Four-time Academy Award-nominee Amy Adams had read the ‘BIG
EYES’ screenplay early on, but she wasn’t prepared to do it at first. “I
thought it was very interesting, but I was at a time where I wanted to play
really confident characters and wasn’t sure how I would find my way into
Margaret.” However, when she next saw
the script, things had changed. “I’d
become a mother and had a totally different perspective on the character and I
understood -- it wasn’t lack of confidence.
I was attracted to the story from the beginning, but at the end it was
Margaret that I really got pulled into.
Margaret is complicated, like most human beings. She’s definitely a little shyer, and she’s
very humble. That’s one of the qualities
about her that I think allowed her to be manipulated.” Adams did a lot of research to prepare for
the role. “When you have a story that has two very different sides and people who
write about it that have different perspectives, it’s really hard to put your
finger on what the true story is. I read
what Walter said about Margaret, then I read what other people said about her,
and there’s not a lot in her own
words.” So Adams travelled to San
Francisco and spent a day with Margaret Keane at the artist’s gallery. “That
was most beneficial, to see this woman and understand that yes, there is this
humility, but there’s this strength and this sense of humor. I didn’t want to pry, but I wanted to get an
understanding of who she was and how this could have happened. What I came to was her gentle nature.” The actress and the artist spent half a day
together. “It makes me nervous when
people look at me,” Margaret Keane says, “but she wanted to watch me paint, and
she made it painless and was so down to earth.
It was wonderful.” Keane was
delighted with the casting of Adams, who sports a vintage blonde bob in the picture. “When I
first saw her with the wig on it was a shock.
It was like seeing myself 50
years ago! She was absolutely perfect.” While Walter Keane was a fixture on the talk
show circuit of the era, Margaret was much more in the shadows.
“There’s only a little bit of footage of
her,” says Adams, “so I didn’t have a lot to pull on who Margaret was.” So Adams based her performance on the elderly
woman she actually met, and, she notes, “In the end, you can really only go
with the text because everything else, all of our memories, even of ourselves,
are skewed. So going with the text,
trying to help tell the story but at the same time being mindful of who she was
as a person and what’s important to her now.
I talked to her about why she would be willing to tell this story. She is a Jehovah’s
Witness and that is why she wants to show that these things can happen in
our life but we can find redemption at the end of it and strength within
ourselves, so I felt like that gave me permission to tell her story, with my
artistic interpretation, while understanding her a little better.”
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| Photo courtesy of Captive Cinema |
“Margaret became identified with the big eyes
and she was able to express her pain and sadness and her questions. I think that’s why people respond, because
there is such an openness and a questioning and a
vulnerability and this amazing quality that children have and she’s really able
to capture that.” Walter
appropriated Margaret’s waif paintings and declared them his own, and they came
to be known as the “Keane” paintings. As
Margaret developed as an artist, she continued to paint “Keanes” attributed to
Walter, but she also created elongated psychological paintings of women, often
self-portraits, which she signed MDH Keane and publicly claimed as her
own.
‘’BIG
EYES” is released and distributed by CAPTIVE
CINEMA.
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