The past year has turned Bridget Fonda, 29, and Eric Stoltz, 31, into two extremely busy people. Starring roles in Single White Female (hers) and The Waterdance (his), plus supporting roles (hers, as Matt Dillon’s doormat) and an uncredited cameo (his, as an annoying mime) in Singles, have enabled her to leave behind the baggage f being “a Fonda” and him to cease being “Oh yeah, that kid in Mask.” This spring sees her playing the lead in Point of No Return, the American remake of the French thriller La Femme Nikita; him doing the same in Naked in New York; and both of them, along with Tim Roth and Phoebe Cates, in Bodies, Rest, and Motion, on which Stoltz also served as producer. She plays a stand-by-your-man kind of gal while he plays a simple-pleasures kind of guy. In the course of the movie, they meet and fall in love. In real life (as opposed to reel life) the co-habit houses in L.A. and New Mexico and co parent a dog named Bucket Head. Over lunch at Joseph’s Café in Hollywood (scrambled eggs for him, soup for her), MLLE talked to Fonda and Stoltz about movies, interior decorating, careers, relationships, housework, and other deep things.
MLLE: I’m supposed to pretend that I’m not here. I’ll just be moderating this interview…
Eric Stoltz: So we’re just supposed to talk to each other?
Bridget Fonda: I’m going to answer everything.
ES: Then my first question is…
BF: Hold on. Let me prepare my iced tea first—the stripping of the straw, the squeezing of the lemon. The little rituals that make lunch so special.
ES: Okay, my first question is, How did you get involved with the movie Bodies, Rest, and Motion?
BF: That goes back to when we were sitting around thinking of people to play the character I ended up playing in the film. I sat there looking at you and finally said, “Well, what about me?” At which point you said, “You’re too young.”
ES: Well, you were, in the original script.
BF: And with a couple of rewrites, suddenly I was approached.
ES: It wasn’t my decision. I couldn’t just change the age of the character without talking to the writer and director.
BF: I didn’t expect you to. But I was okay about it. I said, “Oh, that’s too bad. Why does she have to be that age?” Then, one week later, her age was changed. So [Eric], how did you get involved in Bodies?
ES: I was doing The Waterdance with Michael Steinberg and Neil Jimenez, and Michael brought me the script for Bodies, and said, “Hey, this is a script I want to make a film out of, and I think you’d be right for this part.” So I read it, and I liked it, and I thought I would be right for the part but I wanted to do something more, besides acting in it. So I said, “Hey, make me a producer.” And they fell for it! It’s the first time I’ve been a producer.
BF: You have a deeper interest in the films that you work on than most actors I know. You really get involved in each project.
ES: Was that a drag for you, my being so involved in this project?
BF: Not at all! I took advantage of it. I learned all kinds of things that actors are usually kept in the dark about. Because I think, as a whole, actors have gotten this reputation as being troublemakers: “Don’t’ let them know too much, they’ll only demand more.” I hate being stuck in my trailer, which is like a little isolation chamber, and never knowing how the film works because you’re only seeing what people want to show you. You’re never given the inside.
ES: What interests me, in both Point of No Return and Bodies- even though Point of No Return is an action, shoot ‘em up genre picture and Bodies in more a character picture- in both films you play a woman who turns her back on her career and her man and goes off by herself in the end. What about the character in Bodies made you want to do it? Do you relate to it on some personal level?
BF: On a very deep level. There is a deep down, undefined fear the character has that I related to, that I never really understood and still don’t exactly understand.
ES: Fear about relationships?
BF: Fear about life. I don’t mean a phobia type of fear, or extreme fear, but just an overall debilitating self-doubt that I have. Most people I know have it in varying degrees. I have gone through it. I recognized it from the time I was little. That sort of negative chain that sometimes little girls get—that you’re really nothing until you catch a man. You can tell yourself all day long, “I’m a good person. I am worthwhile on my own. I do not need another substance to make me whole.” But it doesn’t change the fact that you still feel lonely and insecure. It was interesting to play a character who wasn’t always having things inflicted upon her by outside forces. I like that Bodies was much more of an inside thing.
MLLE:Eric, can you talk about the film you just did, Naked in New York?
BF: What drew you to it initially?
ES: The director, Dan Algrant, who made me want to do it. And the script was very good, too. But it was less the material and more the people involved that made me decide to do the film. I figure if you’re going to go to work for sixteen hours a day for three months, you might as well be with people you love and want to be around.
BF: You’ve been lucky in the last few years, working with really great people you’ve formed friendships with.
ES: What about people you want to work with?
BF: Well, if I can work with you again…
ES: Other than that.
BF: I would love to work again with Andy Garcia, who’s a friend. And I would love to work with Phoebe Cates. I could do a series of Phoebe/Bridget films and be very satisfied, because we just have so much fun. With Phoebe, there’s an instant history, an instant friendship, an instant bonding thing.
ES: In Bodies, you and Phoebe took off form the written word and created this friendship between women that you don’t often see on-screen—a non-competitive friendship… which is very interesting, as a man, to watch. It was sort of like being able to eavesdrop on your conversations.
MLLE: [to Bridget] Did you have any love scenes with Tim Roth?
ES: No.
MLLE: [to Eric] Were you happy about that?
ES: Yeah, I was happy about that until I went to dailies one night and they were making out wildly on-screen. In the script, it says they “kiss good-bye,” which I think of as a peck on the cheek. Suddenly, Tim Roth, the maniac, turns it into this deep, passionate kiss. I said, “What the hell was that? That’s not in the script I read.” I t shook me a little bit, but I…
BF: There was a doughnut in my mouth during that kiss. It was not as romantic as…
ES: There’s something sexy about kissing a woman with a donut in her mouth.
BF: Fifteen doughnuts later, I have to disagree. There’s something disgusting about that much donut.
ES: We go through the weird thing of watching each other make love to other people on-screen, and it’s certainly not a comfortable thing. But it’s part of our profession. It’s one of those side effects we have to deal with. Ideally, I’d like to get to the point where I could enjoy it, but I don’t think that will happen.
BF: It’s hard to enjoy watching the person you love kissing someone else—unless you can get the other actor to put a bag over their head.
ES: Well, thankfully, your real love scene in Bodies is with me.
BF: So what was it like to work wit the person you’re living with?
ES: It was… fun. It was the first time I’d ever experienced that, living with my girlfriend and our dog, coming home from work to the woman that I’m in a scene with the next day, having friends stay with us for three or four days. It was sort of like a community-theater experience.
BF: To me it was wonderful to be able to share the most important thing going on in my life at that moment, which was the film, with the person who is the most important person in my life. Usually, [it’s] “I’d like to explain to you what went on today, but it would just take too long and I’m so tired so, hi, Honey, I’m home.”
ES: It’s fun. I guess we like what we do.
BF: I think you like it better than me.
ES: I enjoy the process more. You enjoy working more than I do, though. I mean, you’re leaving today to start another film.
BF: I’m going to Seattle- again- to start working on a Bernardo Bertolucci movie [Little Buddha]
MLLE: You guys have been together for a couple of years.
ES: Yeah, going on three.
BF: Two and a half.
MLLE: How do you feel about being separated like that when you have to work in different places?
ES: We’re in such a weird profession.
BF: Communication is the most important thing. It’s the only thing you have. It’s hard over the phone, because so much communication is done through facial expression. But we don’t let too much tome pass without seeing each other. So far, the longest we’ve been apart is about a month.
MLLE: Can you describe your day-to-day life together—who takes out the trash, who makes dinner?
BF: I do!
ES: Well, we divide up our home responsibilities pretty unevenly. I guess I do most of the work, and…
BF: I reap the benefits.
ES: You don’t.
BF: And I bring furniture into the house.
ES: Yeah.
BF: The plants.
ES: You make the big purchases an I…
BF: The sofa.
ES: And I reorganize the stacks of scripts. We take turns feeding the dog.
BF: Old Bucket Head
ES: We just bought a house in New Mexico and we’re taking turns fixing it up.
BF: We have different ideas about furnishings.
MLLE: What’s the difference?
BF: No furniture, and furniture.
ES: I prefer a much more Spartan lifestyle, and she likes a cluttered living space.
BF: Don’t make it sound like there are Victorian doilies everywhere. It’s not cluttered. I just… we discovered the other day that it comes down to the way we grew up. Trying to re-create the happiest nest of your childhood.
ES: And I was happiest when I really had very little. She had a lot of creature comforts in her home.
BF: When I was growing up, the constant thing in my life was my home. There were lots of trees and it was green and I just loved it. I loved everything abut it—the ugly sofa, I mean everything.
ES: Right, and I’d never even had a sofa until you moved in. Nor a television. I went for ten years without a television, until you forced it on me.
BF: We still don’t have cable. We don’t actually get TV stations, but we have a VCR.
ES: Which is a big compromise for me, because I always wanted to have a lot of time and space to read and think.
BF: I love movies.
ES: So do I. But I always felt like TV was a waste of time somehow. Like if I didn’t have a television, if I didn’t have that distraction, I would spend more time with my friends or reading or somehow connecting with real life. I reached a point in college where I didn’t know if a memory was my own or from TV show I’d watched.
BF: Is that me, or The Three Stooges? I never watched much TV when I was a kid…
ES: I didn’t, either. That’s what’s so frightening. To this day, I still find myself humming songs to stupid TV shows. My mind is so cluttered with useless, trivial stuff…
BF: The I Dream of Jeannie theme song ins not useless and trivial. I love that song. [Sings it.]
ES: An interesting thing that’s been happening lately is that I’ll fall asleep at ten-thirty, and you’ll read until one, and I’ll get up at seven and feed the dog and go for a walk, and you’ll still be in bed. You’ve become a night person, and I’ve become a morning person for the first time in my life. I’m becoming my father. What a thought!
BF: You’ve always been a morning person.
ES: No, I’ve always stayed up late. I’ve always stayed up until two in the morning reading. Let’s not argue.
MLLE: Would you ever tell each other what films not to do or adventures not to embark upon?
ES: Once, in the past year, I wrote on the cover of a script, “If you do this movie I will never speak to you.” But it doesn’t happen that often. It’s not so much fun [telling each other] what not to do, but what to do. Like she just read this script that I thought was very interesting, I encouraged her to give it a chance.
BF: I was on the fence. But the film had Jessica Tandy in it, and I really wanted to work with Jessica Tandy. That’s what I’m doing next, by the way.
ES: We watch out for each other, I guess.
-reported by Shari Roman
Mademoiselle, April 1993