Teenage Girls' Debut: Mates
in Matricide
Newsday 1994
Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet
giggle as they walk, arms clasped. They are momentarily lost in
a world of inside jokes and
fond memories. Or maybe they're simply overcome by the excitement
of it all. When they describe
the glamorous hotel rooms and limousine rides they've had the past
few days, they gasp and squeal.
It's understandable: Teenagers don't usually get this kind of
treatment. Lynskey, prim-looking
despite her thick tights and combat boots, and Winslet, svelte
and blonde in a snug sweater,
are basking in their new roles as movie stars - well, almost
movie
stars. The unknown duo, 17 and
19 respectively, opened last week in "Heavenly Creatures,"
about New Zealand's infamous
Parker-Hulme murder. Like the girls accused and convicted in the
1954 murder trial, Lynskey and
Winslet share a bond that excludes everyone outside their circle
of two. Both vegetarians, they
order identical salads and talk with the relaxed, easy manner
reserved for best friends. But
there is one major difference between the young actresses at the
table and the characters they
portray. Somewhere along the line, the friendship between Pauline
Parker and Juliet Hulme went
terribly wrong. They did, after all, carry out a brutal and carefully
planned matricide. And when
they were finally released from prison, it was on one condition: that
they never see each other again.
(Juliet was discovered recently writing mystery novels in
Scotland under a pen name: She
happens to be the best-selling author Anne Perry. Pauline
apparently lives quietly in
New Zealand.) "Neither of the girls had ever had a close friend before,"
says the director,
Peter Jackson ("Dead Alive"), explaining why Pauline and Juliet put
such
fervid energy into preserving
their friendship. The girls thought Pauline's mother, Honora Parker,
threatened their relationship.
"And in the case of Juliet, she'd never had a close relationship with
her parents. The murder in a
way is secondary. It still would have been a great story if it didn't
have the murder." But,
of course, it did have the murder, and above all, Jackson wanted to avoid
the sensationalism previous
tellings of the story had favored. Research for the script he wrote
with Fran Walsh included poring
through court documents and newspaper reports that described
obsessed lesbian lovers. But
the essense of the friendship came alive for Jackson of their
classmates from Christchurch,
where the girls went to school. "Pauline was this powerhouse -
this fiery, intense, silent
girl who looked sullen and was quite frightening to many of the girls,"
says Walsh, who conducted the
interviews with classmates. "And Juliet was this very arrogant,
stately, snooty English girl
who they all were in awe of and quite admired." Opposites attract,
and
in Pauline and Juliet's case,
the result was explosive. As Jackson shows their friendship develop
on the sidelines of gym
class (they were both kept out of phys ed for health reasons), their
combined imaginations create
a spark neither had experienced before. Jackson was set on finding
actresses who looked like the
real girls. "I was never making a documentary, but I wanted
to
make it as accurate as it possibly
could be," says Jackson. "There are people who remember those
girls, remember the house, the
school. We had to get those things right - to make it believable."
He found Winslet, a startlingly
precise match for the blonde Juliet, in a London audition. She also
passed the "intelligence interview"
that Jackson insisted on before signing anyone to play the
brainy principals. But the right
Pauline Parker was harder to find. After an unsuccessful sweep of
New Zealand drama schools and
troupes, Walsh took a black-and-white photo of Pauline and
began combing high schools.
With only four weeks left before filming, she discovered Lynskey
in
a classroom in New Plymouth,
New Zealand. Her pale skin, dark hair and still-pudgy figure made
her a dead ringer for Pauline.
"The teacher pointed out Melanie and said, `She writes great
poetry, is incredibly
bright and she's really good at drama,' " says Walsh. Lynskey,
15, won the
role over 600 actresses, despite
the fact her acting experience consisted of school plays and
community theater. And although
the movie's success was riding on the ability of thesegirls to
convince us they would do anything
to keep from being separated, they were never auditioned
together. "I don't really believe
in the karmic thing about onscreen chemistry," says Jackson.
"Even if you audition them together,
you're not going to know. After two weeks they could have
hated each other's guts." As
it turned out, that was far from the case. Sitting across from her
co-star, picking at her salad
coyly at the Four Seasons Hotel, Lynskey recalls arriving in
Christchurch two years ago.
"Kate looked like such a movie star when I saw her in the airport,"
she says, amused. "She had this
leather jacket and jeans and long blond hair. And I felt like such a
little . . . I felt terrible."
Then Kate chimes in, shifting her confident British dialect to mimic
Lynskey's close-mouthed New
Zealand one: "Mel's mother says, `Oh,there was such an amazing
chemistry between them, it was
so instant.' " At this they break into peals of laughter and agree
it was true.To get in the spirit
of the parts, they went to the Ilam Homestead, the palatial estate
where Hulme grew up. They ran
through the lush gardens where much of the movie's onscreen
friendship blooms, and they
began to understand the transporting qualities of the idyllic place. As
the characters' friendship strengthens,
the love-starved girls start showing affection for each
other physically -
holding hands, hugging or even kissing. By the time Lynskey and Winslet
undressed forthe camera
- for a scene in which Pauline and Juliet fantasize how their favorite
movie stars would make love
- the two hardly flinched. After all, they'd already "had a lot of
baths together," as Winslet
points out. The luxurious on-screen baths, she says, were actually
exercises in contortion. "We
look so comfortable in this bath, and really, the water's freezing and
my toe's up Mel's bum." "Yes,"
Lynskey mocks, as if summoning a misty-eyed memory. "There
were those beautiful naked moments
together." So when it came to " that kissing stuff,"
according to Winslet, they were
ready. "It was kind of fun, like we were playing a game," she
says. "We knew it was innocent.
It was just so lovely, because we knew that they did love each
other insuch a unique way."
Lynskey agrees, but adds: "It was a bit weird to be kissing Kate.
I'd
never thought about it very
much." She looks at her friend. "Sorry," she says. Winslet is not
offended, but puts on a grin
and a deep lecherous voice, "But it was good." While their off-screen
friendship naturally fed into
their onscreen bond, the emotionally wrenching scenes - of
which
there are more than a
few - took some work. Especially for Lynskey, who had never
had any
professional training. To make
herself cry, Lynskey thought of a close friend who had drowned
four weeks before the movie
began filming. To help her get and stay in character, Jackson never
used stand-ins. The actresses
worked so well together, he
kept them both on the set at
all times. Before certain scenes, he'd ask Winslet to go over to
Lynskey and in Juliet's voice whisper, "I love you." That little voice
haunted Lynskey, she says, and jolted her into character. The
toughest scene for everybody, of course, was the murder, which they filmed
at the end of the 11-week shoot. Leading up to the scene, the characters
rationalize the brutal act they've been planning for weeks. Juliet, in
her grandiose language (in fact, her actual words as recorded by
a court psychiatrist) says, "Only the best people fight against all obstacles
in the pursuit of happiness." But how did the real-life teenagers
cope with the brutal act they were about to commit? Winslet says they never
actually did. It was too hard. "If we ever stopped and thought, `Oh,
- , this is what they did . . .,' " she trails off. "They took a
brick in their hands and theykilled this woman - they smashed
her head in. It's so disturbing and frightening, we have to not think about
it." We see the girls, hysterical and covered in blood, running at
the beginning and end of the movie. To get worked up for the scene, Lynskey
and Winslet ran in circles high atop Christchurch in Victoria Park until
they were close to hyperventilating. "The worst thing was we couldn't just
go home and say, `Oh well, it's just a story,' " says Lynskey. "You can
understand everything leading up to the murder. You can even understand
moments before. But actually doing it was the most horrible,
horrible thing."
"I really don't know how people just step in out of roles,"
Kate says, looking back at her sensational debut at 17 as real-life teen
murderess Juliet Hulme in Peter Jackson's HEAVENLY CREATURES "I knew that
girl," she insists. "I was that girl. I knew her fantasies, her craziness.
I remember researching the period through newspaper stories on, what's
the word, microfilm, and as I drew near the murder date my heart started
pounding like mad and I could barely keep on reading. "And nobody
warned me that there's this comedown after a movie," she adds. "I
spent days and days just crying, trying to get the whole thing out of me,
and I never really did. Juliet Hulme is still in there. I think most
of my characters still live in me. I mean, it takes me a month after filming
just to come back down to earth."