The one song Juliette Lewis wants played at her funeral: “One of my go-to happy songs”
As pitches for films go, “woman gets so jealous of the attention a high-end chair in a shop is getting that she somehow body-swaps with it” has to be up there as one of the most bizarre in recent years, and yet that’s exactly the premise of By Design, the latest movie from Juliette Lewis.
Seemingly unfazed about receiving any accusations of ‘wooden’ acting, Lewis stars with Samantha Mathis in the film that comes out in February next year and which has been described as very much something people will love or hate, which sounds about right given the plotline. But then Lewis has never really shied away from taking on controversial stuff.
After all, this is the actor who, at the height of when the tabloids ruled the mood of any given nation, the mid-1990s, appeared as the female lead in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers opposite Woody Harrelson, a movie that stoked all kinds of red-top fury on its release in 1994, accused of glamourising gun violence and even causing real-life killings.
Lewis was just 22 and coming off the back of an Oscar nomination when she played the role of Mallory Wilson Knox, Harrelson’s murderous other half who accompanies him on a bloodthirsty spree across the US and she would prepare herself for the gritty shoots by blasting Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’, sparking a mix of movies and rock music that became her career over the next 30 years.
The year after Stone’s film, Lewis made Strange Days, a sci-fi thriller written by Terminator director James Cameron in which she played a singer and recorded two songs for the soundtrack herself. It was quite a weird film all told, a mix of political statement, futuristic technology and ultra-violence that flopped quite spectacularly at the box office, losing tens of millions and almost derailing director Kathryn Bigelow’s career completely.
But Lewis was undeterred and over the next year or so got considerable acclaim for her performances in Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Basketball Diaries and then the Tarantino-penned From Dusk till Dawn. A few years later, she pivoted fully to music, starting her band Juliette and the Licks, which included the drummer from Courtney Love’s band Hole and released a debut EP called …Like a Bolt of Lightning. Lewis also appeared as a vocalist on The Prodigy’s album Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned in 2004.
In terms of her own inspiration, Lewis highlights a particular song from the 1970s that was a massive radio hit for London band Manfred Mann, albeit originally written by Bruce Springsteen for his debut album. She told Pitchfork: “Sometimes in interviews I get asked what song I would want to be played at my funeral, and it would be ‘Blinded by the Light’. To this day, that remains one of my go-to happy songs. The structure of the Manfred Mann version is bananas. ‘Blinded by the Light’ is an entire movie in a song.”
Released in 1976, the song went to number one in America and caused a bit of controversy because people couldn’t work out if the frontman Chris Thompson was singing ‘deuce’ or ‘douche’. It propelled the band to new heights after they had gone through several lineup changes and sounds after forming as a blues band in the early ’60s
Lewis added, “I’ve never actually listened to the entire Bruce Springsteen version to know what he does, musically. Did he construct that whole thing where they slow down the tempo? And there’s that lyric! I think that’s what hooks me: when I’m at my happiest, I am blinded by the light.”
Lewis’ band went on to release two albums and support Foo Fighters before splitting in 2018 as she went solo. Most recently, she’s been seen in teen horror Yellowjackets, the fourth and final season of which will premiere later this year.
