Watch Scarlett Johansson's
video for Falling Down
In the profit and loss columns of contemporary celebrity, what goes where is a
question we could probably all make a fair stab at answering. Take the case
of Scarlett Johansson.
Profit? Easy. The list would include the following: the $7m Los Angeles home
she purchased last year with her huge film earnings; her status as both
Hollywood royalty and funky indie-film darling; the fact that directors such
as Woody Allen and Sofia Coppola beat a path to her agent; her 2006
coronation by an American magazine as “the sexiest woman alive”.
And loss? Easy again, albeit tainted for many by a get-over-it,
call-those-problems sneer. Into that column would go the privacy the
23-year-old has sacrificed, and which she guards fiercely. In, too, the
poison she is powerless to prevent people spreading about her: that Tom
Cruise allegedly tried to recruit her to Scientology in an audition for the
role of wife No 3; that she and the actor Benicio del Toro had sex in a
hotel elevator following the 2004 Oscars; that she’s slept her way to
success. And the sense that, no matter how accomplished and natural
Johansson’s performances in films such as Ghost World and Lost in
Translation, Hollywood will indulge a commodifiable asset only so far: as if
to say, okay, you go out and have your fun, just as long as you’re back in
time to make movies as dire but marketable as The Nanny Diaries and The
Other Boleyn Girl. You might, if you were feeling charitable, decide that
the “sexiest woman alive” award belongs here too: in what way, other than in
a dubious, profile-boosting sense, does it profit her? Yet how many of us,
hand on heart, would linger over the negatives? She’s Scarlett Johansson,
for heaven’s sake. What’s she got to worry about?
So, where do we place the information that the actress is venturing into a
music career, with a debut album – Anywhere I Lay My Head – that finds her
covering 10 of Tom Waits’s songs? The fact that it is a brave, complex
record, far removed from the by-numbers, vanity-project disasters of her
Tinseltown peers (see box overleaf), may count fornothing.
Already, denizens of the blogosphere are marshalling their habitual
malevolence: “The album is the equivalent of a fart wafting in and out of
the room,” bitches one. With an economy and perspicacity not witnessed since
George Bernard Shaw wielded a critic’s pen, a second opines: “Who cares if
she can sing? She’s got great tits.”
“I don’t know how people find the time to spend doing them,” Johansson says,
with a magisterial swipe at the blogging community. “And why is it that
people are so mean on the internet? They’re angry – really angry. They write
things in language that I would never, could never, use: all that hatred and
spite. Why is that? I think it’s because people feel so unsatisfied, they
want something more. But a friend of mine thinks they are all really, really
nice people who have to be nice all the time, and it’s them just spewing.”
She says this while downing breakfast in a Manhattan hotel. Johansson is
fashionably late – “I woke up thinking, ‘It’s awfully light for 8am.’ That’s
because it was 9.50am.” In a black trilby, with a silver nose ring through
her septum, and making the most almighty mess of her meal, the actress
looks, for all that she is on the promotional rounds, as if she’s off duty.
A few days later, she will be papped to within an inch of her life on the
steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, flashing an entirely different type
of ring, on the day her engagement to the actor Ryan Reynolds is announced.
She resists any suggestion that both her career and her private life involve
constant bargaining. In the sense that admitting this might imply a
disowning of work such as her dumb-blonde ad campaigns for cosmetics
companies, or films such as The Nanny Diaries, this is understandable. Yet
statements such as “I pour myself into a dress and show up and strut my
stuff at premieres” suggest a degree of gritted-teeth compromise, as if, by
accepting what she calls the “monkey in a cage” aspects of her life, she
buys herself the space and time to be a quite different person when she’s
out of the cage. Listening to her describe, passionately and pellmell, the
making of the album, and the culture shock she then experienced by flying
directly from the recording studio to Spain to make the Woody Allen film
Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it is hard entirely to believe her protestations.
Johansson drove down to the residential studio – on the banks of the Vermilion
bayou, Louisiana – from California with her producer, Dave Sitek, a member
of the New York avant-rock band TV on the Radio, listening to music and
yakking all the way.
“We had no idea what to expect,” she says. “We had no photographs. But we
thought that, even if the studio looked like something from Deliverance, it
would still be fantastic. We decided to drive through the night – okay, I
decided – and we were exhausted by the time we hit the state line. It was
about 5am and all of a sudden it got cooler. Then hotter. Then cooler. You
go through all these weird air pockets where you’re either above or below
sea level. And it was incredibly misty out; you couldn’t see anything. We
opened the windows and, God, the air filled the car, and the smell – it was
so moist and hot and alive and lush.
“We started driving down this little path. All the trees were weeping into the
road, and I’m, like, ‘Dave, where the hell are we?’ And there was the
studio: the most beautiful place I have seen in my entire life. I get chills
thinking about it. So we go in, and all the instruments are laid out, and I
remember Dave going, ‘Here are our Nigerian logs, here’s our Tibetan
meditation bowl, here’s our music box.’ He was sitting at the organ, we were
trying things out, singing, and I knew from that moment that it was going to
be the most wonderful and inspiring time.”
For five weeks, she and Sitek, together with musicians such as Yeah Yeah
Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, worked on a record that honoured both Tom Waits’s songs
and the studio’s spooky, fog-enveloped surroundings. They ran through the
woods at night in the pouring rain, attempting to record the owls; they gave
up trying to screen out the noise of the crickets and decided to incorporate
it instead (or, as Sitek suggested: “Let’s tune them down so they match the
song”). The “devastation and sadness or eerie delight” Johansson first
admired in Waits’s music as a 12-year-old seem to have been reflected in her
Louisiana experience.
Only towards the end did the actress venture into the vocal booth. That delay
was, she says, “incredibly valuable, because it enabled me to have a
relationship with the music that I think a lot of vocalists don’t have: they
come in, lay the track down and get out of there. But this was a really
intimate situation – you might as well be by yourself, in your bedroom. And
in terms of the character of each song, you’ve lived with the words for so
long that you’re kind of breathing them by this point, as if you wrote them
yourself. Which is similar to dialogue. It’s the same way you manipulate a
scene, mould it. When you first get it, it’s like clay. We had to think of
it in that way because it was impossible to think about it as being a Tom
Waits song that you’ve loved for so long – because it’s no longer a Tom
Waits song that you’ve loved for so long, is it? It’s like singing Cole
Porter. You’re not going to sing it the way that Billie Holiday sang it, or
Ella Fitzgerald; you’re breathing your own life into it.”
It is this actorly distancing – in Sitek’s words, the realisation that
Johansson “could act on top of the music” – that prevents the album from
being a halfcocked pastiche. Sitek shrouds Johansson in sonic squalls not,
as the snipers suggest, because she can’t sing, but because in his head he’s
writing a film score beneath the lines she’s delivering. As a child growing
up in New York, Johansson had ambitions to star in musicals, until acting
tempted her down a different path. “Oh, I was one of those Broadway kids,”
she laughs. “Jazz hands, the whole nine. But I was a little blonde girl with
a baritone singing voice, so there was no part in Annie for me.” I was going
to ask her if she could ever imagine trying her hand again, but in a sense
she has, because Anywhere I Lay My Head’s real triumph is that it takes the
unmissably dramatic elements of Waits songs such as Fannin’ Street, I Don’t
Want to Grow Up and Green Grass, and gifts them to the actor-singer,
musical-theatre wannabe in Johansson. Her description of the results as
“sexy and haunting and intoxicating” is spot-on, and a lot more instructive
than those bloggers.
When she left her “little bubble” in Louisiana and flew to Spain for the Allen
film, Johansson anticipated, she says, “that I was going to be really
vulnerable there, that it was basically going to be a feeding frenzy on set”
– and so it proved. They shot a scene on a city square and she found herself
surrounded by “thousands of people screaming”. More recently, she directed
her first short, as part of the forthcoming Big Apple tribute New York, I
Love You, and relished the opportunity to be on the other side of the
camera. The combination of these experiences, she muses, “may have confirmed
to me that I am better suited on the outside of the circle”.
Characteristically, she leaves that thought hanging ambiguously in the air.
But pinning Johansson down is never easy. She will keep doing the less
obvious thing (maddeningly, at times, in terms of her film career). After
she sang on a charity song a few years ago, and subsequently appeared on
stage at last year’s Coachella music festival, she was approached to make an
album. She then recorded a few Tom Waits songs, in what she says was an
overexact way, and hated the results. At this point, some Hollywood
actresses would have scrapped the idea or turned to Timbaland and the
Neptunes to knock up a few R&B hits.
Instead, Johansson slunk down to the swamps and dredged up what would
certainly be hailed as nigh-on a masterpiece if her name didn’t come bearing
so many connotations. Is that her problem? “No,” Johansson laughs. Her mouth
goes dumb, but her eyes say: “It’s yours.” As for profit and loss, well, put
it this way: on two tracks on her album, a musician for whom the actress
admits she feels “geeked-out fan love” sings backing vocals. His name? David
Bowie. And in the video for her new single, Falling Down, she has her neck
nuzzled by Salman Rushdie. He doesn’t look as if he cares whether she can
sing.
Anywhere I Lay My Head is released tomorrow on Atco
Watch Scarlett Johansson’s Falling Down music video at timesonline.co.uk/music
RUSSELL CROWE
The poster boy for anger management fronted the curiously named 30 Odd Foot of
Grunts, huffing and puffing his way through six albums of Oz pub rock from
1992 on. “You treat me like chocolate / Something to eat between meals,” he
wailed on their Gaslight album.
MINNIE DRIVER
Driver originally planned to be a singer, before film success persuaded her
otherwise. She has released two albums, the most recent of which,
Seastories, sees her teaming up with Liz Phair and Ryan Adams on a set of
country-tinged songs that, while scarcely ground-breaking, reveal a fine
singing voice.
LINDSAY LOHAN
LiLo’s 2004 album debut, Speak, with its jaded-porn-star cover shot and icky,
innuendo-rich plastic pop, remains the prize exhibit in Hollywood’s music
hall of shame.
Its successor, 2005’s A Little More Personal, was no better. It tanked, as did
her film career and, more seriously, her personal life.
JULIETTE LEWIS
She sometimes talks as if she thinks she’s female rock’s second coming (and,
good though Lewis’s albums with her band, the Licks, are, she isn’t), but,
three records in and with her film career seemingly taking second place, she
is walking the walk, and doing so with polemical, melodic-punk panache.
KEANU REEVES
Originally called Small Fecal Matter, the Hollywood hunk’s trio, Dogstar, in
which he played bass guitar, failed to set the charts alight with two
late1990s albums and an EP called Quattro Formaggi. Their music was much
like his acting: strangely inanimate, all the right bits in the right
places, dogged, defiantly average. DC
