In the sunny, 1970s-set Licorice Pizza, singer Alana Haim makes her film acting debut in a free-spirited role that Paul Thomas Anderson wrote specially for her. The now Bafta-nominated star tells Screen about her ‘crazy-fun detour’ onto the big screen.
Alana Haim was in London fighting jetlag when the script for Licorice Pizza landed unexpectedly in her in-box. It was late July 2019, and the Los Angeles-based musician was there with her sisters Este and Danielle — also her bandmates in Grammy-nominated pop-rock outfit Haim — to promote their latest single ‘Summer Girl’.
The email was from the script’s author, multiple-Oscar-nominated writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, which was not in itself odd — a fellow San Fernando Valley kid, Anderson had befriended the band a few years earlier (their mother Donna had taught him art in elementary school), and directed several of their videos, including this latest release.
But what surprised the sleep-deprived pop star was the unheralded inclusion of an entire film script: a loose-limbed, roman-a-clef-ish, 1970s Valley-set story about the fractious relationship between a precocious 15-year-old show-kid named Gary and a 25-year-old woman named… Alana.
“I loved the script. It was so funny. It was a page-turner,” she tells Screen International with apparently undimmable cheeriness. “But it was so unbelievable to even think, ‘Oh, this character’s name is Alana, Paul must be thinking about me for the role.’ That’s just so not my vibe. I can’t even fathom something like that.”
So she called Anderson, even though it was still 5am, to check. He had written the part with her in mind, he confirmed, and asked if she would take it. “Oh my god, yes, of course,” she cried. After hanging up, she climbed back into bed, as she needed to be up in just a few hours. “Obviously I couldn’t sleep. I thought, ‘I just said yes to being in a major movie. What did I just get myself into? Oh God. Can I do this?’”
In the deep end
As it turned out, not only could Haim (Alana, not the band) do it, she could do it so well that she received almost universal acclaim for her performance, plus a Bafta nomination for best actress. Even so, her self-doubt is understandable. Aside from music videos, her acting experience did not extend beyond playing the Wicked Witch of the West in a school play. She did not even take any acting lessons between that call and the shoot, which began in August the following year. Anderson was adamant that she shouldn’t. “He said, ‘I know what you can do. You gotta trust me.’”
Haim believes it was observing her at live shows that convinced Anderson she could do it. “Me and Este have a competition of who can make the crowd laugh the hardest,” she says. “I think Paul saw I could be in front of a very large group of people and feel confident and make them laugh, and also be focused enough to play the amount of instruments that I do on stage.”
It also can hardly have hurt that the character of Alana Kane bears a number of similarities to her real-life counterpart. “She’s such an incredible hard worker, which I very much recognise in myself,” says Haim. “When she’s thrown into these crazy scenarios, she thrives. And she fights for the people she loves, and I recognise that in myself as well.”
The Alana character also lives in the same area of Los Angeles (the shoot and story were located right on Haim’s Valley doorstep) and has sisters named Este and Danielle, played by Este and Danielle Haim, while their parents were played by the siblings’ own parents, Moti and Donna. “To have my whole family be with me on this journey was such a gift,” says Haim.
It was while shooting with her family that the biggest difference between actor and character became apparent, when one scene required Alana to yell at her father after a disastrous ‘meet the boyfriend’ dinner.
“My dad had zero script. Paul would say, ‘Here’s the scenario. React to whatever Alana does.’ So when I came in and screamed at my dad, he was fully shocked. Like, none of his daughters had ever screamed at him.”
Really? “Oh my god, I was the most obedient child of all time,” Haim laughs. “Alana Kane’s a little bit more unhinged than I am.”
The toughest aspect of playing Kane, Haim says, was having to learn to drive a truck for the tense sequence where she and Gary (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, also making his movie debut in Licorice Pizza) deliver a waterbed to mercurial Hollywood producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper).
“I am a terrible driver and I had to learn how to drive stick pretty quickly,” she explains, “then immediately graduate to a ’70s moving van that was ginormous. That was hard, and the most terrifying thing. To have my best friend Cooper in the car, and then Bradley Cooper — like, one of the biggest movie stars in the world — and they’re trusting me with their lives… I mean, it was a lot.”
Fortunately, having Hoffman by her side for most of the shoot was an invaluable boon. The two had been introduced by Anderson during post-production for his last film Phantom Thread in 2017 (when Cooper was 14) and hit it off right away. “I was so lucky that he also had never done this before,” says Haim. “If I had worked with somebody who had done a million movies, we would have just been on two different islands. I would have been so intimidated. But every day, it was me and Cooper against the world.”
Back to the band
Anyone keen to see what new cinematic worlds Haim might conquer will have to be patient, it seems. “I have to go back to my band,” she insists. “I love touring the world with my sisters. It will always be my first love. I mean, this was just a super crazy-fun detour for a summer when no touring was happening.”
Still, having discovered this new talent, she would like to act again. “It’s something I truly fell in love with, and it was so much fun working on something new. But I feel it has to be the right thing, the right time, and something I’m passionate about.”
If that ‘right thing’ never comes along, Haim could hardly have a better sole acting credit on her resumé — or a source of fonder memories. “Alana Kane was such a big part of my life,” she beams. “Like, we have this snapshot in time, and we’ll be able to watch it for the rest of our lives. When I’m older I can show the movie to my kids and say, ‘I did this in the summer of 2020, the craziest summer of all time. That’s what I was doing. That’s me.’ I mean, it’s just a beautiful thing.”
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