“My agent sent me the script. She said, ‘Oh God, oh God–but it’s great. Read it.’ I’d heard it described as a woman whose boyfriend gets mad, cuts of her arms and legs and sticks her in a box, and I thought, ‘Well, that sounds ridiculous.’ But I read it– and it was about a million other things too. I met with Jennifer and we talked about what the story meant to us as women.”
Such as?
The idea of a woman being in a box–women do feel like they’re in a box. The idea of having to be this woman who’s very hard and doesn’t let anyone near her and relies on her physicality, and then that’s taken away from her. What it means to become handicapped and to rely on somebody that much. It scared the hell out of me. I could see this character. I tried to make her real.”
The film was finally finished, with Fenn, and with Julian Sands as the doctor. But Boxing Helena doesn’t yet have an American distributor. Will we ever see it here? “I think absolutely it’ll be released, but they might not get the distribution they would like.” That’s a safe bet. No matter how you slice it, Helena is not mainstream American movie fare.
But Fenn remains optimistic about what the film could potentially do for her image. “I’m sure Boxing Helena will eclipse ‘Twin Peaks’ and Audrey Home for me. If,” she adds, “people here go see it.” While she waits, Fenn keeps her sunny side up and calls the film a “personal success. I’d do it again a million times. I’m very proud of the results.”
Fatal Instinct, on the other hand, is definitely being released. It’s an MGM film, directed by Carl Reiner, the television and movie legend responsible for “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” All of Me, Rob Reiner and plenty more that says mainstream Hollywood/box-office potential/high profile. The film’s a spoof of Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, et al. and, says Fenn, “it made me laugh. It’s intelligent. Not like Airplane!”
Although Fatal Instinct satirizes noir detective flicks and modern day sex thrillers, Fenn says she doesn’t play a femme fatale, but her detective-boss’s “Girl Friday. Sean Young plays the vampy one.”
And what was it like to work with legendary bad girl/set wrecker Sean? “I like Sean’s work,” demures Fenn. “In fact, at the beginning, I was one of the people who told Carl that he shouldn’t listen to her reputation and should give her a chance. He ended up doing that, and she’s funny in the movie.”
Three of Hearts doesn’t sound like it was an amusing film to make at all. I heard reports of trouble on the set of director Yurek Bogayevicz’s love-triangle drama (Fenn and Kelly Lynch as estranged bisexual lovers, Billy Baldwin as the boy-toy), and I ask Fenn to elaborate. “Actually, speaking of verbal commitments, in Three of Hearts they were angry at me when I wasn’t really happy with the project and was thinking of leaving. It was pretty wild because the director was confused and we were rewriting every day. And Mitch Glazer [one of the screenwriters] came on and started rewriting and silently directing and basically saved the movie–from my perspective.”
