Olivia Wilde had two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the true story Rush, she plays Suzy Miller, a model who briefly marries F1 racer James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and moves on to Richard Burton. Hunt was the rival of Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) and the film chronicles their 1976 racing season. Third Person was screening the day after my interview with Wilde, and I couldn’t even get a ticket this week. It is an ensemble drama written and directed by Paul Haggis.
CraveOnline: Obviously they can never fit everything in the film. Did you shoot any more scenes as Suzy that got cut?
Olivia Wilde: No. No, Suzy was never a big role. The story’s always been about Hunt and Lauda. Actually, Suzy got an extra scene because there was originally a scene between Burton and Hunt. That last scene of me in the restaurant with James was originally a scene with James and Richard Burton where Burton’s explaining that he’s marrying Suzy and that he wants to pay well for her to settle the divorce. In reality he paid about a million pounds. That was a lot in ’76. That scene ended up being my scene so I actually got a little bonus which was fun.
So you really only have three scenes to portray the entire arc of this relationship. What was the exercise of that for you?
Well, I knew that the purpose of including Suzy in this story was to show a different side of James, to show the kind of tumult of his personal life, that he had demons and that he self-medicated and it made him nearly impossible to live with. Behind this kind of smiling charming golden boy public persona, he was quite a tortured person. Also, before that point, that he was actually quite a charming and romantic person who proposed to a woman he had just met, doing something completely spontaneous and wild and she was totally charmed by that as well. I also wanted to make sure that we portrayed their love story as a love story, that you got a sense that there was something real there. She wasn’t just another one of his conquests, nor was she a kind of long-suffering victim. She was very much in love with him.
Normally the breakup happens in the third act of a biographical story. This really changed things up, because they’re divorced before the halfway mark.
I really love the way Peter Morgan structured the script. So complex, and the editor did a brilliant job, I thought as well, of making it all clear. But really, if it’s a love story, it’s between Hunt and Lauda. The structure of it if you think of them as the love story works perfectly. They come back together in that final scene by the airplane which is one of my favorite scenes. My other favorite scene is when the Italians pick them up by the side of the road. Those two Italian guys and they’re like, “Lauda! Niki Lauda!” That scene’s brilliant but the end, the scene by the airplane, I just think it’s so moving. Peter Morgan says he wrote the whole movie for that scene and I love it because you get the sense that Lauda’s begging Hunt to stay in it, to stay his competitor because he is who is driving him to greatness. Without Hunt, can Niki push himself that hard? I thought that was great.
Do we know that Suzy kept watching the races?
Yes, she did.
So that’s not artistic license.
No, she did. She watched him for years and she’s still very fond of him, remembers him fondly and lovingly. She believes that they were in love and it just couldn’t work. I actually think it’s a very evolved, loving line when she says to him, “You’re not terrible. You’re just who you are at this moment in your life.” Most women, when a relationship doesn’t work, or most people I think find it hard to be that understanding. I think it’s quite loving of her to not say, “Yeah, you’re an asshole. You fucked up, you were a terrible husband.” She’s like, “No, it’s just who you are. It’s who you are right now and I have enough self-respect not to deal with it.”
When you see the role of Suzy in the story was to show that side of James, how much research do you do on the real Suzy?
As much as I could. There isn’t a huge amount available, so I read everything I could, I watched anything I could. I looked at all her photos trying to understand her. I learned a lot from the biographies on James Hunt because I thought, “What kind of woman would fall in love with him? What does that take? What kind of spirit was she?” And she’s still, although I think in her young, wild days she was just an amazingly spontaneous wild woman and now is more mature of course and only remembers the good things about James, when at the time I think he could be a nightmare. He could be a total nightmare.
The movie might bring back some memories.
Yeah, yeah, we’ll see.
