The wedding wrecker

THE time might fast be approaching when people stop asking Anne Hathaway about changing her squeaky clean image. The Disney teen girl confection The Princess Diaries and its sequel introduced Hathaway to the screen and saw her labelled as a “good girl”.

She’s tried to shrug it off by going topless in Havoc, serious in Brokeback Mountain and bitching with Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. But somehow people – and film writers cannot be exempt from the list – harp on about her trying to change her image all the time.

She tries again in Rachel Getting Married, in which she plays Kym, the bride’s sister who’s let out of rehab to attend the wedding but brings with her a bundle of neuroses, worries and bad habits that threaten to derail the nuptials.

Hathaway rises to the challenge, with a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination under her belt.

Despite Kym’s bad behaviour, the actress feels the need to defend her.

“She’s narcissistic, but not selfish,”

she insists. “She’s selfish by normal standards, but you have to consider that the best thing for her sobriety was not to go home for the weekend of her sister’s wedding, and she’s chancing it to be there.

“In every single opportunity she’s given to take the high road or descend, almost every single time she chooses the high road. It’s not the same high road as Gandhi, let’s keep it in context, but for her, she’s doing the absolute best she can.”

IT’S hard to stop her praising Kym who she likes “so much”. She likes her ethics, her sensibility, her sense of humour. “I think Kym and I would be really good friends,”

she says.

“I actually loved her from the first line of dialogue that she had, I just felt a kinship with her. In terms of being likeable, it was just cool to know that the film didn’t hang in the balance of whether you liked my character.

“Sometimes when you’re making a film, you need to like the character in order to care about them because they’re not terribly complex. In this case, there’s so much going on with Kym that she was fascinating enough, and it didn’t matter if you liked her or not.

“I always felt comfortable that the story was compelling and truthful enough, and that her depth of love was enough that people would understand her and love her, before they even liked her.”

As well as not playing a goody-twoshoes, the film marks a move to lower budget cinema for Hathaway after more mainstream movies. Director Jonathan Demme, who made The Silence Of The Lambs and Philadelphia, shot Rachel Getting Married like a home movie with little rehearsal and live music playing a large role in the action and on the set.

For his leading lady, it was just like doing theatre every day, like having a documentary crew there to film it.

“So the point was not to make a film, it was to play the scene,” she says.

“I know I did and I’m sure everyone else did. Jonathan was going to make his movie, that’s going to happen, all we can do is playing these moments as they happen, so it didn’t become like ‘this is my big scene’. It didn’t matter in that way.

“Quite frankly, it was great not to have the distraction of, ‘all right, now it’s Rosemarie’s close-up’, I’ve got to give her everything that I have but also save enough for me because my turn’s coming up too. There was no track for that thought train, so it could never leave the station and it was fantastic to act without that.”

“It’s worth saying that it took a lot of organising – Jonathan seeing everything, Declan (Quinn, director of photography) shooting everything – for that kind of very focused chaos to reign. But it was beautiful and led to a lot of really creative, inspired moments.”

She feels the way Jenny Lumet’s script was written made it easy to make it seem improvised and the way it was shot had more to do with giving it an improvisational feel.

“We never knew where the camera was going to be beforehand,” recalls Hathaway. “Sometimes you’d be staring at someone’s back and all of a sudden it would be Declan, and he’d turn around and suddenly there’s a camera in your face.

“There are shots of me in the movie where I have no idea that the camera was on me. But most of the time I knew. There were usually two or three going at the same time, in group scenes, so in some of those you have no idea. But that’s really liberating.”

The actress did her research on rehab beforehand. She knows people who’ve been or are going through it and they took her to meetings. She read memoirs and went online to find out more.

Having a year to prepare for filming was a big help as it gave her time to come up with every question she could possible ask herself about addiction and to find the answers. “One of my friends gave me some literature that they had been given when they first went to rehab and it was a book of inspirational poetry. When I read it, I was partially reacting to it as Kym.

‘Iremember the first few poems that I read, it drove me crazy. It was so simplistic, that very sentimental positivity which is necessary for a lot of people when they’re in recovery but would drive Kym absolutely ape.”

Rachel Getting Married is definitely different to her usual projects.

“Oh yeah, I’m a big weirdo, so I’d love to do much more experimental stuff,” says Hathaway. “That I haven’t done it up until now is not a lack of desire, just a lack of opportunity.

I just think the freakier, the better.

“I know some of my choices are a little more mainstream and a little more commercial, and I don’t judge myself with those either. There’s a creativity with those as well.

“I think, how great to be 25 years old and say ‘yeah, I want to go off and make a wedding movie with Kate Hudson’ and then turn around and say ‘I’ve also made a wedding movie with Jonathan Demme’. It’s pretty cool to have both those ends of the spectrum.”

■ Rachel Getting Married (15) and Bride Wars (PG) are now showing in cinemas.