Hilary Swank is "Amelia"

Two time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank is really great at playing girls with spunk or even girls with "manly" qualities as evidenced in Boys Don't Cry and Million Dollar Baby but the actress certainly femmed it up in P.S. I Love You opposite handsome Gerard Butler and also The Black Dahlia and The Necklace. Now Hilary takes on the most iconic heroine in aviation, Amelia Earhart who had short hair, wore pants and let no man steer her from her goal; to break flying records and establish the airplane as a means of travel. In her research, Hilary learned that, for the most part, Amelia flew for the pure joy of it.

We always find chatting with Hilary to be exhilarating because she is excited about her craft, uses her hands when she speaks and is, in all ways, enthusiastic about her films. Our "Amelia" chat in Beverly Hills was no exception. For our interview, the actress looked very soft and feminine. Her brown/blonde hair is now longer and she was dressed in beige skirt and chiffon top. The skirt was covered with black lace and the fluffy blouse was decorated with black polka dots. she wore super high black heels but kept the look understated with pale beige lip gloss and slight eye make-up. Only her very dark red nails stood out when she used her hands to emphasize a point. Let's chat all things Amelia.....

TeenHollywood: Amelia was certainly an inspiration to the women of her time but what do you hope that teens and young women today will take away from the film?

Hilary: I think that she’s an inspiration to women of today too. That’s what’s incredible about this movie to me is that I have never had such an outpouring of people come up to me and say, 'I cannot wait to see your film.' More than any of my other films I’ve ever been a part of. I think what a lot of people know about Amelia is what you learned in text books; this iconic image of who she was, but I think people also realize that this was a woman in a time when following your dream was a man’s job. She is an inspiration to us, to continue to follow our calling. But even to take it a step further, I think this was a person who made no apologies for really living her life the way she wanted to live it. Even if she were living in 2009 she would be ahead of our time. I think it’s very challenging to live our lives on the path that we want whether you’re a woman or a man.

TeenHollywood: Did you always want to play Amelia? Was it a dream role?

Hilary: I wouldn’t say I was always longing to play Amelia Earhart, but I do long to play roles that challenge me and scare me and make me learn new things about the world, about myself, about my art. I’d read a script on Amelia about 10 years ago after I did Boys Don’t Cry, and it didn’t capture Amelia to me, and so it was obviously not a movie that I was a part of. When this one came across my desk, I just felt that connection.


TeenHollywood: You've played girls pretending to be boys and girls in so-called boys' professions. Amelia says she feels she isn't beautiful. Do you relate to that at all?

Hilary: You know, I think that being an actor we’re constantly being objectified and things are thrown at us, what we look like and how we should look, and we’re not this enough and we’re not that enough so it’s easy to look at yourself in those terms. I think that ultimately there are so many different ways in which a person is beautiful and so to think that Amelia would talk about herself in those terms is so remarkable when she was so beautiful and accomplished so much, really achieved so much. She was really speaking up for the inner quality of people who were facing adversity and inequality, and for women’s rights, so to just see that she was human in that dislike of herself was a really vulnerable moment.

TeenHollywood: Is there any footage in the archives of her actually speaking or just of her waving at crowds?

Hilary: The actual things that we have of her speaking are limited, and a lot of the stuff that we have of her speaking are when she had her public persona on. I found about 45 seconds of when she didn’t know the camera was actually on and so I got a little bit of an insight of her not public face, which was very obviously insightful for me and something I really grabbed on to, because I didn’t want to parody her. That accent was very specific, the cadence in which she spoke was very specific, the way she carried herself was very specific, as it is for all of us. If I were playing you I would want to break down your exact mannerisms. They were big shoes to fill, I couldn’t take a lot of fictional-license actually that I could probably take if I were playing you, so it was a daunting task and I felt like something that I had to really study to do justice to her.

TeenHollywood: She seems to have a strange accent.  Did you have to work on that?

Hilary: It was really the most challenging accent that I have done to date. I spent over eight weeks trying to figure out how she spoke. There's that period way of speaking which can sound kind of posh. It sounds kind of upper class and Amelia wasn’t that. She was a girl from Kansas and she sounded period yet she sounded different from that. It was challenging I think to walk that line, to find that human quality in her voice.

TeenHollywood: What was the greatest resource you used to research her?

Hilary: There were three things, one was the newsreels like I said, then the literature that we have on her, people writing about her, then the firsthand stuff of her letters and her correspondence between loved ones. But I’ll tell you, she was such a private person that getting to know what she really felt was something that you had to read between the lines, because it’s not really on the page even when she wrote about it. So just getting her childhood was hard. I think our childhood makes up a lot of who we are and how we carry ourselves in the world, and what her parents were like, and the gifts her parents and her sister gave her. Her father encouraged her to get an education, to learn how to write, she was a prolific writer, she was writing poetry at the age of five.

TeenHollywood: What did you take away from playing her for your own life?

Hilary: That you might be doing (what you do) because it’s your mother’s idea of your life, or your friend’s idea, or your partner’s idea, or whatever it is, and I think Amelia was just such a great reminder that you can live your life the way you want it and find love and experience your dreams. You can have it all. That’s what I really learned in diving deep into who she was. You know, you only live once, you might as well be doing what you love.

TeenHollywood: She didn’t pay a lot attention to people who told her to put a lid on her ambition. In your life, were there any people who told you to give up your dream?

Hilary: Oh absolutely. I had one teacher who told me when am I going to give up my hobby? Look, everyone is going to have an opinion and it’s difficult when you’re obviously pursuing your dream. I had someone tell me I was too 'half-hour' (comedic) when I was trying to get into drama. There are always tons of opinions. And some of them can be constructive, and I think you have to learn how to decipher which is constructive, what you can take in and actually help incorporate you into being a better actor or help you become successful, and the other ones that are silly, you just kind of push to the side and try not to take in. As actors we really wear our hearts on our sleeves, and so it’s easy to have that stuff that’s thrown at you be upsetting.

TeenHollywood: Have those two particular people ever gotten back in touch with you since you've won two Academy Awards (she laughs)?

Hilary: Well said. No, one of them pretends they never said it, because I’ve run into that person before and the other teacher I never saw again.

TeenHollywood: When you were exploring the character, beyond the icon what were the elements of her personality that most surprised you?

Hilary: I really think that I didn’t recognize truly how unapologetically she lived her life. It’s something that I touched on. I found it quite remarkable, but at the same time she wasn’t threatening to people. She didn’t live it and say, ‘Screw you all, this is my path,’ and leave a bunch of people behind. She cared about people. She was really sticking up for people as we discussed earlier, and I found the more that I read about her, the more endearing she became. I'd read about her and go ‘What? This is someone I wish I could meet and talk to', and again I think this is why people are so excited about her story.

TeenHollywood: You learned to fly. Can you talk about how that helped you play Amelia?

Hilary: You cannot play Amelia Earhart and not learn how to fly! It was just as exhilarating and freeing and exciting as she writes about. I 'get it' now. Learning how to fly for me was so euphoric because it was like I was learning how to ride a bike. It was a first. It takes all of your senses, and you’re completely immersed. It’s dangerous. It’s adventurous. It’s all of the things I loved and that Amelia loved. I was exciting to learn something new that really was challenging. I didn’t realize the calculations that go into flying. It was like I was back in calculus. I flew 19 hours, I was wanting to get my pilot’s license but for insurance purposes they couldn’t go up by myself in order to do that, especially before filming the movie! Now I’d like to get my license and continue to go up on my own. I think saying that I learned how to fly in order to play Amelia Earhart is pretty great.

TeenHollywood: You have something else in common with Amelia; all the promoting Amelia had to do that her husband Putnam set up for her in order to finance her flying; endorsements, tons of public appearances. You have to promote your movies. How do you feel about promoting things in order to live your passion?

Hilary: Well obviously my passion lies in telling stories. It’s what I’ve wanted to do since I was 9 years old. I love people. I love what makes people unique and what makes them similar. There are similarities between Amelia and me. I find that she loved to travel, and I love to travel, and I’ve been so fortunate in my career, in my job, to travel all around the world, and part of that is to talk about those films that I’m a part of. It’s sometimes, I'm not gonna lie, grueling and difficult. I mean, in the last 16 days I was in Italy and then back to Los Angeles, then London and back to Los Angeles and now New York. I'm constantly in the air and I’m constantly out promoting my films, but as Amelia did, she understood that without that, without the understanding of the business side of things, you can’t have you career. You just try to do the best you can. There’s a line in the movie 'I feel like I’m jumping through a hoop' and sometimes you feel like you’re a little in a circus. But I’m just an actor trying to talk about my love for movies.

TeenHollywood: Talk about actually working with a real Electra plane like Amelia had.
 
Hilary: I have to say it’s a character in the movie. You can’t tell the story without the Electra.  we fly all the time. There are hundreds of planes in the air right now, and they’re going to be there tomorrow. When Amelia was doing it, it was a sport, and she hoped that some day it would be a way of transportation. And this plane, particularly, is a beast to fly. It’s not easy. Flying when Amelia was flying was dangerous so to fly to that around the world, if you really take that into consideration, it’s quite remarkable. When we had the plane, I taxied it. I didn’t obviously get to fly this plane but it’s a whole other thing.

TeenHollywood: Do you think Amelia would be surprised at how commonplace flying has become now?

Hilary: I think she’s be thrilled. It was something that she was always commenting about when she was working with Gene (Vidal, played by Evan McGregor). I think he was one of the first creators of the FAA as we know it now, and it was all about the progress of aviation in any way, shape or form, she just wanted to be a part of that.

TeenHollywood: Doing all the research you did on this, do you think the end is how she really died?

Hilary: I do. I do believe she ran out of fuel. I know there are a lot of different ideas about what happened, was she kidnapped by the Japanese? Was she stranded on an island? But believe me when doing my press a lot of people say, ‘I don’t know if that was really the way you should have ended the movie,’ and I appreciate that there could be a lot of different ways. Maybe if the movie’s successful we’ll pretend she did land and make a sequel.