Category: Articles & Interviews

Categories Articles & Interviews Career

Hilary Swank Says Desire to Tell Stories Same, ‘No Matter Who President Is’

Posted on Author Mary Comments Off on Hilary Swank Says Desire to Tell Stories Same, ‘No Matter Who President Is’

One day after President Donald Trump launched an attack against “racist” Hollywood – a tirade that appeared to be inspired by the upcoming film “The Hunt,” starring Hilary Swank – the actress told reporters at the Locarno Film Festival that it’s “important to celebrate our differences” and that the president’s divisive politics haven’t changed her intent to tell meaningful stories.

“My desire to tell certain stories has always been the same, no matter who the president is,” she said. “The choices that I’ve made pretty much inform who I am as a person, and that’s not going to change no matter what’s happening.”

Swank co-stars in the upcoming Blumhouse film about a group of strangers who wake up in a forest, only to discover they’re being hunted for sport by rich vacationers. Universal suspended its marketing campaign for “The Hunt” in the wake of last week’s shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, while Fox News and other conservative outlets have criticized the film ahead of its Sep. 27 release.

Continue reading Hilary Swank Says Desire to Tell Stories Same, ‘No Matter Who President Is’

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Freedom Talent Leopard Club Award – Hilary Swank

Posted on Author Mary Comments Off on Freedom Talent Leopard Club Award – Hilary Swank
Hilary Swank, this award is given to you by the Locarno Film Festival in recognition of your career achievement. Your story is indeed a model of how to achieve the dream of becoming an actress. From a trailer park, via sports, to Hollywood, where it only took you a few years to win two Academy Awards. How important is tenacity in successfully expressing your talent?

I appreciate that it seems so quick! But it actually took much more than a few years. I started acting at age fifteen. Ten years later I won my first Academy Award for Boys Don’t Cry (1999). Five years after that I received the Oscar for Million Dollar Baby (2004), so I was actually a “10-year overnight success”. Regardless, no matter what your dreams or goals in art, commerce or life, I believe only tenacity, hard work, grit, determination and perseverance can get you across the finish line. Of course you also need a healthy dose of good luck and a support team to finish in style.

Let’s go back to those two Oscar-winning roles. Starting with Boys Don’t Cry, the story of a trans man which must have presented a significant challenge for your performance. How did you set about portraying the inner drama of a person whose body and identity are somehow different?

It all started with me zeroing in on something that had nothing to do with gender: the desire to love and be loved. That is something we can all connect to and is not limited by any identity, race, gender or creed. That’s where we started Brandon Tina’s journey, and in the end, that’s what it’s really all about. It’s incredibly tragic and horrific that anyone, anywhere is murdered because of how they choose to live their life, express themselves, or find and give love.

Five years later came another big challenge, again requiring you to transform your body. You put on nineteen pounds of muscle to play boxer Maggie Fitzgerald, in Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood. What can you tell us about the experience?

It actually was 23 pounds! I know this as every single one of them was hard fought! Pushing your body to the limits is one of the best ways you can learn about yourself. What I learned training and competing in sports in my past and in preparing for that role is that our mind is our biggest obstacle. It’s such a cliché but it’s undeniably true. WE are the only thing standing in the way of our own success. Once we learn how to ignore or not believe our self-doubt and negative thinking, our potential skyrockets.

Taken together, the roles you have played make up an impressive gallery of unconventional female figures. What are the crucial criteria for you in accepting or rejecting a part?

I actually see them as conventional females. We are all in some way underdogs, wrestling with our own demons and trying to find and pursue our dreams, whatever they may be. We just don’t always see these types of women in movies. Thankfully that’s changing! To me these are women who overcome or learn to benefit from their perceived or real limitations and step into new identities of who they are and what they are capable of. To me, this is the exciting journey each of us makes in life.

When you started out as an actress, was there anyone in particular you admired or wanted to emulate?

As far as the skill of acting, everyone says this, but they say it for a reason: Meryl Streep. But I’ve also greatly admired Ingrid Bergman, Debra Winger, as well as actors like Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn.

Apart from the two titles already mentioned, is there any other film – perhaps one which didn’t get the success it deserved – to which you feel particularly attached?

Yes, Freedom Writers (2007) and Conviction (2010). Both are true stories about incredibly inspiring and compassionate women who saved lives through their belief in themselves and others.

The movies have given you a lot, but you also showed a great deal of courage when you took a long time away from your career to look after your sick father. A decision which once again shows great character. What are the human qualities that you risk losing, once aboard the Hollywood rollercoaster?

The same that anyone can if they lose sight of what’s really important in life and choose to let success go to their head.

Source: https://www.locarnofestival.ch

Categories Articles & Interviews Movies

Why Oscar-Winner Hilary Swank Agreed To Fight A Robot On Netflix

Posted on Author Mary Comments Off on Why Oscar-Winner Hilary Swank Agreed To Fight A Robot On Netflix

Oscar-winner Hilary Swank is known best for Million Dollar Baby and Boys Don’t Cry, but she’s taken to wearing a few somewhat surprising hats in the last few years. She tried on indie, madcap comedy in 2017’s Logan Lucky; in 2018, she graced the small screen as one of the Gettys in FX’s Trust. Next, she is trying dystopian sci-fi on for size in a thriller that Netflix scooped up at 2019’s Sundance Film Festival.

I Am Mother, on Netflix June 7, attempts to figure out what would happen if someone pressed the reset button on humanity and tried to start from scratch. Oh, and in this scenario, that someone is a master race of robots convinced that they can genetically engineer the perfect human and, through that perfect person, start a better version of the human race. Also Swank fights a robot voiced by Rose Byrne. Just a simple, light summer movie, for a casual Friday afternoon Netflix session, right?

Of course, fans of Swank’s work have come to expect tough, thought-provoking projects from the actor, so — robot fight and all — this new role is sort of a return to form. Swank plays the lone survivor of the original human race, Woman (she and the other two characters, Clara Rugaard’s Daughter and Byrne’s Mother have no names in the film). She finds her way to robot overlord Mother’s human hatchery, where she attempts to convince Mother’s child-created-in-a-lab, Daughter, that her robot parent isn’t telling her the whole truth.
Continue reading Why Oscar-Winner Hilary Swank Agreed To Fight A Robot On Netflix

Categories Articles & Interviews Movies

Hilary Swank on Her Humble Beginnings, Loving Dogs and ‘Wiping Out the Human Race to Start Over’

Posted on Author Mary Comments Off on Hilary Swank on Her Humble Beginnings, Loving Dogs and ‘Wiping Out the Human Race to Start Over’

The first time Hilary Swank walked onto the set of her new sci-fi thriller she recalls that she was floored by the authenticity and attention to detail of the futuristic bunker where much of the action takes place.

Swank, a two-time Oscar winner best known for Million Dollar Baby and Boy’s Don’t Cry, clearly delves into her role of “Woman” in the futuristic and thought-provoking Netflix film, I Am Mother.

The movie, written by Michael Lloyd Green and directed by Green and Grant Sputore, is about alienation, technology and family relationships. The collaborators wondered what it would be like to be raised without parents, to actually be brought up by technology. They pondered the questions, “What would Artificial Intelligence prioritize? “And what would be important?”

In the wake of humanity’s extinction, a teenage girl “Daughter” (Clara Rugaard) is raised by a robot called “Mother” (voiced by Rose Byrne), designed to repopulate the earth.

Their unique bond is threatened when an inexplicable stranger (Swank) arrives with some alarming news that calls into question everything “Daughter” has been told about the outside world and her mother’s intentions. Continue reading Hilary Swank on Her Humble Beginnings, Loving Dogs and ‘Wiping Out the Human Race to Start Over’

Categories Articles & Interviews Career Movies

Hilary Swank says filming in Australia ‘almost like being on a different planet’

Posted on Author Mary Comments Off on Hilary Swank says filming in Australia ‘almost like being on a different planet’

In the American film industry today, actors don’t come much more credible or committed than Hilary Swank. This is a judgment that would be endorsed by almost everybody, including the voters at the Oscars, who gave her the Best Actress award for Boys Don’t Cry in 2000 and again for Million Dollar Baby in 2005.

Since this double triumph, Swank has moved in and out of the spotlight, dropping out of showbusiness entirely for a few years in the mid-2010s in order to care for her sick father. The film she’s discussing today, the independent science-fiction thriller I Am Mother, was shot in Adelaide in 2017 not long after she returned to work.

At the time, Swank was juggling two other projects, which coincidentally share with I Am Mother the theme of parents and children—the feature What They Had, where she starred as a woman whose mother (Blythe Danner) is afflicted with Alzheimer’s, and the TV series Trust, where she played the mother of kidnapped oil heir John Paul Getty III (Harris Dickinson).

“It was kind of a mad rush to get them all done around the same time,” she recalls over the phone from New York. “But it was definitely an entertaining ride.”

Swank’s performances suggest a highly focused, level-headed personality behind them, and this is borne out in conversation. Her tone is friendly and straightforward, her answers carefully considered, suggesting that she approaches being interviewed as seriously as every other aspect of her job.

“I don’t take roles because I see them as being Academy Award worthy,” she says when asked specifically about her past success and how it affects her current career choices.

While she’s grateful for the recognition, what she looks for are characters that will challenge her — that call on her to rethink how she walks in the world, as she puts it, in both a figurative and literal sense.

As she points out, in I Am Mother she plays a supporting though crucial role, given that she’s one of only two main cast members whose faces are visible on screen. Continue reading Hilary Swank says filming in Australia ‘almost like being on a different planet’