Juggling between the roles of an undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame and second-time mummy, actress Naomi Watts gets candid about her latest movie 'Fair Game', all set to release in India this Friday.
A fascinating glimpse into the dark corridors of political power, ‘Fair Game’ is an action thriller based on the autobiography of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose career was destroyed and marriage strained to its limits when her covert identity was exposed by a politically motivated press leak.
Based on ‘Plames memoir’ by the same name, the movie has been directed by Doug Liman of the Bourne series fame. ‘Fair Game’ stars two times Academy award winner Sean Penn, and Watts who won an Oscar nomination for her performance in ‘21 Grams’.
Crackling with sharp dialogue, intrigue and heart-pumping action, ‘Fair Game’ is a suspenseful account of a woman’s struggle to speak truth to power.
Watts began shooting for the film fresh after the birth of her second child. Watts began shooting for the film fresh after the birth of her second child. We take a sneak peek into what it took this pretty star to slip into the shoes of an ex-undercover CIA agent.
We’ve seen many spy movies over the years. How is ‘Fair Game’ different?
You think of spies and it's all gadgets and slick, groovy, kind of cool moments of jumping off buses, setting something on fire, and you know, it’s kind of unreal. But this film is obviously rooted in truth and just seeing the kind of ordinariness of her life juxtaposed to her leaving the household and going off to strange places, without her family properly knowing about it.
How did you prepare for the role?
We did things like car ramming at full speeds without helmets or seat-belts, a lot of shooting, a lot of setting up of explosives and running for cover. Some things I’m not even allowed to talk about, because they were so dangerous and illegal. But it was, again, to get us into the mindset of what she [Valerie Plame] went through.
How did Sean Penn get involved?
We were friends from filming ‘21 Grams’, and Doug Liman said, “Look, we would love to have Sean, and we have a small window of opportunity, so let’s cut all the middlemen and you know have the script sent to him right away.” So I said, “Okay, fine”, knowing that this content would be kind of irresistible to him. And immediately I got a message saying “Great script. A necessary story to tell.”
Tell us more about Valerie Plame, the woman the movie is based on.
Valerie, even though she’s this very feminine soft spoken kind of woman, she’s got this toughness to her. She could kick your ass. She’s not someone who’s easy to get things out of. She still has the secrecy agreement with the CIA. You know those questions that you just see in the movie, the temptation to ask them to her is there but you know that she’s not going to answer those, so you kind of have to push all that aside.
You just had your second child recently. And then you get this movie offer. It was clearly a case of bad timing.
Absolutely, it could not have been worse timing. I said I’m not reading anything right now. I knew the story; I had followed it well at that time. So, I was instantly intrigued and he said just read 10 pages, and you can’t read just 10 pages of this story and I was surprised is how much more I learnt.