Conversation with Julia Ormond and Gabriel Byrne, on the March 22, 1997 broadcast of the Canadian entertainment weekly, "On the Arts".

Q: Did actually shooting in Greenland enchance what you were doing?

Julia: Oh definitely. I mean, Bille [August] and I went to Greenland actually before in November, and spent about a week to ten days there, and that was very important because it was important for me to establish a relationship with Greenland and an affinity with it as if it were a character, and it does kind of act as a sort of character, a character that is yearned for by Smilla, that is missed, that is part of so many of the characters lives.

Gabriel: Not for me it didn't. I mean, it to me was very separate. To me it was a very physical world, and I'm not predisposed towards that kind of physical deprivation, that living there demanded.

Q: The thing I was interested about - I had read the book beforehand, and the book is densely written, and the descriptions are very vivid - what kind of relationship did you have with the book?

Julia: Well, I read the book as well, obviously, and reread it and reread it, but ultimately you work from the script, but I felt the script is pretty faithful to the book, faithful to the spirit of the book. Obviously there are things that can't be included in a two-hour film, but I think Bille worked quite hard, and Ann Biderman wrote a beautiful script in terms of it.

Gabriel: But the book itself was absolutely fascinating because it's rare that you get a thriller that's written with such a literal kind of style.

Q: It maintains an intellectual curiosity, it's fascinating. Now, your character is the most enigmatic in the movie - is that difficult to maintain throughout making a picture, a character whose function seems to be to keep the audience slightly off-balance?

Gabriel: Yeah, it is difficult, because it's kind of in a way like playing poker, in that you want to be able to keep one step ahead, but at the same time you can't reveal too much and at the same time you can't reveal too little. So it's a delicate line, and I think that suggesting mystery and enigma comes from inside, there's nothing you can do in the exterior to suggest it - you can't put on glasses or, you know. So it has to come from within, and a lot of it has to do with silence and looks and reactions as opposed to active kind of acting, if you know what I mean.

Julia: For me, the thriller aspect of it on its own was not that interesting - if you hadn't had this complex character being in the centre of it, then it really wouldn't have been that interesting. But because she is who she is, and because it's also as much as it is a thriller, it is an emotional journey for her, where she resolves a lot of things, it's about the falling of Smilla herself. And she is a character who is quite tough and quite inscrutable at moments and that's because of her vulnerability, she's sort of brought down all of these barriers, to just cope with the fact that as a child she felt at a certain point when her mother died she was put into a loveless environment, and she associates love with pain, and she's going to prevent anybody from causing her pain.