The ?Palindromes?/Todd Solondz Experience: Ellen Barkin came out of semi-retirement to star in Todd Solondz? ?Palindromes.? In ?Palindromes,? Barkin plays the mother of a 13 year-old girl who wants to be a mom. Solondz used eight different actors to play the daughter, which really made Barkin stretch her acting muscles.
Barkin had such a good time working on this film that she now lists ?Palindromes? as her favorite film experience out of her 40-odd movies.

Barkin claims Solondz is the best director she?s worked with as an actor and she believes that under his guidance her work reached a level it hadn?t achieved prior to this film. ?If Todd Solondz made movies three hundred and sixty days of the year I would be very happy to go to work,? said Barkin.

On the Reason Behind Her Self-Imposed Retirement from Films: ?I guess that at a certain point in life... First of all, priorities change and I guess if you're lucky enough not to have to pay your rent, basically, then you or I take much more seriously the kind of work that I do, what it takes for me to leave two teenagers of my own and six stepchildren and a husband and four grandchildren. So I don't know, nothing appealed to me over the last five years.

There were certainly offers but nothing was either challenging enough as a role, or there were no actors that I got excited about it - or directors. And to be honest, I think that with the state of movie making being the way it is, I can't say that I saw a whole lot of movies over the last five years that I would've left home for.

I know that when I saw 'Being Julia,' I thought, 'Ah, my God, someone, some grown up has a job to do.'?

The Appeal of ?Palindromes:? ?Todd Solondz and Todd Solondz and Todd Solondz. When I met him, he asked me out for tea and I went and he had a script and I said, 'Look, I'm in. I've seen all of your movies. I think that you're brilliant. I'm in.' He said, 'There's no money.' I said, 'I don't care.' He said, 'You're not the star.' I said, 'I don't care.' And then I said, 'Look, whatever your process is it works brilliantly for you. If you want me to come in and audition I will. I rarely get this interested.' And then I read the script and got a lot more interested.?

Developing Different Relationships with the Actresses Who Played Her Daughter: ?Personally I did. I guess that onscreen, I think that Todd did this thing that almost like, if I'm someone's mother? Like when I played Leonardo DiCaprio's mother, they liked that Leo had very hooded eyes and a rounded nose with a ball. They said, 'They look like they could be mother and son.' And I think that what Todd did was he cast those girls almost like an emotional family and all of the material kind of came up from a similar well.

Most of them never met each other until after the movie was over, at the premiere. There was no rehearsal because it's a low budget movie. So they never heard each other talk. I mean, even the grownups. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Sharon Wilkins, they didn't listen to tapes. And yet if you listen to their voices, they all have the same cadence. They all are in the same kind of range.

Sometimes I close my eyes when I watch the movie and try to think about it. I go, 'Okay, I'm going to close my eyes for a little while and I'm going to try and see if they switch and if I know.' And you don't. So when I was acting with them, to me I was just acting with the same person all of the time.?

PAGE 2:Ellen Barkin on the Subject Matter of "Palindromes"