He touches an orange Bic fighter to his sixth cigarette. “She never screams, not until the last moment. Never asks for help, either. She fights to survive, but she sort of knows it’s part of the deal, living in a small Greek old-world town. She accepts her fate, even though she never quits. She knows her own culture: You don’t scream. You take it. You do whatever you can, but you don’t degrade yourself You don’t ask for pity. You don’t lose it. She’s a great example of less is more. But boy is the less loaded.”
In The Usual Suspects, Del Toro convinced director Bryan Singer that his incomprehensible mumble did more to build the Fenster character than the dialogue, which wasn’t essential to the plot. In Traffic, he persuaded Steven Soderbergh to cut some of his lines when he felt a gesture better served the scene. In 21 Grams, Del Toro suggested to director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu that his pivotal final scene with Naomi Watts, in which he tries to offer an apology for an act too destructive to imagine, should be done without words. “We shot it once with the lines,” he says. “Then we did it without lines, and Naomi said, ‘That’s the one.’” That take, in which Del Toro’s remorse and Watts’s grief play out in a shared glance, is the one that appears in the film.
The afternoon is almost gone when Del Toro feeds the final film into the VCR: the 1964 mystery Seance on a Wet Afternoon, one of only five movies to feature the revered theater actress Kim Stanley. She plays an unhinged and domineering medium who bullies her husband into kidnapping a little girl so she can win acclaim for helping reunite the child with her family. Stanley got an Oscar nomination for the performance, which climaxes with her holding a seance with a police detective and revealing not only her own guilt but the source of her madness: the death of her infant son.
“She’s the money,” Del Toro says as Stanley awakens from her trance, turns to her beleaguered husband, and asks meekly, “Did I do it right?” “Right there, suddenly she becomes the weak one. She’s been in another place. She tells the cops without knowing she’s telling. It could be over the top, but she doesn’t take it there. It’s bizarre. And great. Just great.”
Does Del Toro realize that what unites the six performances — commitment, self-restraint, and a trust of silence — also defines his own portrayal in 21 Grams? He inhales, considering. “That role would probably be a mixture of Irene Papas and Bride of Frankenstein,” he says, half joking. He reviews the other scenes in his head. “Actually,” he adds, more seriously now, “I guess you could see all these women in there. Susan Tyrrell, certainly. But not as good. Not even close.”
