Indie icon Lili Taylor has become slightly better known to mainstream movie audiences in recent years, but she acts - and looks – too down to earth to ever make it big in safe and predictable Hollywood products. The actress tells Donald Clarke about playing an unwashed 'bukowski woman' in factotum independent is just a word now.
IT IS Lili Taylor's misfortune that in the early 1990s, just as mini studios such as Miramax were setting out to housetrain the mavericks of American cinema, she found herself crowned the queen of independent movies.
Born in Illinois in 1967, Taylor made her first big-screen appearance opposite Julia Roberts in 1988's cosy Mystic Pizza. While her co-star went on to become the most powerful female actor in Hollywood, Lili ploughed a furrow through more rugged ground. She had a significant role in Robert Altman's Short Cuts. She floated around Jennifer Jason Leigh in Alan Rudolph's Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle. She was distressingly lost in Abel Ferrara's masterly vampire movie The Addiction.
Altman, Rudolph, Ferrara: it is little wonder that critics placed the indie ermine around Lili's shoulders.
Taylor's latest film, Factotum, a fabulously grubby adaptation of Charles Bukowski's novel of booze and brawling, may well fit the independent template, but, elsewhere, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell ersatz independence from the real thing. Does her title mean anything any more?
"No. It really doesn't," Taylor says. "When I was declared the queen of independence back in the 1990s that was meaningless, because that is when everything began to change. Independent is just a word now. Cinema is just dominated by commerce. But now more interesting films are going mainstream and for that I am grateful. If that is the deal with Mephistopheles, that's fine. But, as with any artistic form, we have to go back and discover something deeper in it."
One suspects that Lili's identification as an indie potentate had as much to do with how she appears as what she appears in. Small and energetic, with broad facial features, she looks too much like a member of the human race to be of use to producers seeking the next mainstream star. When she does turn up in popcorn movies - say, Jan de Bont's atrocious The Haunting or Ron Howard's so-so Ransom - she generally plays an eccentric or out-and-out nutter. Does she consciously try to strike a balance between commerce and art when selecting roles? This week, Bukowski? Next week, Howard?
"There is an undercurrent of balancing, because I generally do a play in the winter and that just brings in $500 (€426) a week if you are lucky. The films I like don't pay. Mind you, I would do The Haunting again if it turned out the way Jan de Bont talked about it originally. The intentions were good and obviously it didn't work out that way. Something went wrong. But those films do serve a purpose."
One of the upsides of pursuing a career outside the mainstream is a lower level of intrusive press attention. Profiles of Lili Taylor reveal little juicy information. The daughter of a hardware store owner, one of six children, Taylor fought with depression as a child before securing her high school diploma. Her spell at drama school in Chicago was brief.
"I got kicked out. I got a job to pay tuition and missed, like, one day of class and was thrown out," she says. "But, frankly, I think I had a good attitude, and anybody who graduated probably spent years trying to unlearn all the stuff they'd been taught."
What else does it say here? It seems she dated John Cusack, her co-star in Say Anything, and has also been seen about the fleshpots with Eric Stoltz and Matthew Broderick.
"Where does this stuff come from?" she says with no apparent bitterness. "I never dated John Cusack. This stuff is all hearsay. Firstly I don't really date people and secondly all this stuff is hearsay anyway. I think I have a European sensibility in that sense. I remember going out with an Irish guy and he would say [ adopts decent Irish accent]: 'Dates? We have to go on dates? What's that?'"
The one piece of scandal that attaches to Lili involves former boyfriend Michael Rapaport. In 1998 the actor pleaded guilty to aggravated harassment of Taylor and was ordered by the court to keep his distance. When the issue is raised, she remains jaunty.
"There is not much else to say. Thank God it's all forgotten and over. It is just one of those things. I just took a misstep and thank God it's over." She took a misstep? I am puzzled. In what sense was it her fault? "Oh, just in the sense that: why did I do that? Why did I pick him? We all have these horrible relationships. What was I thinking?"
For the last year and a half Taylor has been seeing the writer Nick Flynn, whose Another Bullshit Night in Suck City memoir was recently published by Faber and Faber. They both live in New York City.
In recent years she has found herself being pestered a little more often in the supermarket. Though Taylor has had a major cult following since her appearance as Valerie Solanas, founder of the Society for Cutting up Men, in 1996's self-explanatory I Shot Andy Warhol, she has recently discovered that being on the telly brings a different class of fame. In 2002 she joined the cast of Six Feet Under as the irritating Lisa Fisher.
"Things definitely did change with that," she says. "But with Six Feet Under, if you are not part of the main family it doesn't interest people so much. They are the ones that really get under the psyche and they are the ones the journalists are more interested in. We just don't get as intense interest as the other characters."
Taylor goes on to praise the way quality series from companies such as HBO have allowed actors to move from cinema to television without looking as if they're slumming. But, for all Six Feet Under's virtues, Bent Hamer's fine Factotum does come over more like your classic Taylor project.
Matt Dillon stars as a thinly disguised version of Bukowski himself: he drinks; he gambles; he scribbles; he vomits. Lili plays Jan, one of the author's trademark damaged lovers. It is an impressive performance by the actress, but it is hard to shake the impression that the boozy, indolent Jan is interchangeable with a dozen other women in Bukowski's novels.
"It is funny. I thought there were going to be a lot more problems for me, as a woman, playing a Bukowski woman," she says. "But there were a lot fewer. He is actually not a misogynist. I really wouldn't say he was a sexist. He has issues and he was getting in there and dealing with them. He was facing up to those issues. Because of that his female characters have a depth that you sometimes don't find in other female characters these days. Jan has real depth to her."
If that's true, then a large part of the credit must go to Taylor. There is a simmering, sluggish energy to her performance which few of her contemporaries could match. It helps that, unlike so many of those actors, she looks so very like a human being. She should take this as a compliment.
