Showgirls may have been a dog of a film, but Gina Gershon's sultry screen presence got a lot of
people squirming in their seats with lust. Controversial exposure of that nature didn't hurt
Gershon's career. She recently wrapped production on Paul Schrader's Touch, due out from
MGM early 97 as well as This World Then The Fireworks with Billy Zane and Sheryl Lee. She
went on to shoot an independent feature in the Czech Republic called Prague Duet dir by Roger
L. Simon (wrote Enemies:: A Love Story) Here she is playing a traditional female lead role
opposite Rade Seredzja (Before The Rain, The Saint) in a love story that deals with finding out
about the past.
Gershon just started production in Paramount's Face Off having been cast alongside Nicholas
Cage, John Travolta and Joan Allen. She plays Cage's girlfriend in the John Woo action thriller
about a detective (Travolta) who surgically swaps faces with a terrorist to go undercover.
An erotic, funny, gangster thriller, Bound is Gershon's first film to be released since Showgirls.
"With Showgirls, first of all I've always been a big fan of Paul Verhoeven and to me Crystal was
a great part. I used to dance a long time ago and I've always been really obsessed with
strippers and showgirls. When I go to new towns I go to the strip clubs and I go to the flea
markets and between the two of them you can suss out and get a feel for the town."
In Bound Gershon plays Corky, a butch ex-con in a white singlet, work duds and boots who is
fixing up an apartment for one of a gang of Chicago mobsters. When she spies the sexy,
pampered Violet in the elevator, the mutual attraction is galvanic. Violet is Caesar's dame, the
woman on his arm who makes him look good while he attends to the mob's business of
laundering money. When Caesar is put in charge of two million dollars worth of embezzled cash,
Violet and Corky cook up a scheme to relieve the gangsters of their dough and implicate Caesar
in the theft. Such a simple plan.
Gina Gershon is wearing an embroidered halter-neck top, dark trousers, silver rings on every
finger. Hiding behind her thick, square black spectacles is a gorgeous woman wearing some
sexy makeup. She has two plastic daisies stuck in her pigtails. With a hot, lesbian sex scene
within the first ten minutes of the film, Gershon may have crossed over a line with this role,
towards taking more risks.
"Well, after Showgirls I felt anything was possible. If I like a role and if I like the director then I
want to do it. It seems to me that during my career people were always saying you shouldn't do
this for some reason or another. I don't want to listen to any rules - I don't know who makes
these rule up. It's such a personal issue. I was talking to an actor and he was saying how
uncomfortable he was with sex scenes and nudity and I said then you shouldn't do it. There's
nothing wrong with it but you should really know where you own lines are drawn and be true to
yourself. Obviously my boundaries are a little further than some people's but I didn't have a
problem with this role."
How much of the excessive, over-the-top nature of this film was on the written page?
"I really didn't get a sense of it until I talked to the Wachowski brothers. So much of that quality
came from the cinematography. So once Bill Pope, the DOP, started moving the camera in
clever ways we started having a lot of fun with it."
Gershon accepted this part when she was still making Showgirls. "I was shooting eighteen hour
days and I was so tired when I had to meet them. I had read their original script of ASSASSINS -
not the one that ended up being shot - and I thought these guys are really good writers. I'm
always looking for good writers because I'm part of a theatre company called Naked Angels. I
wasn't sure if I wanted to do the film but they talked me into it, after I asked them a lot of
questions. To be in on the first film of a couple of potentially exceptional new directors was
exciting.
Gershon felt Corky was a great character. Indeed it's rare for a woman to play the traditionally
male role in a film, to be the silent hero.
"Usually when the women are strong and doing it for themselves and having a life, say in
Thelma And Louise, they usually have to die at the end. In American films the women are
always the girlfriend or the arm piece but it was nice to actually be at the core of the film and be
the hero. No, it was a great part and when do you ever get to play a male role? I kinda jumped at
it."
Getting into character was a process that started with the external and worked towards the
internal mood of this hardened criminal.
"I got to cut off my hair, have dirty fingernails. Obviously she's a lesbian but her sexuality
doesn't define her character. And I got to wear tattoos, which I thought was cool. The only tattoo
that is in the script was the Labris on her arm. But then I started to get into the ex-con mentality;
it seems that when people go to jail they end up coming out with tattoos. I thought of Robert de
Niro in Cape Fear, except I wasn't going to go that far."
Yet yours were very ornate and I liked the one on you hand that looked handmade.
"The one on the hand was a symbol of three circles and a triangle and it represented where
you've been, where you are and where you're going. Corky is a character who would prefer to be
invisible and really is so vulnerable that she puts the hardest exterior to protect herself. She
thinks the tougher she looks, maybe people will leave her alone."
But she also seemed very happy in her own skin -
"She's absolutely comfortable with who she is. I talked to a few people who had just got out of
prison and they all said, 'We just want to keep to ourselves. You mind your business and don't
bother me.' Which makes sense. She's a real loner, which falls into the real hero category of the
lone wolf."
The directors talked about consulting the writer Susie Bright to get the lesbian details right. How
did she influence you?
"She told me a lot of great places to go in San Francisco. I even went alone. I like doing my
research alone because then you can really melt into the world. I was really looking for a 'look'
and what I discovered was there are so many different subcultures. There are the femmes and
the he-shes, the butch dykes so that really opened my eyes. Susie gave me the name of a book
called Stone Cold Butch by Leslie Feinberg and it was such a moving story. I watched a lot of
Marlon Brando, Clint Eastwood movies to get that kind of feeling of that maleness, those who
don't show anything. I started boxing to get that distance and to get muscles. It was really wild
because my boxing partner ended up being Bob Dylan!"
Did you kick his arse?
"I hit him so hard and I thought, 'Oh my god! I just hit Bob Dylan!' and he was, 'Oh, no, it's okay. I
need a good woman to do this every now and then.' He's a real boxer. We have the same trainer
in LA, who said I needed to get in the ring and spar. I had a really good time. You know in the
movie I play the Jew's harp - I added that in - and I was talking to Bob about my Jew's harp and I
think he thought I was a musician and he ended up asking me to play with him. He was having a
concert the next night and he said, 'Hey, why don't you come up and jam with me?' But I had to
shoot the scene in the truck with Jennifer's character all night long and all I wanted to do was
get out of there so I could play with Bob Dylan. But I missed my chance. I almost gave up acting
that night."
Did you run across any trouble with the censors?
"Oh yeah - with Bound they almost wanted to make it NC-17 and we actually had to change the
love scene. The love scene was shot in one take and the one that we wanted to use was so
beautiful - it was much more of a love scene. You actually didn't even see any breasts at all, I
guess it was more suggestive that her hand was on my crotch. If it was a man between a
woman's legs, that would have been okay. But lesbian's use their hands. They thought it was too
suggestive and said if we use that take - which was more of a love-making scene, right now it's
more of a sex scene - they would have made it NC-17. It's absurd and it seems to happen more
with lesbian films as opposed to gay men. When I saw Total Eclipse where the two guys have
sex quite overtly, I watched that and I asked about it and they never had any problem with the
threat of an NC-17 rating."
How was it working with Jennifer so closely?
Gershon laughs - "So closely! I adore Jennifer. She's the most out there one of all of us. When
Jennifer is a little nervous she starts talking very fast and with a high pitch but once you get to
know her more, she's really a smart girl and really lovely. We have lunch but I won't go
shopping with her because she's such a bad influence - she's a crazy shopper. It was wonderful
working with her. She made my job a lot easier because as soon as I saw her - I had been
concerned - but she was so animated and really funny that I thought I could just watch her."
But she's not bubbly and animated in this film at all - she's something else entirely.
"I think this is the best work she's ever done. She's amazing in it. I'm always apprehensive
when working with a love interest, I had to meet Jennifer first before deciding to do it. We were
both saying, 'Who's the other girl?'. As soon as I met Jennifer I thought she's gonna make my job
so much easier for me. She's so animated, fun, adorable and charming. I wanted to get that
sense, with my character, of a guy watching a girl, and she's just so womanly I felt I could just
sit there and listen to her. I could watch her and be amused with a big smile on my face."
Do you think Bound might have been a different film if a woman had made it?
"Maybe the finger cutting scene. Every time I see that I cringe and I can't deal with it. That's
really intense. As much as I like the brothers and I felt instinctively they would be great
directors, when I met their wives I was in. They are so terrific and such great women I thought,
'Oh - I get it.' Then I met their mother and I realised these guys are just surrounded by amazing
and evolved women and I thought okay I'm safe."
How do you think people will react to the unconventional ending?
"I hope well. No one exactly gets off scot-free, though. No one is the poster child for morality, in
this movie. If you talk to Joey, who plays Caesar, he's a victim. If you talk to me, I'm just trying
to do my job but I see a good 'in'. Jennifer's character is trying to get out. They're all a little bit
morally reprehensible in their own way."
