Cover Story: Cameron Diaz
Decisions, decisions, decisions
Cameron Diaz has had to make a lot of tough choices lately, like which way to take her career now that she’s nearing 40, and whether to kill a stranger in order to make a million bucks. Well, that last one is actually her character’s choice in The Box, but still, a tough decision
By Kevin Williamson
It’s a daunting choice every actor has to make sooner or later: to act their age or not?
For Cameron Diaz, that time appears to be now. It’s no insignificant decision in youth-obsessed Hollywood, but in back-to-back roles this year, the 37-year-old — famous for providing the bubbly centre to such effervescent comedies as There’s Something About Mary, Shrek and Charlie’s Angels — is channelling the vacant party girl no more. In this past summer’s tearjerker My Sister’s Keeper, she starred as a lawyer and the mother of a terminally ill cancer patient. And now in the psychological thriller The Box for Donnie Darko writer-director Richard Kelly, she plays another wife and mother — one who is confronted with a choice far more terrible than which movie to do next.
In the 1970s-set film, Diaz and James Marsden (X-Men, Enchanted) are Norma and Arthur, a couple approached by a mysterious, scarred stranger (Frank Langella, an Oscar nominee last year for Frost/Nixon) with a macabre offer.
“Their life is pretty simple at the beginning,” says Marsden during a chat at San Diego’s Comic-Con International. “They’re just this average American couple and this strange guy shows up and he says, ‘Hi, here’s this box and if you press this button someone you don’t know will die, but here’s a million dollars.’ And they’re at a place financially where they could use a million dollars.”
As Diaz, also at Comic-Con, puts it, “The question is, ‘Would I take another human’s life and what would I take it for — a million dollars?’”
Naturally, things get weirder as Norma and Arthur grapple with the consequences of their decision, but the movie never strays from the moral dilemma at its centre. Originally published in 1970 as the short story Button, Button by Richard Matheson, the tale served as the basis of a Twilight Zone episode in the 1980s.
“I did like the existential part of this — why do people do what they do?” Diaz says. “Is there a hand that rests over us and guides us? Is there someone judging us? What is it that defines human beings? On a day-to-day basis we all make decisions that have repercussions. There’s no way you can make a decision without it having a repercussion…. Every day we push a button in some way or another, on every level — from the car that we drive to the food that we eat; every decision is pushing a button. And overall, are those decisions going to lead to our destruction? Yes. Can they also lead to us flourishing? Yes.”
But Diaz says there was another aspect of the film that appealed to her. “Overall, funny enough, I saw a beautiful love story in this,” she says with a laugh.
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James Marsden and Cameron Diaz contemplating big decisions in The Box
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For Kelly, who established himself as a filmmaker with the cult faves Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, The Box
marks a departure — it’s his first studio production. Although there’s
a sob story on every corner of every street in Hollywood, about how
some gifted indie director was pulverized by studio suits, Kelly
insists he had all the freedom he needed.
“Obviously, being blessed with Cameron and James and Frank, it gave
me the opportunity to make the movie at Warners, which was actually a
relief because I knew it would wind up on the big screen with a
marketing budget behind it,” Kelly says. “Those are the luxuries I
haven’t had before. [Working in Hollywood] it’s really just about
getting the studio invested in the story. They got it, they were on
board. They see dailies every day and you get notes from them, but I
was able to navigate those waters. I got to make exactly the movie I
wanted to make. I’m kind of shocked it turned out that way, but it did.”
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And Kelly believes the movie retains the primal appeal of the short story’s concept. “It’s a very pronounced metaphor. It feels like an old myth. That’s what was so fascinating. It’s just a wooden contraption with a glass dome and red button. It’s nothing fancy. But there’s something about its simplicity that makes your head explode with the possibilities of what it could mean.”
With only 24 hours to decide whether or not to push the button — and, perhaps, trigger a death — Norma and Arthur dissect the box only to discover there’s nothing inside. “It’s just a box,” Diaz says. “It’s just a button. There’s no transmitter…. So when the decision is made, Norma just expects it not to be real — that nothing will happen.”
But what if something does happen? Norma eventually convinces herself it will be okay “because it will be somebody we don’t know and probably somebody who deserves it because it could be a murderer on death row. They’re hoping for the best.”
Says Marsden, “It feels like a classic Hitchcock or Kubrick get-in-your-head, under-your-skin thriller. Those are few and far between these days and that’s what terrifies me. I don’t know if you saw the original The Haunting, but you don’t see anything [in that movie] and it kills you — what you don’t see. It drives you crazy. In this day and age, it’s very popular to show the blood and the knives and tie people up, but to me, it’s more the psychological elements that terrify me. That’s what exists in this movie. It feels nostalgic. It gives a nod to many of those Hitchcock films.”
Of course, Diaz has always shown she’s capable of sneaking in a darker-than-expected surprise between slick blockbusters, whether it was the esoteric satire Being John Malkovich, Martin Scorsese’s brutal Gangs of New York, the mind-bending Vanilla Sky or the emotional In Her Shoes. But The Box is her first flat-out chiller. Why did it take her this long? Maybe it’s because she isn’t a fan of scary movies.
In fact, when asked what terrifies her in real life, she answers, “Trailers to horror movies. I can’t watch them. I hate them. I’m always afraid — because I want to look but I’m afraid I’ll look too long and see the one image that I’m not going to be able to get out of my head every night for a week before I’m going to bed.”
Kevin Williamson is a Calgary-based movie columnist for Sun Media.
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Win Butler and Régine Chassagne of Arcade Fire
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Fire in The Box
Fans of Arcade Fire should listen closely
to The Box’s soundtrack as the band’s Win Butler and Régine Chassagne
team up with violinist and fellow Canuck Owen Pallett to create the
film’s suspenseful, melodic score.
As Butler explained to online site Pitchfork, “It’s got this kind of
sci-fi, kind of Alfred Hitchcock feel. Those Hitchcock scores are some
of my favourite movie music. We have a Mellotron, and since it’s the
’70s, it really seemed to fit.”
Arcade Fire,
which last licensed its song “My Body is a Cage” to be used in a very
cool commercial for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, can also be
heard in this month’s Where the Wild Things Are, which includes the
tune “Wake Up” on its soundtrack.
—Ingrid Randoja
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