Minnie Driver has been spending most of her time behind the scenes recently, producing pictures with her sister Kate and providing voices for just about every animated feature that came out last year - Tarzan, South Park and Japanese epic Princess Mononoke. So it's good to see the striking English actress front and centre again in the romance Return To Me, even if she is playing a woman who thinks she has a lot to hide. Driver plays a Chicago waitress who receives a heart transplant, and is embarrassed to let the first man in her life (David Duchovny) know. She gets even more skittish when she learns that the new heart came from her beau's deceased wife.
Was it the romantic fantasy or the character that attracted you to this project?
The latter. I was very interested in the life of somebody who has had a heart condition, somebody who has been infirm and sick. It's so specific what you physically go through, and so daunting about how she literally has not had a life at all. Her life begins when she's 26. The notion of that naivety and innocence, and the detail of the mundane becoming incredibly extraordinary... Riding a bicycle is like climbing Everest for her. There was also the notion of gratitude and fury, her rage about not being able to be unhappy. She has bad days and feels guilty about having bad days. I mean, somebody died for her. All of the women who spoke to me about having their own heart transplants mentioned that.
Do you find it amusing that in your first major movie, Circle Of Friends, you played a chubby ugly duckling, but now you're considered this glamorous beauty?
And rightly so! That stuff all came a lot later. Circle Of Friends was just another job, I had nothing to lose. I don't even know that I've got a lot to lose now, because it's sort of the kind of thing that you can get back. I probably wouldn't enter into gaining a lot of weight lightly; I'd have a lot more concern about it now, just because I'm older and whatever. But that's not to say that you can't or I wouldn't. It wasn't always about becoming a fashion plate, it wasn't always about becoming beautiful. That sort of emerged as something extra. And it's very nice to have those accolades, but it shouldn't impinge on you as an actor.
Why did you and your sister form a production company?
Because it's such a drag sitting around waiting for somebody to tell me I could go to work. I mean, why not? Why not get out there and use the leverage that I have right now to make films that I like, to work with my sister, to do something, most of all to be useful during the long times when I'm not working?
Any sibling rivalry?
I've got to say not really. We have a bizarrely good relationship. We have our fights, but they haven't been to do with work.
Even when one of your movies hits a snag, like Slow Burn?
No. But it is a truly dreadful film! Everything that could go wrong went wrong. Unions shut us down, we ran out of money, we had a director who just wandered off into the desert one day and refused to carry on with it. But we just laughed so much! There's nothing like true adversity when it's not just happening for the day, but you know that the whole thing is an absolute, irretrievable disaster. I think everyone's got to have one.
You made that with your boyfriend, Josh Brolin. Have you met his stepmother, Barbra Streisand?
Yes.
So, how is she?
She's very well.
Guess you've had enough about your personal life in the media, huh?
Well, I refuse to get involved with that. I refuse to entertain that as any kind of a problem.
