58 WINTER 2019 MOVIEMAKER.COMthe girlfriend of Jason Schwartzman’s
Philip Lewis Friedman, had one long, digres-
sive sequence built around her in the middle
of the picture, as the plot digresses from its
obnoxious hero and for some time follows
his more compelling female counterpart.
It culminates in a moment virtually every
review of Listen Up Philip singled out as its
highlight: a sustained, unbroken long take of
Moss’ face, cycling through fear, wonder, and
pleasure as she takes control of her life.
The moment was all Moss. The long take,
Perry tells me, was “one of these things that
was spontaneously executed and never really
discussed or planned that became just a per-
fect 60-second take that you could put intact
in the movie.” He describes it as revelatory,
from a moviemaking perspective—“so much so
that the only thing I could do, because of the
excitement I felt and the response to it, was
immediately make an entire movie for her to
exercise those impulses over and over again.”
So, he conceived of another film for Moss to
star in. It would be the Listen Up Philip long
take expanded to feature length. “If people
liked a shot that’s just a 70-second close up of
Elisabeth Moss’ face,” he explains, “I’m gonna
make a movie that’s a 70-minute close up of
her face.”
He called it Queen of Earth, and Moss con-
sented to star as soon as he proposed it. This
time, though, Moss would be involved much
more intimately with the production—both on
a creative level, helping to develop the charac-
ter and determine how best to have her move
through the film, and on a logistical one, as
Moss hoped to learn more about how indepen-
dent features are made. She took what Perry
characterizes as an unusually serious interest
in the details and particulars of the shoot: He
would send her photos of potential locations
for her to look over, casting submissions for
her to peruse, script pages for her to annotate
or revise. “Some actors could get a bunch of
money and start a bogus production company
and option a bunch of articles or books and
do nothing,” he says. “But she delivered. To me
that was pretty exciting.”
PITCHING HER SMELL
In early 2015, Perry sent Moss a text mes-
sage: “Next character: rock star mother. What
do you think?” She wrote back: “I’m in.” Over
the next two years Perry wrote the script
for what would become Her Smell, the rock
star mother drama that had tantalized Moss
enough for her to commit to it sight unseen.
So expressly for her was the character writ-
ten, Perry says, that it was less liking writing
original dialogue and more “like I was writing
closed captioning beneath a performance I
was already watching.” He knew, after making
two films with her, what to put on the page
to maximize her interest. “My one challenge
was to write a part she had never done before.
That’s what she needs to get excited. That’s
how you guarantee she’ll make your movie.”
Moss was excited by the pitch. But the
screenplay Perry ultimately delivered, she
enthuses, was “a hundred times better,” full
of “theater and Shakespeare and Steve Jobs
and all this amazing stuff.” (Her Smell has a
structure based around five standalone, real-
time scenes, which has earned it comparisons
to the Danny Boyle movie about the head of
Apple.) Moss is open about her research and
inspirations. She cites Amy Winehouse (“dif-
ferent emotionally, but same life trajectory”),
Axl Rose, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain. She
watched videos on YouTube of people filming
themselves high on heroin and meth: “Thatwas weird and disturbing, but so important
to learn the mannerisms.” And after all of that
she stuck to what was written. “In the end I
just forgot the research,” she says. “It was all
in the script.”
This combination of diligence and intuition
is typical of Moss’ approach to acting, an ap-
proach cultivated over her 30-year career. It’s
the technique of someone who has been doing
this too long to be precious or fussy about
theory. Back on the Handmaid’s Tale set, Moss
is whisked away from me and on camera,
and within literally seconds they have begun
rolling and called action. Moss switches into
character like someone switching on a light.
When the director cuts, Moss and I return to
the trailer for another break. I remark that the
transformation is remarkable. Does she con-
sider herself a method actor? “Noooooo,” sheCOUPLED UP: MOSS’ (L) ROLE IN PERRY’S 2014 FEATURE LISTEN UP PHILIP AS PHILIP LEWIS FRIEDMAN’S
(JASON SCHWARTZMAN, R) GIRLFRIEND ASHLEY KANE MARKS HER FIRST PAIRING WITH THE WRITER-DIRECTORSQUARE PEG: TO AVOID TYPE-CASTING, MOSS HAD
TO SHAKE ASSUMPTIONS FROM CASTING DIRECTORS
WHO HAD HER PEGGED AS MAD MEN’S PEGGY OLSON