Halley Feiffer ’07 is one of the few Wesleyan students you can stalk not just on the Facebook but on the Internet Movie Database as well. Halley has acted in three films, most recently “The Squid and the Whale”; a number of off-off-Broadway and regional theater productions; and “one ‘Law and Order’ episode where I played an insane Catholic school girl.” At Wesleyan she has starred in the plays “Life x 3” and “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” and founded (with Jess Chayes ’07) the Wesleyan Playwrights Collective.
Now in the role of director, she has taken on David Mamet’s play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” which goes up at the ’92 Theater, Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 6 p.m. Free tickets are available at the campus center box office.
MB: Tell me about “The Squid and the Whale.”
HF: It’s set in 1986 Park Slope, Brooklyn, and it’s about a family that goes through a divorce. The parents are both intellectuals; the father is an English professor whose career has been steadily petering out, and the mother is just beginning to have her literature published. It follows all four members of the family as they cope with this hilariously awkward and painful divorce.
MB: Who do you play?
HF: I play Sophie, the girlfriend of the 16-year-old son [Walt, played by Jesse Eisenberg]. It’s a really cool part because she’s basically the least corrupt character in the movie. The four family members are all very hurt and conflicted about this divorce and take their angst out on each other in very painful ways. And my character is—at the risk of tooting her horn—the only one who’s really interested in helping any of them. She’s really attracted to Walt, the film’s protagonist, despite his rather obvious shortcoming, and he really treats her like shit. After their first kiss, he looks at me and says, “I wish you didn’t have so many freckles on your face.” There are these very subtle mind games that the characters play with each other that I think is very accurate of the way that humans sometimes tragically interact with each other.
MB: How was your experience filming it?
HF: It was probably the ten most fun days of my life thus far, to be quite straightforward. It was just really dreamy because I loved the script and loved the actors—I was mostly working with Jesse Eisenberg. Half the fun was just hanging out with him because there was so much downtime on the set. It was such a low budget movie that everyone working on it was for the most part the top in their field and they were doing it for a fraction of the pay that they usually get. The cinematographer does all of Wes Anderson’s films and obviously those are much higher budget than this, and Wes Anderson was one of the producers.
MB: Did you get to meet him?
HF: Once. He came to the set when we were filming the scene where we first kiss. And he actually had a suggestion for a line that [director] Noah [Baumbach] had cut—he suggested that he put it back in but in a different place. And now that line gets one of the biggest laughs in the theaters.
HF: And that was exciting because indirectly I was getting directed by him too. I just worked on another movie this semester and I realized that “The Squid and the Whale” was really unusual because it was really a labor of love. Most of the interns and production assistants were unpaid; they were Noah’s students at Vassar. It was obvious that all of us were really excited about this film; it wasn’t just a job for anyone.
MB: So what’s the new movie you’re working on?
HF: Its called “Stephanie Daley.” It’s about a sixteen-year old girl who gets pregnant and is in denial about her pregnancy and then gives birth to the baby in the bathroom of a ski lodge and kills it. And I’m the baby—just kidding. I play her best friend, Rhana. She’s totally different from Sophie. When I auditioned for it in fact I was thinking, I’ll go on this audition but I’m definitely not going to get this part, because she’s characterized as the pretty, popular girl, or confident girl, which is as far from how I think of myself than possible, or how casting directors seem to see me.
MB: Did that make the part more of a challenge?
HF: Yeah. Plus, I was supposed to be the best friend of this actress who played Joan in Joan of Arcadia [Amber Tamblyn]. She has a ton more experience than I do and felt much more comfortable on the set than I did, and also had been there longer than I had. So she was rather intimidating to me, to say the least.
HF: Also, we had very little rehearsal. I directed a play that goes up this weekend, and the difference between the processes of making that play and making this movie were like night and day. The actors have so much time to talk with me, talk with each other, whereas in most movies you show up, you meet your co-actor and you have to make love in a bed or something.
MB: Would you say that’s typical?
HF: I think so. In theater the rehearsal process is so much more intense than in film. In film it seems that you discover much more as you’re actually shooting, and in theater it seems that you make your discoveries beforehand and while you can still find new things every performance the core framework is basically unshakeable. That’s what I found directing this play which is amazing and depressing and kind of wonderful—unless you do about a month of research writing thinking and talking before you even start your first rehearsal, you don’t really understand the play until about a week before it goes up, at best.
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