Emma Watson has a new interview with Rookie, an online magazine. The interview is super-long – you can read the whole thing here. What’s interesting about it is that the interviewer is a couple of years younger than Emma, so it’s like two very young women just gossiping with each other and it’s sort of revealing for Emma. There’s stuff that I already knew about her – she’s an anal retentive little thing, she’s insecure about her fame and talent, but she’s also sort of full of herself (in the way that most young women are hyper-self-aware and full of themselves). Here are some highlights:
The Bling Ring people: “Sofia filmed it in such a nonjudgmental way, though—she never tells the audience how they should feel about these characters, which I think might be quite unsettling for people who want to be told, ‘We should hate these people.’ She made it so true to life, it almost feels like a documentary.”
She’s obsessed with The Carrie Diaries: “My final is tomorrow, so I’ve been living like a hermit. The only thing I have been watching—such a guilty pleasure, it’s the perfect study break ’cause you just don’t have to concentrate too hard—is The Carrie Diaries… So embarrassing to admit that! A 23-year-old that’s fully been watching The Carrie Diaries.
On Sofia Coppola: “It was a real dream of mine. I came to the part in a very roundabout way: I told my agent how much I loved Sofia’s work, and she’s like, ‘You should meet with her producer and [unofficial] casting director, Fred Roos,’ and I did, and we got on really well, and that led to meeting Sofia, and she told me she was working on a project with young people in it. I read the script for The Bling Ring and I just got obsessed. For Sofia Coppola to be making a film which is a meditation on film and celebrity culture and what that all means, how it impacts society, and the psyches of young women in particular—I was just like, ‘OK, I have to be in your movie. I really, really, really want to be in your movie.’”
Feeling like an impostor: “It’s called the impostor syndrome. It’s almost like the better I do, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I’m just going, Any moment, someone’s going to find out I’m a total fraud, and that I don’t deserve any of what I’ve achieved. I can’t possibly live up to what everyone thinks I am and what everyone’s expectations of me are. It’s weird—sometimes [success] can be incredibly validating, but sometimes it can be incredibly unnerving and throw your balance off a bit, because you’re trying to reconcile how you feel about yourself with how the rest of the world perceives you.”
She’s an obsessive diarist and journaler: “I don’t know what it is. I’ve always kept and collected things, and I’ve always been interested in the idea of diaries. I must have 10 different personal diaries: I keep a dream diary, I keep a yoga diary, I keep diaries on people that I’ve met and things that they’ve said to me, advice that they’ve given me. I keep an acting journal. I keep collage books. They’ve given me a place in which I can try to figure myself out, because those kinds of ideas feel too personal to put out into the public or even discuss with anyone else. It allows me to get things out of my head and work them out in a way that feels safe, which is really helpful. I can kind of try things out and play around with things.”
She’s going back to Brown after taking a couple of years off: “I got famous very young, and [college] gave me a safe zone where I could figure things out without people projecting onto me their ideas of what they wanted me to be, or thought I should be. I really like the fact that [Brown] has a very open curriculum, that there aren’t any requirements. Really, I’ve kind of been in charge of my own education since I started out on Potter when I was 9 or 10, and I liked that I could design my own major if I wanted to, and I could take independent studies if I wanted to on subjects that weren’t necessarily in the curriculum. I did an independent study on the psychology and philosophy of how and why we fall in love, which was awesome.”
What she wants to do next: “In terms of my next project, I really want to do a romantic comedy. I’ve been looking for the perfect script. I’m getting to the point where I’m like, “I just need to write the damn thing myself,” because it’s so hard to find something that’s original and really funny. But I’d love to do something like that, just because the last two or three movies I did were kind of heavy.”
Director-chaser: “I’m a real director chaser. I really want to work with Danny Boyle or Ang Lee, I’d love to work with Lynne Ramsay, I’d love to work with Tom Hooper, David Fincher—I have this endless list. I’ll do whatever as long as I can be part of someone else’s creative vision, someone who isn’t just creating something as a piece of entertainment, but is genuinely creating a piece of art. Though it’s nice if it’s commercially successful at the same time. [Laughs] I’m big on directors, more than I am about working with particular actors.”
That bit about her diaries and journals is interesting – there’s something kind of “Beyonce’s 24-7 Archive” about it, only Emma’s version is still kind of cute. As for Emma returning to Brown… I kind of lost interest in her stop-go education after she took that second or third hiatus from school. She went to Oxford for a year, right? And she’ll be coming back to Brown next school year, like in the fall? We’ll see. I bet those plans change a few more times.
