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Roundtable Interview with Theron, Kusama and Csokas
 Oscar winner Charlize Theron tries a change of pace as a futuristic rebel without a pause In Aeon Flux.
Charlize Theron, who won an Oscar in 2004 for Monster, likes to change things up. The blond former model de-glammed herself for Monster to play convicted serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Audiences next saw her in North Country, a Norma-Rae-esque tale of the first successful action against sexual harrassment, set in the coal mines of northern Minnesota, in which she similarly dressed down for her role as a real working mother.
But the film that Theron actually signed on for immediately after her Oscar win was Aeon Flux, a stylized science-fiction action movie based on the MTV animated series of the 1990s, directed by Girlfight's Karyn Kusama. It finally hits theaters on Dec. 2.
In Aeon Flux, Theron plays the title character, a "Monican" rebel warrior in a future world where the last remaining survivors of a global plague have retreated to the final human settlement, the seemingly idyllic walled city of Bregna. It is ruled by scientists led by the enigmatic Trevor Goodchild (New Zealand actor Marton Csokas). Aeon Flux also features Jonny Lee Miller, Sophie Okonedo, Pete Postlethwaite, Amelia Warner, Caroline Chikezie and Frances McDormand.
For the role, Theron donned Flux's form-fitting leather catsuit and traded her blond locks for a black asymmetrical bob. A former ballet dancer, Theron also trained tirelessly to perform the film's many stunts. During one training session, she injured her neck, resulting in a delay in production while she recovered.
Theron, Kusama and Csokas took a moment to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about the movie. The following is taken from interviews on the film's set in Berlin in November 2004 and at Comic-Con International last July.
Charlize Theron, some people might say this is an odd role for you to take as a follow-up to Monster and your Academy Award.
Charlize Theron: Odd is good, don't you think? (Laughs.) I think odd is good. ... I don't want to to go and just keep doing the same thing, you know? I think that [a] challenge is always good. I knew nothing, really, about the genre. And just in that, that was enough of a challenge for me to work with a filmmaker that I really wanted to work with and I thought was a really interesting choice for this genre. Those were all elements that were really important to me. So, you know, it's odd, but that's good, I think.
Were you trying to defy people's expectations of you?
Charlize Theron: No, I just get bored. I get bored easily. I had a great time working on Monster, and it was a creatively exhilarating experience, and it couldn't have gone any better. ... And this is not because I won the award. It's just always been the case in my career. To give yourself to a film takes a lot of time, and ... it has to be something that challenges you as an artist. ... This was something that scared the living s--t out of me, because it's a genre that I've never really touched upon. It's a world that I've never really experienced, and physically it was something that I've never really done. And it went back to my roots. I was trained as a ballerina for 12 years, and I was dying, I think, in some sense, to tell a story physically. And I thought this was a great way to do it. And so I was scared by it, and I felt really challenged by it.
What was the most challenging aspect of the film?
Charlize Theron: It's all pretty challenging. It really is. I mean, yeah, physically very challenging. Although I really have to give Karyn a lot of credit; she tries to stay away from green screen. But that stuff's always challenging. [The] weather's been very challenging in my layered outfit (laughs). And the work has been challenging, but good, you know? It's really interesting to take soemthing that's loosely based on something that's quite familiar and I think quite known for not really having a linear story and to try and put it into a linear story... I do find myself constantsly going, "So, what are we doing?"
You injured yourself on set. Could you talk a little about that? How far into shooting was that, and what stunt was it?
Charlize Theron: It was around the 10th or the ninth day of shooting [in August 2004], so it was pretty early on. We still had a whole film to do. I did a back handspring, a gymnastics back handspring, about 18 of them back to back, and I just slipped and landed on my neck with my body straight up, so with all my weight onto my neck. And I herniated the disk between my third and fourth vertebrae, and it had slipped and was really loose, and it was close to my spinal cord. And I was hospitalized for five days in Berlin, and then came back here and saw some doctors. And I had some nerve damage. I was numb on the right side of my body. And I think we all realized that it was a pretty serious injury. Especially when I had come back here and done some tests and saw some doctors.
Were you able to do all of the stunts you'd planned to do originally?
Charlize Theron: Oh, yeah. I came back and did everything. We had scheduled around [it]. So I came back six weeks later, and with the first two weeks we didn't go straight into stunts, and just slowly, slowly got myself [back]. I was doing five hours a day of physiotherapy and went back with a physiotherapist and kept working with her as well. And we did more than we had planned to do. That was very important to me. This is a very physical character.
How did it affect your performance?
Charlize Theron: You know, it was a little frustrating. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of making film and then having to take six weeks off. For me, anyway, because you can't really take it off, you know? Your mind is still completely connected to it. And so that was a little hard. And then realizing that that was what I had to do. But in a way, very good, because I could utilize that time. Whereas for three months prior to starting this film, I spent a lot of time on the physical aspect. And I really spent that six weeks really thinking about where this woman had to go in the story. So just used it to my advantage.
Is there more pressure when you're doing a film that's a big studio film as opposed to doing a smaller film?
Charlize Theron: I always feel responsible, you know, because it's not my money. And I think that I have, I think you have to go into it disciplined no matter what the budget is. Because on an indie, it might not sound like a lot of money, but it's still some. And it's usually coming from a single financier, so it's one person's money. ... I think no matter what the budget is, you have to play within those rules, and you have to shoot a film within certain days, and you have to make your days, and you have to be ready for surprises like an injury or whatever. So, for me, I always feel responsible no matter what the budget is. At the end of the day, I don't want to waste anybody's time or money. I want to deliver something that's good, and I respect the people who give you the tools in order to do that.
What do you hope the movie's overall message is to the audience?
Charlize Theron: I think that it's socially relevant. ... You can't make anything future-based and not pay attention to what's happening socially. The character is very strong, a very independent thinker, and somebody who really stands for something, who really believes in freedom and really believes in questioning humanity. And so ... the reason why I liked the story so much was that it dealt with social relevance. But also with human relevance, and it's not about a bunch of futuristic robots walking around. These are people who still have to deal with love and pain and their place in society. Where they fit in and how they fit in and whether they're being manipulated or whether they're really free.
Why science fiction?
Charlize Theron: Well, like I said, it's not a genre that I'm familiar with. So the elements that really attracted me is the fact that at end of the day, it's bottom line a love story. It's a human story, and the struggles and the things that this so-called futuristic story takes place in had all the elements of human struggle that I'm really interested in. You know? I'm not interested in playing a robot. These are real people struggling with things that I think a lot of people can relate to.
Are you prepared to be the next big action hero?
Charlize Theron: Yes, that's going to be me. Watch out, Arnie.
Karyn Kusama, this is not a film that we would think Karyn Kusama would want to direct.
Karyn Kusama: Why would you think that?
To go from Girlfight to Aeon Flux doesn't seem like a natural progression. What was it about this project that attracted you, that you saw that you could do something with?
Karyn Kusama: Well, I like stories that ... have very sort of strong central characters. And in that way I think I'm pretty traditional. I'm sort of interested in a very traditional, classical narrative a lot of the time. ... And Aeon Flux is such an interesting kind of flawed and ambiguous heroine in that she behaves sort of irrationally at times, or she behaves from a place of just instinct or animus. And I think that's really interesting. ... I've always actually loved science fiction, and my interest in Girlfight was ... in trying out a social-realist kind of movie within a contemporary setting.
And I think all movies end up being a a form of experiment in that you're always trying to do something new, for yourself and hopefully for the genre. So I thought there was something in Aeon Flux that was particularly fresh, and [it] had the opportunity also to be really, really beautiful, like ... visually beautiful and bracing to look at and to interpret on a narrative level. I feel like that's something that's sort of missing from a lot of sci-fi recently. It's become so much about a kind of gray, dark apocalypse, and we have the opportunity to tell a story that's quite a bit brighter on the outside and perhaps even darker on the inside.
Can you talk about the differences your approach takes in this film from the animated series? What cues you took from that and what departures?
Karyn Kusama: Well, the animated series is visually, of course, I think, very interesting and very strange and fresh at the same time. I like its spareness and its minimalism. ... What's also interesting about it is there's all these strange narrative paths that it takes, and a lot of it, frankly, ... willfully doesn't make a whole lot of sense, which is really interesting for the short-form animated series that it occupied for so many years. And I think now, in making a feature, you sort of have to recognize that a feature film is just a different animal than a short-form animated series.
So you have to start from there and accept that those differences exist, and you can't simply copy the other or imitate the other. You have to reinterpret and rethink to some degree. ... There's a sort of alienation. There's a strangeness. There's some kind of eccentricity in every character that goes perhaps unjustified or unexplained. The movie doesn't have to make a rush—similar to the series, I hope—to explain every single point, because I hope it's ... smarter than that and assumes that audiences are smarter. That's my hope.
Can you talk about Charlize's taking on this role? Again, she's not the person you look at and think, "Yeah, Flux." Coming off of Monster and then the Oscar, subsequently, this seems like a curious choice for her to make.
Karyn Kusama: That's interesting. I actually think that every choice is a choice, first of all, and that maybe part of what the movie is trying to explore, —what I would like to explore in making movies—is there is no one trajectory, there is no grand master plan, and for me what's interesting is that ... in Monster she could play someone who had a tremendous amount of pride and humiliation and violence and tenderness in herself at the same time. And I found it to be her most committed and honest performance, I think, that I'd ever seen. And that commitment to ambiguity, to some degree, is why I think she's perfect for this role. That she can sort of play with the gray area and not be always on this straight trajectory is part of what ... I hope ... interests her about the character, and I know it interests me about the character.
What is it lie moving from a smaller, independent picture to something this scale?
Karyn Kusama: I think the politically correct answer would be [it's] a learning experience. I mean, it's an interesting experience. I can't actually speak ill of it, because what I'm learning is the terrible pressure any artist is under to fulfill the demands of the investment that the company they work for feels it is making. And that's a very difficult task. And it's hard to handle it with grace, and I think that's my biggest challenge. Figuring out a way to navigate through all of it.
The small movies are fabulous, because they afford you a different kind of freedom. Like a very, kind of limited freedom, but [you have a] short amount of time to make decisions very quickly and in a very sort of connected, ideally, way. And I think I couldn't have made this movie on that level. I just couldn't have made a tiny Aeon Flux. It just wouldn't have served the story. ... You just have to relax into it and accept that ... all movies have this sort of struggle to them if you're really going to fight for what you believe is right for the movie, no matter how much they cost. So I think that, in a funny way, a lot of the challenges are the same for a movie this big. They just sort of get amplified by the pressure around budgets.
Marton Csokas, your character's quite different from the cartoon character.
Marton Csokas: Yes.
You have darker hair. You're not a sexual deviant as much as you are in the animated series. Can you talk about what else is different from what people saw?
Marton Csokas: I ... purposely didn't look at it for the film. ... I mean, I loved the series, and I didn't understand or comprehend why that would want to be re-created. And I had a meeting with Karyn Kusama, who alleviated a lot of those concerns, because her attempt and accordingly mine ... was to take some of the themes and plant them in a more human sort of world, which is sort of obvious, really, given that that was animation and we're real people, and ... so that charmed me. And as for Trevor Goodchild, ... there are hints of what he was [in the screenplay,] and I was happy with that. I expressed those fears, ... and Karyn was in agreement with it. ... The sexual deviance, I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss that, but we have hints of it, but in a more psychological way and in a more human way.
When you're involved in a project like this that's based on another medium, there are fans that are always going to have their own ideas. Does that make you leery of getting involved in something like this?
Csokas: Yeah, that was certainly a consideration. I think that's true of anything. It's just like the book versus the film, or, in this case, the animated series. But, hopefully, not having seen the end result, we will have arrived at somewhere different, and the film will reside in its own world, rather than an attempt to replicate [the animated series]. If we do that, we will have failed miserably.
Can you tell us about working with Charlize?
Marton Csokas: Well, she's very professional, and she's very efficient, and she's very good at what she does. In this role, her physical adeptness and skills become very obvious. And her mastery of that. She's very centered in her emotions, so to work opposite her makes for an easy exchange.
What did Karyn bring to this project? Obviously translating it from the animated series to making it more narrative in this medium. What was she specifically looking for from you in pulling all of this together?
Marton Csokas: I think, given the genre, she was looking for the interpersonal relations, the attempt to [base] it in some sort of reality, given the genre, the context.
Any experiences on the set that were really challenging?
Marton Csokas: I remember the falls. I remember being blasted into walls and s--t like that. Yeah. That's somewhere in my memory, my shaky memory. Repetition on things like that becomes quite painful because ... if you do a stunt, sometimes it can look like a stunt, and I'm relatively physically adept, and I like throwing myself around. Once, twice. But then you get to nine, 10, 11, and to try to make it look realistic all the time, that's not really pleasant. Because all the falls I took were meant to be pretty and articulate in grace and elegance and things like that. ... And I remember Berlin. Berlin to me was the star of the film. I loved the six months that we spent there.
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