Photo by Ryan Born

Remember the Daze has been tearing up the film festival circuit this past year. Go ahead: dismiss it as vapid. Accuse it of lacking plot. But one cannot claim it has gone ignored. The flick and the performances around which it is centered have caught the attention of everyone—not least that of Diaz as Brianne, a girl who finds herself confused and uncertain as she seeks to navigate a new clandestine lesbian relationship with her best friend; a role by which many sources have been hailing her as the break-out star of the film.

“Actually, when I went and auditioned I thought that I did a terrible job,” says Diaz. “I left that audition, like, crying because I thought I did so bad!” She laughs. “And then I got a call and I got it. That was nice to hear.

“I think it was the right thing for me, as opposed to choosing politics,” she adds. She goes on to compare it to Melrose Place, in that “I think if you were to do Melrose Place now all the actors would be, you know, sixteen or seventeen. Even though 1999 was ten years ago [the subject matter of Melrose Place and Remember the Daze] is really still significant… I feel like people are going to watch this movie in a couple of years and be like, ‘Oh my god! I remember that!’ I think that people are really going to become familiar with that time.”

The actress was at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival this year on behalf of her latest films—yes, films: she had four in the festival this year, including American Son, Assassination of a High School President, Be Kind Rewind, and Hamlet 2. “Sundance is a really special place for people to go and celebrate their work with other people, and I feel really lucky. I was there for four movies! And I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing here!?’” She laughs. “‘This is so amazing.’”

Our conversation turned not to one of these films, but to a slightly older one: A Guide to Recognizing your Saints. “I still have not [read the book], believe it or not,” she says, “but I should at some point. I worked on it, and I’m so close to it, I kind of don’t even want to.” The writer-director of the film, Dito Montiel, is also the author of the book upon which it is based, and the book is a memoir of his own adolescence. “I think he had the characters in his head that he also knew, and you can never really recreate a person. But I think he gave us a lot of freedom to take from ourselves,” she remarks. There was an interview with her co-star Shia LaBeouf in which he said that he has fallen in love with every love interest he’s ever worked with, she responds frankly. “It’s our job to. I fall in love with everyone too. I mean, I consider it my job.”

Good roles seem to have been coming easily for her lately, and she is thrilled about it. “You know, I think I’ve been really lucky. I think I’m really lucky to choose the projects that I’m really going to respond to,” she says. “I think it’s hard to find any good parts for women… And I say to my agent all the time, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not going to contribute to that. I don’t care. I’ll be broke. But I’m not going to be that.’”

When our conversation leads to Jeff Robinov, the Warner Bros. president of production who infamously said in October that the corporation would no longer be doing movies with women in the lead, she is quick to call him “a silly-ass man” and nearly as quick to assure me, “You can quote me on that.” She sighs.  “A lot of women are the heads of studios, are getting to that point where women are really controlling the ranks, like head of development. And I wish that because of that we could see a lot of characters for women… we women have more numbers in terms of population. So how can you not consider how significant we are in terms of everything?”

However, this is nowhere near enough to dampen her enthusiasm for her upcoming projects, such as Hamlet 2. “It’s about this awestruck actor who becomes a drama teacher,” she explains, “and he gets this really strange idea to remake Hamlet and name it ‘Hamlet 2’, and I play one of the students who help him put on the play. It’s really funny. I think it will do really well; people will love it.”

Considering how much people currently love Diaz herself, the chances she will be proven wrong—about this film or about any other projects she takes on in the future—are slim to none.

Melonie Diaz’s films Remember the Daze and Be Kind Rewind are out now on DVD and her film Hamlet 2 opens this August.

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Jackie   |2008-07-11 21:25:37 Melonie Diaz is a remarkable actress. "American Son" and "Itty Bitty Titty Committee" are two of her best work. She sounds like a real feminist, cool! Reply 1   0

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."