After a lifetime of achievement, Naomi Watts is just getting started

Naomi Watts was clearly thrilled to be getting a lifetime achievement award at the San Sebastian Film Festival this week but, after managing to put a stop to the audience’s thunderous applause, she admitted it felt a bit odd. “It’s very strange when you’re in the middle of the journey,” said the one-time star of Australian soap Home and Away. “If anything, I feel I’m just getting started.”

Watts, who moved to Hollywood in her early 20s on the strength of her success in Australian films such as Flirting (1991), recalled in her acceptance speech scrabbling for work for 10 years before the late David Lynch cast her as the lead in the seminal film Mulholland Drive. “It wasn’t a smooth ride,” she said. “A lot of people were telling me I wasn’t going to make it. I was too this or not enough of that, not right for this or that: I was always being told what I couldn’t do. But I just kept going; I had this resilience. It was a full 10 years of rejection.”

Lynch believed in her, she says, before she fully believed in herself. “He saw me and all those wounds from those rejections now appeared as growth. He changed my life.” Every day making that film was fun, she says. “He gave me a different understanding of what it meant to act, to embrace instinct and uncertainty, to not be afraid of the strange or unexplained.” She dedicated her Donostia – the award takes the Basque name for San Sebastian – to him.

The success of Mulholland Drive meant that she was seen and then sought out by other top directors including Peter Jackson, Clint Eastwood, Alejandro Gomez Inarritu and David Cronenberg. Spanish director JA Bayona, who directed her Oscar-nominated performance in The Impossible as a mother trapped with her children in the 2004 Thai tsunami. Introducing her to the awards audience, he remembered how she put her trust in him, even though he was new to the game.

Sudden success brought a new episode of discouragement. She was, apparently, almost too old to capitalise on her success. “I was 31 in Mulholland Drive and was told that I’d better get my skates on, because it all finishes at 40. Now here I am, in my late 50s.” Only last week, she pointed out, there were several women over 50 in the Emmy nomination lists. “I do think things have changed. Women are consumers of film and TV and deserve to see their stories reflected,” she said in a press conference for her latest film, The Housewife. “I’m grateful to be part of that shift.”

While there are major directors still on her bucket list – in her press conference, she mentioned Paul Thomas Anderson – Watts declared herself still just as excited about working with first-time directors such as Ben Shirinian, who directed her in The Housewife, which is showing in competition in San Sebastian. Set in 1964 and based closely on a real case, the film relates how a cookie-baking, church-going Austrian immigrant was exposed by The New York Times, after a tip-off by Simon Wiesenthal, as a former guard at two concentration camps.

“The duality of that woman, living with that secret, was interesting to me as an actor,” she said. At the same time, it was possibly the most difficult role she had ever done, starting with the “shock and awe” she felt reading the script and then researching her abominable crimes. “It was hard to be in that mindset on a daily basis,” she told the press conference. “Anyone here could tell you how conflicted I was after each scene, especially in darker moments.”

At a time when hate is on the rise “and it’s a very scary time globally”, she said, cinema and the stories it can tell are more important than ever. Her character Hermine Ryan arrived in the United States at a time when the country supported her belief that it was a place where anyone could start afresh and become what they wanted. Watts herself went to the US, she said, “with hopes and dreams – and way surpassed them”. She has now lived there for decades, discernible in the rolling American “r” sounds that slip in between her Australian vowels and crisp English consonants.

Pressed on the state of her adopted nation, she pointed out that she had two American children with actor and former partner Liev Schreiber. “I do love America,” she said in her press conference. “What’s going on today is complicated and nerve-racking, but I have faith things will work out in time.” One of her children identifies as transgender. “I’m proud to be a part of the LGBTQ community,” she said. “Minorities are being attacked right now, and it’s frightful and unacceptable. My heart is with these communities, particularly my family. I’ll do whatever I can to stick up for minorities.”

Standing in front of thousands of people – almost all locals – in San Sebastian, however, she recalled her last visit 17 years ago, when The Impossible screened to the home crowd. “The people of San Sebastian are obviously avid film-goers,” she said, “so I’m happy to be here to celebrate with this compelling audience. And I think of the young girl who dreamed of becoming an actor. How is it even possible that I dreamed standing here, three and nearly four decades later? It’s mindblowing.”

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