The Shipping News is directed by Lasse (Chocolat) Hallstr?m and I play Wavey, a Newfoundland widow and mother of a small boy who has a brain injury, and whose life becomes involved with Kevin Spacey's newspaperman, Quoyle. Cate Blanchett plays his no-good wife, Judi Dench his aunt and Rhys Ifans his colleague at work.
The story is of Quoyle, a hapless, passive man who quits New York and heads for the land of his forefathers - the remotest corner of far-flung Newfoundland - and ends up writing a column called The Shipping News on the demented smalltown rag.
It's based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by E. Annie Proulx and we shot it in Newfoundland, a rocky headland sticking far out into the Atlantic. It's unique - the only place I know with its own half-hour time code. For example, it's three-and-a-half hours behind Europe. The conditions there are so unpredictable that even the Newfies joke that they have four seasons, fall, winter, misery and summer.
We were in misery a lot of the time. Every day there was no telling what the weather would be like. We didn't know what scene we would be doing and you had to be ready to do almost anything every day. It was more than brace-the-weather work
When I started doing movies I thought, 'Oh great, we are going on location to Timbuktu and it will be a big adventure.' But the more you do, the more you recognise the appeal of home and want to make them there, close to your kid's kindergarten, your husband and friends and social life. Making The Shipping News it was so cold most of the time we couldn't go outside.
