High Time for a Challenge or Three

When Andie MacDowell gets excited, she slips further into her famed South Carolina drawl. “You should hear me,” she says. “I definitely have a Southern accent when I’m just being me but a particularly strong one when I’m at home.”

On this day, she’s in a Century City hotel suite, far from her current North Carolina home but audibly enthusiastic about her latest roles, both unexpected, in two films: “Harrison’s Flowers” and “Crush.”

“I don’t very often get to carry a movie,” MacDowell, 43, says with a smile. With a television pilot in the works, she is thrilled to be finding the kind of roles she has been longing to play. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the opportunities that I’ve been given, but I was ready to be challenged more as an actress,” she says.

With credits such as “sex, lies, and videotape,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Groundhog Day,” the actress has felt frustrated with the lack of well-written roles available to women, especially for women older than 40, especially in Hollywood. In recent years she’s gravitated to smaller movie projects like “Shadrach” and “The Muse,” and last year’s “Dinner With Friends” on HBO, for which she received some of her best reviews.

It’s no wonder that MacDowell, who had scored after taking a risk on the small British project “Four Weddings,” would turn to two projects from overseas to test herself and her persona as the gal next door: “Crush” is a British sex-in-the-country romp in which she gets to play naughty, and the English-language French film “Harrison’s Flowers” is a harrowing drama about journalists covering the war in the former Yugoslavia.

She was attracted to the love story of “Harrison’s Flowers,” in which she plays the distraught wife of a Newsweek photographer who has gone missing while on assignment in war-torn Croatia and is presumed dead. Convinced he’s alive, MacDowell’s character makes a perilous journey into the thick of battle to find him. “It’s the kind of script that you don’t get to read every day,” she says. “The woman was actually strong and capable and intelligent and had integrity.”

“Harrison’s Flowers,” whose October release had been delayed to March 15 because of the terrorist attacks, became more timely than anyone could have anticipated with the film’s unsettling parallels to the kidnapping and murder in Pakistan of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

MacDowell points out that 47 journalists were killed over five years while covering events in the former Yugoslavia. “But I think right now it’s more raw and fresh with us because we’ve all gone on this journey with Daniel Pearl. I did it, you did it and everybody else did it. It was there and available for us. There’s loads of other stories that just haven’t been available to us.”

In an effort to understand better what happened in the former Yugoslavia, MacDowell watched documentaries and talked frequently to former photojournalist Isabel Ellsen, who co-wrote the script and was on the set as the stills photographer. Ellsen has written several books about war correspondents, based on her assignments in Lebanon, El Salvador and Afghanistan. Once, while covering a tribal war in Africa, Ellsen used her camera to block a machete aimed at her head.

“She was fascinating,” MacDowell says. “And I also thought it was real interesting because she looked a lot like me. She was about the same height, about the same size and very feminine, but yet extremely brave and capable. And she had been shot twice. The stories that she could tell would just blow your mind. And [she] had gone into a war and helped save people, so there was a whole reality for me for this story.”

“Harrison’s Flowers” was shot primarily in the Czech Republic because land mines made shooting in Croatia too dangerous. The $10-million budget meant there were few amenities.

“No one was catering to you,” MacDowell says. “I had to be sure that I had my earplugs in, [because] no one checked....It was that kind of chaos.” She says she didn’t feel entirely secure that the crew knew what it was doing with the explosions. “I’d just have to trust. But I didn’t know how big the explosion was going to be, if something was going to hit you or not hit you.”

She was also unnerved by the gruesome images as they re-created scenes of the brutal bloodshed. “All the sets were completely shocking,” she says. “You’re acting, but at the same time, you’re in character and you’re being exposed to children being blown up. It looked real. It looked real. You didn’t really have to search for what it would feel like.”

The role took its toll. “It was completely emotionally draining,” she says. “I was really ready for the movie to be over. On the one hand, particularly [for] me, as a woman, when these roles are impossible to find, it was a great satisfaction as an actress. On the other hand, after a while you do not want to live in hell anymore. And it felt like hell, day in, day out. Toward the end, I would have worked 24 hours a day just to get the movie over with if I could have.”

As it was, she and the cast and crew worked 16-hour days during the 54-day shoot. French director Elie Chouraqui insisted the actors be on the set all day and not go back to a trailer between takes to keep them in the mind-set of being trapped.

“I have a very nice photo where Andie is eating in the mud. It’s raining and someone has an umbrella on her head,” he says. “I remember once she told me, ‘Please let me have a good night, let me just have a good [night’s sleep].’ But I said no, because you must

It was the only argument they had, Chouraqui says. “She wanted to rehearse, she asked a lot of questions. Andie, she knew from the beginning that it was really something important for her,” not only as a role but also because of the events that really took place there.”

MacDowell was more than ready for the decidedly lighter tone of “Crush,” a $6-million British comedy opening Friday. In the film, she plays a never-married American expatriate headmistress in the English countryside who meets with her two fortysomething divorcee friends each week over gin and cigarettes. The one who shares the most pathetic unlucky-in-love story wins a box of chocolates. The women’s close-knit friendship is tested when MacDowell’s character begins a tryst with a 25-year-old former student, now an organist at the local church.

Says “Crush” director John McKay of MacDowell, “I needed someone who the audience would believe, without question, was a very good person, because Kate is being good and well-behaved and dutiful and always volunteered for things all her life. And yet, it needs to be someone who we also might enjoy being wicked for a while in the movie.”

It was an opportunity for MacDowell to play a sexier role than she has had before.

“I love the fact that she’s a headmistress but that she ends up having sex on the tombstone [and] in the back of the car twice,” she says with a grin. MacDowell thinks nudity is often unnecessary, but she wanted the sex scenes to be truthful if not graphic. After spying a postcard of an old painting on the set, she suggested one shot in which the audience sees her bare back as she sits up in bed, her face reflected in the mirror.

“I didn’t want it to look like a fake in-the-bed scene,” she says. “The first time I shot it, it was humiliating because, of course, I had to be really naked and I had to sit up in front of all these people ... but then I was able to relax and actually do it.”

“Andie was looking to push the boundaries as far as she would go,” McKay says. “Sometimes she’s been cast as the sort of sweet girl-next-door woman. And no, she’s really a grown-up girl. She’s all woman.” McKay was nervous about shooting the physically intimate scenes between MacDowell and Kenny Doughty, but MacDowell found a way to break the ice.

“She taught me and my producer to do the shag, that sort of Southern dance they do,” he says. “And we thought this was very funny, because shag means something very different in the U.K.” At the start of each rehearsal, McKay had them do the shag. “When I saw them shagging, I knew everything was going to be OK.”

As the relationship between MacDowell’s character and the young man deepens, she faces skepticism from her friends. MacDowell says, “I asked people, ‘Do they look odd together?’ And most people didn’t have any discomfort with believing that these people could be in love with each other.”

But, she adds, “I could not be attracted to someone that young because I am such a mother. I have a son who’s 15. I would feel uncomfortable with the age difference. But on the other hand, I felt that it was interesting to be able to do it--because men do it all the time--as a sense of equality.”

It’s a bias MacDowell has encountered in being considered, or not, for roles in Hollywood projects. “And it’s not that I have a problem working with someone who’s 20 years older than me, but I think that I should also at the same time be able to work with someone who’s my same age,” she says.

MacDowell remembers one discussion with a prominent director she had admired. The subject was a script with a female lead that he said needed to be rewritten around the male character to make it more commercial. “Who came up with this concept?” she asks. “They have some formula, I truly believe, and he said it: Women go to movies to see men, and men go to movies to see men.

“And I just don’t think that’s true. I think people go to movies because they’re good ... and it doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman [in the lead].”

MacDowell has also completed the film “Ginostra,” co-starring Harvey Keitel and directed by “Marie Baie des Anges” director Manuel Pradal, and she continues working as a spokeswoman for L’Oreal, which she has done almost since she started as a model more than two decades ago.

She is also shooting a one-hour pilot for CBS tentatively titled “Jo,” about a widowed veterinarian in New York who moves back to her North Carolina hometown with her daughter after her mother suffers a stroke. MacDowell had wanted to do a TV series for years but hadn’t found a premise she liked until Mike Newell, her “Four Weddings” director, heard she was looking and thought her perfect for an idea he was developing.

The routine of doing a series appealed to MacDowell, especially after Sept. 11. “I could not have taken a job and left [my kids] after that, and to be able to have consistency and to be at home is appealing to me.”

She insisted that the series be shot in North Carolina, near her home in Asheville, so she could remain with her kids--Justin, 15; Rainey, 13; and Sarah Margaret, 7--and husband Rhett Hartzog, a jeweler and former high school classmate she married in November. MacDowell moved with her family to a ranch in Montana for eight years (with then-husband Paul Qualley) and then to North Carolina in 1999, closer to her sisters and father.

“People like to say I’ve shunned Hollywood,” MacDowell says. “That’s not it. I actually think it’s great here and probably I could have had more of a regular life here because I could have done movies here. But the thing is, I really like living where I live, and I like small towns, and I don’t want to be, just because of my job, made to live somewhere that I really don’t want to live.... I don’t like traffic. I like it to be quiet. Two seconds and I’m in the country. I have my horses right there.

“It’s my life. I mean, I’m only going to get the chance to do this once. I don’t want to sit and say, ‘Oh, I really wish--I hated that I didn’t spend my life with my family,’ so I’m spending my life with them.”

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Andre Chautard is an occasional contributor to Calendar.