Before she has even had a chance to schedule driving lessons, budding film star Q’orianka Kilcher has war stories from auditions to top most longtime Hollywood veterans.
Iconoclastic director Terrence Malick thought Kilcher might have the right face and, at age 14, the necessary unforced innocence to play the crucial role of Pocahontas for his movie “The New World.”
But studio executives and insurance companies were aghast. Hanging a multimillion-dollar production on a teenager with one tiny film role? Long shooting hours for a girl who should be chewing gum in homeroom? Love scenes with Tinseltown bad boy Colin Farrell?
“I auditioned 20 times,” said Kilcher by telephone from New York. At a final audition to win over the money folks and legal departments, she belted out a blues tune, “Dr. Feelgood,” to show her range and confidence.
“That was to get the bonding companies to sign on,” Kilcher, now all of 15, said with a laugh.
But they couldn’t take all the girl out of the ingenue. Kilcher (whose first name is pronounced kor-ee-ANK-ah) loudly chews on ice during an interview, then apologizes, then announces it’s not to protect her voice but to cool off a Diet Coke. She gushes with enthusiasm about working with a legend like Malick (“Badlands,” “Days of Heaven,” “The Thin Red Line”) and calls Farrell a sweet “big brother.”
Malick’s directing style requires a face like Kilcher’s to create sticking power in potentially impatient audiences. Malick’s camera often lingers on Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith (Farrell) as they wander through Virginia’s tidewater country in a rapture of natural harmony. Kind observers will call “The New World” poetic and langourous, while those frustrated by the dreamy pace may call it indulgent.
Kilcher’s face also had to withstand Malick’s plan to use natural lighting on location. Her striking beauty comes in part from a father native to Peru; Kilcher looks plausibly American Indian in the movie but in a can’t-quite-place-it way that becomes riveting.
A casting agent trying to land her a part in the TV series “Into the West” called her “an Indian Julia Roberts,” not far off the mark. Malick’s production staff was intrigued by her photos, and she finally met the relatively reclusive Malick on her fifth audition.
“Tell me a story in a British accent,” Malick said to Kilcher. “And I was like, ‘Aauuggghh!”‘ she recalled. Kilcher launched into a made-up fable about a caged bird and a little girl, having practiced for three days from a CD by a dialogue coach.
The role demanded constant language practice. Kilcher had to learn Algonquin to first play Pocahontas as she meets Smith and the other Jamestown settlers from 1607. Then she must play Pocahontas learning formal, British-inflected English.
“Terrence had me learn the whole script in a British accent, then they decided at the last minute to make it extremely authentic. So I had three weeks to study Algonquin,” Kilcher said. “I really made myself learn it, so I wouldn’t worry so much about my pronounciation and I could really react to what the other Native American actors were telling me.”
Kilcher is quick to admit she didn’t pursue the part out of deep conviction. Like almost everyone else, she said, “I only knew the Disney cartoon” version of Pocahontas, singing about the “colors of the wind.”
Malick wanted to tell the story of Pocahontas aiding starving British settlers, only to betray her own tribe because she was blinded by affection for Smith. A second act tells of her adapting to a marriage with another settler, John Rolfe (Christian Bale), then traveling to a formal court presentation in England.
Malick hired a research department to make the shoot as realistic as possible, recreating the unwritten Algonquin language and poring over designs of Indian costumes and tools. Kilcher studied with that group.
“I admire her courage, for being able to dream of worlds collaborating in peace. She was ahead of her time,” Kilcher said. “The more I researched Pocahontas, the more I fell in love with her, and who she was, as well as her personal struggles.”
The natural lighting and the accuracy of the Algonquin encampments “made the cameras disappear” during filming, Kilcher said. During the extensive scenes where Kilcher and Farrell revel on the land, “Terrence Malick’s voice was our guiding light,” Kilcher said. “He would tell us to go for a walk. He’d say, ‘Be the wind, Q’orianka, be the wind.’ There was lots of improvising and lots of playfulness.”
Kilcher knows some of that ethereal feel was lost as Malick had to keep cutting. The film that opened in New York and Los Angeles to qualify for Oscar nominations has already been trimmed by 15 minutes for release in other cities, including Denver. Malick has indicated his DVD version will be closer to three hours.
“I’m looking forward to the DVD; that will be another big surprise all over again,” Kilcher said. Meantime, she’s looking at scripts for other roles, and definitely not expecting a car for her 16th birthday in February.
“I’ve had no time to learn how to drive,” she complained. “So I probably won’t be driving until I’m 17.”
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
