Post by blackcrowheart on Jan 17, 2006 21:55:43 GMT -5
Yes, Virginia, This Pocahontas Is for Real
'New World' Spotlights Plucky Native American Teen
By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 15, 2006; Page N01
Image:
media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2006/01/13/PH2006011300402.jpg
She's running a little late (wardrobe malfunction) and she's limping a little bit from the day before yesterday when she fell down the stairs in a fit of excitement (more on that later), but she's still rocking her platforms (it helps her hurt foot, she says, to walk in heels), strolling very slowly into the National Museum of the American Indian, apologizing for her tardiness, chewing gum and smiling and shaking hands with the museum director.
And here comes her mom, bringing up the rear. With a video camera. Mom. But Mom is intent on capturing everything (for a documentary), all this newness , the movie premieres, the newspaper interviews, the museum visitors doing the whozzat double take. So, after a little sotto voce negotiating -- in German -- Q'orianka (Cor-ee-AHN-ka, which means "Golden Eagle" in Quechua) Kilcher, the 15-year-old star of Terrence Malick's "The New World," does her mother's bidding, and stands there, in the lobby where everybody can see her, holding up a copy of her very first magazine cover (the reason she went tumbling down the stairs), smiling for the camera while her younger brother and her publicist and her agent and her agent's son and a handful of passersby look on.
In "The New World," which opens Friday, Colin Farrell plays Capt. John Smith to Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas. "I don't care about the attention," says the actress, 15, of her fast-budding fame. (New Line Cinema Via Reuters)
"I feel so conceited," Q'orianka moans, gripping the latest edition of the Indian museum's magazine.
All this attention takes considerable adjustment. After all, before her head shot was passed along to Malick's casting directors, Q'orianka's previous screen experience amounted to a brief stint on "Star Search" (she sings, too) and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role in "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." But adjusting is what Q'orianka, part Quechua-Huachipaeri Indian, part Swiss-Alaskan, will have to do. In Malick's much-acclaimed "New World" -- his fourth film in 32 years -- the home-schooled ninth-grader plays a sinuous Pocahontas to then-29-year-old Colin Farrell's grizzled John Smith. She even gets to kiss Farrell -- yes, her first kiss.
Already, she's getting big buzz: Newsweek proclaims her "the new face of female stardom" and enthuses, "The casting of the unknown 14-year-old Kilcher proves a masterstroke." Salon asserts: "Her performance has so much innate elegance that she practically sneaks off with the picture," while New York magazine dubs her role the year's "Breakout Performance: Sexpot." (The film opens in Washington on Friday and had its East Coast debut in Colonial Williamsburg last month.)
Intoxicating praise guaranteed to make a teenager's head expand. Or maybe not: Her artist-activist mother stands by her side, needle in hand, ready to burst any incipient swelling. Conceit isn't tolerated for long in the Kilcher household.
"Once she attempted to go a little Hollywood," Saskia Kilcher, 37, says, a light German accent betraying her European childhood, "and I said, ' No . I'm not here to help you have a six-wing mansion.'
"This is like a very thin line between magic and madness."
The key to navigating that line, mother and daughter have decided, is to inject a little social activism into the Hollywood proceedings. "Climb into the belly of the beast," Saskia says, "and change things from within." Be an actor with a cause.
Which is to say that while Q'orianka expressed a passing admiration for a Cadillac Escalade ("I said, 'Baby! No! You cannot!' ") she pulled up to the red carpet at the Los Angeles premiere of "The New World" in a hydrogen-fueled car and invited Indian tribal leaders to the big event. Last month she participated in a fundraiser for the Pawnee Nation Academy, a college in rural Oklahoma, where she, along with "New World" cast member Brian Frejo, are honorary spokespersons. (The school's tribal planner, Crystal Echo Hawk, says publicity surrounding Q'orianka's involvement has helped put the school on the map and double its enrollment.)
Instead of turning to Hollywood stylists to deck her out in Marc Jacobs and Stella McCartney, Kilcher designs her own clothes and jewelry, and is working toward getting her own fashion line, called Generation Q. Eventually, she'd like to contract with her less-fortunate cousins in Peru to do the work. Then there's her goal to create a music school in Peru (her father's native land), and a law school "so people over there can learn things to protect their lives and stuff." Maybe she'll go to college. If she has time.
"Those are my sights of my future," Q'orianka says.
Yes, Virginia, This Pocahontas Is for Real
As for all the attention, she says, "I don't care about the attention." It matters only, she says, because "that gives you a bigger voice to try to bring about positive changes in the world."
She was born in Germany, the daughter of a backpacking human-rights activist and a Peruvian artist. From Germany, the family made it to Hawaii, hopscotching from island to island, where her younger brother, Kainoa, was born. Sometimes Q'orianka's dad was part of the picture, sometimes not.
Her first languages were Quechua and Spanish. But her parents fought, often and bitterly. Early on, Q'orianka says, she came to associate those languages with strife and conflict.
"So I blocked it out," she says matter-of-factly, adding that she is estranged from her father. Now, she says, she "only" speaks English, German and Algonquian. The Algonquian she learned for the movie. The German she picked up because she wanted to eavesdrop on her mother and her grandmother.
During her early childhood in Hawaii, money was tight, so the family would hang out in the hotels, watching the entertainment. Q'orianka was mesmerized by the dancers and singers. Soon she was dancing and singing, too, studying all kinds of dance from ballet to Hawaiian to West African. She was 6 when she did her first street performance. By the time she was 9, she'd performed in more than 250 dance contests and local variety shows.
Just before her ninth birthday, the Kilchers landed in Los Angeles. "The last place I wanted to be was in L.A.," says her mother -- they were actually heading to Oklahoma so that Q'orianka could record a music demo, but their car broke down in Los Angeles. Saskia thought they'd be there a couple months at most, but her daughter was transfixed. Q'orianka's stage was Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, where she belted out songs in that big, bluesy voice of hers. (Her mother and the singer Jewel are first cousins.)
They saw a Rolling Stones concert, Saskia recalls, and her daughter told her, "Mom, I can see myself in that arena." So they struck the deal: Saskia would help with her career, so long as she used her talents to "empower her voice" and those of others.
Her mother hauled her around from audition to acting class in their beat-up car.
"My mom was so sweet, she would always do anything to get me to acting class," recalls Q'orianka. "She was always walking around very dirty because she was always under the car, being the mechanic. She was always under the car, all dirty and oily and stuff.
"And all the moms were making fun of her and stuff because we are, of course, different and they have their fancy cars and stuff and here we are under the car."
It was at one of those classes that her grease-smudged mother met Carlyne Grager , the woman who would become Q'orianka's agent. Her daughter was taking classes there, too, and the two women quickly bonded. Soon, she'd signed Q'orianka to her Seattle-based agency. Q'orianka was 10 at the time.
We didn't realize how big this was going to be," Saskia says, looking a little overwhelmed and muttering about Hollywood's "claws." "Sometimes I want to put the brakes on things."
Ask her why she thinks she was tapped to play Pocahontas, and Q'orianka shrugs.
"I honestly don't know," she says.
Does she think she's good in the film?
Long silence.
"Mmmmmm," she says, choosing her words carefully, "I really don't like looking at myself like that."
And then she starts talking about the other actors in the film: Farrell; August Schellenberg, who plays Chief Powhatan, her father; Christian Bale, who plays her husband; Irene Bedard (who voiced Pocahontas in Disney's animated feature), who plays her mother.
Those guys, she says, now they're actors .
It was a given that the role of Pocahontas would go to an unknown, says the film's producer, Sarah Green: There were no "name" American Indian actresses to tap, beyond Bedard, who, at 38, was too old for the part. So for eight months, 13 casting directors fielded thousands of candidates from around the world for the role. Beauty was a requisite, as was the ability to convey strong emotions with little dialogue. Someone who could play a young girl and a mature, albeit young, wife and mother -- Pocahontas died in her early twenties. And learn Algonquian. And speak in an English accent. (Pocahontas learned English from the Brits.)
"We were getting nervous," Green says. Seven months into their search, Kilcher's picture ended up in their offices. She'd been passed over for a role in Steven Spielberg's TNT miniseries, "Into the West," by the same people casting "The New World." Someone thought she looked like a young Pocahontas, with her swath of long hair, honey-brown skin and chiseled features.
Green wasn't so sure: At 14, Q'orianka was much younger than they'd wanted. But she took her in for an audition anyway. The audition lasted nearly a month, with Q'orianka going in nearly every day, reading from the script, singing, playing an Indian flute, both Green and Q'orianka remember. They asked her how she felt about speaking with an English accent. Q'orianka went home, listened to a tape, and came back the next day, speaking the Queen's English.
"What we'd discovered is she is mature far beyond her years," Green says. "She's traveled her whole life and has a worldview. We learned she has great drive and discipline. We learned she was kind of fearless."
Then, Green says, they finally turned the camera on her, and well, that was pretty much it.
"The camera loves her. She had this mystery that just drew you in.
"It was unmistakable."
On the set, Q'orianka proved a willing pupil, soaking up advice from Farrell ("He told me as an actor you shouldn't take yourself too seriously") and being open to Malick's creative whims.
"He was a very spur-of-the-moment kind of director," Q'orianka says, laughing. "He would see a tall funnel field or a tall grass from somewhere over there and he'd be like, 'Oh, oh, Q'orianka, can you take your shoes off and just run through the field? Be the wind! Be the wind! Good, good.'
"And I'd be stepping on every possible thorn in the world you could imagine and God, it hurt so bad but I would do it again. . . . It was really fun. You never knew what to expect."
Actor Wes Studi, who played her uncle, Opechancanough, says Q'orianka always came to the set in character and ready to roll. "I had a bit of a trepidation, I suppose, not having worked with that many youngsters, but as far as I'm concerned, she's a total pro."
His only regret?
"I'm just sorry some of [our] scenes [together] didn't make it until the final cut."
She's making her way through the museum, pointing out the Quechua Indian exhibit and talking about how she first met her Quechua grandmother in Peru, just outside Lima, almost by chance. A young museum employee steps up, shyly, to tell her that he's Pawnee, and he heard all about her visit to his rez back home, and good luck with the movie. Q'orianka dimples up and gives him a hug. She's big with the hugs, dispensing them with a warm squeeze and a smile. You get the feeling that she's still trying to navigate the attention.
Did she get all swept up in the Hollywood drama of being the starlet of the moment?
"No, I didn't . . . probably because my family's there," Q'orianka says, "very much watching out for me. Because there are so many things pulling you in that direction and you need support.
"You need people around you that care about you and are thinking about you in your best interest. And keep your mind straight."
She often gets the old-soul observation from people. A lot. "Nearly every person I meet," she says, speaking slowly. "It's kind of weird. I have no clue. I don't even fully know what it means."
But does she think she's been around before? Done the other life thing?
"Yeah, yeah. I honestly think I was an Indian living in the time of the Trail of Tears," she says. "Something like that. Every time I read books about back then, I get so devastatingly sad, so, so . . . I feel such a deep connection to it."
'New World' Spotlights Plucky Native American Teen
By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 15, 2006; Page N01
Image:
media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2006/01/13/PH2006011300402.jpg
She's running a little late (wardrobe malfunction) and she's limping a little bit from the day before yesterday when she fell down the stairs in a fit of excitement (more on that later), but she's still rocking her platforms (it helps her hurt foot, she says, to walk in heels), strolling very slowly into the National Museum of the American Indian, apologizing for her tardiness, chewing gum and smiling and shaking hands with the museum director.
And here comes her mom, bringing up the rear. With a video camera. Mom. But Mom is intent on capturing everything (for a documentary), all this newness , the movie premieres, the newspaper interviews, the museum visitors doing the whozzat double take. So, after a little sotto voce negotiating -- in German -- Q'orianka (Cor-ee-AHN-ka, which means "Golden Eagle" in Quechua) Kilcher, the 15-year-old star of Terrence Malick's "The New World," does her mother's bidding, and stands there, in the lobby where everybody can see her, holding up a copy of her very first magazine cover (the reason she went tumbling down the stairs), smiling for the camera while her younger brother and her publicist and her agent and her agent's son and a handful of passersby look on.
In "The New World," which opens Friday, Colin Farrell plays Capt. John Smith to Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas. "I don't care about the attention," says the actress, 15, of her fast-budding fame. (New Line Cinema Via Reuters)
"I feel so conceited," Q'orianka moans, gripping the latest edition of the Indian museum's magazine.
All this attention takes considerable adjustment. After all, before her head shot was passed along to Malick's casting directors, Q'orianka's previous screen experience amounted to a brief stint on "Star Search" (she sings, too) and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role in "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." But adjusting is what Q'orianka, part Quechua-Huachipaeri Indian, part Swiss-Alaskan, will have to do. In Malick's much-acclaimed "New World" -- his fourth film in 32 years -- the home-schooled ninth-grader plays a sinuous Pocahontas to then-29-year-old Colin Farrell's grizzled John Smith. She even gets to kiss Farrell -- yes, her first kiss.
Already, she's getting big buzz: Newsweek proclaims her "the new face of female stardom" and enthuses, "The casting of the unknown 14-year-old Kilcher proves a masterstroke." Salon asserts: "Her performance has so much innate elegance that she practically sneaks off with the picture," while New York magazine dubs her role the year's "Breakout Performance: Sexpot." (The film opens in Washington on Friday and had its East Coast debut in Colonial Williamsburg last month.)
Intoxicating praise guaranteed to make a teenager's head expand. Or maybe not: Her artist-activist mother stands by her side, needle in hand, ready to burst any incipient swelling. Conceit isn't tolerated for long in the Kilcher household.
"Once she attempted to go a little Hollywood," Saskia Kilcher, 37, says, a light German accent betraying her European childhood, "and I said, ' No . I'm not here to help you have a six-wing mansion.'
"This is like a very thin line between magic and madness."
The key to navigating that line, mother and daughter have decided, is to inject a little social activism into the Hollywood proceedings. "Climb into the belly of the beast," Saskia says, "and change things from within." Be an actor with a cause.
Which is to say that while Q'orianka expressed a passing admiration for a Cadillac Escalade ("I said, 'Baby! No! You cannot!' ") she pulled up to the red carpet at the Los Angeles premiere of "The New World" in a hydrogen-fueled car and invited Indian tribal leaders to the big event. Last month she participated in a fundraiser for the Pawnee Nation Academy, a college in rural Oklahoma, where she, along with "New World" cast member Brian Frejo, are honorary spokespersons. (The school's tribal planner, Crystal Echo Hawk, says publicity surrounding Q'orianka's involvement has helped put the school on the map and double its enrollment.)
Instead of turning to Hollywood stylists to deck her out in Marc Jacobs and Stella McCartney, Kilcher designs her own clothes and jewelry, and is working toward getting her own fashion line, called Generation Q. Eventually, she'd like to contract with her less-fortunate cousins in Peru to do the work. Then there's her goal to create a music school in Peru (her father's native land), and a law school "so people over there can learn things to protect their lives and stuff." Maybe she'll go to college. If she has time.
"Those are my sights of my future," Q'orianka says.
Yes, Virginia, This Pocahontas Is for Real
As for all the attention, she says, "I don't care about the attention." It matters only, she says, because "that gives you a bigger voice to try to bring about positive changes in the world."
She was born in Germany, the daughter of a backpacking human-rights activist and a Peruvian artist. From Germany, the family made it to Hawaii, hopscotching from island to island, where her younger brother, Kainoa, was born. Sometimes Q'orianka's dad was part of the picture, sometimes not.
Her first languages were Quechua and Spanish. But her parents fought, often and bitterly. Early on, Q'orianka says, she came to associate those languages with strife and conflict.
"So I blocked it out," she says matter-of-factly, adding that she is estranged from her father. Now, she says, she "only" speaks English, German and Algonquian. The Algonquian she learned for the movie. The German she picked up because she wanted to eavesdrop on her mother and her grandmother.
During her early childhood in Hawaii, money was tight, so the family would hang out in the hotels, watching the entertainment. Q'orianka was mesmerized by the dancers and singers. Soon she was dancing and singing, too, studying all kinds of dance from ballet to Hawaiian to West African. She was 6 when she did her first street performance. By the time she was 9, she'd performed in more than 250 dance contests and local variety shows.
Just before her ninth birthday, the Kilchers landed in Los Angeles. "The last place I wanted to be was in L.A.," says her mother -- they were actually heading to Oklahoma so that Q'orianka could record a music demo, but their car broke down in Los Angeles. Saskia thought they'd be there a couple months at most, but her daughter was transfixed. Q'orianka's stage was Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, where she belted out songs in that big, bluesy voice of hers. (Her mother and the singer Jewel are first cousins.)
They saw a Rolling Stones concert, Saskia recalls, and her daughter told her, "Mom, I can see myself in that arena." So they struck the deal: Saskia would help with her career, so long as she used her talents to "empower her voice" and those of others.
Her mother hauled her around from audition to acting class in their beat-up car.
"My mom was so sweet, she would always do anything to get me to acting class," recalls Q'orianka. "She was always walking around very dirty because she was always under the car, being the mechanic. She was always under the car, all dirty and oily and stuff.
"And all the moms were making fun of her and stuff because we are, of course, different and they have their fancy cars and stuff and here we are under the car."
It was at one of those classes that her grease-smudged mother met Carlyne Grager , the woman who would become Q'orianka's agent. Her daughter was taking classes there, too, and the two women quickly bonded. Soon, she'd signed Q'orianka to her Seattle-based agency. Q'orianka was 10 at the time.
We didn't realize how big this was going to be," Saskia says, looking a little overwhelmed and muttering about Hollywood's "claws." "Sometimes I want to put the brakes on things."
Ask her why she thinks she was tapped to play Pocahontas, and Q'orianka shrugs.
"I honestly don't know," she says.
Does she think she's good in the film?
Long silence.
"Mmmmmm," she says, choosing her words carefully, "I really don't like looking at myself like that."
And then she starts talking about the other actors in the film: Farrell; August Schellenberg, who plays Chief Powhatan, her father; Christian Bale, who plays her husband; Irene Bedard (who voiced Pocahontas in Disney's animated feature), who plays her mother.
Those guys, she says, now they're actors .
It was a given that the role of Pocahontas would go to an unknown, says the film's producer, Sarah Green: There were no "name" American Indian actresses to tap, beyond Bedard, who, at 38, was too old for the part. So for eight months, 13 casting directors fielded thousands of candidates from around the world for the role. Beauty was a requisite, as was the ability to convey strong emotions with little dialogue. Someone who could play a young girl and a mature, albeit young, wife and mother -- Pocahontas died in her early twenties. And learn Algonquian. And speak in an English accent. (Pocahontas learned English from the Brits.)
"We were getting nervous," Green says. Seven months into their search, Kilcher's picture ended up in their offices. She'd been passed over for a role in Steven Spielberg's TNT miniseries, "Into the West," by the same people casting "The New World." Someone thought she looked like a young Pocahontas, with her swath of long hair, honey-brown skin and chiseled features.
Green wasn't so sure: At 14, Q'orianka was much younger than they'd wanted. But she took her in for an audition anyway. The audition lasted nearly a month, with Q'orianka going in nearly every day, reading from the script, singing, playing an Indian flute, both Green and Q'orianka remember. They asked her how she felt about speaking with an English accent. Q'orianka went home, listened to a tape, and came back the next day, speaking the Queen's English.
"What we'd discovered is she is mature far beyond her years," Green says. "She's traveled her whole life and has a worldview. We learned she has great drive and discipline. We learned she was kind of fearless."
Then, Green says, they finally turned the camera on her, and well, that was pretty much it.
"The camera loves her. She had this mystery that just drew you in.
"It was unmistakable."
On the set, Q'orianka proved a willing pupil, soaking up advice from Farrell ("He told me as an actor you shouldn't take yourself too seriously") and being open to Malick's creative whims.
"He was a very spur-of-the-moment kind of director," Q'orianka says, laughing. "He would see a tall funnel field or a tall grass from somewhere over there and he'd be like, 'Oh, oh, Q'orianka, can you take your shoes off and just run through the field? Be the wind! Be the wind! Good, good.'
"And I'd be stepping on every possible thorn in the world you could imagine and God, it hurt so bad but I would do it again. . . . It was really fun. You never knew what to expect."
Actor Wes Studi, who played her uncle, Opechancanough, says Q'orianka always came to the set in character and ready to roll. "I had a bit of a trepidation, I suppose, not having worked with that many youngsters, but as far as I'm concerned, she's a total pro."
His only regret?
"I'm just sorry some of [our] scenes [together] didn't make it until the final cut."
She's making her way through the museum, pointing out the Quechua Indian exhibit and talking about how she first met her Quechua grandmother in Peru, just outside Lima, almost by chance. A young museum employee steps up, shyly, to tell her that he's Pawnee, and he heard all about her visit to his rez back home, and good luck with the movie. Q'orianka dimples up and gives him a hug. She's big with the hugs, dispensing them with a warm squeeze and a smile. You get the feeling that she's still trying to navigate the attention.
Did she get all swept up in the Hollywood drama of being the starlet of the moment?
"No, I didn't . . . probably because my family's there," Q'orianka says, "very much watching out for me. Because there are so many things pulling you in that direction and you need support.
"You need people around you that care about you and are thinking about you in your best interest. And keep your mind straight."
She often gets the old-soul observation from people. A lot. "Nearly every person I meet," she says, speaking slowly. "It's kind of weird. I have no clue. I don't even fully know what it means."
But does she think she's been around before? Done the other life thing?
"Yeah, yeah. I honestly think I was an Indian living in the time of the Trail of Tears," she says. "Something like that. Every time I read books about back then, I get so devastatingly sad, so, so . . . I feel such a deep connection to it."
