LOS ANGELES – Miranda Otto thought her agent sent her the wrong script when she received an offer to play Elizabeth Bishop in the new movie, “Reaching for the Moon,” in theaters November 29. “It’s such a great role and these roles are often snapped up by bigger names than myself,” she told ARTINFO. “I was like, how did I get this?”
Otto may not be a household name but some of her movies are, like “The Lord of the Rings” and “War of the Worlds.” Another film hse appears in, “I, Frankenstein,” is set for release in 2014. And yet the 46-year-old Australian native couldn’t believe her good fortune in being offered the role.
Poet laureate from 1949 to 1950, Bishop went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 and a National Book award in 1970. “Reaching for the Moon” chronicles her long-term affair with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares during a 15-year stay in the country.
Here, Otto talks about Bishop’s poetry, performing same-sex intimate scenes, and the circumstances surrounding Soares’s suicide.
In addition to being a brilliant poet, Bishop was a feminist and a lesbian, yet she bristled at the label.
She just didn’t want any label. She would have behaved like a feminist but she would not take that word on. She didn’t want to be defined. She didn’t want to be a female poet. She wanted to be a poet.
Can a movie like this hope to avoid labels?
I really wanted people to watch the movie and just see two people fall in love and just feel that as a very natural thing and not even think so much about that. They were both such incredible women in their own right and defined by so many other things. I didn’t want it to be wholly focused on the fact that it’s a relationship between two women.
Were the love scenes necessary? Often in movies such scenes are a distraction.
Sometimes it takes it out of the story. I think you needed to know that they had a sexual relationship. It would have been coy not to have something in there. I wanted to open them up to people but not so it was exposing. I just wanted the love scene to be about that moment of falling love with somebody. That is a really joyous moment full of laughter. I wanted to get that across in some way rather than just make it a sexy kind of thing. I wanted it to be a very emotional moment for them. But I also wanted people to understand in that moment that I had a strong feeling that though Elizabeth was quite discreet in all those things, she knew her way around.
Soares obviously impacted Bishop’s life, but what about her work?
She had a huge impact on Elizabeth’s work. The fact that she’s in some of the work, but also the fact that she did give her a kind of a home for the first time. She was able to give her that kind of sanctuary and support and love. Trying to make a living as a poet is not an easy thing. In that period, Lota really believed in her and was such a strong person, created that studio for her and gave her that space to write.
What about the poetry? What makes her work so singular?
She had such an economy in the way she used language. The form was so important to her, finding the form of the poem. The “One Art” poem is actually a villanelle, that is a notoriously difficult form to work in. She would often be very interested in the structure of the poem. She would sit on poems sometimes for 10 years until she found the exact, right word that she wanted to use. Nature plays very predominantly in her poems. There are images of water and fish. She’ll often go from some very small observation in nature, some very small event, and then pull it out like ripples in a pond into something extremely profound and universal.
