Page 158 - Flaunt 170 - The Phoenix Issue - Bosworth

“T heterochromatic eyes to the fierceness and delicacy of her frame, she radiates dissonance, bursting at once with movie-star effulgence and an earthy groundedness. When I meet her for lunch at Pasadena’s Ma- gnolia House, I’m swept away by her warmth and enthusiasm. The “strangeness” I sense in her is less a matter of the physical than of the intellectual and spiritual. Bosworth is intensely curious about the world and an insatiable reader. Our conversation returns again and again to the books that have shaped our sensibilities and worldviews. Most recent- ly, Bosworth has been enamored with Ocean Vuong, whose debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous reminds her of the work of Haruki Murakami, one of her favorite writers. “I’m more starstruck by great writers than anyone else,” she confesses. “Literature informs my artistry almost more than cinema. It fuels a deep part of me. If I’m not reading, my creativity isn’t being stimulated the way it needs to be.” She is drawn to dark fiction (“The darker the better!”), stories filled with threat and otherworldliness, in which the line between beauty and horror blurs. As an example, she offers a scene from Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle that depicts, in gorgeously excruciating detail, a man being flayed alive. She was so mesmerized and repelled by the scene that she read it aloud to her husband, the director Michael Polish, and the two often revisit it in conversation. Bosworth has found outlets for her dark aesthetic throughout the past decade, most recently in Netflix’s sci- ence-fiction mini-series I-Land (2019) and the post-apocalyp- tic thriller The Domestics (2018). In 2016, she starred in Before I Wake, a dark fantasy about a little boy whose dreams—and nightmares—bleed into reality. The film is an elegant blend of family drama and phantasmagoria, and Bosworth’s per- formance as the troubled boy’s foster mother is complex and emotionally nuanced. Soon, she will play Sharon Tate, the actor and wife of notorious filmmaker, Roman Polanski, who, in 1969, was bru- tally murdered along with seven others by Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ during a three-day string of killings in Los Angeles. Directed by Polish, it will be the first film about Tate’s life made with the approval and input of Tate’s family. Later this year, Bosworth will also star along- side Mel Gibson and Emile Hirsch in Force of Nature, a heist-meets-hurricane-disaster film, in addition to Wild Indi- an with Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Greyeyes, a dark thriller chronicling two Anishinaabe native men who covered-up a murder years ago. As we eat our scrambled eggs and spinach and imbibe our caffeine (she favors tea, I coffee), I happen to mention that I teach at a university. She beams. In 2018, she and her husband opened a non-profit school, the Montana Institute of the Arts, where they teach filmmaking each summer to a crop of students from working-class (and often indigenous) backgrounds. “Our school is unorthodox and unique,” says Bosworth. “I learned from the experience of being on a film set. I didn’t go to film school and I carried that around with me for a long time. I had imposter syndrome and felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. But it really is the experience of actually doing something where you learn the most. So the school is based on learning from professionals who are in the field. We bring in producers, AD’s, people who have really made things.” Michael Polish’s father is a Montanan, and he and Bo- sworth were married on a ranch near Philipsburg in 2013. Both believe Montana is the “perfect place” for their school. “It’s inspirational and still wild,” she shares. “The first two years have been really special and we’re excited for this sum- mer. We feel like we have some magic dust with the program.” Despite significant early success, like starring in block- buster early-aughts films Blue Crush, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!, and Superman Returns, Bosworth hasn’t always felt “in control of her own narrative” as an artist. “For so many years I was a young blonde actress, getting pats on the head. ‘Oh you’re cute, can you not have an opinion?’ ‘Oh, you read?’ ‘You got into Princeton?!’” She’s excited to see the industry changing in the wake of #MeToo, especially as the career of her step-daughter, Jasper, begins to blossom. Bosworth’s turn toward independent filmmaking has also been empowering. “Leadership, driving the momentum of something is in my DNA.” Positions where she lacked creative control have thus been particularly discouraging. She speaks on the frustration of pouring her heart into a scene, knowing she had given an amazing performance, only to see it “cut to shit” during editing. But this changed when she met Michael on the set of Big Sur in 2011. She felt immediately that this was someone who understood and respected her as an artist. “I had never met anyone who said, ‘What do you want to do?’ ‘Well, I want to do this.’ ‘Okay, I’ll write it. Let’s do it.’” Whereas for much of her career she felt like she was just try- ing to survive in an industry that could be as soul-crushing as it was dreamy, all of a sudden she didn’t feel alone anymore. “He can give me a piece of direction that’s so freak- ing ‘out-there’ and I’ll just understand what he wants,” she confides. “The first scene I did in Big Sur I was nervous and all over the place—Michael affectionately calls it ‘fireworks’ because I was over-acting. We were sitting at the dinner table and it’s Jack Kerouac and my character, and she’s in love with him but he’s drunk and fucked up and crazy at the table in front of her son. Most directors and producers want you to pick up the pace,” she says, snapping her fingers, “and you can lose a sense of the magic. But Mike told me not to say anything until I believed it, and I sat there for four and a half minutes, silent, until it clicked and I finished the scene in a way that surprised him but was also just how he wanted it. He called ‘Cut!’ and looked at his first AD and said, ‘I’m going to marry her.’” Bosworth’s relationship with Polish marked a turning point in her life—a rebirth, even. While their film collabo- rations have given her a greater sense of creative autonomy, their marriage has opened her outward and deepened her sense of responsibility to others, near and far. She loves hav- ing wisdom to share with Jasper, whom Bosworth considers “hands-down the greatest unexpected gift of her life.” The two have a unique relationship. Not quite mother and daughter and not quite sisters, they are a blend of both. Utilizing the Spanish taught to her by her paternal grandmother, Jasper calls Bosworth madre.” And Bosworth’s maternal instincts have kicked in: she even learned to cook just for Jasper. Since marrying, Bosworth and Polish have become more socially conscious. Prior to launching their school, they made a film together to shine light on the sex-trafficking industry that preys on Central American migrants. After listening to an here is no excellent beauty that hath not some strange- ness in the proportion.” Francis Bacon, whose insight has shaped reflections on the nature of beauty for more than four centuries, would no doubt find proof of his theory in Kate Bosworth. From her 152