Vera Farmiga’s Quest For ‘Wholeness’
Vera Farmiga isn’t an actress who bounded into the spotlight. The New Jersey-born beauty selects her projects carefully, seeking stories, she says, about “women who achieve wholeness.”
The search has led her to roles both raw and revealing. In 2006, she lit up screens as a police psychologist torn between Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio in the Oscar-winning “The Departed.” On Friday, she’s back with “Quid Pro Quo.” It’s another gritty challenge – this time with an odd twist.
The film stars Nick Stahl (”Terminator 3,” “Sin City”) as paraplegic New York City radio reporter Isaac Knott. Mysterious messages lead Isaac to a news story about “wanna-bes,” an almost invisible subculture of able-bodied people who yearn to be paralyzed, have a limb amputated or be otherwise disabled.
The condition – formally known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) – is real. For Farmiga’s character, Fiona, it is a daily reality. But to describe Fiona as a “wanna-be” is to shorthand her story. Her fascination with Knott’s disability is based in both erotic yearning and soul searching – and provides the film’s noirish mystery twists. As Isaac and Fiona grow closer, they find out more about themselves than they ever hoped, or wished, to learn.
“I can say she was one of the most elusive characters that I’ve ever played,” says Farmiga. “I always had this vision of Fiona and it had to do with likening her to a tree that needs to be pruned.
“Real trees, when they’re pruned, they can completely, severely die and return to life, and I’ve always thought of Fiona this way. She’s a young sapling that needs to be pruned with an ax in order to grow more full and more beautiful.”
Farmiga caught the eye of writer-director Carlos Brooks with an audition tape she shot herself. The two met to talk about the film and sparked a connection.
But the film’s financiers had other ideas when it came to casting. “She wasn’t known yet and they didn’t want to let me hire her,” Brooks remembers. “So I just stopped and waited, and when she got in ‘The Departed,’ it’s amazing how known she became overnight. And they said, ‘Of course, you can hire Vera.’”
In “Quid Pro Quo,” which was shot in New York, the characters’ physical frustrations are matched by their emotional confusion. Fiona is embarrassed, but driven, in communicating her desire to be disabled. She’s dogged in her fetishizing and envy of Isaac and his chair.
“The first thing was not to judge it,” Farmiga says of BIID. “Not to dismiss it as a sick perversion because it’s so shocking. There’s so much disgrace and pain and guilt associated with the syndrome. It’s not like you can find a rehab for ‘wanna-bes.’”
Off-camera, Farmiga and Stahl kept their distance, which was the key to some of the film’s most spontaneous moments. One romantic scene was transformed when Farmiga started an improvised game of bumper-cars with her and Stahl’s wheelchairs.
“The scene as written was going to be sex,” says Brooks. Instead, he let the camera keep rolling – a practice, he notes, “that Nick hates, but Vera loves.” The result was a sultry, wheeled dance into the bedroom.
“I always loved pushing it a little bit further because Nick was always shyer when it came to improvisation,” says Farmiga. “I got a big kick out of making him feel uncomfortable.”
Farmiga hopes audiences will appreciat that discomfort – and the unique flavor it brings to this particular relationship.
“The hope for me is to delight in a really unique romance because that’s really what [the film] is,” she says. “It doesn’t pretend to explain the syndrome in any way. It’s just a really oddball romance.”