Nicole Kidman Recalls Making Jonathan Glazer's 'Birth'

By now, the shot should look familiar: Nicole Kidman sitting in a movie theater, her face registering, among other things, hope and wonder.

Except the masterful sequence I'm contemplating is not the one from the ubiquitous AMC theaters ad that's been adored and parodied for the past three years, but from Jonathan Glazer's 2004 film “Birth.” In addition to ecstasy, Kidman's expression also conveys shock and anguish and, ultimately, acceptance of the impossible. All in two minutes.

Here's how it plays out: Attending the opera with her fiancé, Kidman's character Anna arrives uneasy, and you can understand why. A preternaturally calm 10-year-old boy recently showed up at her Manhattan apartment (at her engagement party, no less) and announced that he is her reincarnated husband, a man who collapsed 10 years ago while jogging. in Central Park. Anna has been thinking about the boy's words for days. Now seated, with Wagner's “Die Walküre” echoing in the background, Anna decides to surrender to the unimaginable and embrace the fantastic idea.

And you see the whole journey unfold wordlessly on Kidman's face in the long, uninterrupted shot.

Nicole Kidman in the movie “Birth.”

(James Bridges / Fine Line Features)

“I knew instinctively, in real time, that it would be the center of the film,” Glazer tells me over email. “He was very eloquent. Like watching a trapeze artist on a tightrope, elegantly suspended in the air.”

Kidman, 56, has carved out a long career full of work in which she has walked a tightrope. He's also still making big moves, as he just finished filming “Babygirl,” a sexually charged thriller written and directed by Halina Reijn (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”) for A24.

On the eve of Saturday's AFI Life Achievement Award gala celebrating Kidman's career, it seemed like the right time to revisit “Birth,” a film that has been reevaluated in the 20 years since its release, emblematic of the risks that he loves to take with her. work.

“I just have enormous confidence,” Kidman says by phone from Austria, where she is filming a second season of the Hulu series “Nine Perfect Strangers.” “I'll just go places, line up with people and say, 'Here I am.' I'm yours. We will live and die together.'”

With “Birth,” she and Glazer created a strange film that introduces Anna, a smart and sophisticated Upper East Side resident, with a shot of her leaning on her husband's tombstone and then spends the next 90 minutes suggesting she will never escape. of his memory.

A woman reads a letter in her apartment.

“This is a strange and disturbing movie,” I begin, shortly after Kidman picks up the phone.

“I don't find it strange, but maybe that means I'm strange,” Kidman says, laughing. “But I never found it strange. I found it profound, the way it addresses pain and how people fill in the gaps to explain things. needing explaining things and then being incredibly open to all possibilities when you are in a deeply vulnerable state.”

“And also,” he continues, “the idea that grief is not finite because it definitely is not. The pain never ends. And you see it in that opera scene. She simply frees herself, believing that it is him, that this child is her husband. For her, it is the easiest path.”

For that famous shot, Glazer says she asked Danny Huston, who plays Anna's fiancé, to whisper something banal to Kidman, “to give her a push or two to get her off balance, out of her daydream.” Her recovery, he notes, was immaculate.

“It was just two takes,” Kidman says of the close-up. “That's how daring Jonathan was. 'Excellent. We did it.' “It wasn’t always like that with him.”

A man and a woman smile in an apartment.

While her memory of filming that crucial scene is accurate, Kidman is a bit hazy on the details of how she prepared to play a woman still tormented by despair a decade after her husband's death. During one of our conversations, she closes her eyes and rubs her temples, as if she were trying to summon ghosts from the past.

“I know, vocally, everything became a lot more meek and timid and lighter,” Kidman says. “I remember being surprised at that moment by the voice that came out of me.”

Do you still have the script, I ask, where could you consult your notes?

“No, I throw everything away,” Kidman responds. “I crush them. Ooh. It would be like people reading my diary. “I don’t want anyone to ever read them.”

So every script?

“Shredded.”

“'Eyes wide Shut'”?

“Shredded.”

I'm not sure I've ever heard you savor a word like “crushed” right now, I tell him.

“Well, it feels like baggage,” Kidman says. “Everything will be in an attic or a basement. I am a traveling actor and I can live out of a suitcase. “That's how I approach life because I always had to put everything in a suitcase and move on.”

Kidman was finishing making “Birth” when she won the Oscar in 2003 for playing Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry's drama “The Hours.” That year, she also appeared in Lars von Trier's hard-hitting, incendiary “Dogville,” Philip Roth's sober adaptation “The Human Stain” and the acclaimed Civil War epic “Cold Mountain,” a hit nominated for seven Oscars. . But even with all that, Glazer had hesitated to cast her in “Birth,” fearing that her celebrity would overwhelm a delicate and quirky character study.

“I was nervous about casting her,” Glazer admits. “It didn't have to be. I underestimated her ability to become anonymous. To fully immerse yourself. He had seen her in 'Dogville'. I loved that she did that. And 'Eyes Wide Shut'. It’s that bravery that attracted me, looking for filmmakers who would challenge it.”

Glazer did just that, noting that the making of “Birth” was complicated. The studio, he says, was “infuriated by my daily script changes and improvisations,” often done because the scenes they had initially written were beyond the capabilities of young actor Cameron Bright, who played the boy.

“So we would shift the emphasis to Nicole,” Glazer says. “Sometimes three or four pages of dialogue would show up at her house at midnight to shoot the next day, completely different from what she had prepared. She arrived in the morning, never late, knowing the new lines perfectly and without complaining. She was by my side at all times. She knew she was looking for something, she protected me and believed in what we were doing. She is an absolute professional and I am deeply proud of her performance.”

Kidman recalls Glazer's “rigorous” reworking of the script, a process she compares to Stanley Kubrick's methodology in making “Eyes Wide Shut,” a 400-day shoot that, in short, amounted to what she calls a “commitment.” to explore the unknown.”

A man and a woman embrace each other in bed.

“Stanley was rewriting scenes that we had spent six weeks filming,” Kidman recalls. “And you just say, 'Okay. Excellent. How do you see it this time?' With Jonathan, he would get those pages late at night and it was glorious because the writing was so good. Good writing is easy to learn. That's never a problem. When it’s not so good,” he laughs, “that’s another story.”

“Birth,” like “Eyes Wide Shut,” revels in its mysteries. Even after the young man's story has been largely debunked as a hoax, some lingering questions remain. And Kidman loves that ambiguity because, as he often likes to say, “None of us know anything.”

Which makes me think about mortality and the film's contemplation of the supernatural.

“How do you feel about the afterlife these days?” I ask him.

“I'm open to ideas, I change, I change and I grow,” Kidman says. “There are times when I feel solid in my strength of who and where I am. And there are other times where I'm like, 'Ooof, everything's been removed and everything feels very tenuous and I'm not quite sure what's what.' And that has to do with having lost people very suddenly. I think that leaves you unstable. As much as we all come up with ideas, none of us has the ultimate power to know what's going on.”

Kidman lost her father a decade ago after he suffered a heart attack, and he often comes up in our conversations. Pain is not finite. We talked about how we would like to believe we could see our loved ones in another realm.

“I can feel it,” Kidman says. “So I'm very open to that. “We just don't know.” He pauses and then laughs. “But I guess we'll all find out someday, right?”

“Birth” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2004. Reviews were mixed, and when the film opened the following month, most audiences stayed away. Today, it occupies a firm place alongside the three other films Glazer has made: “Sexy Beast,” “Under the Skin” and “The Zone of Interest,” which won the International Feature Film Oscar earlier this year. , and Kidman's performance is now considered a favorite. one of the best in a career full of superlative work.

“Films that deal with uncomfortable topics will rarely be received with enthusiasm because they deal with things that don't make people feel safe,” Kidman says. “They are not a relaxing bath.”

“Yes,” I agree, “and you've made a lot of movies that…”

“…they're not relaxing baths,” Kidman responds, finishing the thought, laughing. “They are not lullabies.”

How does Glazer himself feel about “Birth” two decades later?

“I haven't seen him since we did it,” he says. “But I do know that it's a movie that some people connect with deeply and that's a rewarding feeling.”

As part of her AFI gala, Kidman attended a pre-recorded interview about her entire career. How did he feel after taking that trip in the time machine?

“I felt sadness and wonder,” Kidman says. “It's definitely wonderful. Like what?”

She bursts into giggles. “How did this happen? A lot of them are great memories. My mother said in her wedding speech (my second wedding) that Nicole always looked at the world through rose-colored glasses, particularly the past.” Kidman pauses , smiling. “I thought that was kind of nice.”

So where does the sadness part come in?

“The sadness is, 'Aaaaw, I want to be able to do it all again.'”

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