INTERVIEW: Amy Adams

"Another of Anderson’s bad karma masterworks, The Master is a symphony of raw nerves, its crisp 70mm compositions punctuated by bursts of  psychic feedback, freak-out, and other assorted Andersonian voodoo. He uses his actors the way Jimi Hendrix used to use his guitar strings. Like his 2007 Oscar-winner, There Will Be Blood, the film is essentially a battle of wills between two men, a drifter (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls under the spell of self-proclaimed “scientist and connoisseur” Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the leader of a religious cult flourishing in the shadow of the second world war. Adams plays his devoted wife, a Lady Macbeth like amenuensis who’s blue eyes boil with fury at unbelievers. “I do not want to run into her in a dark alleyway,” says Adams. “Give me Charlene from The Fighter any day, we can have a beer, talk about it, we’ll have fun. This woman scares the shit out of me. Excuse my language.” Even for scenes in which Adams was not scheduled to appear, she was instructed to show up, just to make her presence felt. “It was exhaustting,” she says, “But I love the effect, I’m almost blurry.” There’s a lot of the true believer to Adams, with her big, blue eyes, and bushy-tailed manner. That she was once a greeter at The Gap makes perfect sense. Her best performances — the motor-mouthed Ashley in Junebug (2005), the princess in Enchanted (2007) — have mined the comedy and pathos of the pathologically optimistic: sweet Pollyanas hoisting their beliefs aloft a rising tide of reality. If her early work came lit up with the infectious inner glow of the one-time believer, her more recent roles — in Doubt and The Master — have flipped that faith on its back like a beetle." — from my interview with Amy Adams in New York magazine