Scream Queen

That hasn't stopped her seeking challenging movies, however. Her latest, the suburban horror Funny Games, is a chilling meditation on screen violence.

Delicate, tiny and sylph like, when Naomi Watts walks into a room you can see how she has cornered the distressed damsel market. We meet during the London Film Festival. Just as well, really. Since the death of her former lover Heath Ledger that bargepole she keeps between herself and the press seems to have got just a little bit longer.

Today, only a few months have passed since she has given birth to her first child, a son named Alexander. Her partner Lieb Schreiber hovers nearby with the bundle. Unsurprisingly for someone of her profession, there are no signs of weight gain. If anything, she looks even more Lilliputian than before as she curls into something like an asana before me.
The only tell is the standard mummy uniform – jeans, long sleeved t, hair loosely piled back. She’ll be 40 this year, though even in these duds, minus the chicanery of powder and paint, she could pass for a woman half her age.
This is the second time we’ve spoken so I know the drill. Naomi Watts is a serious minded woman, not given to frivolities and trash talking. There remains something timid about her, as if genuinely surprised that anyone would think to ask her questions.
Watching her on the previous evening as she spoke to a packed auditorium about her work, she appeared bemused and often mortified by the occasion.
“It’s lucky that retrospective was only an hour,” she says. “They can be so awkward those things. I only did it as I thought it would be fun for my mum. But it was more than a little embarrassing. I do find it difficult, if not impossible, to speak about acting. I operate from an intuitive place. A lot of the time it just feels right. I’m no good at articulating it later.”
She may be a reluctant celebrity but there’s no escaping it now. Not so very long ago Naomi Watts was as famous for her friendship with Nicole Kidman as she was for her acting. But theirs is very much A Tale Of Two Actresses. During the years when the Kidman-Cruise double act reigned Hollywood, Ms. Watts could be found much further down the food chain in Children Of The Corn IV. There were near misses and high profile disasters. Watts starred in a 1993 adaptation of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea that was all at sea. Tank Girl tanked.
“What’s weird is that the disappointment just kept getting bigger,” Naomi told me in 2003. “As you get older it’s like a scab that keeps coming off.”
Her late big break came with David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Originally filmed as a TV pilot, the extended theatrical version became one of Lynch’s most acclaimed films and made Naomi the most sought after talent in Hollywood. Nowadays, in fact, the Kidman-Watts dynamic has almost come full circle. At a time when Kidman, having chalked up five big budget bombs, is the worst value actress in Hollywood, Watts snaps up every decent female role in the business.
Her characters are every bit as pensive as she seems to be. She was a grieving widow in 21 Grams, a midwife caught up in mafia cross fire in Eastern Promises and a guilty adultress in The Painted Veil. I wonder if all this misery doesn’t get her down sometimes?
“Oh no,” she says. “I am not a dark twisted person. Yes, I have my demons but I always feel that pain is better out than in. This is my way of dealing with it. That’s why comedians tend to be the darkest people. They’re following impulses that are quite the opposite.”
Doesn’t she ever feel like doing a nice comedy instead?
“I have been offered comedies,” she says. “But generally those female roles are just girl parts. That sector is so formulaic, I think good parts in comedies are few and far between. I’m often asked if being a mother will temper my choices. But I will not start doing Disney movies just because of my son. My taste is my taste. I think when the time is right my son will understand the movies I have done.”
She admits her taste for anguish can be traced back to a difficult childhood. Born in Kent to a vaguely show business dynasty, her mother Myfannwy was a costume designer while her father Peter Watts was Pink Floyd’s sound engineer. (The eerie laughter on The Dark Side Of The Moon is his.) The marriage was stormy. The couple divorced when Naomi was fours years old, though there was talk of reconciliation three years later when Peter died unexpectedly.
For the next seven years, the family were based in Wales though their mother frequently uprooted Naomi and brother Ben as she pursued various unsuitable boyfriends. They relocated to Sydney when Naomi was 14 though she still considers herself British and speaks in perfect Received Pronunciation.
While in the Harbour City, her acting career began in a typically Australian way. There were small parts in Home And Away and various miniseries.
“You have to be resilient for this business,” she says. “You have to get on with it. You have to take small parts. You have to deal with crushing disappointments.”
Nowadays she can afford to be rather more choosy. She is often a producer on her own films and consistently seeks out the planet’s most interesting directors.
“That’s true,” she nods. “Most of my choices have revolved around directors. It’s fascinating working with someone like David Cronenberg. But practically speaking, I don’t think I will ever be the go-to girl for popcorn movies. I did do I Heart Huckabees and that was goofy. But that’s as conventional as I can be.”
Ms. Watt’s taste for the dark side has rarely been tested as rigorously as it is by Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. A superb shot-for-shot English language remake of the director’s own terrifying 1997 thriller, even high-brow scream-queen Naomi found the material to be very strong meat indeed.
“It was not an instant or easy decision,” she tells me. “I really struggled over whether to do this one. I got a call saying Michael would like to work with me. Of course I wanted to. I had very much admired his work like Caché and The Piano Teacher. But when I saw the film at home with a girlfriend I was utterly shocked. I had to talk through it as it was so damn creepy and difficult, such an extreme reaction. Ultimately that’s what makes it worth doing, the fact that you can’t get it out of your head.”
The film, though a series of treaties on screen violence, American complicity, Hollywood hegemony, might be summarised more simply as the brutal torture of a middle-class family by psychopaths.
“It was very hard as an actor on any number of levels,” says Naomi. “I have done a few remakes (King Kong, The Ring) and you watch them once and then get rid of them. But this was difficult as everything was the same. I felt like I wouldn’t be able to be organic. Also I was gagged and blindfolded and bound up for parts of the film. I felt like I was trapped. I was trapped. In the end I just had to surrender to it.”
Keeping with the habits of a lifetime, Naomi is currently negotiating for Tippi Hedron’s role in The Birds, a part that will see her fall victim to murderous seagulls.
“The thing is I never see any of my roles as being victims,” she smiles. “I see them as being on a journey. And if that journey requires being attacked by birds then so be it.”

Funny Games is released April 4.