A Little Rambling Never Hurt

As a little girl, Laura Dern always knew she’d really be a grown-up when she got her first purse. She just didn’t expect that distinctively feminine acquisition to coincide with another milestone--the first retrospective of her relatively young acting career. When she walks on stage Monday at the Sundance Film Festival to accept an award for her commitment to independent film, the elegant, gray-flannel overstuffed handbag that she jokingly considers “very Grace Kelly” will be close by.

She’s “very attached” to that purse, Dern says, much like she is to each of the wide-ranging and often eccentric characters that she is being honored for portraying since she was a child actress. She’s been in some big box-office hits, including “Jurassic Park,” but the smaller films are closest to her heart. “I try to do things I love or care about for some reason,” Dern says.

“But it’s also very scary. Decision-making is very scary for me. But to have the support of one person, if not a group of people saying, ‘Hey, we see that you’re trying to do this.’ It feels great. I hope that this will give me the opportunity to stay strong in my own way.”

Dern, 31, was chosen to receive Sundance’s Piper-Heidsieck Award for Independent Vision because of the “extremely risky and risk-taking” roles she tackles, despite the fact she’s not even at the midpoint of her career, says Geoffrey Gilmore, co-director of the festival in Park City, Utah, that runs through next Sunday. “It has a lot to do with the kind of exceptional contribution she has made, even at this young age. She has taken on roles that are not attractive personas. They really show off the kind of perversity of life.”

Roles such as the dimwitted, glue-sniffing Ruth who becomes the center of a satirical war over abortion in Alexander Payne’s 1996 film “Citizen Ruth,” or the slightly confused and highly sexual Rose in Martha Coolidge’s “Rambling Rose,” which earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress in 1992, or the sexy child-woman in “Smooth Talk” from 1985.

Dern says she’s thinking about the Sundance award as a little angel that says, “ ‘Trust your choices. Try to have integrity and see that other people have support to have their own voice.’ ” She’s used to putting awards in perspective. Her past is filled with public acclaim, including Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations.

“Starting my career as a kid, I was doing what jobs I got,” says Dern, who made her official film debut in “Foxes” in 1980.

“I remember screen-testing for ‘Sixteen Candles,’ and I got ‘Smooth Talk’ and somebody else got the other movie. Then David Lynch asked me to be in ‘Blue Velvet.’ You know, with ‘Mask,’ ‘Smooth Talk’ and ‘Blue Velvet,’ I loved the specific experiences so much. Each one was a specific filmmaker with a specific vision. (The 1985 film “Mask” was directed by Peter Bogdanovich; “Smooth Talk” was directed by Joyce Chopra.)

“I played a part in the filmmakers’ vision by creating a character that felt honest and authentic to me, as opposed to them saying, ‘This is how you’re going to play this part and fit into my movie,’ ” she says during an interview before the start of the Sundance Festival.

“Part of their vision was hiring me to do the job they’d asked me to do as opposed to telling me how to do it. Even at a very young age, I learned about instinct and collaboration. I just feel so lucky that way.”

Worried about rambling on, she pauses to take a breath over lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. She looks decidedly unlike a movie star. Her wispy blond hair is pulled back unevenly in a ponytail holder more likely to be found in a grade-school girl’s hair than that of a soon-to-be-honored actress with two movies coming out this year. She is tall at 5 feet 10 inches, but her wafer-thin build makes her seem smaller. Dressed in a dark pin-striped pantsuit and barely ironed white shirt, she emphasizes a word or two in every sentence. She is clearly comfortable playing with the English language.

“I think almost every movie I’ve done is the kind of movie people have strong feelings about,” Dern says. “And I like that. Now, more than ever, I hope I can do things that people are affected by. And I don’t mean jarred by, or something that is shoved in people’s faces.”

*

Dern, one of the queens of the indie film world--along with such offbeat stars as Lili Taylor and Parker Posey--has her own definition of an “independent film,” and it’s not that it has been made on a shoestring or that it’s a non-studio project. “I’ve been very fortunate to consistently work with filmmakers, be it in a large studio movie or a small independent film, who are independent visionaries and are in a situation where they are allowed to make their movie.”

Even when she makes a huge mainstream movie, such as Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” in 1993, she works with “filmmakers who make their movie. Because of that good fortune, I think it’s what I’m used to,” Dern says, continually gesturing with her finely manicured hands for emphasis. “Because of that good fortune, I think it’s what I’m used to. Now I intentionally try very hard to continue to work with that energy.”

Payne, the director and co-writer of “Citizen Ruth,” puts Dern’s acting skills in league with some pretty impressive company. “She’s really good when she has a character to play,” he says. “She can do character leads, like Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep. She’s not just a movie star who plays some version of herself. And those are the actors we most value.” Dern traces her desire to appear in films that have a message to being the daughter of “actor parents,” Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern, who divorced when she was 2. “I was raised by two people who loved being actors. Loved it. And that was the goal, getting to challenge themselves and grow as actors.”

“And that’s all I can go by, too. I just want to keep growing and learning, and that’s not always going to be the best choice for other things,” she says. “But for me, in terms of my education, as an actor, I feel very proud of my choices.”

More often than not, many of those choices involve portraying women who display a lot more questionable character than they do big-screen glamour. In “Wild at Heart,” she could pass for the queen of trailer trash. In “Citizen Ruth,” she is so shockingly unattractive that even she admits it was sometimes hard to look at herself in the mirror while sitting in the makeup chair.

But it wasn’t hard for the audience to watch Dern in the role of Ruth, Payne says, because of the way she approached it. “That part could have been played very hard-edged, but she brought to it an innocence about Ruth that might have been lacking in another actress’ interpretation,” he says. “It got across the idea that she couldn’t help what she was doing. The audience kind of forgives her for her bad actions. A lot of that is really Laura, and it helped me.”

The movies Dern chooses to appear in don’t have to be “preachy or dogmatic, but it’s important to Laura to do movies that say something,” says Judy Hofflund, her manager for three years and her agent for 11 years before that. “She looks at the statement a movie makes. She doesn’t have to be up on a soapbox. It can be a very subtle and hidden message.”

“Daddy and Them,” the movie she recently finished filming, fills the bill because “there’s something in there to make you understand life a little bit more, because it’s all about relationships,” Hofflund says.

With it written and directed by Billy Bob Thornton, that’s somehow fitting. He is Dern’s boyfriend, and they appear together in the Miramax film that will be released in the fall.

What was it like working with her significant other, an experience that can be fraught with personal and professional peril? “I loved it,’ Dern says. “It was a real familial experience, and made very much in the independent spirit. It’s wonderfully irreverent and human and funny.” Like many of her films, “Daddy and Them” also features her mother. (When her mother received a best supporting actress nomination for “Rambling Rose,” Ladd and Dern made Oscar history as the first mother-daughter duo to be nominated for an Academy Award in the same year.)

Even when she has a lesser role in a film, Dern still cares that the movie has something to say. In “October Sky,” coming in February from Universal Pictures and based on a true story, she plays a teacher who inspires a boy from a small mining town in Tennessee to win the national science fair; today, he works for NASA. Dern was “delighted that the movie showed that you can tell young people everywhere that it’s possible to make a dream come true,” Hofflund says.

Dern has passed on certain movie roles “that could have brought her a lot of fame and money,” Payne says. “She only does films she likes and that she thinks would be good.” Having standards can get in the way of finding work. Dern has averaged a film a year since 1980, but she is still trying to figure out what her next project will be. Her life and career are nothing if not eclectic. When she has time, she takes classes at two local universities in pursuit of a degree in world religion and psychology. She has done movies for cable television, including last year’s “The Baby Dance” for Showtime, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination, and became a footnote in television history when she played a lesbian Ellen DeGeneres is infatuated with in the coming-out episode of ABC’s “Ellen.”

In a perfect world, she’d get to make two movies a year, she says. But many of the scripts she is seeing are violent neo-noirs written by Quentin Tarantino wannabes, she says, and there is a much wider world waiting to make it to the big screen. “I’ve read a lot of scripts lately in which I think that there is a trend toward very violent, very sexual, very raw, dark genre movie-making,” Dern says. “Maybe young filmmakers are saying, ‘I’m going to do something in the independent world that’s so dark that nobody else would make this.’

“It may go with the purse and the retrospective, because I’m going to sound very adult and wholesome,” she says, laughing. “But I think the really courageous and bold move is to make a movie about human behavior. I don’t mean to make it sound like I don’t support reviewing darkness and corruption and everything else in film. It’s extremely important, but I think for my taste, I’m starting to like pure movies more than ever.”

For Dern, “pure” translates into movies the studios used to make by the likes of legendary filmmakers Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, “when the stories were about human behavior and longing and desperation and a lot of dark and light things. They had an incredible power to them. And I don’t know if the other stuff is really powerful. But I think when we’re young and we’re starting, we think that maybe it’s powerful to do something that nobody else has ever done.”

Movies that show real life--people struggling to raise children, have relationships and be intimate with other people--those are “the most interesting thing in the world,” Dern says. “I think any actor would say that. It’s the most interesting stuff to act. It would be so great if independent film took the opportunity they had to make a movie for $4 million about stuff I believe audiences want to see.”

She considers Lucille Ball one of her idols, “which is very instructive,” says Sundance’s Gilmore. “You get the sense of the kind of presence, the kind of strength she’s talking about. That’s not an actress that most women or major actresses would have chosen. Lucy had this capacity for taking risks. There was always something that Lucy was doing in which she forgot herself. It’s part of what made her so famous as a comedienne--the ability to run with something. Laura Dern is willing to do that.”

Dern is close to her maternal grandmother, who helped raise her, and the matriarch’s reaction to her Oscar nomination helps Dern to keep everything in perspective. “My grandmother asked me when I was going to be on a soap opera,” she says with a hearty laugh. “She just can’t wait till the day she can watch me at 3.”