Role Call
Role Call is a series in which Vulture talks to actors about performances they’ve probably forgotten by now, but we definitely haven’t.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Warner Bros.
Ashley Judd wants to know why I love Heat. Judd co-starred in Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece as Charlene Shiherlis, wife to Val Kilmer’s gambling junkie Chris. In a film that is primarily about the complex relationships between men, Judd’s Charlene is the flagbearer for the women those men inevitably leave behind, if they’re following the rule about dropping everything when you see the heat coming around the corner. She’s responsible for one of the film’s most enduring images — Charlene using the “stand” symbol in blackjack to tell Chris that she’s been made, and he needs to escape on his own — and is one of Mann’s most memorable female characters, a real one who stays loyal to her husband while still conveying the devastating toll of loving a man with split allegiances.
But before we get into all of that, Judd is curious about why Heat is one of my favorite movies (“Oh, really?”). I talk about how compelling I find the film’s suggestion that your soulmate could be someone you’re not romantically connected to, as Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna and Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley are, and how moved I am by Chris and Charlene’s relationship, and how much they love each other while also knowing the best thing for each of them is to be apart. Judd starts remembering her experiences from the film in a stream-of-consciousness flow. “What you just said about your soulmate not necessarily being a romantic partner, when the crew is in that vast wasteland, and they’re making their decision about who’s in and who’s not — the way that Val looks at Bob is with such love and such devotion,” Judd says. “Everyone needs a family.”
After Heat, Judd was a dominant screen presence for the next decade, leading critical and commercial hits like A Time to Kill, Kiss the Girls, Double Jeopardy, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. But for the past nearly 20 years, she has primarily been a committed and vocal women’s-rights activist. She’s open about her history as a survivor of sexual violence; has worked with the United Nations and various nonprofit organizations, including YouthAid and the International Center for Research on Women; and has traveled to 20-plus countries around the world to champion gender equality and fight sex trafficking. She was one of the first to speak out against Harvey Weinstein’s predatory pattern of sexual abuse against women in Hollywood (and appeared as herself in She Said, which dramatized the New York Times investigation into Weinstein), and is currently a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program, teaching, guest lecturing, and researching male demand for female bodies. “Not all men are violent, but most men are silent about other men’s violence,” she says. After calling Mann to reminisce with him before our interview, she spoke with me about her memories of the filmmaker’s generosity on set, her working relationships with Kilmer and De Niro, and how she now views the film through her experience as a feminist activist.
Thank you for letting me share why I love this movie.
I watched Bob and Al’s scene earlier today, and I was struck by how intimate they are with each other. I remember it was shot at Kate Mantilini. I had a few salads there over time. The level of intimacy and disclosure between the two of them is so striking.
In Heat, these two men have only crossed paths during this specific crime, but they recognize so much of themselves in each other. But I am wondering if it is okay to start asking you questions.
I think what works better for me, Roxana, is just to reminisce a little. The way my system works is it’s already started before we got on the call. I’m on Mass Avenue in Cambridge. I’m teaching at Harvard. I’ve been chatting with Michael Mann today. My system is having a lot of memories of this. I teach about male entitlement to female bodies and systems of prostitution, and that’s a lot of, in a way, what the movie is about. I was given opportunities — because it was a well-resourced movie — to do research, like at a supermax prison, at a firing range with automatic weapons, speaking with prostituted women in Las Vegas.
I was coming out of Ruby in Paradise, which was awarded the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize in 1993. Keith Crofford, the producer, counted loose change on his desk so they could hire a rental car for me to drive myself to the airport. Then I make a little independent movie in the former East Germany [The Passion of Darkly Noon] and live in a Soviet-era vacation block. Then I step into Heat, which was so well-resourced, and I was just recognizing today that it was my first film like that. Maybe Smoke had a big budget, but I only worked for two days — it may even only have been one day — because I was on Broadway at the time. But Heat, to my experience, had so much money and this production office in Santa Monica where I was welcome to go anytime.
It was a Warner Bros. picture and they — I would never use this language today — “bought me out” for the entire shoot, even though Charlene shot episodically throughout the production calendar. They took me off the acting market. They had exclusive access to my time, which meant that I both worked and had a lot of free time. So I would go to the production office, and Michael so welcomed that. I was thanking him this morning for that. In a way, I was like the baby in the family, because I’m the baby in my family. I still tend to show up in spaces like I’m the youngster. I remember seeing the work of production designer Neil Spisak, and all the location-scout visuals on the walls, and just hanging out and being around. I was that wonderful combination of eager and shy. They arranged for us to go to dinner as a cast. Was it just the women, or did Bob and Al come to that, too? Oh, I can picture it. Susan Traylor was there. No, I think it was just the women. Natalie Portman wasn’t there, of course, because she was a child.
Maybe you and Amy Brenneman and Diane Venora, do you think?
Yeah. I remember Susan saying, “Why do you call Bob ‘Mr. D’?” And I said, “Because my sister said it’s like calling Jesus ‘Harry.’” I’m this Southern person who called people “Ms. Roxana.” I didn’t know what to call Bob and Al, for crying out loud. [Laughs.] We had this dinner, and that was really neat. The other thing is that it was well provisioned enough that I was able to rent a house at the beach. I just read poetry in bed, but I had to wear sunglasses because the sun was so bright on the ocean. Isn’t that precious?
What appealed to you about the character? Do you remember what your first impressions of Charlene were?
I don’t remember. I’m having some other memories today about it, Roxana, because of the class I teach here at Harvard. What I think of is the ineffable cachet of Bob De Niro and Al Pacino doing the movie together. Like, who cared what the script was? What I know about myself is that I always prepared very earnestly. I really opened my emotional and somatic system to being in the experience of the character in the room when I was auditioning. I really brought my most idealized values and aspirations as an actor to every audition. I did my best to make whatever membranes were there between myself and the character dissolve. Whatever the experience was, it would be consistent for me to just have really been as present and emotionally available to myself as I could have been.
I remember a table read. I remember in pre-production, there were these bank robbers, hustlers, formerly convicted people who hung around and who were hired consultants. I assume they were remunerated. They certainly should have been. They were lending their lived experience. And I remember this one in particular — I don’t remember his name, but I remember his physique, his physical presence. He was gregarious and friendly. He wasn’t overbearing, but he was lively and engaged. He and his cohort were the teachers, discussing the loyalty code within the crew. I remember, and I shared this with Michael this morning, him kind of pulling me aside, and I wouldn’t use this language today, but he said, “They’re sociopaths.” That was like this really caring piece of fathering he did. Like, we’re here making this movie about people and giving the characters the dignity of their experience. And we’re not going to valorize this. That helped me be a student and not necessarily get enmeshed, to have an observational boundary, rather than feeling like we were all family or something. They may be what we call “maladaptive,” and they may not work particularly well in what we hope is a cooperative and peaceful society, but they’re just really doing what they have access to in order to stay safe.
You mentioned there were men who were consultants. Were there women who were consultants or women who you connected with?
Michael had us visit a supermax prison so that I could have the horrible, horrible, horrible experience of what it was like when the Val Kilmer character was incarcerated and I was living on my own until he got out. What would it be like to go visit him while he’s incarcerated in a supermax, for-profit prison? I was driven out to the desert to this place and it was awful — awful. The other thing we did is we went to a shooting range and fired automatic weapons. It was awful. I had never done that before. And the individual whom I referenced earlier was assigned — I look back on this now and I’m going, “Was that even safe?” — to take me to Las Vegas. I flew to Las Vegas with him, and I was able to visit with women who men were prostituting.
What can you tell me about those conversations?
I was grieving earlier today, Roxana: Where are they now? Did they make it out? Are they safe? Are they still trapped in the game and the life? Are they still being bought and sold? Are they still alive? Are they okay? Where are they now? It was really hard. It was really hard. [Pause.] I’m a survivor of commercial sexual exploitation as a teenager in a foreign country. Male demand for my body is something I’ve experienced throughout my life, starting at age 7, which is the first time I remember. But I know that there are other examples because there are police records. I don’t have a memory of it, but there are police records. I had not come into recovery yet, and my system hadn’t started to heal from complex relational and deprivation trauma. So I’m sitting in this space, and interestingly enough, I have some wisdom, which is a little audacious to say of a person who was the age I was at the time, but I was really well educated and had a perspective on it, you know? I remember this one woman telling her story. She was from somewhere in the upper Midwest. For most of us, a family member is the first pimp, and that was her experience. She looked in the mirror and she said, “I wish I could see my dad.” She wished he would walk into the joint and see her, because of that distorted and false sense of empowerment when we think we’re consenting to our own exploitation, because we’re doing it to ourselves and sort of participating in this distorted power structure. “You’re not doing it to me, I’m doing it to myself, and I’m getting one over on you.” I was witnessing her have that experience.
This is so moving, and it puts such a perspective on the character of Charlene that I had not considered until this point. Thank you for being that open with me about it. I hope we can watch some scenes together and talk about what you remember from filming them.
I have it loaded on my laptop so we could watch a couple of scenes together. I did rewatch the first scene today, and I was looking at some more subtle things that I think in my previous viewings, my system wouldn’t have been alerted to. I hear a despair in “We’re not acting like grown-up adults who are getting somewhere,” and “I’m married to a gambling junkie who’s a child growing older,” which is like a Joni Mitchell line. Chris is an untreated adult child, addicted to excitement. That’s basically what Tom Sizemore is saying [with the line “for me, the action is the juice”]. So I hear the despair, and I would regard Charlene as wanting to dream of something better, and yet that’s really dangerous. Then when he comes at me, it’s so direct, so fierce, so uninhibited, so unconstrained, so really ferociously open.
What do you remember about working with Val?
He was very sweet and very kind. He really expressed a lot of care. [Opens her laptop to watch the scenes we’re discussing.] Here’s actually the scene when they’re talking about the job. There’s that moment where they’re all looking at Neil. It’s amazing. “I roll with you, Neil, whatever.” That’s the loyalty code. They probably have father hunger.
I’d love to talk about the scene where Neil follows Charlene to the motel and learns she’s having an affair.
I’m looking at it now. The colors are so cool. I remember I was excited, I was nervous, and the part of me that’s confident was confident. Bob doesn’t let in looky-loos in terms of people who might be cluttering around to try to watch or observe him act. There was this good privacy. I remember it almost like the wall of an amphitheater where we could really be in private and not have people observing. He just was so friendly. Every time I went to New York for years after that, he wanted to know if I was in town.
I really enjoy your line delivery of, “I’m sick of it.” I feel so much for Charlene in that moment.
What comes to mind is that I’m really a truth teller, kind of like the Greek chorus, who’s passing through from time to time saying, “This is fucked up. This isn’t working very well.” I see Charlene’s function in the script in that way now. At the time, I was working on the inner turmoil and hoping to have those emotions available while acting. And I don’t know how good or useful a meta perspective like that is to a character as you’re filming. But she really does tell you, “$8,000, that isn’t enough. Where’s the money?” Neil’s demanding my loyalty to Chris, who she loves, who’s loyal to him. I’m thinking about the Karpman Drama Triangle: the victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer. Neil thinks I’m persecuting Chris, who’s becoming the victim, so he’s going to be the persecutor who persecutes me to rescue Chris so Chris can stay on the job, because he doesn’t want Chris to go off on some drunken binge and disappear.
This conversation is putting such a different perspective on my read of these relationships. Would you like to watch the final scene with Charlene and talk about that as well?
I just want to make sure I mention this, because we may not get to it, but it’s that scene where Bob’s calling the person who supplies the passports. When Jon Voight answers that phone, how dirty and sticky the phone is — did you ever notice that? What the prop master did to the phone, it’s so disgusting, and it’s so incredible. I’ve only directed one thing, but when I directed it, I wanted when someone walked into a motel room for there to be a little smoke coming from a hot plate in the room. That was my homage to the telephone in Heat. With the motel scene and this guy, played by Hank Azaria, I’m thinking about, What am I getting out of that relationship? Why would I do that in the first place?, which I do think is the internalization of patriarchy and trauma. It’s the unmet needs.
We have more understanding now of the forces that shape that. In this last scene, Mykelti Williamson’s character, Sergeant Bobby Drucker, tells you that Chris could be outside, and he wants you to identify him.
I became a labor leader on one of my later movies, and we were working these really long hours on a soundstage. I had been constantly reassured, “We don’t have this location again, we have to wrap out this location,” and they kept kicking the can down the road in terms of letting us go. Someone came up to me and said, “Michelle Pfeiffer would have gone home by now,” and I was like, “Oh. I’m No. 1 on the call sheet. If I don’t work, the crew can rest. Everyone has more time to drive home in Los Angeles traffic.” In Heat, I remember having feelings about the little boy because they were twins. At the time, there was some pacifying and telling one of the boys, who was visibly upset in my arms, “We’re just going to do this one more time,” and they did it however many more times, more than one. It was deceit. It’s like the child was a utility rather than a human being. Kids have boundaries and rights, too. Today I would do that differently. [Watches the scene.] Another night scene; everything I did was at night. [Laughs.] I was so tired. [Watches the moment where Charlene gestures to Chris, using the blackjack symbol for “stand,” that he should leave.] Bless my heart. No wonder people go like this to me in airports. [Does the “stand” symbol.]
Do they really?
Yes, of course! [Laughs.] That’s Romeo and Juliet, but the reverse, right? I’m giving him freedom. I distanced ourselves from each other for this scene. Once Val and I finished the other scenes, we didn’t connect again, which may have in its own way contributed to the feeling of the finality of this moment, and the longing.
Do you remember anything else from filming it?
What I really appreciate is how slow I went. It takes a lot of courage to go slowly on set, and I went very slowly: the walk, arriving, and then the gaze to the left. I don’t know what decision I’m going to make. I want everyone to fuck off. And he’s slow, too. It’s devastating, the look on his face. He starts to read it when I don’t smile back right away, and then his sense of safety kicks in. He turns and he asks for directions. He’s making his alibi in real time, and that is what I get to experience when I watch him go. I see relief. I see the tenderness and the care I’m provisioning, because I’m going to keep him out of the pokey for now. [Pauses the scene.] I’ve never paused right there and seen what a cool shot that is. Let me watch the walk back in. Val keeps his chin down, but he just cuts his eyes up to the balcony one more time. It’s such control. It’s so calm, but it’s so suspenseful. That Elliot Goldenthal score is incredible — it’s like a spiral. The strings are low; it’s like the hum of insects. And I love that Michael just kept, or the editor just kept, the relief, and then cut. The size of the frame is matched between his close-up and my close-up.
With the context of the work you’re doing now — or without it, however you want to answer — when you look back on Heat, how do you feel about being part of that legacy? How do you look back on it as part of your life?
Part of what comes to me, Roxana, is my sincerity and my earnestness. After I wrapped and changed out of my costume and returned everything, I would go back to set. Michael would silently gesture “welcome” to me, and I would sit under the camera and watch. He would just make me so integrated and welcomed, even if it was a day when I wasn’t filming. It was really neat. And the food was good. I think this is the movie on which I started napping during my lunch.
I love that.
Then when Morgan Freeman and I became so close, he was like, “Of course you sleep during lunch. Robert Redford, everybody sleeps during lunch. I sleep during lunch too.”
That’s great. I’ve done a lot of these interviews, and I haven’t yet heard of a director being like, “You’re wrapped; come back and observe.” I think that is such a beautiful detail and says a lot about your relationship with Michael.
I remember Michael saying something to me about James Dean and referencing Giant for the hand gesture. He kind of found that in the moment.
I was like, “If that happens organically, I’ll do that. And if it doesn’t, I won’t, but if it happens, cool.” I just really wanted it to be spontaneous.
My partner and I have been watching all my movies in order. We’ve stalled at Frida, so we haven’t watched something in a couple of years, which is why I had to rewatch these scenes with you today. The depiction of women in this movie is not okay. I look at all my movies that way. When we watched Norma Jean & Marilyn, there’s that scene with Josh Charles; we’re at the Roosevelt Hotel, at the swimming pool, and I take off my swimsuit and he doesn’t. I’m like, “Wow, I wouldn’t do that today, and I would call everybody out on that. He should have taken his swimsuit off, too, or we should have both kept our swimsuits on.” Not okay. Today when people say, “Kiss the Girls is my favorite movie,” I’m like, “Let’s talk about that,” because male sexual violence and male torture of women is not entertainment, and that’s what that movie is about. Calling it “resilience” rather than going into the structural inequality that caused the harm to happen in the first place — we’re all implicated in that. Sherry Lansing was the first woman to be the head of a studio since Mary Pickford, and she called for the more violent ending to that movie. It’s all internalized. We’re all a part of it. I’m not saying that I’m not, because I went along with those things, and today I would not. It’s an important part of the commentary 30 years later.
The purpose of this feature is to understand your memories of a film and how your feelings about it may have changed. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like in watching these scenes, you have an emotional reaction to them, but there’s also the very valid feeling of, women were presented in a certain way in this movie, and looking back on it now, there were problems with that. Is that a fair way to say that? I don’t think you’re saying that you regret being in Heat, but maybe I’m wrong.
Oh, no, I loved being a part of the movie. And I’m glad, still, that I was a part of this movie, and I do think it’s iconic. It’s a reflection of reality, and reality is problematic. To say the movie is problematic is not to put the responsibility and focus where it lies, which is with the reality of which it’s a reflection. Observation and critique is what I’m offering.
Judd directed a segment of the 2013 Lifetime anthology film Call Me Crazy: A Five Film.
In 1992, Lansing became chair and CEO of Paramount Pictures, a position she held until 2005.
