“I’m the only Oscar nominee who sells yogurt [Activia] that makes you shit,” cracked Jamie Lee Curtis throughout a career-retrospective dialog with movie historian Leonard Maltin on Saturday night time on the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara. The newly minted best supporting actress Oscar nominee for Everything Everywhere All at Once was on the town to gather the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Maltin Fashionable Grasp Award, and charmed attendees — together with quite a lot of Academy members — with self-deprecation (“All the ‘nepo baby’ jokes, believe me, I’ve heard them all”), a declare that she “invented” Instagram and basic candor about her 45 years as a display screen actress: “I know what I can do, I know what I cannot do, and I’ve managed to have a really rich and robust group of opportunities in show-off business.”
Maltin — the namesake of the award Curtis was accumulating, and a buddy of Curtis’ late dad and mom, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, and Curtis herself — was barely capable of get a phrase in edgewise, however neither he nor the viewers appeared to thoughts, as Curtis tended to search out her technique to actual insights or heartfelt observations. One, for instance: “I am the granddaughter of immigrants from Hungary and from Denmark, people coming to America having the opportunities and the difficulties and the heartaches and the tragedies and the tiny little bit of joy. And then they each — both of them — raised children who became massive stars from incredibly impoverished beginnings. And then to have their daughter, who did not come from an impoverished beginning — I’ve had a life of privilege and ease, I have never pretended anything but that — but nonetheless, that their daughter is sitting here, talking to you about the craft of acting, about a lifelong career — I’m 64 years old, I’ve been doing this since I was 19 — I’m honored and you’ve honored my parents and my grandparents.”
Curtis claimed that she by no means had any intention of following in her well-known dad and mom’ footsteps. “I was never going to be an actor,” she stated. “I was going to be a police officer.” However then a tennis coach-turned-manager inspired her to audition at Common to play Nancy Drew in a movie mission. She didn’t land the function, however was signed by the studio — which was run by her godfather, Lew Wasserman, essentially the most highly effective individual in Hollywood on the time — to a seven-year contract, and left faculty to go concentrate on that. She struggled to realize traction, and in reality was devastated to be fired early in her profession — together with 11 different actors — from the TV sequence Operation Petticoat (an adaptation of a movie wherein her father had starred), nevertheless it turned out to be the most effective factor that ever occurred to her. “Had I not been fired from Operation Petticoat, I would not have been able to audition for Halloween,” she defined in reference to that 1978 John Carpenter horror flick, and that is the job that modified my life.”
After quite a few auditions for the a part of Laurie Strode, she landed the half that made her — like her mom, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho — a legendary “scream queen,” and in addition impacted quite a few different elements of her life. “All of my life goes back to Halloween,” she volunteered. “All the good things in my life, including my husband, including my family — everything can be traced back to Halloween.” However within the speedy aftermath of that movie’s success, she surprisingly obtained few different gives, which is why she is further grateful to Carpenter for writing her a component in his subsequent movie, 1980’s The Fog.
Because it seems, Carpenter was however one in every of “three Johns” — a double-entendre that she had some enjoyable with — who gave her main skilled breaks. John Landis had employed her to relate a documentary brief about horror movies, after which fought for her to star reverse Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in his 1983 comedy Buying and selling Locations. “I owe John Landis a great debt of gratitude because that flipped the switch,” she stated, which means that she was now not pigeonholed as a horror film actress. After which, due to the aptitude for comedy that Curtis demonstrated in Buying and selling Locations, John Cleese wrote her a component in his 1988 comedy A Fish Known as Wanda.
There have been different notable films alongside the best way, together with Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Metal in 1990, James Cameron’s True Lies in 1994 (she acknowledged Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger for giving her above the title credit score with Schwarzenegger regardless that they didn’t should) and John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama — in addition to the occasional return to the Halloween universe, beginning with Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. Curtis, who has since starred in a number of further sequels, stated that one of many few regrets of her profession was not insisting that Debra Hill, who had co-written and produced the primary Halloween, even be a producer of the second. “She wasn’t angry at me,” Curtis stated of Hill, who died in 2005, “but I was angry at myself.”
Curtis acknowledged that she was a last-minute substitute for others in a number of of her better-known roles, together with the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday and the 2019 thriller Knives Out, each of which proved to be blockbusters. And she or he handed alongside a lesson that she realized on ensemble movies just like the latter: “Here’s the deal. It’s my secret sauce, you guys. Don’t go back to your trailer. Trailers are not your friend. Stay on set. I’m telling you that pearl of wisdom: stay on set. Be an active set-sitter.” Her half in Knives Out was markedly elevated just because she was round.
After which got here dialogue of All the pieces All over the place, an artwork home flick that exploded into essentially the most commercially profitable movie within the historical past of A24 and essentially the most Oscar-nominated movie of the yr. Curtis stated her agent advised her she had obtained a script from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for a movie wherein she would star reverse Michelle Yeoh, and for that motive she instructed her agent to say sure — however he urged her to learn the script first, given how bizarre and strange it was. She says she was charmed and knew off the bat that she wished to play the officious IRS agent Deirdre — “a forgotten person,” like Yeoh’s character — with a dowdy look much like the one she employed for Billy Bob Thornton’s 2001 movie Daddy and Them, wherein she starred reverse Ben Affleck, with one exception: she wished her to have fantastically manicured nails, since she figured that the one time Deirdre was ever touched by one other human was when she visited the wonder parlor.
And, moments earlier than being offered with the pageant’s award by none aside from her husband, the comedy grasp Christopher Visitor, Curtis emphasised the great pleasure that she feels in being related to All the pieces All over the place: “It’s a beautiful movie about many things — it’s about love, it’s about family reunification, it’s about the American dream and the failure of the American dream and what we put immigrants through, it’s about marriage, it’s about a child — it’s deep.”
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