Laura Dern: the actress known for her kook, cool, and quirk looks to the future with a friend and fellow shape-shifter

All too often, women in Hollywood have to choose a persona and run with it--the Madonna, the whore, the Lucy, the Ethel--but in her two decades in film, Laura Dern has escaped public branding and remained a force as unpredictable as the weather. The daughter of veteran actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd has deftly navigated the spectrum of personality, from her wide-eyed innocent in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) to her unhinged outsiders in Wild at Heart (1990), Rambling Rose (1991), and unforgettably, Citizen Ruth (1996). Now, after a three-year absence from the screen, Dern returns with John Curran's ensemble drama, We Don't Live Here Anymore, an unsparing autopsy of two marriages torn asunder by self-inflicted wounds and terminal distrust. Rounding out the cast are Mark Ruffalo, Peter Krause, and her interviewer, Naomi Watts, who visits Dern in her L.A. backyard to talk choice and change.

LAURA DERN: First of all, I have never talked to a journalist with this many notes. [in a Valley gift accent] Like, you've totally done your research. NAOMI WATTS: [also in a Valley girl accent] It's my new career, so I want to do a good job. [in a normal voice] In case anyone doesn't understand why we're talking like that, it's a little character thing that we do. [laughs]

LD: It's our little thing that we share.

NW: Another thing we share is David Lynch [who directed Watts in 2001"s Mulholland Drive]. You once said that he is "an experience," and I thought that was the perfect way to describe him.

LD: Getting to work with him is life-altering, isn't it? He dramatically changed who I was as an actor without me even being aware he was doing it. The thing I love most about him as a director is that he expects one thing from you: to have no boundaries as an artist. That's so fun.

NW: And you're his "little tidbit," and I'm his "buttercup." [laughs]

LD: Where do they come from, his names for us?

NW: That's his secret! I know you are one of those people who, like all true artists, hate compliments. And I'm one of those people who, like all true artists, hate giving them. [both laugh] But I've followed your career and have gotten to know you as a person, and it's extraordinary to see the choices that you've made. There isn't anything that you haven't done: comedy, sexuality, darkness, and innocence. Did the roles just come to you, or were they conscious decisions?

LD: Well, on one hand, I've been lucky. When I was 14 I screen-tested for the TV series Family Ties, and I didn't get the part. I could have spent a decade on that show. But on the other hand, as a teenager and young adult, I also had some choices. When I was 16 I was asked to do a really mainstream Hollywood love story, but at the same time I was offered no money to play the small part of a blind girl in a Peter Bogdanovich film [1985's Mask]. And I was like, "Peter Bogdanovich!" It was my dream to work with this man. And my agent totally didn't get it, so he fired me. [laughs] As an adult, I started making actual choices. People have asked me, "Is there a theme in your work?" and I really don't know the answer, except to say that the one thing I feel a lot of my movies share is that they are often about a woman trying to find her own voice. In [We Don't Live Here Anymore] we're both women trying to define ourselves.

NW: Shall we talk about our film a little bit? It's about people who are doing loathsome things to one another, and it seems like an honest and brutal depiction of what marriage can be. I know that you, like me, had some degree of reserve about this material.

LD: I didn't understand the script when I first read it. I was confused and slightly sickened by it--I think we all were. What I loved about the movie was that none of the characters were easy to love, and we all made extremely complicated and amoral choices at certain times. There's also a lot of humor in [Dern's character] Terry that is so intolerable. She's such a mess.

As a parent she can't get everything together, and she's a rager and a drinker. I had never played an adult whose anger was without boundaries. It's an interesting thing to capture, especially as a woman. I'm proud I got to play that part, but there was a piece of me that went, "Oh, she's so hard to watch here!" I don't know if you felt like that watching [Watts's character] Edith.

NW: From me, John always wanted no emotion because he wanted to show that Edith has reached a point of utter complacency. I'm so afraid to do nothing onscreen, because I feel like people will fall asleep. There are some people--Benicio Del Toro, you, Sean Penn--who could be reading a phone book and there's life behind their eyes. But for me, I feel like I fall apart if I don't get to scream. LD: Isn't that amazing? Because that's what is so great about your performance! It's probably good you are continually forced to do stuff that's uncomfortable.

NW: That's why we look to work with great directors. When you're choosing a film, what's the first thing that gets you? Is it a director or a script?