Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (1)

Very very Vera
October 10, 2006

Actress Vera Farmiga is having a busy year, what with featured roles in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and the upcoming Anthony Minghella film Breaking and Entering, not to mention a substantial feature in the Sunday New York Times Magazine several weeks back.

But this month, it’s not her big-budget Hollywood productions or Times cover stories that people are talking about, but rather her outstanding star turn in filmmaker Debra Granik’s 2004 independent offering Down to the Bone, which will be issued on DVD by Hart Sharp on Oct. 31.

For her harrowing performance as a working class mother of two struggling with a cocaine addiction, Farmiga won a Special Jury Prize for Acting award at Sundance and the L.A. Film Critics Award for Best Actress (beating out Reese Witherspoon, Felicity Huffman and Dame Judi Dench).

“Down to the Bone has been the calling card for everything thereafter--The Departed, Breaking and Entering, and six other films I’ve done since then,” Farmiga told us last week. “We’ve been applauded by our valiant effort by the whole industry.”

The micro-budgeted indie has indeed gone to bat for Farmiga—both Scorsese and Minghella screened the film before it was released theatrically and were so moved by her performance that she earned auditions for the directors’ latest films.

“It wasn’t really a surprise to me—I knew what we had done was from the heart and that there were no gimmicks,” says Farmiga. “Debra finds God in the details.”

Farmiga appears with Granik on a supplemental commentary track on the Down to the Bone disc. As it was the first commentary she ever recorded, Farmiga found it a bit “demystifying” to talk about her process.

“I like to put my performance up on the screen and let others talk about it, so it was a change of pace for me,” she laughed. “But I like listening to Debra!”

Posted by on October 10, 2006 | Comments (1)