Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

In Her Own Words

"One time," Juliette Lewis says, "I wanted to get to know someone better by writing down questions to him…" She says, "These questions are more telling about me than anything I could write in a diary."

Juliette says this on an antique sofa in a rented house in the Hollywood Hills, a very white and vertical, a very Getty Museum house-stark modern but full of her antique furniture-a house she's renting with her husband, Steve Berra, until they can move into their new home near Studio City. She's holding a handwritten list she's just found, and reads:

"Did you ever stab someone or cut them intentionally with a sharp object?"

She reads: "Do you like asparagus?"

She reads: "Do you have a middle name?"

She drinks chai. She doesn't watch television. She loves playing cards, King's Corner or Kings Around the Corner. She uses that fancy new toilet paper, Cottonelle, which feels like you're using a cashmere sweater. In the basement is Steve's severed head-a very realistic replica left over from a skateboard video and made by the same team that made Juliette's pregnant stomach for the movie The Way of the Gun.

From the list, Juliette reads: "Do cats frustrate you as pets, or do you admire their independence?"

Over the past twenty-four hours, she's talked about her family, her father (Geoffrey Lewis), her career, the Scientology thing, getting married, and writing songs. The songs are important because after years of being scripted, these are her words now.

Juliette's mother, Glenis Batley, says, "Okay, this is the great story."

This over breakfast in Los Angeles. Glenis drinks lots of coffee and has lots of red hair and is still the lovely woman who once modeled for an old photograph Juliette has framed at home.

Glenis says, "I got pregnant, and I was on this incredible diet that was absolutely pure, but I didn't really want anyone around. I noticed the contractions were five minutes apart so I called, and I got this one doctor that I didn't want, and he said that he'd be there right away. He said, 'Whatever you do, don't push. So I went and I sort of reclined, and along comes the next contraction, and I get this irresistible urge to push, and I think, 'One little push won't hurt. So she's born. And she's very noisy. Anyway, I'm holding this infant, and I nearly drop her, and now she's really sure that I don't know what I'm doing, so she's crying. And it's the first light of morning, and the doves are cooing, and up to then I hadn't known what her name was… Juliette!"

She says, "I decided to spell it the French way because the tragedy sucks."

From her list, Juliette reads: "Did you ever break a guy's nose?"

She reads: "Would you say you won more fights than you've lost?"

In her kitchen, grinding coffee beans, Juliette says, "When I was growing up, what influenced me were all these musicals. Like Fame. That was my dream. If I could have a school where they just sing and dance. So, Fame and Flashdance and Grease. Did you ever see the movie Hair? I was sobbing. That's a musical that kills me."

She says, "I was going to be a singer first. Before being an actress, I was going to sing. And I always thought I'd maybe act on the side. I always thought of musicals. Singing and dancing. I want to sing still, so I wrote songs with a friend who's a musician. The biggest fun thing is it's my words.

"The only break that I got was that my dad had me meet this small agency. Say hello. The big problem for actors starting out is getting the agent. Agents want you to have a SAG card, but you can't get your SAG card unless you have an agent putting you up for work. It's a catch-22. So my dad got me into an agent's office, but I still had to audition. I did a reading, and they had to see something in me.

"If you met me when I was younger, I was really quiet. I did a TV show once and people were asking my agent, 'Is she okay? She seems really down. It was just your typical teenage crap. Just because I don't smile at everyone and ask them how they're doing, I have to be sad?"

From her list, sitting on an antique sofa, Juliette reads: "Was there a time when you were mystified by the workings of your penis?"

She reads: "Do you look more like your mother or father?"

The tape recorder goes on and on, listening.

She says, "Even at eighteen I'd go, 'Where is the hidden rule book that says I have to be made up? Because they'd have this chair and all this makeup. I was, like, 'Can't we just take a picture? That's why all my magazines from earlier are not made up and they're not raw. They're in-between, and what shaped me is what they called the 'alternative girl' or the 'kookie girl' because I couldn't vamp up at the drop of a hat.

"When I was younger, they'd have a rack of clothing I'd never wear… They'd have a makeup person… And I'm supposed to represent myself? It was like this weird thing. I'd always wanted to be like my male predecessors, like Brando or De Niro. You take a man, and you just document him in a picture.

"What you exude, your sexuality is just a part of oneself. So a manufactured sex appeal which includes an open mouth and lip gloss and bright colors, this is this American porn sex appeal which has nothing to do with sex. It's like blowup dolls. I could do that, very easily. It's not like I can't. It's just never been my objective.

"Now I realize you're selling things," Juliette says. "So you basically become a rack."

She reads: "Did you date an older woman that you'd consider an older woman, and what did she teach you?"

"What's the first image you have of the female body?"

She asks: "Does the respect factor drop when a woman has breast implants?"

Juliette says, "I had two dreams about De Niro when I was working with him. I think it was all in anticipation of this scene. Because this, in my head, was the big scene. In one dream, we were underwater in a pool and we'd come up for air. He'd go underwater, and I'd go underwater, and we'd glide past each other deliberately, like kids would play in a pool when they like each other. Like a flirtation. But I woke up from that dream, and I had a crush on him.

"In that scene, the little tango dance between our characters, all I knew was he was supposed to walk up to me, and then say, 'Danielle, can I put my arm around you? He's supposed to kiss me in the script, but all Scorsese said was, 'Bob's going to do something. Just go with the scene.

"Before that scene, I knew we were going to film the kiss part. I had just eaten lunch. It was catfish or something, and I was, like, 'Should I rinse my mouth out? But I didn't want to, because that would let him know I thought about it. I don't want to act like I thought about the kiss. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. So I didn't. I didn't do mouthwash. And then I get to the set, and Bob is right near me, and I smell mouthwash. And then it dawned on me in that moment-I felt like such a little kid-because I thought, 'He's being professional. He's being considerate of me. He's being courteous. But by then it was too late to go back to the trailer. I don't know if I was offensive or not.

"When you watch it, that's the first take. We did it twice. He puts the thumb on my lips. It's very intense because we're only this far from each other, and I'm looking right at him. He starts to put the thumb in my mouth, and she moves it away. And then he persists, and she allows it. And people after that kept talking about the sexuality and burgeoning sexuality at that age, and I never looked at it that way. I looked at it as, before he did the thumb thing he was listening to her, he was validating her in a way that her parents weren't, and then he did this sexual thing. But what you see in my eyes is, after she sucks the thumb and it gets pulled out, she's looking at him like, 'Was that good? Did you like that? It's a pleasing thing."

She says, "His thumb was very clean."

She reads: "Did you go to sleep-away summer camp? (Because some of my greatest childhood memories are from summer camp.)"

She reads: "Do you like roller coasters?"

Steve Berra says, "A long time ago, I was on tour, skateboarding, and I bought Kalifornia at this gas station. I remember trying to imitate a laugh that she did in one of her scenes. It had blown me away. Just this one little laugh the character Adele did. It was so natural and truthful, and I remember trying for ten minutes to laugh however she did it. I didn't know her. I couldn't figure out how the hell this person was so good."

A video copy of the movie is playing in their living room, and Juliette laughs, pointing out all the lines she just ad-libbed in the moment.

Juliette says, "On the page, my little character, Adele, had maybe a sentence here and there in a scene. So I met with Dominic Sena and was really taken with his energy and his vision for the movie. He was very enthusiastic. So basically he let me create that character. Ninety percent of what I do in that movie I made up there. That was like a turning point for me, acting-wise, because I had to really come to the table with something, really invent something. To me, my first official character. That little Adele character."

She reads: "What do you imagine happens to someone after the body dies? And do you believe that you are a spirit with a body or just a brain?"

Then, "The follow-up question is: How do you explain Mozart writing symphonies at seven? (Because I think that's a prime example of creative ability being spirit-generated.)"

Juliette says, "When you have good actors to work with, you guys just sort of create this alternate universe of pretended reality. It's the unexplainable. I just think it's magic. It's pure belief. My security blanket is the camera. I know the camera's universe. It's capturing only this much. I have a certain security or certainty that I can execute stuff in that space. It's the condensed reality of the camera.

"Sometimes, you want to put in an aside that goes, 'By the way, audience, it was really three in the morning when we did this scene. It was thirty degrees outside. And I brought you all of this despite all of that. It was That Night, a movie I did before Cape Fear had come out. It was this 1962 love story. A guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Very endearing, very sweet. I was supposed to meet him in the middle of the night on a pier in Atlantic City. It was freezing, but it was supposed to be summer. You know, those hot nights. Meanwhile, I'm kind of blue. My lips go, 'brrrrrrr, and they chatter. So I had to hold it so I'm not chattering, plus be in a summer dress. You'd be in your parka until they said, 'Okay, we're ready for you. Then you'd take it off and say, 'Gosh, I'm so in love…

"When I worked on From Dusk Till Dawn, the vampire movie when I worked with George Clooney, he said, 'Gosh, all my friends keep asking, "Ooo, so you're working with Juliette. Is she really psycho? Is she really intense?" And I'm like the most opposite from intense. Maybe when I was young I was a bit brooding. Maybe I'll cop to that. My work is actually, really a light process. I go in and out of it. When the camera's going, I'm on. When it's off, I'm off."

She says, "When people want to know how you're able to do what you do, they need to explain it. It helps them if they go, 'Okay so you're kind of really crazy, and that's how you're able to be really intense onscreen. They need an explanation, when my explanation is, it's magic."

From her list, she reads: "Did the female anatomy ever mystify and scare you? (Because it did me, and I'm the owner.)"

Driving past the Scientology Celebrity Centre, she says, "The whole thing in Scientology, the big motto is: What's real for you is real for you. So there's not, like, a dogma. It's simply an applied religious philosophy. And there's little courses, like the Success Through Communications Course. They have things you can apply to your life, but not like a falsity, not like a robot-thing. You can see if it works, and if it doesn't. If it works, it works. It's something that has helped me a great deal."

From the list, she reads: "Have you ever been caught in a natural disaster?"

She reads: "Did you ever own Birkenstocks?"

Just outside her bedroom door, looking at a framed, poster-sized picture of herself and Woody Harrelson from the cover of Newsweek, Juliette says, "With Natural Born Killers, I've appreciated as times goes by how that movie is satire and my character is a caricature, although I filled it with some real human emotion. But to me it's kind of campy. It's silly. It's exaggerated beyond what's real. I just had to give it some energy, like that whole beginning sequence-how sexy am I now! — where she's yelling. I have a big voice, so I can turn the volume up, but when we'd cut, it felt silly. Everyone thought, ooooh, I must've been so disturbed, but I wasn't. To me it was just very campy, that performance."

About how people reacted to the movie, Juliette says, "You could homogenize everything, but you're still going to have your exploders, your guys who explode. And why is that there? I think since the fifties, the increase in psychiatric drugs has turned that into a landslide from what it was… I did research. I actually spoke at some Senate meetings, but that would be a much bigger problem for them to deal with, considering that you have six million kids from six on up on Ritalin. So they don't even want to look at it. They'd rather just say, 'Could you guys just please be less violent in the movies?

"Here you have the famous Son of Sam guy, the killer, he said why he killed was the dog barking was giving him messages. Was the Devil speaking through the dog. Okay, so do we lock up all dogs? Because of what that criminal says?"

From her list, she reads: "What was your favorite expression growing up? Or what was it closer to:

That's so fresh.

That's so bitchin'.

That's so wicked.

That's so rad.

Or, that's so hot."

Juliette says, "I don't think you have to use your past to create in the present. There's different schools of acting where you have an incident that was painful and you match it up to the movie and use it. To me that's too complicated. I just surrender to the material. I just have to surrender.

"To me, the three hardest things to do in acting are: one, sobbing, because I so rarely do that in my life. I may well up, but I don't sob. Laughing hysterically is another, where it says 'She can't stop laughing. And the third one is being surprised or being scared, like, 'Gosh, you scared me! You have to think backward, like, 'When I get scared, what happens? Oh, maybe my hands shake after the initial shock. It takes a minute to get your breath back. You work on getting to that place.

"To sob, I usually use the pressure or the fear that I have to do it, and if I don't do it, I'll fail. I'll fail myself. I'll fail my director. I'll fail the movie. People have this faith in me to produce. The frustration that I can't cry will lead me to tears."

She says, "I was doing Natural Born Killers, with Oliver Stone, and it was this scene with Woody Harrelson up on a hill, and we're arguing. And I'd just gotten my period that morning, and didn't sleep very well. I'd gotten about an hour's sleep, plus the pain of the woman thing, and we're arguing, and we cut.

"Woody's like, 'You want to do it again? I want to do another take.

"And Oliver's like, 'Yeah. How about you, Juliette? You want to do it again?

"And I go, 'Why? It sucks. What's the point? I suck. I don't even know why I'm doing this. I'm not going to get any better! It sucks! It's terrible!

"And they look at me, and Oliver says, he pulls me aside and says, 'Juliette, nobody wants to hear how you suck. Nobody here cares that you think you suck. And from that point, I stopped doing that. It was such a turning point. Such a very good thing he did. He stopped me from catering to that little shit."

She reads: "Did you ever fall in love with an animal in a way where you wished you could talk like human friends? (Because I would fall in love with my cats and wish that we were the same species so we could relate.)"

At a party in Westwood, actress and screenwriter Marissa Ribisi watches Juliette and Steve eating chicken and says, "They're so cute together. They're like a couple dudes."

Leaving the party, under a full moon, they take fortune cookies and get the same fortune: "Avenues of Good Fortune Are Ahead for You."

Driving home from the party, Juliette says, "All I thought about for a wedding was to have a view. We were outside on a cliff. It was the first time I saw him in a suit, and he was dashing. My view-because I had to walk this little trail that came out of this tunnel, because there was this park, then a tunnel, then this cliff-and as I was getting closer it was just this silhouette of this man with the sun behind him. It was incredible."

She says, "I kept thinking, 'Should I have the veil down or veil up? Veil down? Veil up? I loved the idea of a veil, because inside it's like a dream. And that's what wedding days are like."

Steve says, "I didn't have shoes. All I had time to do was buy a suit so I didn't have shoes that would go with it. So I had to borrow my friend's shoes. We just swapped them on the cliff. For the pictures."

The VCR in their living room breaks, so they're watching Steve's skateboard videos on the bedroom television, and Juliette says, "When I first saw his skateboarding videos, I welled up in tears. First of all, the music is so beautiful, and he chose the music, the piano. It is so aesthetic to me, his gliding and jumping and defying the physical universe. Because that's not supposed to be done. You don't take an object with wheels, and jump off a structure. It's a defiance. It was the first time I was able to be awed by a partner in this way."

Upstairs, looking at a framed photo of Marilyn Monroe, Juliette says, "People have reduced Marilyn to a sex symbol, but the reason she had so much power is she made people light up. She had a joy. When she's smiling in a picture, she's a blend. She's in a female body, this beautiful woman form, but she has that child-love shining through, this kind of child-light that makes other people light up, too. I think that's what's special about her.

"There's a word for it in Scientology. What's common to children is they give off… how they're able to uplift, their joy, it's called 'theta. It's what's innate to a spirit. So in Scientology, a spirit is called a thetan, and what a spirit would give off is theta. It's what I would call magic."

Reading from her list of questions left over from that long-ago romance, she says: "Do you feel that we are all potentially Christlike?"

She says: "Do you have hope for humanity? And if not, how can you honestly keep on going in the face of that hopelessness?"

She stresses, "There are no right answers to these."

POSTSCRIPT: Halfway to Juliette's house, the man who was driving me got a call. Apparently the magazine's credit card wouldn't authorize payment, and the dispatcher told the driver to "obtain payment from the passenger." Payment for half a day's driving was about $700. The week before this, a hotel gave me the same story about another magazine's credit card, then billed both my credit card and the magazine's. I felt pretty cagey about the double-billing issue, and told him no way. He told me I was a thief. I told him to let me out at the next stoplight. He locked the doors and said, no, and my bag was still in the trunk. I started calling the magazine in New York, but by then everyone had gone home. For the next two hours, we drove around the Hollywood Hills with the doors locked, the driver shouting that I was responsible. I was a thief. I shouldn't use a service I can't pay for.

I'm telling him how the magazine made all the arrangements. And I keep calling New York. Still, I'm thinking, Wow, I'm a limo hostage. This is so cool!

Eventually, I call 911 and say I'm being kidnapped. A minute later the driver throws me and my bag out in the gutter in front of Juliette's house.

I never told her what happened. I just went up and rang the doorbell. She and Steve probably still think I'm always this shaky, sweaty mess.

Turns out the magazine's credit card was just fine…