The Blueberry Nights of Norah Jones & Wong Kar Wai
Under a blazing sun on the Cannes beachfront, the singer and the director discussed serendipity, filming in English, and blueberry pie.
by Karl Rozemeyer
Norah Jones, known more for her vocal stylings than her acting, steps out of her comfort zone and tests her chops in front of the camera in Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights. The director is renowned for Chinese-language films like In the Mood for Love and 2046, but Blueberry Nights represents his first foray into making a fully English-language movie. Under a blazing sun on a Friday afternoon on the Cannes beachfront, Jones and Kar Wai discussed their collaboration, the joy of eating blueberry pie, and what they discovered about Ely, Nevada.
"This happened very serendipitously," recalls 28-year-old singer and first-time actress Jones. "[Wong Kar Wai] asked and I thought, Okay. And then we just had this blind faith in each other. It was very natural... I didn't think about this being risky for me because it just seemed like a wonderful experience, and later, as I [got] the final cast list and started realizing what I was about to do, I got very nervous." Who wouldn't be nervous with co-stars like Jude Law, and Oscar nominee and winner David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz, respectively?
Jones, who still gets the jitters when she performs as a singer, says she didn't receive much direct acting advice from Wong. "He told me to not act. He said to do whatever I wanted and all the other actors will adjust to me."
The director even went so far as to advise against acting lessons. "[Norah] has a lot of confidence," he says. "She doesn't have any problems in front of the camera." He did encourage her not try to be someone else so that as much of her own character as possible was imbued into the role of Elizabeth, a lovelorn waitress who travels across the country befriending an assortment of lonely and lost characters. To ease her fears, he suggested that she imagine she was singing for the first time on stage with the best musicians accompanying her. "'You just sing and they will catch up with your tempo because they are so experienced.' That was the only advice I gave to Norah and she got it."
Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights
Photo by: © The Weinstein Company, 2007/MaCall Polay
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Wong Kar Wai had not met Jones when he considered her for the part. "I was in Taipei in a taxi [one] evening," he recalls. "[And] one of her songs came on the radio. Her voice is so cinematic." Just listening to her sing conjured up the image of a girl "like Norah Jones standing on the corner of a street, looking up at her boyfriend's apartment. She is heartbroken. This was the beginning of the film and this was the image that I wanted to capture."
The pair's initial meeting was one of subdued mutual respect. "He didn't say much," remembers Jones. "He was very mysterious actually. [And] I had not been aware of his films before... I watched In the Mood for Love before I decided to meet and I fell in love with it. He didn't say very much [when we met] and of course there was no script and no story and no cast. Nothing. But having seen some of his films, I just thought it would be amazing."
The script did come more into focus, but Kar Wai purposely kept it free-form. "I don't want to work with a very defined script because I don't want to confine a role. I may create something and ask my actors to adjust to it to play someone else. I always make it open. I would just give them a concept."
The freedom on set, however, did not mean there weren't some harsh working conditions for the actors to endure. "We got kind of beat up by the weather on this film because we were in the heat of summer. It was the hottest summer I have experienced in my life, and I'm from Texas," Jones explains. "We had to turn the air conditioning off all the time for the sound and so it was very hot, and then it was cold in the winter."
Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights
Photo by: © The Weinstein Company, 2007/MaCall Polay
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Jones, who has toured widely across the United States, had visited most of the film's many locations but had never been to Ely, Nevada. "That was amazing! It is a teeny little town in the middle of the desert — a lot of gambling. It was the most beautiful place I had ever been, actually. I [stayed] at this teeny little Motel 6 and right behind me are all these mountains and the desert."
Getting acclimated to both acting and fierce weather were not the only obstacles that Jones had to overcome. Blueberry pie features prominently in the film and Jones was worried that she might have had to gorge on them during shooting. "[Wong Kar Wai] kept saying, 'Are you ready to eat some pie?' He kept taunting me with these pies," she remembers. "They had ten pies on standby [the first week], but I didn't eat any because we never got to the shot. So, by the time I finally did have to eat the pie, I was ready for it and I only had to eat about four pieces in a row once. I actually never liked it before and now I love everything blueberry. He showed me the ways of blueberries."
Acting under Wong's direction was an experience Jones clearly enjoyed but she has no immediate plans to pursue an acting further. She says she'll take another role only if it "makes sense." "If I never act again," she says, "then I had such a cool experience doing it once. It left the good taste of blueberry in my mouth."
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