Meryl Streep is no stranger to big-screen musicals, after starring in Mamma Mia! and Into the Woods.
She also sings in her latest film, Ricki and the Flash, in which she plays a rock star who abandoned her family to chase fame, with limited success. Later in life, she gets one last chance to make it up to them and redeem herself. The cast also includes singer-songwriter Rick Springfield, veteran actor Kevin Kline and Streep's daughter Mamie Gummer.
It is interesting that the Ricki character is not that successful as a rock star.
Absolutely. There is more forgiveness in the fact that my character is supposed to be mediocre. I was immediately enamoured with the script for this movie. I sat in a chair and it made me laugh. It was very “felt” and moving and sort of bumpy. It felt honest and it was funny.
You’ve worked with director Jonathan Demme before, on The Manchurian Candidate.
We worked together on that more than 10 years ago and that was a very different experience. It was a remake of a famous film, and it was extremely stylised. My character was fairly straightforward, as a villain, and you’re not interested in all the character’s different dimensions. It’s sort of flat-out Iago evil. But this film had more layers and was a lot more fun to approach. It was our own to invent. It wasn’t coming from any other material.
And Jonathan has a rich connection to music. His Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, is seminal.
He’s done amazing things with Neil Young and with Talking Heads — that’s a terrific movie. He really gets it. That’s his wheelhouse — he loves the music and so do I. I love music. Rick Springfield was maybe the biggest gift that this movie had and all the guys in the band, Rick Rosas [the bass pslayer] and our drummer, Joe Vitale. I had heard of Bernie Worrell [the keyboard player]. I knew Rick, of course. Sadly, Rick Rosas passed away after we made this film and we’ve dedicated it to him. He was particularly generous to me. He had played with Neil Young for 30 years and came off Neil’s tour straight into our rehearsals. And I started from zero. I didn’t know anything about anything. We had two weeks to rehearse as a band and that’s no time at all, even if you can play the guitar.
Were Rick and the backing band very patient with you?
Oh yeah. I was really at their feet. I was just in love with these guys. I’m sure it was really annoying because I kept apologising, which is very annoying, but they were very patient. Then there was a moment about a week in when we started sounding like a band. It is like people say with golf, you hit a good shot and then you are in it forever.
Stepping away from the music, it must have been great to work with Kevin Kline again and with your daughter, Mamie Gummer?
Kevin is wonderful and a really, really great actor. I’ve known him for so many years and we’ve done a lot together in theatre and in film. Have you seen him on stage? He is pretty great. Kevin is a very talented musician himself and I love working with him. He did come up to me on the first day when we’re playing in the club, and he said: “You don’t sound bad.” I thought, “Thank you.” That was the highest compliment. He meant that we sounded good. At least, that’s how I took it — as a compliment.
And, yes, I got to work with my daughter, Mamie, as well and that was joyful. I loved doing my scenes with her and I think she’s terrific.
How much guitar training did you have before you started rehearsing?
I played for three months. To begin with, I started learning on an acoustic guitar with a teacher in New York, Larry Saltzman, and then moved to the electric guitar about a month in, after four lessons. Then I worked pretty much every day with Neil Citron, who is this genius guitar teacher, a session player out of LA. He runs his own music-production company. He knows everybody. He is one of those Laurel Canyon guys from back in the day. He taught me a lot of little tricks that rock ’n’ rollers use, quick changes and stuff like that.
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