Natalie Portman and Benjamin Millepied in Black SwanI’m indebted to ‘the Mysterious J’ for bringing the article below to my attention. And the tempest continues…
Entertainment Weekly
EW.com March 25, 2011
by Adam Markovitz
'Black Swan' double claims Natalie Portman only did '5 percent' of full-body dance shots in the movie
The ballerina who served as a dancing double for Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning role in Black Swan tells EW she has been the victim of a “cover-up” to mislead the public about how much dancing Portman actually did in the film. “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie,” says Sarah Lane, 27, an American Ballet Theatre soloist who performed many of the film’s complicated dance sequences, allowing Portman’s face to be digitally grafted onto her body. “All the other shots are me.”
Lane’s claim follows a March 23 L.A. Times article in which Portman’s fiancé and Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied said Lane’s work in the film was far less significant. “There are articles now talking about her dance double [American Ballet Theatre dancer Sarah Lane] that are making it sound like [Lane] did a lot of the work, but really, she just did the footwork, and the fouettés, and one diagonal [phrase] in the studio,” he said. “Honestly, 85 percent of that movie is Natalie.”
Lane disagrees. “The shots that are just her face with arms, those shots are definitely Natalie,” she says. “But that doesn’t show the actual dancing.” Lane admits that she was never promised a particular title for her six weeks of work on the film, though she was disappointed to see that she is credited only as “Hand Model,” “Stunt Double,” and “Lady in the Lane” (a brief walk-on role).
Lane also says that Black Swan producer Ari Handel specifically told her not to talk about her work to the press, even though she claims there was no such stipulation in her contract. “They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” says Lane. “It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years…. Can you become a concert pianist in a year and a half, even if you’re a movie star?”
Reps for Portman, Fox Searchlight, and Handel have yet to provide comments on the matter.
Lane is barely seen in promotional materials for the movie, including a VFX reel posted by studio Fox Searchlight that appears to show all the digital alterations made to key dance sequences. An unverified version [now deleted from YouTube] of that reel, leaked to YouTube, seems to shows how digital face replacement was used to put Portman’s head on Lane’s body. (The clip was included in a blog post by Dance Magazine‘s Wendy Perron, who wrote about Lane’s story earlier this month.)
According to Lane, Portman’s dramatic transformation into a ballerina — a narrative firmly at the center of her successful Oscar campaign — wasn’t as impressive as the public was led to believe. “I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff,” says Lane. “I do give her a lot of credit because in a year and a half she lost a lot of weight and she really tried to go method and get into a dancers head and really feel like a ballet dancer.”
In interviews, Portman didn’t hide the fact that she had used a body double for key sequences in the film, though Lane’s name, and the extent of her work, were played down. “I do have a double for the complicated turning stuff,” Portman told EW last November. “It was not anything I ever could have done in a year, nothing I could’ve caught up with. But I think it was just better for all of us if I did as much as possible.”
Lane insists she isn’t speaking out of jealousy over Portman’s acclaim. “[Natalie] is an amazing actress, for sure,” she says. “I know that it’s not a personal thing against me. I know that it’s just a political thing. It’s just unfortunate that I kind of lost credit.”
Personal comment: Readers should note the carefully chosen quotations used:
Sarah Lane: “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie all the other shots are me.”
Benjamin Millepied: “There are articles now talking about her dance double [American Ballet Theatre dancer Sarah Lane] that are making it sound like [Lane] did a lot of the work, but really, she just did the footwork, and the fouettés, and one diagonal [phrase] in the studio,” he said. “Honestly, 85 percent of that movie is Natalie.”
Sarah Lane: “I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff,”
Sarah Lane: “I know that it’s not a personal thing against me. I know that it’s just a political thing. It’s just unfortunate that I kind of lost credit.”
There is nothing in conflict between: “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie” and “85 percent of that movie is Natalie.” And Sarah is right when she says, ‘from a professional dancer’s standpoint she doesn’t look like a professional dancer.’ Natalie doesn’t, certainly her legs, but that’s what body doubles/stunt persons are for and the film wasn’t made for the professional dance community. Sarah got as much credit as any other body/stunt double gets in a film. With this tempest I’m not so sure that ‘Any publicity is good publicity’ if the person comes off as a whiner.
As I’ve written before I think the unfortunate part of this whole thing is the naiveté of Wendy Perron the editor of Dance Magazine who added her prestige to the notion that Sarah Lane was ‘thrown under the bus’ by the studio PR machine because she was “exploited” thinking – erroneously – that body doubles get more credit in films than they do and the celebrity chasing media pounced on this as a catfight to generate magazine sales and website hits. And, it worked.
Na, This was just lying and exploitation to rake in the dough. It was marketing hype. They, of course didn't have to commit such blatant lies and deception. They could have been silent, and given Lane etc. the credit dues without essentially coming off as hollywood creeps.
ReplyDeleteThe "excuse" that this is how body doubles are done... no credit except a tiny line in the credits is a lot different from the marketing hype where they made it seems that Portman worked her ass off to amazingly learn "ballet" for a year.
We all knew that there would be real dancers and "special" effects so the lying was unnecessary and demanding that Sarah keep her mouth shut so that they could carry on their deception is telling of their motive - greed.
Sure an action here star has a body double for the one or two dangerous scenes. But this movie was about ballet in a sense and the hype was about her achieving so much from her hard work and so forth.
I suspect Millipied has not won any fiends in the dance community with this stunt. He's revealed himself to be a person with no character, ego driven and a opportunist. Aronosky, likewise is a creep in the fine hollywood tradition of exploitation. Nothing unexpected here and why I don't waste my time seeing the crap they put out. They certainly don't care to give credit where credit is due if it will impact their ticket sales etc.
Lies have short legs... they don't get very far.
Mysterious J
What we are seeing here is the double wanting to get as much, if not more recognition as the star. Ms. Lane should have known what being a double would entail. Stunt doubles give up their bodies to give the stars the spectacular scenes, yet keep them safe. There are some who do their own stunts, etc., but only because they were stuntpeople themselves or want to inject some realism.
ReplyDeleteOf course, all this is going on after Natalie won the Best Actress Oscar and while she's promoting her next movie, "Your Highness" with the guy from "Easbound and Down." She's playing a kick-@$$ princess (remind anyone of a previous role she had?) protected by two not-so-capable bodyguards. That'd be something to watch. Seeing Natalie go from Padme Amidala to Nina to her next role. Also knowing she's going to be a mother in a few months. Wow! Too bad Benjamin has claimed her.
This reminds me of the discussion we had about having a professional dancer play the role of Nina Sayers, in that the people arguing for having a professional dancer don't understand how the film industry works or how delusional it is to expect an A-list ballerina to take a year from her short career for a project she has little control over and which may or may not be a success and with which her name will be associated for ever.
ReplyDeleteIn this instance a body/stunt double was asked to curtail her interviews because the studio felt they were diverting attention from the star. To the extent that occurred I’m sure it was unintentional on Sarah Lane’s part and she was unaware of what she was doing. But no one gets in the way of the star and isn’t counseled about it. As Sarah said she found making the film an educational experience. Ballet organizations are usually nonprofit so they have patrons, donors, subscribers and ticket buyers to please rather than shareholders of film companies none-the-less Artistic Directors make business decisions controlling the roles of lesser performers to feature dancers their audiences want to see.
And lest readers think this doesn’t happen in ballet there is the instance (that ballerinas are still learning from today) when Dame Ninette de Valois, first convinced Moira Shearer (who didn’t want to do the film) that it was in her interest to take the role of Victoria Page in The Red Shoes. Then, when The Red Shoes was a huge success and audiences – especially when Sadler’s Wells toured America - wanted to see Shearer rather than the star Margot Fonteyn de Valois worked to drive Shearer from the company. Under Ninette de Valois an entire generation of glorious dancers languished in the shadow of Fonteyn long after she should have retired. No one should get huffy about “the Hollywood tradition of exploitation” when business decisions are made.