'Mockingjay — Part 1': Natalie Dormer on Shaving Her Head and Directing Jennifer Lawrence
The press day for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 was like a a scene in the Capitol, set in a heavily guarded luxury hotel in Manhattan that required special wristbands and permissions to enter.
Natalie Dormer wasn’t surprised to hear about the high-level security; when Yahoo Movies remarked that it seemed more effective than the protection the Secret Service has given President Obama of late, Dormer cracked, “Well, Jennifer Lawrence is here.”
The 32-year-old Game of Thrones actress has a dry wit in person, but she’s all business in her Hunger Games debut. She plays Cressida, the tattooed filmmaker who is charged with accompanying Katniss through the wreckage of her home district and coaxing her into recording pro-rebellion propaganda videos. It’s a vital role in a sober film, but Dormer was in great spirits when she spoke with Yahoo Movies on a cold Saturday in November.
I saw the movie last night.
Did you like it?
Yeah, I did… but what if I had said no?
No, I’m genuinely interested.
I just always wonder, what would happen if someone said no.
Some people will be like, “Uh, I don’t know they split it in two.” And I can go, “Well let me tell you why they split it in two.” So if you had a point like that, I’d be interested in hearing it.
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Did they tell you they split it in two?
It wasn’t something they did lightly. [Director] Francis [Lawrence] speaks very eloquently about why it was important to him as a director, because he needed to thematically be able to break it up. Because, if you know the book and know the heavy action sequences that happen in the second book, in the second half, he really needed to give the introduction of District 13 its time and the origins of President Coin, and also to give poor Katniss her time with the PTSD.
You play a director here. You are engaged to a director [Anthony Byrne], and you’ve worked with some great ones, like Ron Howard [in Rush] and Ridley Scott [in The Counselor]. Who were you channeling?
It’s slightly different, because Cressida is a documentary filmmaker, so she’s like an embedded field journalist. It’s almost, you could argue, closer to what you do as a job. So it’s that journalist/filmmaker; she’s about getting the shot, about getting the message. She has to take an editorial stance, and it just happens in this case that her editorial stance is her political conviction.
I watch a lot of news anyway, I always have. I listen to a lot of radio and current affairs, and watch a lot of news footage, and I just did a lot of that. I always had the news on. And when you’re an actor and you’re in different cities, in different parts of the world, it’s very interesting when you turn on the television, and the slightly angle that even the Western world media will have.
So was there anyone you were channeling as a director, when you talked to Katniss as an “actress”?
I’ve worked with so many. It was my ode to all of them that I’ve ever worked with. I have a lot of respect for directors. They’re very calm, patient human beings with a really tough job, who have to actualize a vision. And Francis was great, because he came up to me on the set and allowed me to improvise, to ad lib. He said,’Don’t just stick to the script. Feel free to move your cameraman to the left, or interrupt Jen halfway through her line.’ You need to feel that autonomy to feel like you’re in control of the situation, like he is.
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So you’re directing within the scene.
Yeah, within the confines of. We’ve got to get to the end of this scene, and get what’s written on the page. I looked to Francis a lot. I looked at the way he was talking to his DP, and the way he was talking to his cameraman. I’d often go to the camera operator and say,’Just explain to me this angle on why you’re doing this shot from here.’ I was right there with the real guys.
He’s directing you to direct Jennifer.
Yeah, and I’m paying attention to how he’s playing his camera crew for how I talked to my camera crew. And some of it really did make it into the film. There are some ad-libbed moments.
When you watched the final product, were you like, “Oh, I directed that” at any particular moment?
When we come out of the hovercraft, when we’re in District 12, and I’m talking to Jen and we land and I say the first shot is going to be here — that’s all improvisation.
So you’re making the movie within the movie.
Well kind of. That’s giving a little too much weight and gravity. But it’s nice that some of it made it into the cut.
On something this big, that little bit of freedom is nice.
Yeah, and it’s kind of cool to shout “Action!” on a Hollywood set, when you’re not really the one who should be shouting “Action!”
Cressida’s head is fully shaved in the book, right?
There’s artistic license, because in the book, Katniss describes Cressida as having a shaved head and a vine tattoo. But Francis and I wanted to give her this sort of punk, defiant haircut. Because she’s an artist and she’s a documentary filmmaker, so there’s a little bit of rebellion in that girl from when she was young. And obviously there are very strong stylistic choices in the Capitol, and that’s where she’s from. So we thought it would make more sense, it would be edgier, punkier to go the half.
A fully tressed Dormer at the L.A. premiere of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 on November 17, 2014
The day they shaved it, was it a traumatic experience?
I kind of had the trauma. I’d gotten to the zen place. I’d kind of processed it before I got there.
What did you think when you first saw it?
It was pretty cool, I couldn’t stop touching it. It’s a weird sensation. That side of my head hadn’t seen the sun since I was less than zero. It was in shock for a while. You guys suffer from shaving rash, and for the first few days, the side of my head was very upset about being exposed to the elements. It’s amazing how the human body adapts. And then it calmed down. It was like, Okay, we’re going to be with air now.
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Did you keep the tattoo after shooting?
No, I never rocked it. We all used to talk about us going out in Berlin one night, because that would have been the place to do it. But I never actually got around to it for some reason. It’s a shame.
It would have been all over the internet.
That was also the thing. We kept it hidden for three months, because we started shooting in October, and I think my big reveal was at the SAG awards show, which I think was in January. We were trying to keep it under wraps for a while
How’d you do it?
I can just flip my hair over. You can’t see the undercut now, when my hair’s done you can’t really see it.
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Photo: Getty Images
