Natural Born Actress

You’re always skeptical when you hear of yet another Hollywood actor releasing his or her own CD. Why? Well, generally, most of them are just really bad, right? So when I first received the Juliette and The Licks (a band fronted by actor Juliette Lewis) CD in the mail a few years back, being a guy, of course all I could think of was her scene in Cape Fear where she put Robert De Niro’s thumb in her mouth. I loaded it into the CD player more out of curiosity than anything else. Maybe I could play it for a colleague and we could both laugh at how bad it was. So I put it on and surprisingly, what I heard was good, solid garage rock, not unlike Joan Jett. And this was her first CD from 2005 – Like a Bolt of Lightning. Four years go by, years that were devoted to just music and no films, and she releases a couple more CDs, the songs get better, she starts touring with big bands (Foo Fighters, Muse, Chris Cornell and this year The Pretenders) and playing at all the important festivals around the world. In 2009, we find this Oscar- and Emmy-nominated actor with three films coming out and a new album, the just-released Terra Incognita (sans previous band The Licks), produced by The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez-Lopez.  

Jonathan Clarke – Why the name Terra Incognita?

Juliette Lewis – I guess it means unknown territory in Latin and that’s where I really wanted to go and be – both musically, in making a really wild-sounding record and physically, by touring around the world in places I’ve never been, which I’ve been doing for the past few years.

JC – So it’s now Juliette Lewis with a new band?

JL – A new band with a new sound. Juliette and The Licks had built a good reputation as a solid, garage-y type of rock band for five years. It took a lot of courage for this to be just me now, just using my name. I always wanted to have a band name like Juliette and The Licks, or, you know, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Patti Smith Group, Iggy and The Stooges, who all influenced me a lot. You know, really strong front people. My whole motto now is to be loud and proud. I am proud of what I have done here now musically and in film using just my name. I am all about owning it. So now I can do what I want. My next record could be Afro rhythms; who knows? So with this new album, I wanted to go a bit stranger with the guitars. What I was doing before was pretty much straight up, old school rock ’n’ roll. And now, at times, the guitars are a bit more psychedelic and radical. The groove this time is more in your hips than banging your head.

JC ­– I just have to list some of your movies for our readers. Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase…

JL – Love it. You can see it every year around the holidays!

JC – The Wonder Years TV show, My Name Is Earl, movies like Cape Fear, Husbands and Wives, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Romeo Is Bleeding, Kalifornia, Natural Born Killers, Strange Days, Basketball Diaries, From Dusk Til Dawn and Old School, to name just a few. So you have this relatively new career in music, but the tunes had to be playing in your head the whole time you were growing up, right?

JL – I always used music to get into character for my movie roles. For Natural Born Killers I was listening to a lot of Hendrix. Like “Voodoo Child Slight Return.” The chaos, danger and despair in that song is really amazing. Music is so visceral; you can hear two chords and some drumming and you instantly feel something. I’ve always listened to music that suited my many moods. For Cape Fear, I was listening to all the torch singers like Billie Holiday, Anita O’Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, because of all the heartbreak in the songs they sang. Plus I had this teenager role where my character was filled with longing.

JC – So you have not put the film career completely on the side though?

JL – I took four years off from movies so I could totally focus on music. I was going for broke. Two of those four years I was on the road, too. Just recently, though, I did a handful of movies because I had a break in the music cycle. So coming out in October I have a film with Drew Barrymore (Drew’s directorial debut) called Whip It where I play a roller derby girl named Iron Maven. Ellen Page stars in it and I am sort of her nemesis. It’s a really fun movie, sort of a coming-of-age film with Ellen’s character. I also did a comedy with Jennifer Aniston. And also a really heart-wrenching, dramatic, smaller type of film with Mark Ruffalo directing and starring that will come out next year.

JC – So the new album again, Terra Incognita – translation, unknown territory in Latin – but it seems like you are getting to know this territory pretty well.

JL – It’s a sonic landscape filled with pixies in a bowl and danger.

JC – That sounds like a record review.

JL – That’s from my mind. The album cover is me holding a bull on a leash and that vision came to me out of a guitar riff. Kind of like taming a bull; you can’t do it.