America’s new ‘civil war’: Natalie Portman on school shootings
Regular mass killings are having a ‘psychological impact on every kid going to school’, says actress, who plays a singer badly wounded in a school bloodbath in Vox Lux
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Hollywood star Natalie Portman called school shootings America’s “civil war” on Tuesday, comparing the psychological torment they cause to the threat of terror attacks in Israel.
The Oscar-winning actress drew the parallel before the premiere of her new film about a traumatised pop diva, Vox Lux, which opens with a Columbine-style massacre.
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“I have been interested in the questions around the psychology of what violence does to individuals and in mass psychology for some time, coming from a place where people have encountered violence for so long,” said the Israeli-born star, best known for Black Swan.
“Unfortunately it is a phenomenon we now experience regularly in the United States with the school shootings.
“As [the film’s director] Brady [Corbet] has put to me before, it is a kind of civil war and terror that we have in the US,” she said.
The regular mass killings were having a “psychological impact on every kid going to school every day and every parent dropping their kids off”, said added. “Small acts of violence can cause widespread torment.”
Portman, 37, plays a singer who is badly wounded in a bloodbath at her school but builds a pop career after she sings at a memorial for her classmates.
Corbet, who was a schoolboy in Colorado at the time of the Columbine killings, confessed that the massacre “marked me psychologically. I was living there when it happened. It was close to home.”
The director, who is best known as an actor – starring in Thunderbirds and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games – was editing his award-winning directorial debut, The Childhood of a Leader, in Paris when the city was hit by a wave of terror attacks in 2015.
“I had a five-month-old [child] at that point, and me and my wife were shaken by it. One restaurant that got shot up was a place we went a few times a week, it was a narrow miss. We were haunted by it,” he said.
We live in an age of anxiety. We are having more sleepless nights than ever
Corbet described his story as a “poetic rumination of what we have all been through … We live in an age of anxiety. We are having more sleepless nights than ever.”
He said the film, with its anti-heroine star – played by British actress Raffey Cassidy in her younger years and Portman when she becomes a Madonna-like diva – was meant as a salve, “something we could come together over”.
“When I think about what will define the early 21st century, especially as an American, it’s Columbine, 9/11 and the global terror threat that has permeated every place I have lived. I wanted to look at what we’ve all been through in the last 20 years,” he told Screen magazine earlier.
Corbet later said that “the 20th century was defined by the banality of evil. I think the 21st century will be defined by the pageantry of evil.”
The director – one of 21 vying for the Golden Lion top prize at the Venice International Film Festival, which will be awarded Saturday – said it took him a year alone to put together the film’s soundtrack before he started shooting.
Australian pop singer-songwriter Sia and avant garde darling Scott Walker came up with the tunes for Portman and Cassidy’s characters, with Portman’s husband, French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, putting together the dance numbers for the stadium show finale.
Vox Lux is the second major pop-music-based movie showing at Venice to turn on the rise of a female singer. Lady Gaga last week won glowing reviews for her debut as a big-screen leading lady in a remake of A Star is Born.
