The Saturday interview: Feathered fiends

Natalie Portman has reason to smile. The 29-year-old’s acclaimed performance as a tortured ballet dancer in Black Swan has just won her the best actress award at the Golden Globes, she’s pregnant with her first child and recently got engaged to her Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied.

It’s already shaping up to be a very good year for the actress who began her career in Luc Besson’s Leon aged just 13.

With motherhood on the horizon, she’s unfazed by the awards attention, instead excited about “cooking a child”, as she calls it, and the audience reaction to Black Swan. “It’s obviously very flattering, and it’s exciting to be in a film that people like in a year of good films, but the really rewarding thing is the audience reaction, which has been so overwhelming,”

she says.

“It’s fun to hear people debating their different takes on what the movie is about, what it means and what’s real and not real. Just to see people engaging so passionately is your greatest dream when you’re making a film.”

In Black Swan – the latest film from The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky – Portman plays ambitious New York ballet dancer Nina Sayer, who embarks on a reckless journey of psychological and sexual discovery after landing the leading role in a production of Swan Lake.

The director first approached Portman about the role eight years ago while she was still at college. She wasn’t a newcomer to ballet, having studied it from four years old up to the age of 12, but gave it up to be an actress.

She’s still fascinated by the ballet world.

“It’s a female art form that’s still dominated by men. It’s interesting that [ballerinas] represent the larger world of women, where one gets too old or out of shape, there’s a younger woman to slip into her place.”

She’s aware of the parallels with Hollywood, but says the pressures of the ballet world are far more intense. “There is an age limit, but film and theatre are a little more flexible for actresses.

You can change the kind of roles you do and go from leading lady to character actress, whereas for dancers, your career is over.

“There’s more material reward for what we do than for dancers. Theirs truly is an art of passion – no one’s becoming rich and famous being a ballet dancer anymore, but there’s something incredibly beautiful about that.”

The preparation was punishing, as Portman had to train for five hours a day, every day for a year, before the film started shooting. “I went into self-punishing mode,” she admits. “I didn’t sleep, didn’t eat and worked out all day because I was living that character.”

In between takes, she couldn’t rest, but had to keep warm and prepare for the next shot: “It was good to keep that level of alertness,”

she says. Halfway through filming, she dislocated a rib during a lift. “It’s where one rib goes under another and it feels like a stitch, so for the second half of the film, I couldn’t take a deep breath. But it’s good to understand what real dancers go through.

“Injuries often happen when they get promoted, because they’ve been dancing so hard and don’t want to be replaced. So they’ll dance with a sprained ankle or something extreme that would usually have people benched.

They’ll dance beautifully on stage and limp off into a bucket of ice. It’s pretty shocking.”

Financing the film was an endless struggle for Aronofsky but it prolonged the agony of training for Portman.

Although it would have been easier for her body if the film had been made eight years earlier, the actress believes she wouldn’t have been able to do the role justice in her early twenties. “As a child actor, you’re always looking for approval and trying to please. To get to that point where you’re really trying to make yourself happy and fulfil yourself through performance is a whole new experience.

‘That’s what I gained in my late twenties and it gave me a perspective. It also made the earlier parts of the film, where Nina’s insecure, naive and trying to please everyone, all the more difficult, because it felt like a regression of sorts.”

She admits she found it hard to shut off Nina at the end of a day’s filming: “There are always little strands of your character you don’t realise are in you that linger for months afterwards.

This role was much harder to shake because it was all-consuming.”

As for whether the mum-to-be has any of the Black Swan in her, she says: “I think everyone’s a little bit of both. I don’t think anyone’s all white or black, we’ve all got that purity and impurity battling inside of us.”

* Black Swan (15) is now showing in cinemas.

Direct lines

V INCENT Cassel sits down and asks where the film writers gathered at the round table are from. We are all from the UK.

“This morning it was international. Japan, Russia,” he says of his day of press interviews so far. “So I will speak English – what would you like to know?”

The French actor flits neatly between his homeland and the US for film roles, equally at home in French dramas like Mesrine and La Haine as international movies such as Elizabeth, Ocean’s Thirteen and David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises.

In Black Swan, he plays the charismatic but demanding artistic director of a New York ballet company mounting a sexuallycharged staging of Swan Lake. In common with several of the other actors in the film, he was intrigued to work with director Darren Aronofsky, who made Requiem For A Dream and The Wrestler.

“When I saw his first film, Pi, I was very interested because it was very European first of all and, even though I didn’t understand the story, I loved it. He had a style, visually and in terms of what he likes to talk about – perversion, control, all those things. I never thought I must work with him but when he called I was very happy.”

He didn’t base artistic director Thomas Leroy on anyone in particular but he has a number of dance connections that shaped his performance. His father, the French actor Jean-Pierre Cassel, “was dancing a lot – he did a lot of shows”. He was also close to Broadway choreographer Michael Bennett, of A Chorus Line fame. “I ended up dancing too for seven years on a daily basis in a very serious way. Not to be a dancer – I never dreamed of being a ballet dancer – but I took ballet because I thought actors should know about moving.

“Actually, actors should know how to do everything. So I started by trying to learn everything and physical stuff was something I was attracted.”

He can’t remember wanting to do anything but acting, although he points out that his brother is a rapper (with the group Assassin) and he hung out with musicians.

“I am very attracted by music, so I’ll end up doing a musical, I guess,” he adds.

If you imagine making Black Swan, with its concentration of extreme passion and emotions, was a rollercoaster to make, then think again. He found it easily to slip away from the character off-camera. “I always do, I easily do, I’m a non-suffering actor,” he says.

“Only with Mesrine I would throw up in the morning because I was eating too much to get big for the character. What I was doing was wrong and against nature.

“But for me – and I shouldn’t really say – being on the set is like a party really.”

Away from the movie set, he regrets not watching more films. “I wish I did. But you know, you have kids, you have a life, there are so many things,” he says.

“I can only watch documentaries. I think if you become what you are, you are dead. So you should keep on moving. I still know it’s not all about movies.”