from answers.com....
I must forego any comments I definitely have and allow this to speak for itself... simply aghast...
Sienna Miller Talks About "Factory Girl"
From Rebecca Murray,
Directed by George Hickenlooper from a script by Captain Mauzner, Factory Girl examines the life of pop culture icon Andy Warhol's muse, Edie Sedgwick. Sienna Miller stars as Edie, the daughter of a wealthy family who became one of the stars of Warhol's The Factory, a place all the hip musicians, poets and actors hung out in the 1960s to create art during the day and party all night.
Edie was one of the shining stars of Warhol's group of young bohemians, but the lifestyle and a love affair with a rock star (played by Hayden Christensen) caused irreparable damage. Psychologically messed up and addicted to drugs, Edie died at the age of 28.
Sienna Miller on Researching the Role and Playing Edie: “I researched it for about a year. I read every book there was to read, and watched all of the films I could get my hands on. Actually, Guy Pearce and I went down to the museum in Pittsburgh - the Warhol Museum. They let us into an archive room where they had different movies that people haven’t seen, so we watched them. The thing about that era was that it was so well documented. Everyone recorded everyone doing everything. So, there are just normal conversations between Edie and Andy that he taped, that I had a CD of, to get her voice and her speech patterns. And then, I watched the way she danced, and I talked to her husband, her brother and her friends.
You feel like this underground detective, going around. I went to Santa Barbara and saw her grave. There’s the Sedgwick Reserve, which was the ranch she grew up in, and we found the entrance to it and climbed over and started running, to try and find the house. We got about a mile up, in the baking sun, and saw a sign that said, ‘Mountain lions operate in this area,’ and screamed and ran back out. So that didn’t go so well. But I spoke to her brother and he said that he would personally take me on a tour around the house.
I felt like I did everything I could have possibly done. I wanted to get to the stage where I was so familiar with her speech. She was very mannered - the way she smoked, the way she laughed, the way she moved. There’s this book, Edie, by George Plimpton that has really detailed descriptions of her soul and her spirit. I didn’t want it to be an imitation. In order to emotionally connect to the material, you have to have done your homework enough that you feel comfortable with all the physicality, so when you’re on set, you can let go of it and try to relate to the character as much as possible.”
Talking to Those Who Knew Edie: Miller’s research included speaking to the people in Edie’s life. “Edie’s husband and Edie’s brother, and a lot of Warhol’s friends -- Brigid Berlin, Gerard Malanga and her best friend Danny Fields, who Edie used to live with. They’re all great friends of mine now. I met as many people as I could but I sort of felt like, if people didn’t offer it up, I didn’t want to intrude on that because she was cared about and loved. But, actually, I met Kyra [Sedgwick, Edie’s cousin] at Sundance. She was lovely and very friendly and nice.”
Getting Into Character: “I think that the most important thing was to psychologically try to understand why she was the way she was. From an exterior point of view, you see this girl who came from a very privileged background and had an education, and then went to New York and took too many drugs and died. People often say to me, ‘Why? Who cares?’ But once you start delving into it, and you psychologically understand why she was freaking out so much…
She had a really tortured background and a difficult upbringing. She was in and out of mental institutions, and had shock treatment at age 14. She was psychologically very disturbed. Once you empathize and understand that, then it justifies why she was just running away from reality. Reality, for her, most of her life, was quite a scary place. She was very layered and I wanted to understand the vulnerability behind her. She looked so confident and aloof and beautiful, but underneath all of that, she was really fragile. I think that the vulnerability was something that I wanted to portray.”
Asked if it was painful to play Edie, Miller replied, “I wouldn’t say it was painful. It was emotionally draining at times, certainly. The scene when I confront Warhol in the restaurant - that really emotional scene - was my second day of shooting. That was a little bit painful because I had just arrived and didn’t know anyone. Sometimes, stuff like that happens. And I had to make a decision whether to sink or swim, and you just have to go for it. So it was emotionally challenging and also completely rewarding, from an acting point of view. You feel a huge sense of achievement when you do get to a place, emotionally. But I really loved it. I would be happy playing Edie, and no one else, for the rest of my life because she’s just so interesting.”
The Physical Resemblance to Edie Sedgwick: Miller looks astonishingly like the real Edie in the film. “I looked like her in the film,” said Miller, “because we had an amazing hair and make-up team. I saw this photograph of her that’s a beautiful photograph and I sort of fell in love with her. But I didn’t think, ‘Oh, God, it looks like me,’ at all. But that was what drew me to the script. When I first got it, on the front page was a photo of her. And she just has this magnetism and this luminescence and I think, like most people, I was very drawn to her. I saw resemblances, when I had the brown contacts and the beauty spot and all of that.”
Miller says she was a fan of certain parts of Warhol’s work prior to working on Factory Girl. “I think I like what it represents and, having really thought about it, I think he’s an absolute genius. He was so ahead of his time. A lot of them were. With the way that he made his movies, putting the microphone in and making it real… He just had real people having real conversations. Flash forward to us now, and our culture and our generation is obsessed with reality TV - but he was doing it in 1965. This man was just so forward-thinking. And the mockery of America, with the Campbell soup cans, throwing it back in its face, I think that’s really interesting stuff.
I prefer other artists, personally, but I really appreciate what he was doing. I wouldn’t mind having a Marilyn in my house, to be honest.”
On Working with Guy Pearce: “We actually went to New York in September and October, and we sat and went through the script with the director, George [Hickenlooper], and really re-wrote some of our stuff and read it out loud. We had a couple of nights where we’d put on the make-up and run around the hotel room, being them a bit. And then I got back to London and Guy would call me every now and then, going, ‘Edie, it’s Andy,’ and we’d have this conversations, just because it was so much fun. We really adored each other. We got on really well, which is great, and I think important. But on the days where the relationship wasn’t so good, we wouldn’t really talk. We did it as much as we could and then, at the end of the day, we’d be like, ‘I’m sorry. I love you.’”
Miller and Pearce would sometimes stay in character all day long. “We’d just been doing it for so long and, because it was a biopic and they are real people, I just felt - and I think he did too - a huge responsibility to do it as best we could. And also we were having fun. We were all in the clothes and we looked like them. We didn’t do it religiously. But I think it’s hard if you’re doing a scene where you have to hate each other, to be like, ‘I love you.’ You want to keep a little bit of tension.”
Guy Pearce has hours of footage of he and Miller goofing off in character as they prepared to film The Factory Girl. “We would just be in my room and I would put on some eyelashes and he’d paint his nails black. I think he has a video of us. He used to film everything. Guy filmed everything because Andy used to film everything. He has hours and hours and hours, and days of footage from all of us on set that I think would be a brilliant film, in itself.”
Edie Sedgwick’s Fashion Sense and Personal Style: “I haven’t gotten to keep any of the clothes yet. That’s something I’m still working on. But, I love ‘60's style. She had such a unique sense of style, and really accidentally came upon it. She used to do these jazz/ballet work-outs, and she’d wear her leotards with her black tights, and then she couldn’t be bothered to change, so she’d just put a coat over it, and it caught on and became this huge trend. It was sort of an inadvertent thing that happened. But, she had extraordinary clothes - beautiful clothes.”
Up Next – A Role in Stardust: Miller reunited with her Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn for Stardust. “He just phoned me up, out of the blue, and said, ‘Listen, there’s this little part in my new film. Will you come and do it?’ And I wasn’t working so I said, ‘Sure.’ I only worked on it for two weeks, and I play this horrible girl. Well she’s not that bad, but she’s the catalyst for why Charlie Cox’s character - who I had also worked with on Casanova, so it was a no-brainer to do it… She decides that she wants a shooting star and she makes him go across into the Wonderland to get it. She’s quite bossy and demanding and not very warm. But it was a cameo.”
Miller didn’t get in on any of the big special effects scene. “No. I was in a scene with Robert De Niro where he was over the other side and I was supposed to look at him. And, of course, I held the look for about an hour, trying to make the most out of it. But, no. No special effects.”
), a fuzzy black wannabe Edie ensemble and now at an FG screening a huge black-and-white striped dress. Let's not forget Anna Wintour's leopard-print coat at the premiere. I suppose it's inevitable and to be expected but I just find it to be really annoying, tacky and dumb.
