BigStar - Summer of Sam, Mira Sorvino

You might say Mira Sorvino has come full circle as an actress. Following her award winning turn as the comical call girl in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, Sorvino kind of put men in their place as a female action hero in The Replacement Killers. Not one to shy away from combustible characters, Sorvino is starring now in the controversial Spike Lee movie Summer Of Sam. The actress talked about some of the grueling sexual and emotional ordeals her character confronts when mixing it up with co-star John Leguizamo.

PRAIRIE MILLER: You've got some pretty intense sex scenes in Summer Of Sam. Do sex scenes make you feel uncomfortable at all?

MIRA SORVINO: Yeah. They're never easy to do. I don't like doing sex scenes! I feel they're really miserable to make.

PM: How do you actually do scenes like that?

MS: I basically worked one on one with Spike and John. John and I workshopped our scenes with Spike, and Spike would have us improvise and really take them as far as they could go. You know, find out what was really going on behind them, and find out what our background was as a couple. What was going on in John's head, and what was going on in mine. And then he would rewrite the scenes. He would like enhance them to fit the characters that we were becoming with him.

PM: Talk about how your character Dionna gets affected by the serial killings.

MS: It affects John's character Vinny more directly than it affects her. She's one of those people that I think doesn't spend that much time worrying about how and when she's going to die. I mean she's the kind of person who believes that when your number's up, your number's up.

There was a scene earlier in the film that is no longer there, where a friend of theirs plays a joke on them and says bang, bang, bang in their car window. Then both of them become hysterical. However, she's not the kind of person who thinks, he's going to get me. That's just not where her head is.

Her father is very worried about her. And then her husband almost became one of the victims. I mean, he knows that if he had stayed in that car right at the beginning of the film, that he would have been in the place where a minute later the two people were killed.

So he is kind of obsessed with it. And his whole mentality becomes further and further degraded through the film by all the pressure that he's feeling, and his own confusion about himself. And about his marriage, and his friendship with Adrien Brody's character. So it's through him that she feels the most influence of the violence, because he's changing on her in ways she can't even understand.

PM: Everyone else is freaking out about the killings. So why does she play it so cool the whole time?

MS: You know, this is not the kind of woman anyway who is walking out on the streets late at night. I mean, she's a fairly cautious person. But some people are not people to become obsessed, and some people are. And her particular personality is not really somebody who is going to think all the time about, you know, am I going to be the next victim. Whereas her husband thinks about it constantly. I mean, he's obsessed with it.

PM: The sexual personality of your character in Summer Of Sam is very fascinating. Talk about the way Dionna tends to blame herself for her husband's sexual hangups and sexual insensitivity towards her.

MS: Okay...Well, actually I don't think that Vinny is insensitive to women's needs. I just don't think he can see his wife in that way. Because I think he's more sensitive to the needs of the other women that he spends time with. But he has a classic kind of madonna-whore syndrome. Except it's sort of a very strange one, in that he feels that God is telling him that he must not do anything out of the ordinary, anything kinky with his own wife, that he has to go out and do that with other people!

But he can't see her as anything but kind of saintly. He feels horrible about himself if he thinks of her in other terms. So that's a big issue in their relationship. And she doesn't even really understand that about him, she doesn't know that.

But I do think that it is a fairly common thing, that when a person discovers an infidelity, that they may think that, well he or she wouldn't have cheated on me without reason. You know, like what was the problem in the relationship that led to the infidelity.

I mean the thing is, my character doesn't know the extent of it. She knows about once, and she doesn't understand that she's kind of the laughing stock of the whole community. Which I think is really doubly painful for her to learn.

Everyone else knows that Vinny is a philanderer, that's what he does. And she thinks, oh God, he cheated on me once. Maybe he's been cheating on me, I don't know, but let me bring him back to me, let him fall in love with me again. You know, what can I do?

In a certain sense I think it's so disturbing to her, that part of her doesn't even want to accept that it's real. You know, part of her won't even be completely honest with herself until way later in the film. I mean she would like to think, well maybe I'm wrong. But she's still kind of angry with him.

PM: Talk about your very wide range of character choices in movies, from Mighty Aphrodite and The Replacement Killers to Summer Of Sam.

MS: Well, The Replacement Killers came at a particular point in my career where I had never done that kind of a film, ever. And actually most actresses start out more with that kind of film, and then move into the serious films. And so for me it was kind of a vacation, into the adrenalin of action movies.

And I did love my character. I felt that she was kind of like a guy in a western. She had that kind of thieves' code of honor. You know, she was tough, she was stoic, and yet she had heart. But it's not a serious film with a serious statement, no.

But I tried that, and I mean I think a career is built on a variety of different roles. Right now, I'm sort of back into the more artistic films that I started out with, and that I'm probably closest to personally.

PM: Getting back to Summer Of Sam, that confrontation with Vinny in the graveyard was a really explosive scene. It seemed so real. Talk about how you got that effect.

MS: It took about a whole night. And it was pretty draining. The interesting thing about the scene, is that it builds from like the two of them sitting in the car and there being something really wrong in their relationship, but it hasn't come out yet. And they've just come out of this crazy sex and drugs scene. They're both processing it. She's nervous, and he's furious.

She's trying to calm him down, and doesn't even know how to explain her own behavior. She doesn't know whether to feel ashamed or liberated, or whatever. So it starts off and she's not that angry, she's just very nervous and worried, and doesn't know what's going on.

And then he starts attacking her. And then it's like everything in the whole film builds to this whole point for her. I mean everything that she's done for him, he's like taking away. You know, like calling her a whore and all of that. And so all of a sudden, she explodes.

And then to maintain that, to go through that part of the scene, that was very draining, because we did it take after take. You know, different angles moving outside of the car, and inside of the car. And you had to let all of that rage that had been pain turned into rage, come out all at once.

But I have to say, that once it was done I felt great. I felt, you know, that there had been a real catharsis. That if this scene hadn't existed for me as a character, then it would have been so much of a harder character to play. Because there never would have been any release from this sort of long suffering of the character. I mean she just suffers all this time, with no end in sight. And now she has a catharsis.

PM: How much did you steep yourself in '70's culture for Summer Of Sam?

MS: Spike had all of us as a group watch footage from the '70's, live coverage of everything that was happening that summer. You know, the riots, the heat wave. And documentaries about the Son of Sam, documentaries about the whole cult theory. We met with one of the actual detectives in charge of the case. He spoke to all of us as a cast. That was right in the neighborhood that we were working. We met with him at the local swim club.

And then I went out with the local women. I found some wonderful women there at the swim club who offered to take me around in their van, and just tell me what their lives had been like that summer. Where they would have gone to hang out, what they wore, what they talked about. How they would have reacted to a husband cheating on them, what nail polish I should wear. You know, everything from the sublime to the ridiculous!