Interview & Review: Anne Heche Talks Life, Plan B and her latest film, THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID

  • Print

THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID, a dramatic-comedy of life in contemporary Manhattan, tells the tale of three insanely different women and their fights to live, love and hope.

Directed and produced by Carrie Preston, THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID is also produced by Joshua Astrachan, Lucy Barzun Donnelly, Mona Panchal and stars Anne Heche, Marcia DeBonis and Alia Shawkat and is written by Kellie Overby.

THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID opens as the two bizarrely bonded best friends Dee Dee/Heche and BeBe/DeBonis are spending the day readying BeBe for her first big date in some time with a serious contender. Unfortunately the two are polar opposites. Bebe is the hopeful romantic and Dee Dee the scornful and broken hearted.  A chain smoker, Dee Dee is addicted to anything that injures: BeBe believes and hopes.

As the two meet for coffee, a stray newbie Manhattanite wanders into their lives with a story that can only happen in New York. Clementine, played by Alia Shawkat, a twenty something nymphomaniac, is distraught as her long term boyfriend, as they wake, tosses her from their apartment. As the story goes, over coffee, she explains in intimate detail her insatiable needs and now she, alone and lonely with only hand-held electronic support, wandered without direction into the coffee shop and turned the twosome into a trio, of uncommon and oddly bonded friends all living, learning and loving in the jungle.

Having the opportunity to interview Anne Hache star of THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID the following is an excerpt of the interview.

Janet Walker:  The film is and I’ve lived in New York, so I understand how bazaar relationships can develop and there is almost a magnet for people who come together that would never come together in any other place and how did you guys work together to build those bazaar, interchangeable, but bonded relationships?

Anne Hache:  Well, I think we all had lived in New York so we knew, there were couple of things going on, one it was about ,where do you get if you’re single in New York and you haven’t found a partner or a mate and how lonely that is and how the city becomes an obstacle to you. That’s really difficult. And then the other thing being as new to the city, as Alia’s character is new to the city being so new that New York becomes this beast that you have to navigate and struggle with to overcome. And we were really all friends brought together by friends. Carrie really thinks that this is a movie about friendships. I feel this is a movie about finding friendships even in the darkest hour and learning to have faith when you don’t have it and learning to trust that’s my characters journey I think.

Janet Walker:  What challenges you most about your role? You know, I want to go back for a moment to that story about playing twins on Another World and doing your waitressing job. When you got cast on Another World, and you said it was four years that your managed both a waitressing job and Another World?

Anne Hache: Oh no, no, no the waitressing job went away in the first year. I was on Another World for four years.

Janet Walker: That’s amazing that you would maintain that and have that back-up. Do you do that often have that Plan B just in case?

Anne Hache: I do so many things right now and I guess I do. I’ve never seen it as saying I have a back-up plan. I guess I do. It’s so funny to put it that way. I’m always doing a bunch of different stuff and maybe that is, I mean my family it’s no secret was very, very poor and I don’t want that for my life or my children’s life again certainly. But some might say I could relax a bit more and know that it is not going to happen to me that I’m not going to end up in a car but for better or worse I love doing different things. So, maybe my Sun Block line is a back-up to my acting.

Janet Walker: Yes. Yes. Well, I don’t think you’ll need that. So what challenged you most about your role in THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID?

Anne Heche: Oh Dee Dee gosh. I opened the script there was a girl who was hung-over, fell out of bed, got up and brushed her teeth while smoking a cigarette and then I stopped and I was like ‘What?’ First I’ve never read anything like that and thought that’s one of the most absurd things in the world to actually describe a character that way and taking action that way because it’s such punishment and such self abuse. And such addiction! That girl, I mean it reads funny so the challenge is make all that nasty stuff funny. Who is she? I mean if this is the beginning I can’t imagine where this script is going to go. But there is so much self destructiveness in that behavior that I really had to go into some dark, what I felt needed to be really, really dark waters of a person who has lost hope for themselves and make that funny.  So that was a pretty wild beginning to a character in a story about redemption, finding faith in your friends, and being true to yourself when you haven’t been and you’ve been stuffing it for  how many years Dee Dee haven’t told the truth about herself. Really tough stuff and I got to be hilariously funny if I never faltered from that self abuse.

THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID is genuinely laugh out loud funny loud chick flick. Having lived in New York for some time one can appreciate the up’s and down of the in your face life that Manhattan offers.  The pit falls and fall out that create and bond the most uncommon friendships are portrayed with an over the top flair in THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID.

A 2012 Soho International Film Festival and an official selection at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID is playing in select cities and will be available on VOD.