Halle Berry
Halle Berry talks about Gothika, a ghost story in which her character, psychiatrist Miranda Grey, wakes up as a patient in the very asylum where she worked, with no memory of committing a terrible crime
You've been quoted as saying you were actually quite scared by some of the movie's scenes during filming
It was creepy rather than scary! At the end of the day, we all know it's a movie and that this stuff isn't really happening - but it was a little creepy to be in dark dungeon-type places, spaces where you knew real deaths had taken place.
It was always very cold and there was just some element in the air that made us all feel like we all weren't truly alone where we were shooting, and that lent to the spookiness of the filmmaking.
Did you ever go home wishing you were making a musical instead of a horror picture?
[laughs] Oh no, I loved the three months we spent making a horror movie. It was a great departure for me because I've never worked in this genre before.
I was tempted to go back and watch The Shining and some of those really great horror or thrillers, but I resisted because this has to be a film that stands on its own and I didn't want to mimic or copy things I'd seen before.
But it was a relief at the end. I enjoyed the experience - it was really cathartic for me, most movies usually are.
I've also grown as an actor as I've got older. I've learned how to go to work, immerse myself 100 per cent in the character, and then at the end of the day take it all off and go back, get a nice bubble bath, have a nice massage and realise that is not my life. And that feels good.
Didn't you have a paranormal experience of your own while filming your Dorothy Dandridge biopic in 1999?
People who believe in ghosts are the ones who have had that experience. Our nature is to be very sceptical: unless we've seen it, we don't believe it. I did have a couple of experiences on Dorothy Dandridge. Her spirit or some spirit was around me all the time. I knew it, so did the crew and everybody around me.
Nothing outlandish happened; it was just a feeling that we would all get. Strange things would happen that couldn't be explained other than by saying, "OK, something supernatural has got to be happening here".
You throw yourself about a lot in this film, I wonder if you injured yourself?
In Gothika I had a broken arm. It was in a scene that didn't involve any stunts, Robert Downey Jnr twisted my arm the wrong way and it just...broke [laughs]. But we're friends. It was an accident, just one of those freaky things that happen while making this odd movie.
So we had to stop filming for eight weeks while I had a full-blown cast on and after that my full arm cast was reduced to a small very thin cast from my wrist to my elbow and I finished with that little cast on.
Was it the same arm that your character injures onscreen during the film?
No, it was the other arm! But we thought it would be a good camouflage - people would think it was the arm that was bandaged, so they never really looked at the other arm and I think a lot of people maybe missed the cast on the other arm because they were focusing on the arm with the white bandage. In a few places in the movie, you can see my cast but nobody seems to have noticed it.
1 | 2 | next
printer friendly
send to a friend
Created: 02/04/2004 Updated: 03/09/2004
Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Horoscopes| Message Boards | Quizzes | Newsletters | Join
iVillage Ltd is a UK company registered in England & Wales (3837269) at 80-110 New Oxford Street, London WC1 1HB
