I had the pleasure of nearly working with Lara Belmont once. She had just done Tim Roth’s THE WAR ZONE, which was much-hyped in the biz, and the word was that casting her in our film could help us get the backing, so I was under a certain amount of pressure to like her. I met her and DID like her. She liked our script and the notes she gave me on her character were very intelligent, if practically illiterate from a strict grammar and spelling point of view. Only then did I see THE WAR ZONE.She looked fantastic onscreen. Her seemingly lidless eyes hooked you into a scene, and you could read great depths of thought behind them. Her steep wall of forehead and impossible four-dimensional lips made her fascinating and surprising from every angle.
All this was somewhat dissipated whenever she parted those lips to give utterance. A newcomer to acting, Lara hadn’t really any facility with lines, which tended to sound like lines when she spoke them. I later heard that Roth and crew had sometimes filmed rehearsals, without telling her, in an attempt to capture the freshness and spontaneity that would vanish when she was self-conscious. I wasn’t convinced this had worked.
Anyway, whore that I am, I offered her the part. I was hoping that the experience of doing Roth’s film, and the confidence she must have gained from the (to me, somewhat inexplicable) rave reviews, would help her out. Knowing how great she was considered purely as a compositional element, and knowing that she was both smart and extremely dedicated (she burned her body with a cigarette lighter during one scene of THE WAR ZONE, something I had no intention of asking her to do), I had some hope that her difficulties with dialogue-speaking could be overcome. I was gambling with both of our reputations, though.
Anyway, Lara’s agent ultimately persuaded her to do a different film instead (”a piece of nonsense”) and our project lumbered on for a few years before dying a natural death. So I never found out if our film could have sailed to glory on Lara’s amazing face. I’d still love to get her in front of my camera though: whether or not I succeeded in getting the best from her as an actor, no film with those features gracing it could ever be entirely ordinary. http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2007/12/08/features/
