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Miller the Factory Girl - CanMag.com - January 31st 2007
Sienna Miller is a glamour icon in today's Hollywood. Who could forget her Golden Globes dress with that hair braid halo over her head? She got to play a fashion icon of another era in Factory Girl, the story of Edie Sedgwick and her time with Andy Warhol.
Interview: Sienna Miller on Factory Girl
"I haven’t gotten to keep any of the clothes yet," she lamented. "That’s something I’m still working on, but I love ‘60's style. She had such a unique sense of style, and really accidentally came upon it. She used to do these jazz/ballet work-outs, and she’d wear her leotards with her black tights, and then she couldn’t be bothered to change, so she’d just put a coat over it, and it caught on and became this huge trend. It was sort of an inadvertent thing that happened but she had extraordinary clothes, beautiful clothes."
Playing a real life person is a hefty task for an actor, and Miller did not take it lightly. "I researched it for about a year. I read every book there was to read, and watched all of the films I could get my hands on. The Warhol Museum let us into an archive room where they had different movies that people haven’t seen, so we watched them. The thing about that era was that it was so well documented. Everyone recorded everyone doing everything. So, there are just normal conversations between Edie and Andy, that he taped, that I had a CD of, to get her voice and her speech patterns. And then I watched the way she danced, and I talked to her husband, her brother and her friends. You feel like this underground detective, going around. I went to Santa Barbara and saw her grave. There’s the Sedgwick Reserve, which was the ranch she grew up in, and we found the entrance to it and climbed over and started running, to try and find the house. We got about a mile up, in the baking sun, and saw a sign that said, 'Mountain lions operate in this area,' and screamed and ran back out, so that didn’t go so well."
Taking all of that into account, Miller set out to avoid direct imitation. "I wanted to get to the stage where I was so familiar with her speech. She was very mannered, the way she smoked, the way she laughed, the way she moved. There’s this book, 'Edie,' by George Plimpton that has really detailed descriptions of her soul and her spirit. I didn’t want it to be an imitation, so in order to emotionally connect to the material, you have to have done your homework enough that you feel comfortable with all the physicality, so when you’re on set, you can let go of it and try to relate to the character, as much as possible."
Sedgwick bears a striking resemblance to Miller, but she doesn't see it. "I looked like her in the film because we had an amazing hair and make-up team. I saw this photograph of her that’s a beautiful photograph, and I sort of fell in love with her, but I didn’t think, 'Oh, God, it looks like me,' at all. But, that was what drew me to the script. When I first got it, on the front page was a photo of her. And, she just has this magnetism and this luminescence and I think, like most people, I was very drawn to her. I saw resemblances, when I had the brown contacts and the beauty spot, and all of that."
Factory Girl has a wide release this Friday, February 2nd.
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