By Tim Nasson
Beverly Hills – I recently spent a morning with Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow, the day before she appeared on Oprah along with Jude Law, her co-star in the new film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Paltrow has come a long way from her days spent in a specially constructed, air-conditioned baby-stroller on the sets of her mother’s (Blythe Danner) movies and plays, or visiting her father, the late TV producer Bruce Paltrow (St. Elsewhere), on the sets of his popular shows.
It wasn’t until 1983, when Paltrow trekked with her family across the country from LA to Massachusetts, so that her dad could produce summer-stock shows in the Berkshires, that she got bitten by the acting bug.
“My parents were so supportive,” said Paltrow, 33, about the encouragement she received when she told her parents she wanted to act.
At 19, Paltrow quit college (UCSB), where she was majoring in Art History, to pursue a full-time acting career. “I didn’t know it was the right decision at the time,” she says, “but I knew that Art History was not for me. Thank God acting has been so good to me.”
She had a bit part in Se7en, where she got to know and became engaged to the film’s star, Brad Pitt. That was nearly a decade ago. Since then, she has seemed to accomplish it all — and lose a few things on the way. She: broke up with Pitt, “because we would not be able to keep our marriage a happy one while at the same time pursuing our careers,” was voted “Most Stuck Up” in Movieline’s “100 Most Stuck Up Actors,” dated Ben Affleck, was voted one of People magazine’s “50 MostBeautiful,” modeled for Calvin Klein, lost the role of Rose to Kate Winslet in Titanic, turned down the role of Emma Peel in “The Avengers”, spent a Thanksgiving with Stephen Spielberg and wife Kate Capshaw in the Hamptons, was a member of Madonna’s wedding party, became a vegetarian, moved to London, took up residence with husband Chris Martin of Coldplay in a home they bought from Kate Winslet, remained in labor for nearly three days, sans epidural, until the last eight hours — which is when she became a mother for the first time to daughter Apple.
Fruit loops
The question everyone asked at the time, and is still asking, is, Why Apple? “It sounded so sweet, and it conjured such a lovely picture for me: you know, apples are so sweet, and they’re wholesome, and it’s Biblical, and I just thought it sounded so lovely and clean! I just thought,‘Perfect!’
“Then she was born, and it became an international outrage,” Paltrow laughed, “which I found surprising, because there are people named Lily, Rose, Ivy, or June, or lots of pretty nouns!” OK, then!
The filming of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, according to Paltrow, was a fast-paced endeavor. She plays a Lois Lane-type character in the $70 million film, which takes place in the late 1930s. “We raced through the movie,” she said. “In a typical movie, you do six or seven scenes a day, if that. But because everything in this movie was done before we arrived, except for the acting, we did more than 40 scenes each day. In a big movie, you shoot for a few months. We were done with this movie in less than a month.”
But “the movie took more than six years to put together before we arrived. It’s full of beautiful scenery. The filming was actually done on a blue screen. The soaring skyscrapers and lush greenery are all computer-generated. The end result was a whole new experience.”
“When you film a movie on location, you always wonder how it will look on the big screen, with all the lighting. I am so used to saying to myself, ‘I can’t wait to see-how they lit that.’ With this, it was like seeing a whole film where you had no idea.
“The most amazing thing about this film is the film before the film.” She alluded to the film’s director, Kerry Conran, who, nearly a decade ago, began work on the film, ironically, with his Apple computer. “Over the course of more than a year, he put together a six-minute mock-up of what he envisioned this movie to be in its complete form.” Paltrow was brought into the project at the behest of Jude Law, her costar in The Talented Mr. Ripley, who was cast first.
Sky Captain can best be described as a cross between Indiana Jones, Superman, Star Wars, Metropolis and, yes, Tomb Raider.
With its sepia tones, its inside jokes (director Conran pays homage to George Lucas by using 1138 as the number on a door, The Wizard of Oz plays Radio City Music Hall in 1939) and its all-star cast, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is sure to open eyes and raise eyebrows.
Gwyneth Paltrow Interview with Tim Nasson about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
