fight things like noticeably poor camera placement during her big speech on horseback to the troops, you know?

SS: Okay, I will not do that -- what about Across the Universe?

RS: Are you a Beatles fan?

SS: Yeah.

RS: If you're a big Beatles fan, I think it's recommendable, but it's all about the music. The story is tailored to the music, not the other way around. In that sense, it doesn't have much more resonance than a well-made music video.

SS: So it's almost like an experimental film.

RS: Yeah, I mean it's the Beatles greatest hits, "the movie." Tons of Beatles references woven into the story, and so on. It's not some big transcendent experience, not for me, anyway.

SS: It's one note. Okay. And Jesse James is great, I hear. All the good ones come out right about now, because of Oscar time.

RS: Right. Okay, I think I'm gonna go track down what movie you're doing next with my two data points -- Australia and December, 07.

SS: Wait, I'm not doing it yet! I've only auditioned.

RS: Just kidding. Good job on Wristcutters, though. I like movies like that -- it gave me some stuff to think about.

SS: Oh, that makes me happy. You know, it's so far back that it seems like it should have come out already, but I forget that if it's a fresh movie for people then it might be a really good experience.

RS: What should people look for you in next? Cracktown or One Missed Call?

SS: I think Cracktown is going to Sundance, but One Missed Call actually comes out, so both of them are sort of happening together.

RS: Alright. Well, it's been fun talking to you. We'll catch up sometime.

SS: Okay, sweetheart.

RS: Have a good night.

SS: Bye.

Check out www.wristcutters.com for more info.