She reads: "Did you date an older woman that you'd consider an older woman, and what did she teach you?"
"What's the first image you have of the female body?"
She asks: "Does the respect factor drop when a woman has breast implants?"
Juliette says, "I had two dreams about De Niro when I was working with him. I think it was all in anticipation of this scene. Because this, in my head, was the big scene. In one dream, we were underwater in a pool and we'd come up for air. He'd go underwater, and I'd go underwater, and we'd glide past each other deliberately, like kids would play in a pool when they like each other. Like a flirtation. But I woke up from that dream, and I had a crush on him.
"In that scene, the little tango dance between our characters, all I knew was he was supposed to walk up to me, and then say, 'Danielle, can I put my arm around you? He's supposed to kiss me in the script, but all Scorsese said was, 'Bob's going to do something. Just go with the scene.
"Before that scene, I knew we were going to film the kiss part. I had just eaten lunch. It was catfish or something, and I was, like, 'Should I rinse my mouth out? But I didn't want to, because that would let him know I thought about it. I don't want to act like I thought about the kiss. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. So I didn't. I didn't do mouthwash. And then I get to the set, and Bob is right near me, and I smell mouthwash. And then it dawned on me in that moment-I felt like such a little kid-because I thought, 'He's being professional. He's being considerate of me. He's being courteous. But by then it was too late to go back to the trailer. I don't know if I was offensive or not.
"When you watch it, that's the first take. We did it twice. He puts the thumb on my lips. It's very intense because we're only this far from each other, and I'm looking right at him. He starts to put the thumb in my mouth, and she moves it away. And then he persists, and she allows it. And people after that kept talking about the sexuality and burgeoning sexuality at that age, and I never looked at it that way. I looked at it as, before he did the thumb thing he was listening to her, he was validating her in a way that her parents weren't, and then he did this sexual thing. But what you see in my eyes is, after she sucks the thumb and it gets pulled out, she's looking at him like, 'Was that good? Did you like that? It's a pleasing thing."
She says, "His thumb was very clean."
She reads: "Did you go to sleep-away summer camp? (Because some of my greatest childhood memories are from summer camp.)"
She reads: "Do you like roller coasters?"
Steve Berra says, "A long time ago, I was on tour, skateboarding, and I bought Kalifornia at this gas station. I remember trying to imitate a laugh that she did in one of her scenes. It had blown me away. Just this one little laugh the character Adele did. It was so natural and truthful, and I remember trying for ten minutes to laugh however she did it. I didn't know her. I couldn't figure out how the hell this person was so good."
A video copy of the movie is playing in their living room, and Juliette laughs, pointing out all the lines she just ad-libbed in the moment.
Juliette says, "On the page, my little character, Adele, had maybe a sentence here and there in a scene. So I met with Dominic Sena and was really taken with his energy and his vision for the movie. He was very enthusiastic. So basically he let me create that character. Ninety percent of what I do in that movie I made up there. That was like a turning point for me, acting-wise, because I had to really come to the table with something, really invent something. To me, my first official character. That little Adele character."
She reads: "What do you imagine happens to someone after the body dies? And do you believe that you are a spirit with a body or just a brain?"
Then, "The follow-up question is: How do you explain Mozart writing symphonies at seven? (Because I think that's a prime example of creative ability being spirit-generated.)"
Juliette says, "When you have good actors to work with, you guys just sort of create this alternate universe of pretended reality. It's the unexplainable. I just think it's magic. It's pure belief. My security blanket is the camera. I know the camera's universe. It's capturing only this much. I have a certain security or certainty that I can execute stuff in that space. It's the condensed reality of the camera.
"Sometimes, you want to put in an aside that goes, 'By the way, audience, it was really three in the morning when we did this scene. It was thirty degrees outside. And I brought you all of this despite all of that. It was That Night, a movie I did before Cape Fear had come out. It was this 1962 love story. A guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Very endearing, very sweet. I was supposed to meet him in the middle of the night on a pier in Atlantic City. It was freezing, but it was supposed to be summer. You know, those hot nights. Meanwhile, I'm kind of blue. My lips go, 'brrrrrrr, and they chatter. So I had to hold it so I'm not chattering, plus be in a summer dress. You'd be in your parka until they said, 'Okay, we're ready for you. Then you'd take it off and say, 'Gosh, I'm so in love…
"When I worked on From Dusk Till Dawn, the vampire movie when I worked with George Clooney, he said, 'Gosh, all my friends keep asking, "Ooo, so you're working with Juliette. Is she really psycho? Is she really intense?" And I'm like the most opposite from intense. Maybe when I was young I was a bit brooding. Maybe I'll cop to that. My work is actually, really a light process. I go in and out of it. When the camera's going, I'm on. When it's off, I'm off."
She says, "When people want to know how you're able to do what you do, they need to explain it. It helps them if they go, 'Okay so you're kind of really crazy, and that's how you're able to be really intense onscreen. They need an explanation, when my explanation is, it's magic."
From her list, she reads: "Did the female anatomy ever mystify and scare you? (Because it did me, and I'm the owner.)"
Driving past the Scientology Celebrity Centre, she says, "The whole thing in Scientology, the big motto is: What's real for you is real for you. So there's not, like, a dogma. It's simply an applied religious philosophy. And there's little courses, like the Success Through Communications Course. They have things you can apply to your life, but not like a falsity, not like a robot-thing. You can see if it works, and if it doesn't. If it works, it works. It's something that has helped me a great deal."
From the list, she reads: "Have you ever been caught in a natural disaster?"
She reads: "Did you ever own Birkenstocks?"
Just outside her bedroom door, looking at a framed, poster-sized picture of herself and Woody Harrelson from the cover of Newsweek, Juliette says, "With Natural Born Killers, I've appreciated as times goes by how that movie is satire and my character is a caricature, although I filled it with some real human emotion. But to me it's kind of campy. It's silly. It's exaggerated beyond what's real. I just had to give it some energy, like that whole beginning sequence-how sexy am I now! — where she's yelling. I have a big voice, so I can turn the volume up, but when we'd cut, it felt silly. Everyone thought, ooooh, I must've been so disturbed, but I wasn't. To me it was just very campy, that performance."
About how people reacted to the movie, Juliette says, "You could homogenize everything, but you're still going to have your exploders, your guys who explode. And why is that there? I think since the fifties, the increase in psychiatric drugs has turned that into a landslide from what it was… I did research. I actually spoke at some Senate meetings, but that would be a much bigger problem for them to deal with, considering that you have six million kids from six on up on Ritalin. So they don't even want to look at it. They'd rather just say, 'Could you guys just please be less violent in the movies?