How independent movies shaped Julianne Moore’s career
The career of Julianne Moore is something the actor herself defines as “two-pronged”. She has starred in several independent movies, which she considers “movies for myself” as well as those “to make a living”, or in other words, Hollywood blockbusters.
Moore started her career in the mid-1980s, starring in the cast of the soap opera As the World Turns, where she began to make a name for herself. The actor considers the beginning of the 1990s, though, as the dawn of the independent movie, a golden age if you will, and her performances in Andre Gregory’s Vanya on 42nd Street and Todd Haynes’ Safe drew widespread critical acclaim.
Moore had been discussing independent films and Safe with Haynes in a feature for Criterion. She began, “I do think for me, to be really shallow about it, it was a really interesting point in my career because it was at the beginning of my film career intercepted with the beginning of the independent film. Safe, you couldn’t have gotten more independent than Safe.”
“It was made for a million dollars without the expectation that we were going to make a lot of money,” she added. “There was the idea that this was a different kind of filmmaking without the economic expectations. Oddly, when I started out in the 1980s, I was doing a lot of television, and I was doing some theatre, but I didn’t do any film work.”
Safe is set in 1987, directed by Haynes, and Moore plays a suburban housewife whose life is thrown into chaos when she develops an illness caused by the environment around her. Moore would go on to play similar characters, psychologically troubled women, throughout her career.
Continuing to explain how independent films changed her life, Moore said, “It wasn’t considered serious or whatever, but independent film changed a lot of things for everybody. Suddenly, there was a new avenue; you could have an artistic voice.”
“At that point, we were given that tremendous freedom and it really changed the way I thought about what I wanted to do with my career,” she added. “I ended up having a very two-pronged career. I had movies that I wanted to do for myself, and I did movies to, you know, make a living. In a sense, it helped me, and it shaped what I do.”
Moore also believes that it has become a lot harder for independent movies to get made in the way they were in the 1990s. “I actually think it’s much harder now because the economic expectations for any kind of film are just untenable,” she said. “It’s made it impossible for anybody to do anything new.” So it appears that that golden age might just have disappeared for now.
