Natalie Dormer talked with ScreenRant about her role as Cressida in Mockingjay Part 1.
So the first thing I thought was very interesting about your character in this film was even though she exists in the source material, I think one of the most pivotal things about how we receive her onscreen has to do with your mannerisms about how you approach all these things – like the propaganda films. I know in our culture right now it’s such a…I mean you have a film like Nightcrawler that kind of looks at the darker side of when everybody is taking a camera and filming these tragedies. It was very pivotal to see how you depicted that, because the wrong way you could slide into something like you’re a TMZ producer or something like that. Can you just talk about where you drew inspiration from for this character, and how to kind of depict her onscreen in the right way?
Natalie Dormer: Sure. There is a moral line to walk when you have that responsibility of packaging and spinning a message. The interesting thing to know about Cressida is she has a genuine political conviction to overthrow tyrannical, repressive government of Snow.
So it’s almost irrelevant to her to begin with whether Katniss Everdeen wants to be or can be the Mockingjay. The revolution needs a Mockingjay. And so, Cressida wants to do that for her home. She wants to do that for the populous.
If you are asking me about general spin: it’s everywhere. A camera never gets pointed anywhere without a subjective angle being taken. It’s, at its height, most important when there is a war cause going on. I drew a lot of my inspiration from just watching a lot of footage. There is a lot of stuff happening around the world right now that we see on the news. And even the way that it’s portrayed in London, where I’m from, in contrast to how it’s portrayed here in The States, or in France, or in German news, where we also shotMockingjay. Even if you are talking about Western democracies, there is still an angle and a position taken that is reflective of that country’s interests, of that populous’s interests.
So, for me, I love those big themes that don’t talk down to an adolescent audience to think about that stuff, because anyone with a smartphone now can take a video and send a message out. So we all have to be responsible and think about what we are doing.
That was a really, really long answer to your question, but I hope you can cut that into some sense.
