By Fred Topel | Image property of Universal Pictures.
For a film noir thriller like The Black Dahlia, you’d expect us to talk to a femme fatale, wouldn’t you? Well, Scarlett Johansson could out fatale and femme if she wanted to, but that’s not her character in the film. She plays a detective’s wife, who suffers for his obsession with solving a murder, ultimately falling for his partner.
Scarlett Johansson Talks The Black Dahlia
“I guess it's that classic thing of you always want what you don't have, but I mean, at the same time the relationship between Lee (Aaron Eckhart) and Kay is so complex,” said Johansson. “As Bucky (Josh Hartnett) says, 'Whether she saved him or he saved her, who knows?' I'm paraphrasing that, but you don't really know if they ever had a real physical relationship. If they did it's not happening anymore and it's almost like a relationship that elderly people would have in that it's a real codependent relationship and a real true love for one another almost like a brother and a sister in a way. So when she meets Bucky and she realizes that she has this sort of passionate interest for him I believe that it's kind of easier for Lee to give her up to that because he sees that there is a sort of true love there or the possibility of a real healthy relationship with someone.”
The Black Dahlia- Scarlett Johansson
The women in The Black Dahlia in many ways serve as functions of the men who are obsessed with them. That’s how Johansson approached Kay. “Luckily I had what a lot of actors don't have which is the source, having the book. I mean, you read a script and you interpret the character's emotions through their actions and their words, but I had the perspective of Bucky's character looking in on Kay. So I really used that as the beginning source to find the character. As far as the physical appearance of the character I really wanted her to look nothing like Hilary's [Swank] character or the Dahlia. So we thought that we would dress her in cream and beige and things that were soft because Hilary's character is so kind of hard and really a glam vixen.”
It wasn’t all serious on the Black Dahlia set. Sometimes it was just like playing dress up. “Well, of course for me getting to play a woman during that period and the makeup and the hair and the costumes and the cars and the sets was all very glamorous and fun and I've always kind of had an affinity for that period. I got to wear a lot of beautiful vintage pieces and they built a beautiful wardrobe for me. So that was a lot of fun.”
The Black Dahlia opens to theatres Friday, September 15th.
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