Having copped awards on both coasts for her work in Pamela Gien’s one-woman show The Syringa Tree, Caroline Cave merits consideration as one of Canada’s leading stage performers. After her remarkable turns in David Christensen’s 2005 drama Six Figures and Toronto filmmaker Ed Gass-Donnelly’s new melodrama This Beautiful City (see review page 19), she’s primed to become one of our best movie actresses as well. The BC native spoke with EYE WEEKLY at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival.

I saw a through-line between your roles in Six Figures and This Beautiful City in that both women seem at points to be pushing for the disapproval of others. Are you attracted to contrary characters?  
I’m really fascinated by the threshold where desire becomes conscious and how it manifests. Whether we do it covertly or passive aggressively, with kindness or with malice, the unconscious always springs into action. My character in Six Figures, I think, was stronger — she knew what she wanted, she had a picture of her life. In This Beautiful City, [my character] Carol has a picture of her life but she’s not fitting that picture. She’s not as strong, she’s voiceless. She’s impotent, and yet she still has these desires that come to the surface, but they manifest in a much more perverted way.

I also think that both films are also about the traps of living — Six Figures takes on upper-middle class problems, while This Beautiful City juxtaposes the high life against the low.
A lot of movies are about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. But the circumstances in this film are brought about by personal choices, often to the detriment of others and also to oneself. But there’s choice there, nonetheless. I’m not interested in [playing] victims. When you’re an ingénue, in your twenties, you play a lot of characters where things are done to you — to say the least. This Beautiful City is about the power of choice.

Did you know Ed Gass-Donnelly from your time in the Toronto theatre scene?
You know, Ed had never seen a single thing that I’d done onstage. So for me, it was pleasurable to walk in as a film actress and get the role based on what happened in front of the camera. But I had seen Ed’s play Descent [upon which the film is based] at Summerworks several years ago and I was really quite affected by it.

How does the movie differ from the stage production?
It’s been opened up, of course. Your relationship to time is more literal in the film, I think everything is slightly more literalized. Critics are going to attack the pushing of circumstance and reality in this film. But Ed is not going for naturalism in This Beautiful City so much as natural, honest performances within a kind of forced, hyper-realistic situation. He’s got five characters in a five-block radius around Bathurst and it’s like a little experiment on “what if?”

How did you manage your character’s very extended — and very intense — nude scene?
I didn’t know where my fear left off and where the character’s started. There was an exposure of self in that scene that was really petrifying.

It’s not the only scene in the film that calls for that kind of physical exposure…
Yes, there’s the scene where I’m watching TV with [Noam Jenkins’ character] and I pull my pants down… We knew that the scene had to end out on the balcony, with some kind of sexual violence, but we didn’t know how to get there, what the trigger was that would make him that angry. And then I knew. [Carol] is acting out, like a teenager, trying to get a reaction out of him. There are more obscene things that I did in other takes but they were more about my bravery, about what I was willing to do and where I was willing to go, than they were about Carol’s. Maybe they’ll be on the DVD. 

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