PATRICIA ARQUETTE NOV/Dec 2001

Patricia is a devoted Malibu mom. She’s also the star of Human Nature, the new film from Being John Malkovich scribe, Charlie Kaufman.

Producer Rachael Horovitz talked with Patricia about her son, her daffy side, and true romance.

RACHAEL: You were a young mother, weren’t you?

PATRICIA: Yeah, very young. I started acting when I was eighteen, and by the time I was nineteen I was pregnant.

RACHAEL: Good god.

PATRICIA: I had just gotten my first incredible part. It was the part that Jennifer Jason Leigh played in Last Exit to Brooklyn.

RACHAEL: What timing.

PATRICIA: I had to tell the producers I’d just found out I was pregnant. They still wanted me to do it, so I said, “Well, let me walk around the block and think about it for a second.” When I came back, I told them, “I don’t want my baby absorbing this heavy material.” I mean, a biochemical change goes through your body when you’re really “in” a scene. Even if you’re just breathing quickly — like in a scene where you’re anxious — it changes you physically. And I didn’t want to go through all of that while pregnant. I didn’t want to worry about gaining weight or being nauseous on the set, either.

RACHAEL: It sounds like you were quite self-aware for that age, not only in terms of choosing to have a child, but also in knowing so much about yourself.

PATRICIA: It was a scary choice to make because I didn’t have much of a career at that point. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I’ve got ten other offers.”

RACHAEL: What sort of effect did that have on you — starting to work as a young mother?

PATRICIA: Actually, I don’t think I would have worked nearly as much if I weren’t a mother. I literally had a child to feed. Enzo’s father and I broke up when he was one month old. That was a big surprise: “Oh my God, my whole life has changed and it’s so scary.”

RACHAEL: Who was your support system?

PATRICIA: My family, my mom. And I have a few great friends who I’ve known for years and years. They were all like, “I’ll baby-sit.”

RACHAEL: I hear that you’re religious. Is that how you were raised?

PATRICIA: My parents had a hysterical, dramatic relationship, but they never had much to do with religion. Although my mom was Jewish and my dad did convert to Islam.

RACHAEL: How did you experience your dad converting?

PATRICIA: At the time we were living in Virginia on a hippie commune. Apparently, my father was planning to convert to Judaism, but on the day that he went out to do it, he changed his mind. When he came home my mom said, “Well, how did it go?” He said, “A really weird thing happened on the way to converting. I got lost and I ended up in this place, speaking to this man for a long time, and I converted to Islam.” My mother was like, “Wow. All right. That’s different. Okay.” I was about four or five. When we were little we would go to Passover dinner, but we would also fast on Ramadan.

RACHAEL: Interesting beginnings. So what about your life now? I hear you recently moved to Malibu.

PATRICIA: I’m kind of a hermit. I don’t really do a lot, and I haven’t had a nanny in two years.

RACHAEL: What’s a typical day for you as a Malibu mom?

PATRICIA: I get up at six. I make my son some breakfast, get him up, get him dressed. We feed the dogs. And then I drop him off at school. He just started junior high. Usually I come back and start working on whatever little projects I’m doing. I’m a never-ending project person.

RACHAEL: Can you tell me about this public service announcement project you’re putting together in the wake of September 11th?

PATRICIA: Well, I had heard about so many hate crimes that were happening here. I started reading the community posts on the internet, and people were saying things like, “We should start internment camps.” I’d go to my son’s soccer games and I’d hear moms saying, “Well, I refuse to work with ‘those people’ any more, and I think we should deport all of them.” It was just horrifying to me. And I thought, “This isn’t the way I feel. This isn’t the way so many people feel in America.” I began to think about a positive propaganda campaign to remind people that discrimination is not acceptable, it’s not patriotic.

RACHAEL: So you’re the producer of this series of announcements?

PATRICIA: I guess so. [laughs] A friend of mine had a friend at a radio station, and when we told the radio station what we wanted to do, they said, “We’ve got 1,200 stations and we’ll give you the recording space.” Then we called another group of radio people and they said they’d play the announcements. So within a few days we had 3,000 radio stations involved.

RACHAEL: Fantastic.

PATRICIA: It’s coming together. When the event first happened I kept thinking, “I’m drawn to do this and yet I don’t feel like I can get out of bed.”

RACHAEL: Well, I think that you probably have a special ability to connect. After working with you on Human Nature, Michel Gondry said that you reminded him of Björk. Everyone involved in Dancer in the Dark felt that she totally disappeared into her character.

PATRICIA: I don’t believe I become my characters, but I do empathize to a degree that’s wholly unnatural. And I don’t know if that happens because of the acting, or because this is who I am — and that’s why I’m acting.

RACHAEL: I always see your performances as being so vulnerable and yet so funny at the same time.

PATRICIA: I think the characters that I respond to most, there’s some innocence about them.

RACHAEL: I love what David O. Russell, who directed you in Flirting with Disaster, said when I asked him about you. He said, “There’s a great daffy role out there that Patricia still hasn’t gotten yet.”

PATRICIA: Yeah, I really want to do that.

RACHAEL: Is daffy a word that describes you?

PATRICIA: There is a daffy aspect to me. My dad was a comedian. Comedy was a really good survival mechanism in my household. If you wanted to get out of trouble, you could talk intellectually, you could talk spiritually, or you could make people laugh. Those were our options. I think that kind of sculpts you.

RACHAEL: I wonder if starting your adult life so young didn’t preserve some of your innocence.

PATRICIA: It worked out really great for me. My son and I got to grow up together. Of course, the last few years have been rough because both of my parents died. It really feels like it’s against nature to lose your parents, even though you know it’s inevitable. So I’m kind of in flux right now.

RACHAEL: It’s the hardest thing in the world. It sounds like their spirituality might have helped prepare you for it.

PATRICIA: Oh yeah. And they had beautiful deaths. I mean, their kids were with them, kissing and holding them.

RACHAEL: Were they still together when your mother died?

PATRICIA: They’d actually been in the process of breaking up for a couple of years, but they hadn’t divorced.

RACHAEL: What are your thoughts on marriage at this point?

PATRICIA: I’d say it can be really beautiful if you do it the right way. I think you have to have space to change throughout your life into who you’re going to be. I’m not against it, but I’m also not rushing ...

RACHAEL: Did you like being a wife? Did that have any specific kind of definition to you?

PATRICIA: Well, that’s what I think was interesting about Human Nature. When my character, Lila, begins losing herself, and then she feels like she’s going to lose her man, she experiences that scrambling, terrified feeling of, “I’ll do anything to be what you want me to be.”

RACHAEL: And have you felt that?

PATRICIA: Yeah, I think somehow. I’ve seen a lot of women lose themselves in trying to make a marriage or a life work. Back in the ’70s people used to say things like, “She had to go find herself.” Well, people don’t say that kind of thing anymore. But I think a lot of times it’s kind of the case; your life can become usurped by a dream. It’s like you sign some invisible paper saying, “Okay, I’ll make the family and the home and I’ll be the perfect mate.” And it’s just not all there is at a certain point.

RACHAEL: I wonder if the same thing happens to men.

PATRICIA: Maybe. I think everybody gets into relationships with the best intentions.

RACHAEL: How do you think that people will react to Human Nature?

PATRICIA: I have no idea how to gauge the temperature of the world. Every time I make a movie that I think is great, it doesn’t get the kind of attention I think it will.

RACHAEL: What was the biggest surprise to you, as far as the public reaction?

PATRICIA: Probably True Romance. I didn’t understand why the studio didn’t put more money into it and why they took it out of theaters so fast.

RACHAEL: That film was totally underrated.

PATRICIA: Yeah. At the time the heads of the studio were like, “What is this movie? Who green-lit it? The heroes are selling cocaine and I don’t like it.” So I just do the best I can. And I have plenty of pleasure working on movies.

RACHAEL: You’re not shooting anything right now are you?

PATRICIA: I’m about to start a film called Rain Falls. It’s a small movie about two young couples. Over the course of the film two of the characters become swingers. The movie becomes a deconstruction of all of their relationships.

RACHAEL: It reminds me that I once read that you were puritanical about fidelity.

PATRICIA: Fidelity is really important to me and I’m militant about honesty. I definitely want those things in my life but I think they should be easier than a strangulation.

RACHAEL: Do you think that you’ve instilled those traits in your son?

PATRICIA: Yeah, I worry about that. You have to think about what your impact is on your kids, but you can’t sit there and beat yourself up, like, “Oh my God, did I teach you this or that?”

RACHAEL: So what would be the best trait of yours that you think Enzo has inherited?

PATRICIA: I guess the best trait would be that he’s very loving to people.

RACHAEL: And what would be the worst?

PATRICIA: Probably also that he’s very loving to people.