Thursday, January 17, 2008

Marisa Tomei Shares Pieces of a Part


By Susan Thea Posnock

A performance is in many ways a collection of fragments: Take one versus take five; an edit here or there; a close-up versus a long shot. The filmmakers decide what the audience will see onscreen. Yet elements that don’t reach the final cut can still inform it.

For actress Marisa Tomei, some of her personal pieces in this process are literally collecting dust. That’s because with each role, she keeps a black-and-white composition notebook. It’s her way of finding time to “daydream” about the person she must become.

“I’ll have ideas or images or the timeline of the character’s personal history, or just questions [in the notebook],” she says.

Once she moves on to the next persona, she throws the books down into her basement. Who knows, maybe that’s one reason Tomei, who turned 43 in December, looks so damn good. Perhaps those notebooks are a kind of “Picture of Dorian Gray.” In addition to the immortality offered by movies, her filmography lives on, discarded but not destroyed in those books.

Read the full post here.

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