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was excited for me... It came from a place of... she was just in it, we were all so into the filming process, and in the end, I was grateful. Because it helped me stay in my character.”
Silvers attempts to express this somewhat inexpressible sensation. “Have you seen Soul? There’s this one amazing moment when he’s in this thing called ‘The Zone’... and every artist knows what this is. When I watched Soul, I was thinking whether, as an actor, ‘Have I really ever been in The Zone? But with Birds of Paradise, I realized—oh my god, I was in The Zone for the entirety of filming this movie. I was no longer Diana, I was so invested, I was like married to this character. I knew ev- erything about her. I knew what made her cry, I knew what made her angry, I knew what motivated her. What broke her heart. I knew her so well.”
Then pandemic panic set in, as it did and has done with so many productions, and filming was stopped six days before com- pletion. Luckily, the production carried on a few months later. “I didn’t know if I could ever do that again,” says Silvers, shaking her head, “I had spent so much of quarantine trying to almost ‘shed’ it. Then we got back to Budapest, I put on my playlist, and I was back in it; I was Kate again.”
Silvers hasn’t seen the full cut of the film yet. “There was only one scene where Sarah let me watch all the way through while we were doing ADR... there was this weird gurgle I did, my stomach made a noise, and we were trying to figure out where it was. So I got to watch this one monologue, and I was like ‘Ohhh, I want to see this movie!’ It was reassuring to know that there’s a world where all of your hard work can pay off. That you can watch something, and you’re not actually watching your- self anymore... I didn’t see myself, I only saw the character.”
Ballet movies might be grueling work, but they’re a surefire way for an actress to really prove themselves. NB: Black Swan, The Red Shoes, An American in Paris, both Argento and Luca Gua- dagnino’s Suspiria, Girl by Lukas Dhont, or 2016’s Polina. Silvers began her research early. “I first watched Black Swan in the 7th grade on the way to an orchestra competition,” she recalls. “I had downloaded it on my phone. I love Natalie Portman—love ballet, loved dance school. We’re all on the bus—my teacher is walking past me, and it’s like right at the frickin’ sex scene, and she looks at me, and I look at her, and I’m like, ‘It’s Black Swan’, and she’s like, ‘Okay...’ It was very embarrassing, but whatev- er—you can’t get mad at a 12 year-old.” And did she revisit the lauded film more recently? “I thought about watching it again right before Birds of Paradise,” she shares, “but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to mimic someone else’s performance; I felt like if had rewatched it, that’s what I would have done. But I did watch The Red Shoes. I love that movie. It’s so weird.”
Further exploration of global cinema turned out to be a round-about journey for this California girl. “When I was 17,” she recounts, “I went to Paris to model for a couple months—it was horrible—they said I was too fat or whatever, even though I wasn’t fat... That was pre-everyone saying, ‘Why are we telling all these young girls that they should not eat?’ I guess I didn’t fit the model mould, or whatever. But that doesn’t matter.” Because the trip had a silver lining.“I went to Switzerland afterwards to see my grandparents, as my Mom’s side are Swiss, and hung out a lot with my cousin, and he and I spent all our time just watch- ing French films.”
This Franco-binge whet her appetite for the future: “I think it would be very cool to do a French film. I really want to learn the language properly. I feel like I’m still young, and I can figure it out.” I’m sure she can, in the spirit of Jean Seberg, Jane Bir- kin, Charlotte Rampling—and indeed, Jacqueline Bisset—before her. She’s already getting into the advanced stuff. “I really liked Mauvais Sang with Juliette Binoche. I wanted to cut my hair like hers, but my modeling agent was like, ‘Don’t you dare.’” She’s pleased to hear the reclusive director Leos Carax has a new film coming out in 2021, Annette, shot in LA and starring Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver. “That’s so cool.”
Now that we’re on the subject of film, Silvers becomes lo-
quacious. She tells me how auteur Mia Hansen-Løve’s semi-au- tobiographical Goodbye First Love spoke directly to her heart.
“I really loved that movie,” she says passionately. “It is so good. Everything about it, including the soundtrack. It was funny, because it’s about this guy who is an architecture student, and at the time I had just been just dumped by an architecture student in New York... He definitely wasn’t ‘The One,’ and I was totally just being dramatic, but I’d never really ‘dated’ someone like that before. I was like, ‘I have a boyfriend, this is so cool,’ and then when he dumped me, I was beside myself.” The sensitive portrayal of lost-and-found love triggered something deep. “I remember watching the movie in my friend’s apartment in the Lower East side... I felt so ‘seen.’ I was crying like a baby, and then I said to myself, ‘I’m going to smoke a cigarette.’” Silvers smiles and declares defiantly, “I don’t even really smoke, but I’d just watched a foreign film, and I was feeling so emotional, and so it just felt right.”
There actually is a Diana Silvers Film List up on her ‘gram. It seems Hollywood has found not only a new muse, but a cin- easte too. Along with Goodbye First Love, the following appear: 20th Century Women, the fondly nostalgic West Coast ensemble piece and Mulholland Drive, that hypnotic swirl of duality and desire. “David Lynch is also someone I really want to work with,” she shares. “He’s beyond. He’s the dream.” Midnight Cowboy. Goodbye Lenin. Little Miss Sunshine. Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Big Fish—small town surrealism from Tim Burton. The epic Man Who Fell to Earth by Nicolas Roeg. Disney’s Fantasia. She’s also well-known for loving Almost Fa- mous and having quite the Penny Lane fixation.
You can also find Silver’s own forays into photography and Super 8 footage published on her personal website. Silvers’ intrepid, curious nature drove her to the medium. “I’ve always been a bit of a wanderer,” she remarks, “and when you’re a wan- derer and a bit of a nomad, photography is the perfect thing to do, because you can just do it by yourself.” And like attracts like. “I met one of my best friends because she’s a photographer, and a mutual friend proposed we shoot together. She takes all my favorite photos of me, and we go on adventures, we go to new places together, and we see new things. It’s something that has bonded us and will continue to bond us for life.” Photographer Alexandra Hainer’s Instagram does reveal many shots of her friend, along with cute captions such as ‘She got her Crocs on relaxed mode’ with a Crocs-and-socks wearing Silvers chilling on a rooftop gable.
In turn, Silvers’ close group is immortalized in soft, real-film snapshots with a vintage aura, in which the intimacy is palpable. “I feel like I’m lucky that my friends let me take their photos,” she shares, “because when you spend a lot of time with some- one, you start to see them in a different way; when you take their photo, it’s already going to be different than if a stranger took
it, because their guard is already down.” And that’s the way she likes it to be.“As cliché as the ‘eyes are the windows to the soul’ thing is, it really is true. I’ve even seen it in photos of myself when I’ve worked with different photographers. I can tell when I was guarded, and it shows.”
I ask whether the constant media speculation about the dating lives and sexuality of Silvers and her friends annoys her? “Oh I don’t care,” she says resolutely. “No, that doesn’t annoy me at all. I mean, at the end of the day, everyone is free to do and
be whatever they want. I don’t think who you’re dating actually reflects your sexuality. It’s really not fair to base someone’s sex- uality off of who they are dating. Because sexuality is fluid and ever-changing, and we’re always evolving. So is our sexuality.”
I note that her generation is fortunate to have the tools to present themselves unmediated, to demand to be called by the pronouns they decide upon. “It’s just about respect,” she affirms. “If someone says ‘these are my pronouns’ and another person chooses not to respect that, then that person is an asshole. We’re all just here to live as we please and hope that we get respect of our peers around us.”
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