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.
