The Oscar campaign for Sienna Miller’s lead turn as doomed
socialite and Andy Warhol gal-pal Edie Sedgwick in the Weinstein
Company’s Factory Girl never really gained traction, but the
film is finally seeing its overdue release this week, and cast and crew
alike are out in full support of it, hoping to catch some gulf-stream
momentum amongst the elite film press out there already tired of
talking about the Dreamgirls Oscar non-nominations.
I’ll have much more on the movie in the coming days, but thought it
would be interesting to kick things off with director George
Hickenlooper’s thoughts on his paparazzi-hounded star (below). To wit:
Paul Giamatti or Brian Posehn, depending on the budget. “It was Natalie Portman, Kate Hudson, the whole shebang. Brittany Murphy gave an insane audition, which was amazing. Selma Blair gave an amazing audition. Lots of great actresses gave auditions. Then (producer) Holly Wiersma called me from the Venice Film Festival, and said she had this great actress, Sienna Miller, who just finished Casanova with Lasse Hallstrom. A couple months later I’m in a casting meeting at Endeavor, my agency, and come across this headshot of this blonde girl with this slightly insouciant, sardonic smile. I’m thinking, ‘Wow, it’s a young Julie Christie.’ I look on the back, and it’s Sienna Miller. I hadn’t seen anything she’d done, so I got a tape of Keen Eddie, and I thought it was OK. It didn’t really blow me away. But something about her headshot struck a chord with me. I kept thinking about her. And then her name came up a couple weeks again, she was flying into town. I said, ‘Let’s audition her.’ So the audition was at 3 o’clock, and I had to catch a plane at six. Three o’clock rolls around, then 4 o’clock, and I’m thinking, ‘Where is this Sienna Miller, where the hell is she?’ So I get on the phone to try to find her, I’m furious… and then literally, right as I’m about to walk out, Sienna walks in and is like, ‘Ohmigod, I’m so sorry, my towncar got lost, and I just flew in from London…'”
“And, I mean, people are always apologetic, but I was just completely blown away by her discombobulated, self-effacing manner. It was explosively charismatic, and it took my breath away. You have that experience with some women that you meet, but it wasn’t a sexual thing at all. The energy was just very powerful. …And she just read off the page, and I was startled by how good of an audition it was. I felt like Edie Sedgwick, or at least my perception of her, was being channeled from some other world. …So as I was sitting in the plane on the taxiway I got on my phone — even after they’d said to shut off your cell phone — and called Holly and said, ‘I want Sienna, she’s the one.’ So that’s how it happened. It had nothing to do with anything else other than her audition.”